planetwater

It is wild, how on one day a topic can be discussed so wildly on the internet. Today it seems like RSS is the hot topic.

• First I noticed this post on camendesign: complaining that RSS won’t be on the top GUI layer of the new generation of web-browsers;
• Oliver Gassner wrote about it (in German): The RSS reader is dead, but not RSS per se, because notifications are important and RSS is the underlying technology;
• even Seth Godin wrote about it: In contrary to Oliver Gassner, who uses it to keep track of only a few blogs, Seth Godin uses it to keep track of many blogs;

Here are my thoughts:

• RSS is dead and twitter took over its role. This is the impression I get at least often when using twitter. A lot of people seem to use twitter to announce their blog posts. I think this is not what twitter is good for and neither what twitter is intended for. Why waste twitter posts?
• It still is very useful for me to use an RSS reader. This is how I keep track of blogs that are of interest to me
• It is easy and tempting to subscribe to too many blogs or RSS streams. I am trying to unsubscribe to blogs on a regular basis

Here I am in 2010 writing a blog post on Google Earth. You know, the thing has been around for a while, and most relevant people to this blog are aware of it. However, I just came across to posts on the Google Earth Blog, that demonstrate what a how this thing gets continuously updated and improved:

• There are updated historical images, and quite a few in Germany have been updated. The resolution is not the greatest, but it is still interesting! Instructions: Activate “Historical Views” by selecting “View” from the menu bar and then check “Historical Imagery”. Then a little slider appears in the top left corner of the map screen in GoogleEarth, which you can slide in order to “travel through time”.

City of Nuernberg in December of 1943, courtesy of Google Earth

• The Google Earth Blog blogged about a kml file from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The great thing about this kml file is that it is animated: A voice tells a story, the globe spins to places the voice talks about, and related images pop up. Cool!