Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Just like software, books get upgrades too: I've been tasked with the job of expanding and revising Lifehacker the book to a shiny new second edition due out in the spring of 2008. But I need your help. As I dive deep into revising this monster, I want to hear from you: what do you want to see in the second edition of the book? What did you love, hate, roll your eyes at, shrug or smile at the first time around? I've set up a Google Group to get your opinions and thoughts as I write, and in return you'll get sneak previews of the new edition, a behind-the-scenes look at a book-in-progress, and incredibly good karma. The really helpful folks will even get their name listed in the book's acknowledgments—after that, fame and fortune await! Join up the Lifehacker book 2.0 Google group and have your hand in getting the latest and greatest in life hacking on shelves this spring. Thanks in advance for your help and interest and for making the site—and the book—better every day.

Google slightly improved their onebox that shows the current time in different locations around the world, across the different time zones. For instance, you can enter time in moscow or time in berlin, germany or usa time. For one thing, the new time onebox result now shows different possible locations if the query is ambiguous (e.g. for the query usa time, locations range from Chicago to Washington or Denver). Also, the clock icon is now dynamic and shows the actual time... in gray/ silver when it’s night, and yellow/ gold when it’s day, apparently. The old time onebox was icon-less.

It seems time difference calculations can not be triggered though. Entering time difference germany china and similar will not show any onebox, even though it might be helpful.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First Google’s new book search features and now some upgrades to Google Spreadsheet. Like I’m ever going to get seven hours of sleep again in my life.

I have actually been using Google Spreadsheets a fair amount at work. It’s not as full-featured as Excel, but I don’t often create spreadsheets that need so much horsepower. And there’s something handy about knowing your spreadsheet is as close as any Web-enabled computer.

I was very happy to see that Google Spreadsheets now has AutoFill, which is for me the official “feature that most quickly becomes annoying when it isn’t available.” Especially when you’re filling in date ranges. Google has made the best use of its Web connection by hooking in AutoFill to Google Sets. Remember Google Sets? Refresh your memory at http://labs.google.com/sets . With Google Sets you can enter a few items that are similar (colors, candy bars, cities) and Google Sets will try to fill out your list with more similar items.

Enter a few similar items in your Google Spreadsheet, and select that range of cells. Hold down CTRL (if you’re using Linux or Windows) or ALT (if you’re using Mac) while you’re clicking and dragging on the small box in the lower right corner of the cells. Google will try to fill the range of cells you’ve covered with similar items. I found it worked really well for colors, though Google couldn’t cover the entire range I selected. It went a little bonkers when I started entering book genres, and introduced a couple of non-English words. But other than that the Google Sets offering worked pretty well.

Google Spreadsheets has also introduced new data import features which allow you to import RSS feeds, HTML, comma- and tab-delimited files, and text-delimited files. You can get all the skinny on those import functions at the Google Docs documentation. The import function that really caught my fancy was the feed import function.

The syntax is =ImportFeed(URL, [feedQuery | itemQuery], [headers], [numItems]) . This basic query will fill my spreadsheet with a list of recently updated or added items at Project Gutenberg: =ImportFeed(”http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss”) . Perhaps I only want the last five items from the feed, and I want to include headers instead of only the data. The syntax would look like this: =ImportFeed(”http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss”,,true,5). (The two commas together are because I don’t have a feed or item query in use here.)

Let’s do a project. Say I want I want to keep a tally of new DVD releases, and use it in Google Spreadsheets so I can share it with other people and we can make notes (”Seen it,” “I want to get that one”, “Huh?”) I go poking around for an RSS feed of new DVD releases and find one at Rotten Tomatoes.

I enter this RSS Feed into Google Spreadsheets ( =ImportFeed(”http://i.rottentomatoes.com/syndication/rss/new_releases.xml”, , true, 100) ) and presto, I have a listing of the latest DVD releases. But I only have as many as are in the RSS feed right now. Ideally I’d like to be able to save an accumulate items as they are listed in the feed. Feedcatch might work for that — but I’m not sure if Feedcatch is still functional. Anyone know?

Once I have the data, I can publish it in several ways, including creating an embeddable IFrame for a blog. Further, I can specify a range of information to embed, not the whole feed.

This embedded frame will automatically update as the sheet itself updates.

As I think about it, I think that the ability to import HTML files might be pretty fun too. Say I was Tim Carter of AsktheBuilder.com . I could import a Google search result that gave me the pages indexed in the last 24 hours that contained the string AsktheBuilder and pulled out all links on that page:

=importXml(”www.google.com/search?as_qdr=d&q=askthebuilder&num=100″, “//a/@href”)

There’s crud in these results — it’s ALL the links on the page, after all — but this might be a useful way to monitor for pillaged content, nice comments, etc. THEN you add a column next to the first column that pulls titles from the content you’ve found, giving you a quick way to glance over search results. (Like so, where the column is A35: =importXml(A35, “//title”)) Unfortunately you’re limited to 50 functions per spreadsheet (FIDDLESTICKS!) so there’s a limit to what you can import.

I could and will spend a LOT of time playing with this. If the spreadsheet offered filtering functions, many more amazing things could be done. Who needs sleep anyway?

