BlogNotes: Moving to Google Feedburner

Just a quick note -- apparently since Google's acquisition of FeedBurner on June 1, 2007, they have been moving the FeedBurner application to Google hardware, software, and data centers. Feedburner publishers including Diplopundit have recently been asked to move their feeds from Feedburner to Google Feedburner.

There should not be a loss of service with the feeds during this transition process. All feeds.feedburner.com URLs will redirect readers to feeds hosted by Google. Readers will continue to receive Diplopundit feeds.

But if you do encounter troubles with receiving my feeds, please be patient. According to Google FeedBurger, everything should return to normal within 72 hours of the move.

Google Vote Mapplet - Live!

A quick update on the Google mapplet that provides voting location. We wrote previously about this here. It went fully functional in the last day or so. Check it out here: http://maps.google.com/vote. Please verify your voting location with your voting officials, especially if there is no early voting in your place.

Google Vote - 28 Days to Election Day

Google has rolled out a nice mapplet that hopefully will help rock the vote this year. Google Vote currently at http://maps.google.com/vote, will provide voting location, registration information and more. All voting location information won't be available for another week (mid-October) but the site is already useful for checking out days left to register by mail (not a lot left, hurry!), in-person registration deadline, information about voting by state, and the state voter's hotline or contact person.

Some bloggers have speculated that this project started out as a Google 20% project but has now become fully supported (although this is still not on display in Google Labs). Once voting information are fully loaded, voters should be able to generate driving maps to their voting places. Until then, please check with your state and local election officials to verify your voting location.

Roll the Google Vote video below:

Google "In Quotes" and the Presidentiables

Google Labs has just opened a new project to the public called In Quotes. The feature allows you to find quotes from stories linked to from Google News. The Google release says that direct quotes, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted. The quotes and their speakers are determined automatically by a computer program and the company does not guarantee the completeness or accuracy of the information that we see on screen

You use a pull down menu to determine the different sets of people you want to compare about a particular topic. The feature currently allows you to choose and compare quotes from political candidates and other political figures. When you click the Spin button, the quotes will rotate and the system will display two new quotes for you to compare. This way you will be able to compare multiple quotes about a specific topic from the two speakers you've chosen. There are 20 political figures available in the United States version of the site (including the leading candidates from both parties who are displayed by default), with other editions available for Canada, India, and the UK. There are also 20 current topics on display from Iran and Iraq, to human rights and immigration.

It is in Google Labs for a reason; it still needs refining on how each keyword is used. But it's fun to tinker with. Check it out!