24th June 2007, 11:59 pm
iTunes now number 3 music retailer. Behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
I have wanted to play with the Google Mashup Editor, but it’s not open to the world yet. Until it is I will live vicariously through the Google Group.
Virtual Earth for Government.
Suggest now works on Google News. Nice.
Andrew Goodman has a very good open letter to Jerry Yang.
Dell lets users refuse bloatware. Okay but doesn’t go far enough; this should be for EVERYTHING and imho Dell shouldn’t preinstall anything but a PDF reader.
24th June 2007, 01:54 pm
Groovy guy Philipp Lenssen has an excellent post about how to pull data from Google into Google Spreadsheets.
As he notes the syntax is =GoogleLookup with two variables; to find the population of Boston you could use this syntax:
=GoogleLookup(”boston”; “population”)
When you paste that into a Google Spreadsheet, Google will load the results (in this case with a citation year.) I couldn’t get everything to work — I tried a pounds-to-Euros automatic conversion and it would never come out right. Google has a fairly extensive docs page but I suspect they’re not covering everything.
(Google’s full slogan, if you didn’t know, is “Do no evil, do lots of easter eggs.”)
I would love to combine this with a scraper to extend the functionality a lot. I’ll have to look into the possibilities of offline spreadsheets like Excel — see what they can pull up….
24th June 2007, 01:18 pm
You know, the late 90s and the bubble were a long time ago, yet whenever I see some overblown press release talking about revolutionary new paradigms or some other such nonsense I still want to go hide under something.
I suspect with this site I’ll be spending a lot of time hiding under my desk. Killer Startups, at http://www.killerstartups.com/, reviews over 2 dozen new sites a day. It looks a lot like Digg, with spaces for Diggs (only they’re called “Killers”) and reviews of each site.
You can browse the sites by date, search by keyword, or browse about a dozen categories. I looked at the Search category, of course, which has 97 listings at this writing and included sites like TheMolu and ZitGist, but also older sites like Exalead. Each site listing has an overview, a description of the site from the site itself, and a brief review from KillerStartups. KillerStartups also notes why the site in question might be a killer, but also asks some questions about the veracity of the startup (that’s the difference between the late 90s and the late 00s — there is some attempt to pop the bubble.) Each listing also has a “Killer Data” box that attempts to show contact information, traffic data, etc. — but the data boxes I looked at were mostly empty.
There are RSS feeds, of course. Feeds cover all startups, today’s, and the top ten. Sadly I could not figure out a way to get a feed by category (I want to see what this site finds in the way of search; I’m less interested in ecommerce, marketing, etc.) Still, it’s frequently updated and the site reviews aren’t breathlessly excited. Worth a look.
