Posts from July 26, 2011

+1

Seasoned bloggers knows people are rarely moved to comment on a blog post. Especially, one hit wonders sent from Google, who were simply looking for Train times between Clapham and Norbiton and instead see some commuter rant aimed at South West Trains.

However, microblogging has taught us that people are slightly more likely to grudgingly acknowledge an amusing one-liner with a 'Like' or a 'Fave'. Clicking a button is quick and easy - even for lazy people.

The recently launched Google Plus also uses '+1' both for posts and - probably the single feature I like most of all in Google Plus - the ability to add '+1' on individual comments.

I always equate this with a knowing smile across a crowded room - just to say "I saw what you did there. It made me smile but it's not worthy of a reply to say 'Hey - that clever bit of word play made me smile' but have a 'Like'".

As Drupal 7 has a Google +1 module available and Google Webmaster Tools includes reports to track this metric, I thought I'd add a '+1' button to every single post on this blog.

Now - you know what you have to do. Even if you were just hunting for train times.

Google Music - available by 2017

A few weeks ago, I signed up for a invitation to Google Music. The service is only available in the US but, by a lucky chance of fate, I just happened to be connected to my corporate VPN so I was successful and an invitation duly arrived in my Inbox.

Initially, the Google Music Manager software didn't support Linux. Nor was the Ogg Vorbis audio format supported so I didn't pursue it any further as both of these were show stoppers for me. I don't intend re-ripping my entire music collection to MP3 format.

However, last week, Google released a Linux version of Music Manager and added 'support' for Ogg format audio files. The 'support' for the Ogg format is slightly strange - Ogg audio files will be transcoded back to 320kps MP3 files which represents a conversion from one lossy format to another lossy format. Hopefully, in the longer term, there will be true native support for Ogg.

Anyway, I downloaded the Music Manager software and started uploading my music collection mainly so I could listen to music on my netbook which currently runs Chromium OS.

I started the upload 2 days ago and it's been running during the day. So far, it has managed to upload 505 songs out of a total 1,880 so it's not exactly a speedy process.