Google Blog Converters 1.0 Released

Blog authors around the world, Google would like to remind you that it's your blog, your data. Now that Blogger allows users the ability to export all contents of their blog, the Data Liberation team would like to announce the Google Blog Converters project. This new Open Source project provides the ability to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. This initial release provides Python libraries and runnable scripts that convert between the export formats of Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType, and WordPress.

In addition, the source code includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine. Future additions to the project will include support for BlogML and synchronization tools between various services that do not provide a import/export feature but do provide APIs for accessing and modifying blog contents.

We're excited to provide this level of control for your personal blog data. Contributions to the project are always welcomed and encouraged, so check out our source code (download, 2.7 MB zipped) and let us know what you think. We look forward to your feedback in our discussion group.

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Google Helping Bloggers with Data Portability

Want to move your blog to another publishing platform? Well now Google has made it easier for you. Last Friday, the Data Liberation Team announced the Google Blog Converters project on their Open Source Blog.

Google made data portability a lot easier for Blogger users a month ago and with this announcement it appears they are offering easier portability solutions to WordPress, Movable Type, and LiveJournal users as well.

Friday's release provides Python libraries and runnable scripts that convert between the export formats of the above platforms. Future plans include synchronization tools between services that don't offer import/export features as well as support for BlogML.

Google has also released templates for hosting the conversions on Google App Engine.

Take a look at the examples hosted on Google App Engine:
- Blogger to WordPress
- WordPress to Blogger
- LiveJournal to Blogger

But beware the caveat noted in the readme file:
"There is a limit to the size of a downloaded file on appspot.com of 1 MB of data. Thus, these hosted applications should only be used for reference or for the conversion of small blog export files."

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Will Google and Microsoft Own the Web?

It's something of an open secret that Mozilla, the organization behind the open source Firefox Web browser, gets most of its funding from Google -- 91 percent, to be exact. The deal gives Google top placement in Firefox's search engine bar. But now that Google is also shipping Chrome, its own branded browser, some critics are asking whether the search engine giant's deep pockets have allowed it to gain too much influence over the Web browser market.

This week, Mozilla CEO John Lilly admitted that his organization's relationship with Google is "more complicated than it used to be" in light of the current funding arrangement. But Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz goes even further, claiming that because the market is controlled by just a few giant companies -- namely Google and Microsoft -- the Web browser has become "hostile territory" for application developers. Could the days of an open Web be coming to an end?

The technologies used to build Web pages -- including HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) -- are all open standards, maintained by industry consortia. No one company owns them. But experimental features often appear in new browser releases first, then are integrated into the official standards later. One example is Google's Gears technology, which is built into Chrome and is available as a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Gears is widely expected to influence the upcoming HTML 5 standard.

That's all well and good, except that arguably only Microsoft can compete with Google's share of the browser market. For example, Opera is a longstanding alternative browser that is often praised for its compliance with Web standards, but its market share is but a fraction of that of Firefox or IE. Because of Opera's narrower reach, a new feature introduced in Opera might be seen as less significant, and therefore be less likely to become part of the public standards.

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Google reveals upcoming Android features

Android is in the process of being turned by Google from its own development project into open source. This week, some of the changes made to the mobile operating system by a private group of developers came to light in Cupcake--the Android code the group shares with the outside world. Now, according to the Android road map, the Cupcake enhancements have started to be merged into the wider, open-source Android project.

The private development branch will continue to operate, and the current merging of the new features into the master Android branch will be completed in early January.

Some of the changes coming to Android are bug fixes, affecting elements such as e-mail, conversation-list scrolling, and the alarm clock. Several new features are, however, also being added--for example, the ability to save MMS attachments. The Linux kernel upon which Android runs has been upgraded to version 2.6.27, and "basic x86 support" has been added.

The WebKit browser core has been updated, and support for the new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine has been added. The browser will now support cutting and pasting, and will also include a find function.

Android's camera functionality has received a major boost, with the addition of video capture. Download functionality has also been enhanced; applications can pause their downloads, and interrupted downloads can now be resumed instead of failing.

Virtual keyboards will also become possible, and third-party developers will be given the application programming interfaces to create their own input methods. A new API for speech recognition is also included, as is A2DP stereo Bluetooth support.

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The End of Twitter?

If you work in an internet related field (programming, designing, administrating, etc) you’ve probably heard of the “micro-blogging” service Twitter. For those who don’t know what it is, Twitter is a social networking site where users share “Tweets” (140 character messages) with each other and the world at large. As is the case with many new internet technologies however, Twitter has it’s shortfalls, and it might not be long before newer micro-blogging services take over.

