Daniel Ho’s Musings

OK, I love epidemiology.

This coupled with Google geekiness and you know I have to write about it. It seems that the geniuses at Google found that using aggregate Google search data, they can estimate flu activity in your state up to 2 weeks faster than traditional methods.

Check out the current data for your area here: http://www.google.org/flutrends/ and if you’re interested in how it works, click here. Come on, do it. I know you’re interested…right?

This is an issue that I’ve had for a while, but only recently got around to figuring it out.

I have multiple Gmail accounts for work, play, etc. To make things worse, I make extensive use of Google Reader and Notebook. To switch between the accounts, you have to log-out of one, and into another. Doing this many times a day was slowly driving me insane. So, I did what all self respecting geek would do (other than rolling their own solution)…I Googled!

Basically, I was looking for a solution that would let me swap between a few sets of “cookies”, or the small set of data stored by Google on my computer’s browser that includes my identity, the fact that I logged in successfully, etc. Fortunately, within a few minutes of starting my search, I found CookieSwap.

CookieSwap is an add-on to Firefox that does exactly what I was looking for!

“CookieSwap enables you to easily swap all your cookies so that you can be logged in to multiple web e-mail accounts (like Gmail and Yahoo! mail) at the same time and quickly switch between them.

CookieSwap is an extension that enables you to maintain numerous sets or ‘profiles’ of cookies that you can quickly swap between while browsing.”

To personalize the profiles so that it doesn’t say “Profile1″, “Profile2″ etc., more help in setting up the plugin is here.

This service only works for looking up US businesses, but it works well. It would be my favourite Google app if it did Canadian businesses as well.

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Google Voice Local Search is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone.

To try this service, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone.

Using this service, you can:

* search for a local business by name or category.
You can say “Giovanni’s Pizzeria” or just “pizza”.

* get connected to the business, free of charge.

* get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone.
Just say “text message”.

And it’s free. Google doesn’t charge you a thing for the call or for connecting you to the business. Regular phone charges may apply, based on your telephone service provider.

Note: Google Voice Local Search is still in its experimental stage. It may not be available at all times and may not work for all users. We’re fine-tuning the service to get better at recognizing your requests. It’s currently only available in English, in the US, for US business listings.

PART DEUX

Holy crap…even after a long day at the office, I managed to transfer all my Bloglines RSS subscriptions to Google Reader. I have lots, so how does one do this in no time flat? Easy!
If you don’t know about OPML, now’s the time to figure it out.

From our friends at Wikipedia:

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines. Originally developed by Radio UserLand as a native file format for an outliner application, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of web feeds between web feed aggregators.

The OPML specification defines an outline as a hierarchical, ordered list of arbitrary elements. The specification is fairly open which makes it suitable for many types of list data.

Actually there is nothing to figure out. All you need to know is that this is a way for RSS feeds to be exported and imported.

So, in Bloglines, go to the bottom of the feeds and export the feeds to an OPML file onto your desktop. The file will be named export.opml. You to go Google Reader, and under Settings/Import Export…import the export.opml file and tada! You’re done!

All I have to say is…schweet!

TIPS

If you read a log of blogs, learning Google Reader keyboard commands will save you a ton of time. This is the best feature for my use anyway.

To figure out what the commands are, just type ‘?’ anywhere in the Reader’s screen.

Here’s a quick run down of the commonly used ones. Definite well worth the time getting to know these. They are fairly obvious so I am pretty comfortable with them already:

j/k: next/previous item

n/p: scan down/up (list only)

o/enter: expand/collapse (list only)

s: star item

+ s: share item

v: view original

m: mark item as read/unread

r: refresh

u: toggle full screen mode

+ a: mark all as read

I have been using Bloglines to read my RSS feeds, and have been happy with it. That is, until Chris Brogan came a long and start blathering on about Google Reader.

As you may know, I love Google. Like many geeks out there, even though we know that Google has grown into a huge monster, it is our favourite huge pet monster!

The reason why I wasn’t already a big Google Reader fan is because the first version of Google Reader was slow, buggy,…and did I say slow?

The new Google Reader is not perfect, but MUCH better than the first version. It is SO good in fact that I’m going to do the switcher thing back from Bloglines. The current version is fast, has keyboard shortcuts (extremely valuable if you read a lot of blogs), and there is an ability to share what you are reading.

If you’re currently a hater…go back and check it out. It’ll be worth your time.

Great stuff…now I just need to migrate my links over.