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I took a premature look at PlanetEye in June. I found a conceptually interesting product that wasn’t ready for real-world use. Since then, the site has opened to the public and gone through a redesign. It’s now worth checking out for planning vacation travel.

The organizing principle of PlanetEye is the “Travel Pack,” which is a way of categorizing your destinations. You can create a Travel Pack for anywhere you’re going and then drop restaurants, hotels, and activities into it. Photos of your destination or activity (from other users) show up on a Pack page, and PlanetEye will put a Pack’s items all on a map for you and let you easily share your Pack with others. I’m thinking of creating a “Rafe’s S.F. Visitor Guide” pack to send to people who come to visit our home.

Packs also recommend alternate activities. At some point, they’ll will be prioritized based on a social formula; right now they just seem to be highly rated professional reviews. Which brings us to the best part of this service: the content. PlanetEye aggregates professional reviews and makes them all easy to find and discover. There are a few useful expert articles on the site as well. And it’s a very attractive site–more travel magazine than utility. Combined with its recommendation system and Travel Pack organizational scheme, it makes for a good system to collect activities, lodging, and dining options for a location.

(Credit:
PlanetEye)

Activities, restaurants, and hotels get useful summary pages.

(Credit:
PlanetEye)

Travel Packs can be private, or you can borrow a public one.

However, the system doesn’t do enough for you once you’ve built your checklist. Yes, it does connect you to hotel sites for reservations and to OpenTable to book restaurants. But there’s no timeline view of your activities to go with the map view, so planning your attack on a vacation spot is still a manual process. I’d like to see a planner like TripIt, or a printed city guide like Offbeat Guides, to go with my Travel Packs.

The P8400 is part of the P series of upcoming Intel processors that uses less power than current mainstream mobile processors.

A post on Laptoping says some model will come with 16.4-inch screens. Other models include ultraportables “featuring a 13.1-inch screen,” Laptoping said. This series, as well as other Sony notebooks, will have a High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI).

This document posted on notebookreview.com shows a VGN-FW100 series image. One model (Vaio VGN-FW160E/H) posted on notebookreview.com is spec’d with a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400, 4GB of memory, a 250GB hard disk drive, and Blu-Ray Disc drive.

(Credit:
Sony)

A consumer notebook line with 13.3-inch LED backlit LCD is also cited with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 graphics chip on various sites. Models listed here specify an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400.

This may be good news for Advanced Micro Devices, too: its mobile graphics processors look to figure prominently in the new lineup.

Sony is set to refresh its notebook lineup with upcoming mobile chips from Intel. Specifications posted on some reseller sites and leaked in Sony documents show a major refresh potentially in the offing.

Sony said it would not comment on speculation.

Sony Vaio laptop

The T9400 is not yet listed on Intel’s processor pricing page, but logically slots in below the T9500 (2.6GHz) listed at $530.

One reseller lists a Sony Vaio VGN-FW198U/H laptop with a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 processor, 4GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, and a Blu-Ray disc drive. A price of $2,149.99 is given.

The Vaio FW series is expected to pack AMD-ATI HD 3470 graphics as well as other graphics processors.

Last.fm, the social music service that CBS Interactive acquired last year, is venturing into original content for the first time with a new video series called Last.fm Presents.

Last.fm, still headquartered in London, continues to expand–one might say it’s moving into MySpace territory. It promoted a number of concerts in the U.K. last year and plans to back new events in the U.S. and Europe soon. Earlier this week, CBS announced that Last.fm would be powering AOL Radio’s online stations in Europe.

A number of social-networking sites have ventured successfully and semi-successfully into pop-culture content: News Corp.’s MySpace.com, which rose to fame as a promotional tool for independent artists, has launched a number of video shows, entertainment programming, and a live concert series as well as an ad-supported music service that will likely compete directly with the one Last.fm announced earlier this year.

Members can sign on to Last.fm Presents as they would with any other group on the social network. The videos will also be syndicated across the “CBS Audience Network” of content partners.

Several smaller social-media sites also have begun to expand into original content with the aim of seizing the digital age’s equivalent of the pop-culture niche that was occupied by MTV before the rise of the Web. Streaming media site Imeem has started to syndicate video content from partner companies, and Buzznet has acquired a handful of influential music blogs to beef up its editorial offerings.

The series consists of interviews with popular and rising bands and artists; among the first artists featured are techno legend Moby, rising alternative-pop singer Santogold, and popular indie band Spoon. Last.fm has also made a selection of live concert footage available on its site to complement the interviews.