One such new micro-blogging service is identi.ca. Even though identi.ca doesn’t have as many users or features as Twitter (yet!), it does some things Twitter does not.

1) REALLY easy setup.

Identi.ca supports OpenID*. Since I already have an OpenID set up, I used it to register my new Identi.ca account. All I had to do was enter my OpenID, approve identi.ca, and choose a nickname. That’s IT! No adding mundane details like my name or e-mail address… all that was pulled from my OpenID automatically.

Of course, if you don’t have OpenID you can still register at Identi.ca normally, and the process looks simple and easy.

2) IM and Text Message support.

When I first started using twitter, I could “tweet” using an instant messaging program. Unfortunately, this functionality soon disappeared, with little explanation as to where it had gone or when it was coming back. Likewise, one of the strongest features of Twitter is the ability to receive tweets from people you’re following on your cell phone as text messages. In the USA this works fine, but here in Canada Twitter has had to disable the service due to excessive costs from the cell phone companies.

Identi.ca seems to have neatly avoided both problems. As of right now at least they have an IM service that works and they’re using e-mail to SMS for their text messaging. e-Mail to SMS doesn’t cost them anything - the fees are passed on to the user. I looked into it and for me it would be a $5 a month upgrade, or 15 cents per message received. This is a bit of a pain, but at least the option is there.

3) Interfaces with Twitter.

Identi.ca interfaces well with twitter, so if you’re switching over you don’t need to worry about people missing your Tweets. Just add your twitter username and password to Identi.ca, and anything you post to identi.ca is copied to Twitter. Win / Win!

4) Identi.ca is Open Source.

Rather than being a closed platform like Twitter, Identi.ca is built on open source software and works with an open source license. This, combined with support for FOAF files*, Microformats*, and OAuth* means that other webmasters can set up their own micro-blogging systems, and fully integrate back to Identi.ca.

In short, Identi.ca takes sharing what you’re doing right now to a whole new level, and its smart business plan and open licensing agreements mean that it will continue to expand long after Twitter has died. If you’re just thinking about getting into the micro-blogging world, take Identi.ca for a spin. As with Facebook / Myspace, sometimes in the internet world “the second mouse gets the cheese”.

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Does Google Hate WordPress and Other Blog Platforms?

Doing a simple search for the term blog reveals some interesting information found in the SERP. There is absolutely no mention of WordPress or any other blog publishing platform. Yet, there are three instances of Google mentioned.

Ironically, after allowing Google to track my web history, doing the same search logged into iGoogle, one would think that the results would be more "personalized" based off my previous browsing history and also due to the fact that visiting WordPress.org is one of my top most visited sites while logged in.

To no avail, the SERP still included three instances of Google with no listing of WordPress, TypePad or any other alternative blog publishing software. To further my research, I searched for the term: create a blog, and found that three of the top ten results show Blogger.com and once again, no instance of WordPress.

What are your thoughts about this? Does Google hate WordPress and other blog platforms? Is this a way of Google attempting to lessen the number of new bloggers from using more powerful platforms which in return make Google's job controlling them more difficult? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Google Sorts One Petabyte Of Data In 6 Hours

According to last Friday's Official Google Blog, the Google Systems Infrastructure Team has sorted a record 1 terabyte of data on 1,000 computers in only 68 seconds, which breaks the previous mark of 209 seconds established in July by Yahoo.

Team leader Grzegorz Czajkowski wrote that the team followed the rules of a standard terabyte sort benchmark and used Google's MapReduce software framework that supports parallel computations over large (multiple petabyte) data sets on clusters of computers. Yahoo's effort had featured a 910-node cluster, and used Hadoop, an open-source MapReduce implementation.

The sort benchmark, which was created in 1998 by computer scientist Jim Gray, specifies the input data (10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files), which must be completely sorted and written to disk. Not content with just rewriting the record book, the Google team then decided to up the ante in sorting massive volumes of data.

"Sometimes you need to sort more than a terabyte, so we were curious to find out what happens when you sort more and gave one petabyte (PB) a try," said Czajkowski. "It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1 PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers. We're not aware of any other sorting experiment at this scale and are obviously very excited to be able to process so much data so quickly."

One petabyte is a thousand terabytes, or roughly 12 times the amount of archived Web data in the U.S. Library of Congress as of May 2008. One way to put that amount in perspective, according to Czajkowski, is to consider that the aggregate size of data processed by all instances of MapReduce at Google was, on average, 20 PB per day in January 2008. A paper explaining MapReduce on the Google labs site says that the upwards of one thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day. So the infrastructure team's MapReduce job that extended the benchmark factors out to 50 typical MapReduce jobs, or one-twentieth the total of all daily MapReduce jobs run on Google's clusters.

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