Lately, I’ve been thinking about improving my Spanish, so when I stumbled upon the site SpanishSense, which contains lessons with voice dialogs, podcasts and help material I became pretty excited. One thing I really like about the site is how they allow you to embed lessons in your own site, to spread the word and build a community where everyone can help eachother in the learning process. According to the site, they also have Chinese lessons, but I’ll wait with looking into that for now - after all, it’s easy getting those new languages confused with the five I already know (six if you count beginner spanish that I didn’t practice for 2-3 years). You can try one of the SpanishSense lessons (introductions) by using the player I put in this post…

Another thing I did to find ways of improving my Spanish was to add a tab called Spanish to my iGoogle page - which of course gave quite a few widgets to use, including a dictionary, Babelfish and news in Spanish.

In other news, I’m looking around at a lot of Web 2.0 sites lately, getting some invites here and there (often found through Mashable), getting updated on new web API:s through ProgrammableWeb while in the process of starting one new site and one new blog. Meanwhile I’ve learned more about Google maps API (including the AJAX version), tiny mce (there must be ways of doing it better, but since it’s popular I guess they’re on to something), Community Server (I’m not very impressed), Dapper, Yahoo! pipes, Google trends and some add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird. Next is to learn some more about the Google Mashup Editor and perhaps OpenKapow for the site I’m creating. Together with Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes I believe those tools can make wonders…

This is just about the maps for now, not about stand-alone software like Google Earth.

I’ve become impressed by the Google Maps API when working with it, by the support from the Google team and by the constant feature updates we keep getting - and of course by many of the extensions from the community.

I’ve tried out PdMarker, Clusterer and a few other extensions with varying results, and believe some of those features should be part of the standard API. Today I actually saw in one of the Google groups threads that some of those features will come to us soon, and especially the marker.onHover() for tooltips and marker icon change seems to be on its way.

As a way of learning the API I’ve followed some of Mike’s tips for managing the maps - and noticed it seems very updated (I haven’t seen any dates) - as well as following the official blog, looking a lot at the docs and sometimes checking out Google Maps Mania.

Even though I’m impressed by the maps, marker overlays, geocoders etc I am also a bit disappointed in the fact that I noticed this technology slowing my browser, and in conjunction my entire system, down so I can’t work at normal pace. Of course I understand it takes a bit of code to get it all running, but it seems to me there are still some memory leaks - and I really don’t like the message about ‘unresponsive script’ Firefox tells me about every time I exit the browser after looking at maps for a while….

I’m looking forward to the next update - but even more, I’m looking forward to GMap3(), hopefully with better OnUnload()…

I wish you a nice mapping..

Lately I’ve been tinkering a lot with maps and what is called the GeoWeb by some. I’m starting to master the API for google maps, geocoding addresses, airport locations etc through different services and creating my own maps showing markers and marker clusters to show locations for hotels, car rental offices and airports, as part of my job. While doing this I’ve also had the chance to discover much more of the GeoWeb, seeing a webcam over Trafalgar Square in London (which is placed wrong on the map) and a couple of creative mapmaking and tour creating sites, making me believe a great deal in the GeoWeb, and in the future both for services such as Google Maps and free software like Google Earth.

Some creative people use a map as a CV, a WikiMapia project was started to let anyone add information on maps - giving it so much information that my old laptop can barely move the map - and you’ve probably noticed the Google maps flight simulator, Goggles. You can find where you would end up if digging a hole through the planet from any position - I would end up in the middle of the pacific ocean if I started digging from here, so I guess I’ll skip that for now.

While creating my own maps with overlay, I’ve noticed it’s very simple javascript which helps us control the maps, overlays, events etc, and am now considering creating my own mashup using maps and some other services - doing something I haven’t seen around, at least not in Europe - but that will be a secret for now, until the plans start coming to life…

Happy mapping, and have a great weekend - I know I will, going to another place on the map…

I’ll keep exploring web 2.0 sites with this post, recommending a phone company for global calls at local cost, voki (I put one on my front page), a pretty meaningless timeticker, learning japanese, another time management tool and a nice tool for creating mindmaps.

You probably know about Twitter for short messages on what you’re up to - now you can find a similar service for the french speaking crowd at Yelago. WeShow is another beta showing videos, Streamy promises to become a new way for sharing stories online and Walletproof helps you save money both online and offline.

I’ve been looking at script.aculo.us and prototype for making this site a bit more user friendly, and less static, with some simple effects. Using Wordpress this could mean having to alter in the current theme, which I’m not fond of since I would have to remember altering again in another theme if I decide to switch. For this reason I decided to have a look for a plugin, and found what I wanted from the Signified site, with both prototype and script.aculo.us plugins for Wordpress.

After activating both plugins (instead of writing in the theme or creating your own plugin), you simply create a block element which you want to apply the effect to, and then add a trigger for the effect. In my case, I created a div for this content looking like <p id="scrcontent" style="display:none">Text</p>
and a trigger anchor to show this div: <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="new Effect.BlindDown('scrcontent');">Click</a> - it’s a simple thing to do, but be careful to not use too many effects, or it could scare away your visitors.

After installing the plugins (don’t forget that the prototype plugin is needed for the script.aculo.us plugin to work, if you want to try it yourself) it was a simple thing to add the functionality to the site - you can Click to see a description of how to do it.

In the near future I’ll explore other nice plugins and effects and show results here. Until then, have a happy playtime!

I noticed that an old post became relatively popular, the one called “The Web - past, present and future“, looking mostly at different solutions for the future web, and touching lightly on what others have said. Today I instead describe some of my own thoughts about the future of the web - with 3D applications such as Google Earth and Second Life, vertical search engines such as momondo, Ziggs and SimplyHired, and online applications like for example BudgetPulse and LabPixies helping you replace old offline applications with online equivalents.

Some keywords for the future as I see it are Usability, Attitude, Flexibility and Creativity. What is missing most now is the Usability, and looking at the average web 2.0 application you can easily see many flaws - some of which I’ll consider here later. For some testing, I joined a few of the new networks and similar ‘Web 2.0′ sites, such as yumondo, tried some online tools like udutu, while wondering how those names suddenly became so popular - but at the same time positive about the globalised feeling and relaxed attitude it shows for names.

I’ll write more about my findings here later - for now I can say that many of the sites have slow loading, that it’s often difficult or impossible to bookmark search results and similar, and that many of the designers have tried being too cool and forgot that someone should be able to use the site as well…