The Live Maps team is really together right now. It is offering a product that, in my opinion, is clearly superior to Google Maps. Live Maps is the best browser-based map experience out there today.

Live Maps now offers a wealth of new features, including exporting to GPS devices, improved 3D imagery, and one of my personal favorites, MapCruncher integration.

The example that the Virtual Earth team used (seen above) is overlaying a seating chart onto Giants Stadium. This could also be used in cases like overlaying a campus map, labeling buildings on top of a university or corporation. I think that this has really great potential in providing a new level of information for maps that you are viewing.

Microsoft is rolling out its new “version 2″ 3D imagery in four cities (Las Vegas, Denver, Dallas, and Phoenix) for now, with more to come later. The rest of us will have to wait and look on in envy. 3D improvements include higher-resolution textures, rendered trees, and buildings reaching farther out of the city cores and into the suburbs.

The feature in this release that has me really excited is MapCruncher integration. MapCruncher basically enables you to apply layers on top of the map that you are looking at.

Another thing for GPS owners to get excited about here is that you can now export map collections in three different GPS-compatible formats (KML, GPX, and GeoRSS). Adoption of these standards also means that you can view these exported collections in any compatible application, such as Google Earth.

(Credit: VE/Live Maps Blog)

A side-by-side comparison of Giants Stadium with and without the seating chart overlay.

Thanks to Kip over at my other blog, LiveSide, for alerting me to this new release. The full feature list:

Export your collection to your navigation/GPS device
Improved 3D cities
3D modeling with 3DVIA
Labels for bird’s-eye imagery
1-Click directions (party maps!)
MapCruncher integration
Enhanced explore of map content from across the Web, contributed by other people
Neighborhood subscribe via GeoRSS
Tour enhancements, including hi-definition movies
Directions and traffic enhancements
Improved display of KML files, including Google MyMaps links

Las Vegas hotels, as seen in Live Maps 3D

Microsoft’s Live Maps team just dropped a huge new version of its service in addition to the traffic updates from earlier Thursday.

If Gmail is so great, how come it’s been in beta testing for four years now?

Google is trying to be open-minded with the feature additions for now.

“The idea is you can do whatever you want, get it out to tens of millions of people, and get feedback,” Coleman said. And popular features will be incorporated into Gmail proper.

For now at least, only Google engineers can add features. “Any engineer can code a labs feature,” Coleman said. “Once the code is written and mostly working, it’ll get into the next product build that goes to users” through the labs feature.

The openness of Gmail contrasts with the arguably greater openness of Yahoo’s Zimbra, which is an open-source project. However, just because a project can be modified doesn’t mean those modifications will appear in the version of Zimbra that Yahoo or another company offers as a service.

• Custom keyboard shortcuts.

Update 5:35 p.m. PDT: I added more details and a comment that Gmail should finally exit its beta-testing phase “soon.”

“We have really high standards,” Coleman said. “There are a few things we want to do before we take it out of beta, but we expect to do it soon.”

• ”Muzzle,” which conserves buddy-list screen real estate by hiding status messages.

• Superstars, which lets people select custom stars to label mail.

At 6 p.m. PDT Thursday, users will be able to select from 13 new features in a “labs” tab in the Gmail settings page, said Keith Coleman, a Gmail product manager, in a meeting with reporters here.

• Signature tweaks that let people automatically add a signature file above quoted text in an e-mail reply.

The 'labs' tab in Gmail settings now has experimental options for users.

• The “e-mail addict” tool that lets people lock themselves out of their e-mail account for 15 minutes.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Google will invite users to try new features the company is considering adding to its Gmail service, the company said Thursday.

“We’d like to get to a point where more people can build on this. That would require something with a different level of interface,” Coleman said. “We’re interested in making it possible of users and us to iterate on the product faster, so it’s something we’re interested in.”

Among the new features that are possible:

Eventually, though, the company is interested in opening the system up to outsiders if it can find a way to integrate outside code.

(Credit:
Google)

• Mouse gestures that let users take actions based on mouse movements.

“There are some things in here we think are probably bad ideas,” Coleman said, pointing specifically to a snake game that’s one of the 13 features that’s amusing but probably not a great idea for mainstream deployment. “It’s something we would never do.”

• A quick-link tool that lets people bookmark specific Gmail messages.

• A fixed-width font option to view a message within a font whose characters are the same width–handy for some formatting challenges.

