advertising a CSE XML file?

Would you consider this
<link rel="cse" type="application/xml" href="http://vrypan.net/log/wp-content/plugins/google_cse/wp_cse.xml" title="Google CSE XML" />
to be the right way to advertise the existance of a Google CSE XML file? Any suggestions?

Google CSE v0.1 WordPress plugin

This is version 0.1 alpha of “Google_CSE” a WordPress plugin that creates a Google Custom Search Engine using a WordPress blog and its blogroll. (Read, my slice of the web to get the idea behind it.)

After you install (read the included readme.txt file!), use < ? cse_search_box(); ?> in your templates to display the search box. Please note that it may take a couple of minutes before Google updates its caches and your CSE starts working -this may be the case for any changes too, like adding or removing blogs from your blogroll.

As I said, this is still alpha. I’m looking forward to your comments.

Download google_cse v0.1.

Google CSE in blogger.com

Well, it turns out that my idea is old news :-)

Google Custom Search Blog explains to add a CSE box in blogger.com.

I’m working on the WP plugin.

my slice of the web

It’s not a novel idea, and it has been in my mind for years: there is a special set of URLs that define what I call my “personal slice of the web”. These are the sites that form my blogroll, the feeds I’m subscribed to, the links I tag using del.icio.us, the URLs included in my browser history, etc.

For each one of us, this “personal slice of the web” is much more important and much more familiar than the rest of the web. I have always thought that we should have better tools to manage this “slice”. We should be able to view and visualize it better, search it, share it, etc.

During the last couple of days I have been fooling arround with Google Custom Search Engine. A wordpress plugin that creates a CSE using your blogroll is almost ready, it just needs some polishing (you can see it here in action).

I have also written some code to create a Google CSE based on my del.icio.us links (a demo is here) but this needs more work -it’s just a couple of quick’n'dirty scripts.

web is such a big place…

The Web is such a big place compared to the desktop.

web apps should make documents shareable

I think the main feature web apps bring to users is “sharing”. The share button is the equivelent of copy-paste on the desktop. Copy-paste was (AFAIC) the main feature GUI brought to desktop over CLI. It created a whole culture, the “copy-paste culture” [1]

The “share” option is why I use web apps -Google Docs is a great example of this. I think that web apps will be judged more and more on how easy and intuitive they make sharing. From simple embedding into web pages and blogs, to fine-grained sharing with access rights among team members.

Of course, if it’s sharable, it should be mashable too :-)

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[1] any related links? Couldn’t find any!

social media and scale

Jason Calacanis is declaring facebook buncruptcy.

It is something I always wondered about: how much can you scale social media? How many comments can an individual follow? How many emails can an individual read and respond to? How many friend connections can you keep up on Facebook or LinkedIn before loosing control?

After a certain scale, social medial are still reciprocal but maybe not symmetrical… This could be an interesting mesure to compare social-* (media, networks, etc) platforms.

Google Public Policy Blog

Google Public Policy Blog: Google’s views on goverment, policy and politics, is good reading.

I especially like their “open broadband manifesto” (“manifesto” is my addition).

However, what I would expect from google is some kind of commitment to user data accessibility. Are users free to move their data from service to service? Do they know exactly what kind of data a service is collecting and using? Should/Do users have the right to delete their own data? Who owns what? What is the equivelent of Open Source Software in Applications? What is the minimum functionality a Web API should expose to the world?

Com’ on Google, we expect you to be able to deal with difficult problems…

You have to choose sides

Google intergates FeedBurner in Blogspot

Blogger feeds can now be transparently redirected to FeedBurner.

That was an easy one, not something spectacular, but definitely useful. Still…
- waiting for FeedBurner and Google Analytics integration
- waiting for FeedBurner and AdSense integration

BTW, shouldn’t WordPress.com provide all users with the FeedSmith plug-in?