Google Maps geocoder adds support for UK
Good news for the Brits: UK Geocoding Now Available in the Maps API. This means that the Google geocoder in Graticule should now work in the UK. I’m interested to hear how well it works from anyone using it.
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Articles tagged with google
Google adds more countries to geocoder
Google has added support for India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Ireland to their geocoder. If you’re using Graticule, it should Just Work™. Let me know if you have any problems.
Addicted to Democracy
It’s not what you think…
A couple months ago, I stumbled upon Democracy Player, which calls itself “the free and open source internet TV platform”. It’s an unique video player that puts a bit of a spin on the traditional podcast/vlog application.
In addition to being able to subscribe to any podcast feed that includes video, Democracy features a channel guide that is somewhat iTunes-esque, allowing you to browse and search video “channels”.
Democracy can search and download videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, and more, and allows you to save the search results as a “Channel”. The player will then download any new content that matches your search criteria.
I don’t subscribe to a lot of vlogs, but I religiously watch (ironically) Democracy Now! and The Show with Ze Frank. Check it out!
(John, sorry to steal your phrase)
Plagiarism Friday
Plagiarism isn’t a topic that comes up very often (or ever), but yesterday I ran across it several times in unrelated circumstances.
#1: Local businesses
As Aaron Schaap and Daniel Morrison have described, we found out that Macatawa Driving School pretty much copied Century Driving School’s website. Both of these are local companies and are direct competitors to each other.
What makes this even more interesting is that Century Driving School discovered it when working with the people from Yellow Book to place ad. Yellow Book showed them a few examples of other local businesses, one being Macatawa Driving’s ad. Century noticed that Macatawa’s layout and copy from their add was very similar to what is on Century’s website. And it doesn’t stop there, even their printed applications are almost identical.
#2: Google and Yahoo
Google launched a customized version of Internet Explorer 7 this week, which adds the Google toolbar and makes Google the default search engine, instead of Yahoo. The only problem is that they ripped off Yahoo’s IE7 website.
#3: The Decemberists and Stephen Colbert
This one is less like plagiarism and more like using a good idea, but interesting none-the-less. As Ze Frank points out in yesterday’s episode of The Show (along with the Google/Yahoo incident), The Decemberists are hosting a competition for fans to make their next video using snippets green-screen video, mimicking Stephen Colbert’s “green-screen challange”. Ironically, Stephen Colbert took the idea from someone else.