The code behind the new features has been vetted at a basic level, but not otherwise heavily tested or screened.

Even without finding security holes in the SCADA control software, it’s possible to break into power plants by downloading malware to employee computers through a socially engineered e-mail that directs them to a malicious server, a security expert said at RSA 2008.

Boston-based security firm Core Security has discovered a serious hole in the Suitelink software that is used to automate operations at power stations, oil refineries and production lines, according to a report in New Scientist.

We can all live with outages at Yahoo Mail, Twitter, and CNN.com. But what about when there’s an outage that affects our electrical power, heating systems, and gas supplies?

Fortunately, Wonderware, the company that makes Suitelink, has issued a software patch for the vulnerability. Now it’s up to the plants to update their software.

Attackers exploiting the vulnerability could crash the software by transmitting an outsize packet data to a certain port on the computer running Suitelink, the article says.

It appears that Microsoft will do anything to keep Google from cutting a deal with Jerry Yang. In addition, we discuss the One Laptop Per Child XO-2 device, as well as the ongoing fascination with Twitter by the digerati crowd, despite the fact that the site is often out of commission.

On this week’s EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest developments in the Microhoo saga.

Update 7:52 a.m. PDT: Matt Cutts, Google’s Web spam guru, believes the audio feature is indeed a hat-tip to XKCD. “I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature,” he said.

Is it a coincidence? Speak your mind in the comments below, and I’ll update if Google gets back to me with a response.

Also, Munroe himself remarks on his own blog about the audio feature, aptly pointing to one commenter’s post: “It’s the DUMBEST FEATURE I’ve seen thus far. There is no practical use for it. None. Zero. Nada. Sheesh. (The audio preview of my own post sounded moronic!)”

Ask and ye shall receive.

At least if the supplicant is the Net’s most prominent techie cartoonist and Google is in a position to fulfill the request.

Though I could be persuaded otherwise. I suspect it’s evidence of Google being witty, mostly because I’m having trouble figuring out the utility of the feature besides to show off what I see as a generally pretty impressive text-to-speech engine. Perhaps they’re trying to see how well the engine can handle a little more load.

In late September, I chuckled at Randall Munroe’s XKCD cartoon about living to regret YouTube comments. The cartoon suggested a virus that would read people’s YouTube comments back to them before they posted. The result was the mass realization that we’re all a bunch of morons, which, judging by the average YouTube comment I see, doesn’t seem too far off the mark.

(Credit:
CNET News)

It would be more useful if there were some way to train the audio engine when it flubs, as it does with some foreign terms and proper nouns, or at least let it know its errors. I was impressed it could handle some awkward terms, though, including “CNET” and “syzygy.” It runs out of available syllables before the comments field runs out of room for words, though it seems well suited to the typically brief, if inane, YouTube comment.

Well, lo and behold, such a thing now exists, as Google Blogoscoped pointed out Thursday, though alas not with the mandatory listen-before-you-post requirement Munroe suggested. Google added a text-to-speech button that will play back your comments.

YouTube comments, now with a text-to-speech engine.

While Election Day involves a good deal of waiting for results, bloggers won’t be kept silent until the polls close.

“By any kind of absolute standard the man is an appalling moral leper,” he wrote.

“Bear in mind that Philadelphia is where ’street money’ comes into play for Democratic GOTV efforts; this may not be a ‘Black Panther’ at all, but just an ordinary thug hired to look menacing enough to frighten off the weak-kneed,” Ed Morrissey wrote on Hot Air.

The left-leaning site Talking Points Memo tried to subdue the story by checking in with the Obama campaign. A spokesperson for the campaign told Greg Sargent the men were not affiliated with Obama, and an Obama volunteer on site said the two men were not intimidating anyone.

Stories of supposed Black Panthers watching over precincts in Philadelphia at Democrat Barack Obama’s behest flooded right-leaning Web sites and blogs on Tuesday. Pundit Michelle Malkin has footage on her Web site from a University of Pennsylvania student approaching a precinct where two men are standing in front of the door holding clubs. They tell the filmer they are security. Malking refers to the men as a “Obama civilian security force.”

With what’s at stake in this election, it’s easy to blow things out of proportion, seems to be the message from Comedy Central’s Indecision 2008 liveblog, where Dennis DiClaudio takes his shot at the story about “that incident in Philadelphia in which black people were spotted allegedly being black at a polling place.”

He called the story “another desperate Republican attempt to whip up racial hysteria to give them hope of winning the election.”

