I’ve been interested in Pompeii from an early age, ever since I first read about how the Roman town had been buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and that archaeologists were revealing it bit by bit just as it had been thousands of years ago. Images of the macabre body casts of the eruption’s victims were terrifying and compelling to me at the same time. The 1972 film Pink Floyd at Pompeii made a perfect soundtrack to my early investigations, and the images of the band set up in the otherwise empty ampitheatre were haunting.

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So for those of you who aren’t using Buzz (yet?) and in an attempt to keep stuff I write about in one place, I gathered up some of the posts I’ve made on Buzz for this story. I don’t know if I’ll keep using Buzz or not, and if I don’t I’d like to have a copy of this stuff somewhere. I use my personal website much like a Doogie Houser electronic journal while I use Facebook for sharing links and videos I find interesting, but how I might use Buzz is still kind of in flux. Things I write on my personal blog are automatically included as “notes” on Facebook, so folks I am connected to over there will be able to see the kind of things I’ve been posting over there. Since Buzz is integrated into gmail (where I spend a lot of time) and a lot less bloated with ads and other stupid app clutter, it seems to lend itself much better to serious conversations than facebook does so its possible that I’ll want to figure out some kind of automated method to integrate those conversations happening on Buzz back into my own site (I like to archive stuff I write so I can reference it later). Sounds like RSS would be the perfect solution but of course Google doesn’t make an RSS feed for my Buzz posts available… neither does Facebook – even though they both will happily use the technology themselves to suck in outside content.

The following posts are just my side of the conversation for posts I’ve made on Buzz since I started using it, to participate in the conversation fully – sign up and follow me there!
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It’s fairly common knowledge that Google has been scanning in (actually photographing) entire books, converting the images to text (OCR) and storing the digital text in a database for searching for the Google Books project. Google claimed about a year ago that by that time they had scanned in over 7 million titles at a cost of over $5 million dollars. (note: Google has taken steps to make it difficult or impossible to download or print portions of copyrighted material.) Today they announced that users can download a million titles that are in the public domain – books for which no copyright is in force.

They will be offering these titles in EPUB and PDF format. I’m not familiar with EPUB, but it appears to be an open format which allows the text to “flow” into whatever screen size you have. As a long time user of Plucker on the palm for ebook reading, I’m hoping it’s at least as cool as that open source project. This is a very exciting day! The only downside is that the texts are just OCR’d scans and they aren’t cleaned up at all. Hopefully folks like those that participate in the Gutenberg project will lend a hand to help get them fixed up.

Microsoft was right to be afraid of Linux, as Google just announced that a Google Chrome Operating System is on its way for sometime later this year and runs on top of… LInux. The new OS is being designed specifically for netbooks and Google claims will be able to power them up and get you on the web in a few seconds, but Google says it could easily power a full up computer as well. Like all Linux distributions, the OS will be open source allowing anyone in the world to review and modify the code that powers it. Many programmers think that it is open access to source code that has allowed Linux and BSD to maintain a comfortable lead as the most popular OS powering servers that run the internet. It is also anathema to Microsoft and Apple who have built empires on proprietary (closed) code with business and consumer customers respectively. Google’s stated strategy has already proven effective by Apple as their closed OSX is actually running on top of a variant of BSD (which is probably why it is so stable). Ubuntu Linux has been making some inroads on cheap and older hardware (as users replace a corrupted Windows OS on an older machine), but on new hardware, Windows still dominates. A Google OS based on Linux is exciting (if predictable).

I noticed today that the Google Street View car must be out our way as many of the major roads in eastern Suffolk county are now on the map in blue. The NYT reported that the 3D camera-equipped vehicle was in the five boroughs a couple weeks ago for its third round of updates to the area. Perhaps the Google crew were headed out at the Vineyards and the Hamptons recently? Most of the roads featured in Suffolk are major thoroughfares.

For lots of interesting Google Map adventures, visit GoogleSightseeing.com