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service has started on a humanitarian mission: to help find Steve Fossett. As you might have heard on the news, Steve Fossett went missing on September 3 while flying over the Nevada desert. Satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts (he did not file a flight plan) and Mechanical Turk HITs have been set up to review those images.

The HIT is listed at http://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?requesterId=A1U5V688O4PR3V . It’s live for a week and you have sixty minutes to work on each HIT. The HITs are small squares of satellite images that you have to review for unusual objects. Examples are provided for you; if you want to get a closer view of the image, you’re given a coordinate to use in Google Earth. With each hit, you either report that you have seen nothing unusual or you report any strange objects — a space is provided for comments.

I found some of the squares pretty dark — being able to refer to Google Earth will be a help, I’m sure. If you’ve been interested in Mechanical Turk, this is your opportunity to see how it works and help out in the search besides. You will need an Amazon account to work on the HITs.

The State of Florida has launched a controversial new site which lets school students and parents check on the disciplinary histories of public school teachers.

MyFloridaTeacher.com (not Firefox compliant but according to the local news has attracted over 600,000 visitors this week) is powered by the searchable database of the Florida Department of Education Bureau of Professional Practice Services, and reports on actions taken up to and including revocation of teaching licenses.

The Bureau of Professional Practices Services investigates complaints and wrongdoings by Florida teachers.

The information is public record, but Department of Education has made the information easily accessible by any Internet user.

Teacher wrongdoings available on the site range from DUI’s to sexual misconduct to the trafficking of cocaine. If anything, MyFloridaTeacher.com may have opened up a can of worms for the State of Florida as parents are now questioning how some of these teachers can still be working with their children.

More on MyFloridaTeacher.com :

Problems With Teacher Check Web Site
Checking On Teachers

Netscape has announced that it plans to revert back to its old self with AOL powered news stories and send the Netscape Social News Community packing, to a location to be disclosed later.

TechCrunch first mentioned the rumored move, and I also covered it with my thoughts on the Netscape project and how AOL would be making a mistake by not keeping it going.

Why ditch the Netscape social news project and move back to the old Netscape?

Netscape’s Tom Drapeau explains :

Many of you may remember that Netscape.com used to be much different than it is today. In fact, it used to contain more mainstream news before we shifted to the social news site you see now.

We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.

The decision to redirect the current Netscape.com site is based on that feedback and our desire to better serve our community.

Other reasons for the change could be new opportunities in advertising revenue, especially from search, which could not be reached via the social news site and/or a loss of loyal Netscape users who were not used to reading stories on Viagra, Making Money from AdSense, or Bollywood on a daily basis.

What will happen to the Netscape Social News project? Seems that AOL plans to rebrand it and house it on a separate domain.

We, as a company, remain committed to delivering a compelling social news experience for our users. This move is an effort to make both the former portal experience and the social news experience accessible so that you can decide which you prefer–or, even better, that you want to participate in both.

We look forward to unveiling a new social news site as soon as possible. The ability to post, comment, rate and share the news that’s most relevant to you is as important to us as it is to you. We will be maintaining an open dialogue with you, our users, so that you’ll be the first to know as soon as we’re ready to pull back the curtains.

Do you think the new Social News portal will be housed on an AOL.com subdomain? A Netscape subdomain? An existing Weblogs Inc. site. Or an entirely different site?

Whereever they send Netscape, let’s hope that AOL beefs up the editorial moderating and delivers the same link love that they do now.

In above chessboard, which is actually a Google Spreadsheet embedded using the advanced publishing options, the king and rook automatically switch their places around every hour (not necessarily in compliance with chess rules!).

There's really no use to that, it's just a thought experiment. To reproduce this, first create a new Google Docs spreadsheet. Now for every second field use a black background color and white foreground color, and copy some nice Unicode characters, like the chess pieces, into the cells. Publish the document as webpage and copy the URL of that page. Now go back to edit the original document, hit F2 in a cell and use the new importXml formula – which can be used to reference any kind of external HTML or XML – but reference the spreadsheet you are currently working on itself using the just-published URL (line breaks added):

=importXml(
        "http://spreadsheets.google.com/
        pub?key=pvm6FPiylicJhtAc45XcYbg",
        "//td[@class='g s1']/text()")

Additionally, the left field's XPath – the second parameter in above function – will grab the value from the right field, and vice versa. You guessed it: this will cause the king and rook to continuously change places! (The update rythm is around once per hour due to Google's caching of importXml. During my first test, after around 8 hours the spreadsheet was broken and just displayed "Loading..." – if you can't see it, I saved a screenshot.)

Update: And... after approximately 10 hours, the second try above broke too and displays "loading" now instead of chessboard figures.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google Reader just added search! Yay! Suppose you remembered that someone did a cool post comparing PageRank to Play-Doh. Just do a search and you’ll remember that it was Rhea writing on Search Engine Journal:

I’m going to be using Google Reader’s new search a lot. What are some of the things you’ll do with Reader’s ability to search your feeds?

Tony Ruscoe posts on blogoscoped.com about past and recent traces in the wild about evidence of GDrive.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-04-n51.html