“We might need to call this a mis-election and go all the way back to the beginning and start all over again,” DiClaudio says.

Partisan Web sites on the left and the right kept busy on Tuesday documenting and rebuffing allegations of intimidation tactics, saying one last goodbye to President Bush, and throwing mud at each other.

E.A. Hanks, in a piece titled, G.O.P. R.I.P.? on the Huffington Post, said the party risks finding itself in a “tar pit of irrevelency…somewhere between Neve Cambell’s career and stacks of leftover ‘Cool Runnings’ VHS tapes.”

While the tension built around who the next president will be, Matthew Yglesias of the progressive group Think Progress took one last shot at President Bush.

Other liberal bloggers took the opportunity to consider the state of the Republican party as a whole.

HotAir.com, another rightwing site, notes that the incident was reported on Fox News.

Meanwhile, Sargent’s colleague at TPM, Josh Marshall, showed a little more passion on the subject.

Google starts opening up
Google is notoriously secretive about exactly how it decides which results to show in response to a particular query–a subject of high interest to companies counting on high placement or people hoping embarrassing Web pages will fade away–but the company has begun opening up. Manber promised in a blog posting in May to shed more light on search quality in coming months.

“We opened the way for any engineer to go improve things. Mostly because it’s based on data,” Manber said. “There is no separation of research and development. Everyone does both.”

“Ideally, we would understand your question, we would understand all knowledge, and match the two,” Manber said.

Of that collection, Google only provided good answers to the inflamed rib query, he said.

Google offers various advanced search options, but its general policy is to use its single search box for everything.

That sounds like a pretty long shortcut, but clearly Google has set its standards and goals very high. “We strive to answer every question, in every language, in a personalized fashion, in less than 100 milliseconds, for free,” Manber said.

Google also tests search algorithm changes on users, different groups of whom receive different search results through a comparison process called split A/B testing.

He also said the company has a team of “dozens” who do nothing but analyze the quality of search results, where quality is measured by hundreds of charts. These employees support the engineers who try to improve the search results, and Google wants those engineers to experiment with new search quality methods, Manber said.

In Manber’s view, humans are a puzzle only beginning to be unlocked. “The 20th century was about conquering nature. The 21st will be about understanding people,” he said, and computing is following suit. “The largest computing clusters in operation today are doing search, e-mail, social networking.”

In other words, the company must use computers to comprehend humans, said Manber, the vice president of engineering in charge of Google search, in a speech at the Gilbane Conference here Wednesday.

Manber shared several details about Google’s search quality process in his speech. For one thing, he said, there are more than 100 “signals” the company uses to determine the order of search results. Signals can be anything from language to location to a person’s previous search behavior–the latter only if the user enabled Google’s search history feature that personalizes results.

That’s not possible today, though, so Google takes a shortcut: Google tries to analyze and summarize all content, extend a user’s query into a summary version, and then match the two.

These experiments take place on a dedicated cluster of servers, Manber said.

“My group at Google has at its disposal many thousands of machines, with storage measured in petabytes,” Manber said. “This is just for our own use, not for satisfying your queries.”

He cited as examples out a series of searches whose intent generally seemed clear enough to a human: southeast utah news-airplane crash 10/25/06, hairstyles for ears that stick out, inflammation and pain under my rib, what is answer to this math problem 6x/10x, how many calories in a pound, if real number show else error blank excel.

Frictionless engineering
“The basic idea is to remove friction from engineers…An engineer with an idea does not ask for permission,” he said. Instead, the engineer tries the experiment, and Google meets once or twice a week to judge by the data whether the changes should be incorporated into Google’s main search results.

“We have to understand as much as we can user intent and give them the answer they need,” Manber said.

Straightforward queries also can be tricky. Google uses context to gauge what exactly “GM” stands for General Motors in the query “GM
cars” but genetically modified in the query “GM foods.”

Tough nuts to crack
Manber appears to take a perverse pleasure in difficult searches, relishing the fact that expectations for search match the rising capability and size of Google’s infrastructure.

Update 2 p.m. PDT: I added more detail and examples of searches that stumped Google.

SAN FRANCISCO–Udi Manber sums up Google’s core challenge with this description of people’s expectations: “Here’s what I say, now give me what I need.”

Udi Manber, head of search engineering at Google, speaks Wednesday at the Gilbane Conference.

The end result: Google adopts search changes quickly and frequently. Google made 450 search algorithm changes in 2007, for example.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)