TechnoCloud

It’s not often these days that you see a piece of technology that makes your draw drop, yet Microsoft have done that to me with Microsoft Surface. If there’s a better piece of gadget eye candy I’d like to see it (although Scoble saw it two years ago the showoff!).

Microsoft Surface is a touchscreen computer that allows you to interact with pieces of digital content as if they were physical objects on the table - to move, expand and even transfer content between physical devices, to create a music playlist through drag and drop using your fingers. It even recognises physical objects on the table and allows you to interact with them, from a wifi camera to a beer glass (so you can order another).

Check out the video below to see it in action.

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Good post from Danny Sullivan breaking down what Google’s forthcoming Universal Search means in visual and descriptive terms.

In short, Google will be incorporating into the default search engine rankings page results from across it’s various search engines, e.g. video, images, books… This presents all kinds of challenges in terms of user interface, information overload and access to the nugget(s) of information you were searching for in the first place.

Web users have seen these changes coming in various guises for some time as Google has tweaked the interface in various markets. At different times I’ve seen images, maps, blog and news results dripped into the results page. The next evolution looks to make those tweaks live across the search engine.

It’s Google’s own version of the wider widgetisation of the web where different data sources are pulled in from across the web customised to the user’s individual needs and preferences.

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Hot on the heels of the impressively silly Twittervision comes the Flickrvision mashup. This combines the latest geo-tagged Flickr images with Google Maps to show images being uploaded in real-time on a world map.

It’s a good visual way of getting a sense of the global community that powers Flickr. There’s also plenty of potential to make this tool more useful by increasingly the levels of personalisation, for example, creating a slideshow of your favourite tags or locations over the last 24 hours.

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Now you can add TechnoCloud as a widget to your blog or space courtesy of Widgetbox’s Blidget. Widgetbox also comes with a built-in stats package which allows the publisher to see not only subscriber numbers, but also the number of views of a particular widget. The widget can also be customised in terms of size, colour and function.

As a test, I’ve just setup TechnoCloud as an RSS feed using the Flickr toys broadway poster image from earlier in the week. To get it click on ‘Get widget’ at the bottom of the widget.

One initial observation. I originally installed the widget on my sidebar, but couldn’t help noticing that the page took much longer to load, so decided to restrict it to this post. Perhaps I’ll be sticking to straightforward RSS in the future…

If it’s taking an eternity to load, let me know in the comments and it’ll be consigned to the widgibin.

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Every wonder what the world of social networking looks like as a map? No? Me neither.

However, if ever you do, a comic book artist has drawn this map which reflects relative audience sizes. Unfortunately, you can’t quite make out the TechnoCloud pixel - the map equivalent of a desert island with single palm tree…

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If ever you get bored with uploading and categorising your photos on Flickr, have a play with these tools that make use of their API.

Among the highlights:

• Make your own mosaic
• Warholise your images
• Create a magazine or movie cover

Those source photos you uploaded are becoming for many just the raw materials for an increasingly customised web experience.

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Google Personalized Homepage, now surprisingly renamed the unoriginal iGoogle, is opening up gadget production beyond developers with ‘make your own gadget‘.

Now people without development or web design skills can use a wizard to create a series of personalised gadgets to embed into their iGoogle and share with others. Gadgets (or widgets depending on platform and prevailing wind) are being democratised across the web.

We’ve progressed from fixed content elements, to select your own ‘official’ gadget, to add/create a developer gadget, to now add/create your own ‘laymans’ gadget, it’s all part of reducing the barriers to entry of contributing and sharing content that we are seeing across the web.

Expect to see the wizards grow in number and sophistication across gadget (and other) platforms as web users grow more and more comfortable with personalising content consumption and the tools that enable them to do so become easier to use and build.

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