Google Street View is cause for both concern and enthrallment. The first article I caught about it suggested that a worker on an espresso break was caught on camera, his absence from work caught on camera. That does sound creepy, though I wonder why catching an espresso would be cause for concern? (Was it a crappy roast?) Obviously, that’s missing the point that the technology itself seems invasive.

While looking up directions with google maps, I decided to check out the Street View feature. It’s only available in San Francisco, Denver, New York, Miami, and Las Vegas. I can already see the utility of this tool for making map reading a much more visual endeavor. Why do maps exist in their current state? It’s a semiotic code, a way of breaking down geography into symbols that can fit on one page. We didn’t previously have the means to create more accurate visual representations of our surroundings, especially with constraints of scale.

Naturally, I immediately wondered how they do it? Is it live satellite feed? I didn’t think that was likely as the images are pretty detailed. One of the sources of images is from a vehicle with eleven lenses, capable of taking a full image along city streets. That is, of course, why the aforementioned employee on an espresso break wasn’t discovered until weeks later. It also begs another question, which is– why HR would automatically assume that the espresso break was during work hours? I don’t see any time stamp on the images. I sense an urban myth generated to create the sense that this application is totally creepy. Though it does create the potential for severe invasion of privacy, the images of people are very fuzzy and they are not in real-time. Further and frankly, these are street views, and any photographer could capture street views and distribute them through any means. It is the sheer volume of Google’s project that is frightening, and we should all take pause to consider all of the ways in which our perception of what is public and what is private have been flipped upside down by new technologies.

Also of interest is that Google was not the first company to attempt this type of street view documentation. Who else would have the hubris to envision such a project? (Of course, their version is clunkier and less user friendly, but I would expect nothing less…)

For the moment, I remain at least as enthralled as I am creeped out.

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock. If you take a step back and don’t actively seek out new tech solutions, they are definitely not coming to you (unless they are listed in your aggregator!!!)

I struggle with recommending a good aggregator to people. Bloglines has always been too cumbersome for my taste, and I really like Sage, which integrates into Firefox. However, with Sage, I have not been able to find the time and energy to coordinate my reading list on various computers that I use. I was reading a blog last night which mentioned Google Reader, so I immediately tried it out. I imported my opml file from Firefox very easily and then started playing around with how it works. There are a few constraints that I don’t like, particularly the fact that once a subscription is set up, you have to go into Manage Subscriptions to change the category it is assigned to, which seems a little less intuitive than Google Mail.

The things I love:
-You can easily pull a Subscribe button to the top of your browser in order to easily add subscriptions while reading.
-No importing issues: When I pulled my bookmarks in from Sage, it maintained all the folder categories I had set up.
-You can star important items to come back to later (!), much like Google Mail.
-You can share items that will show up on a unique url.
-Items are easier to read than they were in Sage. Whereas Sage had a two-column format (that I don’t see any place to modify), Google Reader is one column with larger font.

The only thing I miss about Sage— it detects feeds for you. I could suspect there is a feed somewhere, click to subscribe, and I navigate away from the page only to find there is no feed. However, there’s no reason I can’t confirm there is a feed with Sage and then add the subscription to Google Reader.

Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but until just now, I didn’t realize that you could import Google Scholar references right into Endnote. A friend was exalting the glories of RefWorks because of its interoperability with Google Scholar, and since he said, and I quote, “RefWorks sh*ts all over Endnote.” In addition to immediately reverting to defensiveness about my tool of choice, I took this to mean that Endnote did not have the same capability. You can see why I might have leaped to that conclusion. And for the record, RefWorks could be a good tool for someone who prefers to keep their database online, which I don’t.
As my use of Google Scholar has increase, my curiosity about whether or not there was a filter available to import to Endnote has too. And in fact, there is no filter, there is a simple change in setting to see that preference, which a university in New Zealand tipped me off as to how to go about modifying this.

To summarize, you simply go to “Scholar preferences” in Google Scholar, and set the “Show link to Import Citations” to the bibliographic manager tool of choice. Voilá, a link appears next to each of the records generated by Google Scholar.