Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

MSN’s new beta of Virtual Earth seems like a better solution to mapping than Google maps, but you’re about to see just how much better it actually is. We’ll use the Amazon.com Corporate Headquarters as our example here, which is located currently on 12th Ave. S. in Seattle Washington.

Resolution:

MSN VE lets you get at least three times closer to your target than google maps:

Labelling:

MSN Virtual Earth seems to know more about what a property is than Google Maps:

Cool Interface:

Virtual Earth has a cooler semi-transparent overlay at the top, compared to Google’s blase and clunky “one thing after another” approach:

Not to mention that MSN Virtual Earth also has built in “locate me” and blogging features. Wow! aThese are just my first impressions, but it seems like Microsoft has built a Google-Maps killer!

Update:

MSN Virtual Earth is down? At least, this morning, it’s not responding to ping:

Pinging virtualearth.msn.com [207.46.159.135] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 207.46.159.135:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

For more on MSN Virtual Earth check these out (from Scoble):

• radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/24.html#a10738
• spaces.msn.com/members/virtualEarth/
• blogs.msdn.com/cthota/archive/2005/06/30/434508.aspx

WP-From/Where is a brand new Wordpress 1.5 compatible plugin that logs search engine traffic to your site and displays a list of clickable keywords that people have used to get to your site! For example, on this post about homeless photography, I’ve gotten visitors from the following keywords:

Download:

You can get the latest version of this plugin from its repository page. You can also download the file directly.

Installation:

To install this plugin, simply upload wp-from-where to your wp-content/plugins/ and activate in the admin interface. It’s a one-click install!

Usage:

After the plugin is installed, it will begin logging records immediately. However, to display them, you’ll need to call a defined function. For example, in my sidebar.php file, I have the following:

<?php if(is_single()) { ?>
	<div class="line"></div>
	<h3><?php _e('You Came From'); ?></h3>
	<ul>
		<?php wp_from_where(true, 'DESC', 20, '<li>', '</li>', '') ?>
	</ul>
<?php } ?>

You need a call to wp_head(); somewhere in your header.php file for it to log to the db properly. The function wp_from_where takes the following arguments:

1. boolean $per_post, true if you want to display these per_post, false if you want a total across all posts.
2. enum $sort = (‘ASC’, ‘DESC’), defaults to ‘DESC’ to list highest hit-rate keywords first.
3. int $limit, defaults to showing 10 items at a time.
4. string $before, defaults to the blank string, prepends each item.
5. string $after, defaults to the blank string, appends each item.
6. string $sep, defaults to a space-comma, goes in between each item.

Update:

The latest version indexes both the post_id and the keyword for much better performance. I have about 25,000 items in my production db right now, and my blog was becoming uncommonly slow. With the new index, everything’s back to normal! Why, you wonder? The queries match both post_id and keyword per user hit, which, as you can imagine, is quite a bit. Now we should be scalable again.

I just took the MIT blogging survey, which was actually cooler than I thought. For example, they ask for your blog url and then pull 5 random links and ask questions about them:

It’s pretty awesome, takes 10 minutes, and is probably for a good cause.