PLANET Bernie's world

From the tongue twisting name department we welcome PubSubHubbub, or as some people have shortened it to: PuSH. Like rssCloud, PuSH is a way for services that subscribe to updates from your blog (think Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes) to get updates even faster. In a nutshell, instead of having to periodically ask your blog if there are any updates they can now register to automatically receive updates each time you publish new content. In most cases these updates are sent out within a second or two of when you hit the publish button.

Today we’ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. There’s nothing to configure, it’s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts.

For those using the WordPress.org software we are releasing a new PuSH plugin: PuSHPress. This plugin differs from the current PuSH related plugins by including a built-in hub.

On January 24, 2006, Jennifer Kesse vanished. The police quickly determined that she was abducted, but nothing solid has turned up in the past four years. Not long after that, a website was set up to help spread information about the case.

A tip recently came in saying her body was buried in a field in Orlando, Florida. The police conducted a massive search of the field, but came up empty. The field is very large, about 15 acres, and the body could be anywhere in there.

During this time, users on her site discussed the new events and came to a stunning revelation: using Google Earth's historical imagery, they found an image from approximately one month after she disappeared. The image seems to show some promising information:

A few cool bits of news about StreetView:

• Navigate through photos: Google has added a feature where you can navigate through user photos while in StreetView. The new feature is quite cool and feels a lot like Microsoft's Photosynth (seen in our Resources for Haiti or Frank's recent photos of Petite Tabac). This new StreetView feature is a neat way to fly from photo to photo, and offers a way for you to see much more imagery than the standard StreetView provides.

Here's a video of how it works:

CyberCity3D is getting good at building virtual hotels. A few weeks ago we showed you the Sheraton Keauhou Bay Resort that they built, and now they've got a few more to show off.

I really appreciate their attention to detail. Not only do they build excellent buildings, but they include trees, sheds, tables, etc. It's quite remarkable.

Their two new hotels are:

With the Winter Olympics wrapping up, Google thought it'd be fun to revisit the site of the first modern Olympic games. They've added detailed 3D coverage to the city, with thousands of buildings now showing off sharp 3D models.

They provide a list of fun places to check out, such as the Parthenon and the Herodeion Theater. If you can't load it up now, check out the video below of a short tour:

The first satellite images from the earthquake in Chile are starting to roll in. Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who is currently aboard the International Space Station, has been sending back images today. They're not high-res, but they're still quite stunning. In the image below, you can see what appears to be silt and dirt in the water, apparently as a result of the quake.

We've put together his three images into a single KMZ file so you can take a look using Google Earth. I'd expect Google will release some images within the next day or so, but no word on that yet.

You can now send your WordPress.com posts to Facebook.

Using Google Earth and GPS to Track Afghanistan Cash | Danger Room | Wired.com

To avoid fraud, Afghanistan cash-for-work projects are documented locally using GPS-enabled cameras. (This will work as long as nobody decides to hack the EXIF data:-)

Google warned by EU over Street View map photos - Yahoo! Finance

Marty of Aimclear sent this screen shot of what, at first glance, appeared to be a spammy onebox for the Google search SEO Duluth and perhaps foreshadowed the return of SEO to the 7 Pack after their banishment:

Neither is the case. Apparently there is a Physicians Assistant in Duluth by the name of Kengo Seo. As is often the case with Medical Practioners the listing sites that Google referenced had the last name first and it was added to the index that way.

Mathew Hunt of Small Business Online Coach, recently pointed out what appears to be a new bug in Google’s clustering algo that causes one business’s citations to show up on another business’s Places Page.

It appears that Google Maps, when scraping multiple citations for different businesses that appear on a single unstructured web page, not only conflates the citations for that specific page but brings along other citations not from that page, from one business to another. In my case a number of citations from one of my clients transferred to another client. They are not in the same industry, nor the same part of the country. The only thing they had in common was that both have citations on my client list.

Here is an example of the problem where a number of citations from The Option House Restaurant in Bradford PA appeared on the Sports Reaction Center Physical Therapy (Bellevue WA) Places Page. From the Sports Reaction Center Places Page:

The new Google Jazz interface has received another facelift (thanks Barry) and continues to evolve. Initially the new interface, which was rolled out on a very limited basis in November, was showing only a 5- Pack of local listings. Earlier this month it was modified once again to show the 7 Pack. The new tweak cleans up the interface by eliminating the color block and a number of menus along the left hand side.

I was curious how the display in its current configuration affected the presentation of local and organic search results on a range of displays. The Google result page scales from just over 800 pixels to just under 1280 pixels. In the 800 range, things are cropped and above 1250 pixels or so it stops scaling. What will then show to whom on the new display?

I have captured images at pixel widths of 800, 1024 and 1280 both with and without sponsored ads at the top of the display to determine what will show. For the purposes of the capture I shut off tabs and other enhancements that a typical user is unlikely to be using. According to w3schools.com 76% of browsers are displaying at more than 1024×768 resolution with only 20% at 1024×768 and 1% at 800×600. Even if w3schools stats overstate the actual resolutions due to the sophistication of their audience, their trend line is accurate and it shows 1024 heading to oblivion within the next few years and 800 x 600 nearly there.

By Georges van Hoegaerden

Iran threatens airline ban over Arabian Gulf tag | Reuters

"Iran has threatened to ban airlines from using its airspace if they refer to the waterway between Iran and Arab states as the "Arabian" instead of "Persian" Gulf." Admittedly a very creative way to censor. Let's hope India and China don't catch on. Most likely, the upshot would be no more in-flight mapping for affected flights.

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Google LatLong: Google Earth now available for Android

Google Earth for Android: Faster than iPhone, with bigger screen, voice commands and a road layer.

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By Georges van Hoegaerden

By Georges van Hoegaerden

Last week, through a long string of conversations with a CalPERS board member and some trusted peers, I ended up speaking with Joe Dear (Chief Investment Officer) and other members of his Venture team at CalPERS in Sacramento, the largest pension fund in the United States with $200 Billion in total Assets Under Management and single largest investor in the Venture sector (as a Limited Partner, or LP), with an allocation of around $20 Billion in direct and indirect (fund-of-funds) alternative investments (which includes venture).

Joe expressed specific concern about the ailing Venture sector, a message we as participants in the Venture ecosystem should all take very seriously. I do, because I hear it all the time, and it worries me how devastating a withdrawal of CalPERS (10% or so of all U.S. Venture and the consequent ripple) from Venture would be to Silicon Valley and to our country.

Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.

We’re often asked when we plan to make our intelligent proofreading technology available for more languages.

We’ve been hard at work and today we’re announcing After the Deadline proofreading for French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Bing To Use Flickr Photos, Live Video, But Google’s Got Goods, Too | Gizmodo Australia

Remarkable what a difference a week makes: Before, uploading photos to my favorite photo site Flickr meant foregoing their publication on Google Maps and Bing Maps. Now, suddenly, they are popping up on both. Upload once, and see them published on multiple platforms, That's how it should be, of course.

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Here at WordPress.com we like to keep stats on the various features and resources available to our users. So as part of the release for rssCloud on WordPress.com I added internal stats to see how it was being used. It tracks things like the number of subscription requests and the number of sent notifications (pings) that get processed each day.

That’s where the numbers for my rssCloud Update post came from. It’s been three months since that post so I took another look at the numbers to see how things were going. The first thing I looked at was the number of subscription requests per day. I was a bit surprised by what I saw: