Webware

Google Australia engineers have created a Flash map to keep track of the deadly bushfires ravaging the southeastern part of the country and help reduce the traffic burden to the official sites coordinating emergency services.

The fires, which have reportedly claimed more than 100 lives, are being tracked in real-time with information provided by the State of Victoria's Country Fire Authority via an RSS feed. The numbers on the map markers indicate the number of fires at that location and the colors represent the current containment status of that site (green represents safe, yellow for controlled, orange for contained, and red going).

"We hope that it's of some use to people who may be affected, to emergency services personnel, and that it takes some load off other websites which are being inundated," the team wrote in a blog posting. "The map certainly makes the scale of this disaster immediately apparent."

The team says it is working to incorporate additional information into the map and also offers tips for Web site operators who want to embed the map on their sites.

Additionally, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has posted a Google-powered map on its site.

The blog Liako.Biz has posted an examination of how data portability allows for these maps to be created.

Mozilla has put out a road map proposal for the next version of Ubiquity, the company's user interface project that aims to mash up user-controlled shortcuts with information from the Web. Besides the promise of an interface overhaul, the plan's big hope is to integrate Ubiquity with Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird products, along with user desktops.

In Firefox's case, Ubiquity integration for everyone (not just testers) could come as soon as version 3.2, due sometime next year. According to the road map specifications, the upgraded Firefox implementation would integrate Ubiquity into the "awesomebar," removing the need for users to learn a new keyboard shortcut to toggle it on and off.

The big caveat here is that any Firefox implementation would not allow third party commands for the sake of security, meaning you couldn't just start typing a new Gmail e-mail from your address bar. In such a case, users would be related to Firefox-specific shortcuts, and be required to use a separate instance of Ubiquity to take advantage of third party commands.

As for Thunderbird, Mozilla's e-mail software, the company hopes Ubiquity integration could change the way people search and manage their in-boxes. The spec says there's a need to "extend Thunderbird in ways that provide compelling advantages over Web mail." This could include things like deep integration with your system files and applications, to the point of being able to search for and add an attachment with just a few keystrokes--all without leaving the application or diving through a sea of nested folders in a pop-up menu. There's also a mention of having Ubiquity share the same set of command feed subscriptions, so if you subscribed to a new feed in either application it would be transferred over transparently in the background.

Of all of the proposed items, one that holds the most potential is integration with the user's desktop. This takes Ubiquity out of the walled garden of the browser and into user work-flow in other applications. It's the one area of the proposal with the least amount of detail, however it notes proper implementation would be in existing launcher services such as Quicksilver (for Mac) and Enso (for Windows). Presumably, when integrated with either of these, users would be able to begin to mash up items from their machine with Web services that much faster.

You can read more about the proposal on Mozilla's wiki page. See also our previous Ubiquity coverage, and Mozilla's demo video of what the product is capable of.

When you've gotta go you've gotta go. Unfortunately, finding a place to do that when you're in New York, one of the largest cities in the world, can be difficult unless you've got some local knowledge.

Human-powered search engine Diaroogle is up to the task. It'll help you find the nearest toilet based off its user-generated database. Like Mizpee, which does the same thing but with a much cuter pretense, it's got user ratings for general cleanliness, the rules of gaining entrance, and occasionally even pictures snapped by users to show how good or bad the porcelain sanctuary is.

All toilets are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, and are done so by the submitter. If you disagree with someone's review, or policies have changed that would keep you from being able to access said bathroom, you have the option to rebuke it with your own review. Going forward, it would be smart to add user ratings and comments to pre-existing entries.

Of course, because this is a mobile toilet finder, all of this hinges on the experience you'd get accessing the site from your phone. Since it's running through your mobile device's browser, it can't take advantage of any of that newfangled GPS or Wi-Fi positioning business. Instead, you'll need to feed in a street address, neighborhood, or ZIP code. There's no map, so you'll need to use something like Google Maps, or to ask a stranger so you can get going--err get to a place where you can go.

Diaroogle is off to a promising start, although compared with perennial all-star Mizpee, it's missing the other 49 states and all of Europe, along with some helpful items like hours of operation, mobile maps, and the business model of including coupons from local retailers.

[via BuzzFeed]

Looking for a toilet in NYC? Diaroogle will help you out, although it's less helpful on the phone than it is from a laptop.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The goliaths of the Internet are dangling an ever-larger supply of bootstraps for folks who want to try new ideas for the Web.

The first case in point is Google App Engine, an infrastructure that lets people run their Web applications on Google's servers, for free up until certain limits are set. Second is Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search service) that lets people extract Yahoo search results, reorder them, and mix them with other content--also without constraint within certain limits.

A rough-and-ready search engine Vik Sighn created to show how a Python programming library used to process Yahoo's BOSS-based search results on Google App Engine.

(Credit: Vik Singh)

On Monday, Yahoo programmer Vik Singh, who has been involved in the BOSS project, released software that lets those two projects work together. Specifically, he adapted a package called the BOSS Mashup Framework (BMF), which provides some pre-written tools to let programmers more easily use Yahoo search data via the BOSS interface, so it runs on Google's App Engine.

"Running BMF on top of Google App Engine is a seemingly natural progression, and quite arguably the easiest way to deploy Boss--so I spent today porting BMF to the GAE platform," Singh said on his blog.

Those tools, called a library, are written in the Python programming language that so far is App Engine's only native language.

Singh also built an example application: the Question-Answering Service. (Don't expect infallibility, but it does answer some questions correctly.) There was a day when this sort of thing, even this imperfect, would require a lot more resources than just a few dozen lines of source code. You'd have to assemble a lot of servers to index the Internet, analyze the results, process queries, and serve up results.

Another example Singh mentioned is called 4HourSearch, so named because it took four hours for programmer Sam Pullara to whip it together, according to his blog. The search site presents a Yahoo-powered interface that mirrors that of Cuil, a loudly trumpeted would-be Google slayer.

The top headlines at a given time on Wednesday morning at OurSignal. Yeah, a bit short on relevant news.

(Credit: OurSignal)

On Wednesday morning, I read about a new site called OurSignal, which mashes up the top headlines from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and HackerNews, promising to show a more diverse array of what the Web's recommending. Kind of like OriginalSignal for social news.

Unfortunately, when I loaded up OurSignal, staring me in the face was "Goatse In Spore," a reference to an extremely crude graphical Web meme (don't Google it, please). Not exactly the kind of top headline I was looking for.

The concept is kind of cool: "warm" colors mean a story is gaining momentum, and "cool" colors mean it's fading. Bigger boxes mean more votes on a story across the Web. And it refreshes every 15 minutes, which isn't that impressive in the real-time culture of Summize, but is still quick enough to provide a fresh take on the news.

That's the problem: news. Social-news sites, for better or for worse, have become known for being places to find the most popular Top 10 lists and funny videos in addition to the news, and OurSignal is no exception. So if you're looking to find the goofiest Digg and Reddit headlines in one place, this is a nice resource; but if you're actually looking for the news, you might be out of luck. Putting a handful of social-news sites together unfortunately doesn't do much to help the content.

I'll stick to Google News for now, thanks.

A helpful search for my favorite hard-to-find brew.

(Credit: BeerMenus)

BeerMenus.com, I've been dreaming about you at night. And now you've jumped into my world. We're a match made in heaven.

Here's how it works. Much like a boozier version of Menupages, BeerMenus aggregates bars' beer lineups so that you can search for a particular establishment or for a particular beer to find out where it's on tap (or bottled) and for how much. For those of us who prefer their beer to be a bit more esoteric than Bud Lite or even Stella Artois, this is a godsend. I searched for my favorite variety, Allagash White (a delightful Belgian-style white ale brewed in Portland, Maine), and BeerMenus gave me a list of ten establishments where I could find it along with a Google Maps mashup.

For even more hops-and-barley fun, BeerMenus indexes special events at bars as well. That's something that Going, Upcoming, Yelp, and their socially prolific brethren already handle, but it's still a nice feature.

The nifty little site, which just launched Thursday, currently only extends to New York's prolific bar scene, and within that, it still only has about 150 Manhattan bars' menus available. And unfortunately, at the moment I'm across the country in San Francisco so I can't actually do a field test. I'm guessing it's generally accurate, but beer menus do tend to shift around more frequently than food menus do--that's an area where social-networking features like comments and reviews could help.

But really. Think about what could happen if this expanded: frequent travelers could learn where to find their favorite brews in unfamiliar cities, or learn where they can try out a nice pint of a regional favorite. The site also has plenty of room for recommendations, discovery features, and reviews--like a Snooth for beer.

You'd never have to drink a crappy beer again.

Intel wants to make the whole Web editable, just like a single Wikipedia page.

The chip giant on Tuesday will make a beta available of Intel Mash Maker, a free browser extension that allows users to modify Web pages and combine information from different sources. Its first beta works with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, though at this point the features are far more mature in Firefox, Intel said.

The product, which originated in Intel's research labs, is similar to existing mash-up tools like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly in that it has a graphical design tool.

Intel Mash Maker suggests customizations and widgets.

(Credit: Intel)

What's different is that the actual mashing up of information on Intel Mash Maker happens on the client, rather than the server. So instead of making a different Web application to, say, plot real estate listings on Google Maps, Intel Mash Maker lets people add a widget that adds visualization to the real estate listing site.

... Read more

Trulia builds a Google Street View into its real estate search results in areas where it's available, letting people check the neighborhood of a property for sale.

(Credit: Trulia)

Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has incorporated Google Maps Street View into its Web pages, the company said Wednesday.

The combination presents Google's view of a particular property from the road and lets users virtually pivot around to see the surrounding area. It works in the 40 cities where Google has supplied imagery for its Street View service.

It's nothing that couldn't have been done manually before by typing an address into a separate window with the Google view, or likely even with an on-page mashup, but having the curbside vantage readily available is certainly handy, and Google worked with Trulia to integrate the feature, the search giant said.

ThisIsMyJam uses the Musical Brain API to generate music mixes based on melody, tempo, timbre, and other attributes.

(Credit: ThisIsMyJam)

Most of us remember mix tapes as those carefully curated cassettes that collected our favorite music together into one 90-minute playlist. Ask a DJ about mix tapes, however, and you'll hear about a whole other side to the art, involving matched beats, seamless crossfades, and other nuances of literally mixing music together. If you're looking for an alternative to mix tape sites such as Muxtape and Mixwit, ThisIsMyJam offers people a way to create mix tapes that emphasize the science of blending songs together.

Based off of the Musical Brain API, ThisIsMyJam allows you to create interwoven music mixes that take into account song attributes such as tempo, key, timbre, genre, and more. There are plenty of drawbacks, such as a limited selection of music, no direct song uploads, and a maximum song playback duration of 20 seconds, but despite these limitations, ThisIsMyJam illustrates a novel approach.

Surprisingly, we found the appeal of ThisIsMyJam to be its degree of difficulty. It's one thing to throw together an iTunes playlist, but creating an overlapping mix of music requires some trial and error. It took us more than a few tries to come up with a mix that didn't make us cringe during discordant song transitions, but the process of reexamining the mix, removing duds, and adding new songs made the final result feel more creative than simply throwing a playlist together and hitting enter.

At the end of the two-step ThisIsMyJam process, the resulting mix comes with its own static URL, a dynamic "Latest Mix" URL, and code for embedding the mix into your own Web site (illustrated above).

Via CreateDigitalMusic.