One interesting tool they created in response to the disaster is an image gallery which shows how status updates spread in the hours and days following the earthquake and tsunami. The black dots show the high influx of updates.

These are three images from the set of ten. It’s interesting to see how the flow of Facebook took place in a span of 24 hours. Highly concentrated updates occurred earlier on the west coast, and within 12 hours the east coast became enveloped with Japan related updates.

Facebook has released this tool as a part of their effort to heighten awareness, and increase donations towards the disaster effort. They’ve partnered with Zynga, famed Facebook game developer, to take donations for ‘Save the Children’s Japan Earthquake/Tsunami Emergency Fund‘. If you’re an avid CityVille, Frontierville, or Farmville player, funds from virtual goods purchased in the series of games will go towards the joint Zynga/Facebook effort.

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At the Google Code Blog, Fox details the problem of planning a trip and unsuccessfully searching for upcoming conferences. She says that though Google’s Developer Events Calendar has been around for a while, it only listed events Google sponsored or attended.

The new calendar allows others to post upcoming events – conferences, user groups, or parties – for the developer community. It can be viewed in calendar or map views.

A few have already added their events, like the "Jurisdictionary club" in Oklahoma City, the Bossa Conference in Brazil, and JavaOne in San Francisco. 
 

The Multimap acquisition will complement Microsoft’s other mapping services, including Virtual Earth and Windows Live services. It will also boost Microsoft’s potential to be a key online mapping provider, as it looks to better compete with both Google and Yahoo.

Data from Nielsen Online shows Google Maps has a 21 percent reach among the globes users, compared to 1 percent for Multimap. Google maps had an estimated 71. 5 million unique visitors in October and Google Earth had 22.7 million unique visitors.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Maps had 7.1 million unique visitors globally during October. Multimap had 1.4 million users in October, trailing competitors MapQuest, ViaMichelin, Mappy and Map24.

"This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the UK and globally," said Sharon Baylay, the general manager of Microsoft’s online services group.

Microsoft said their was future potential to intergrate Multimap on it products and platforms.

"Partnering with Microsoft gives us a world of new opportunities to build our mapping services into new technologies and applications," said Jeff Kelisky, the chief executive of Multimap.

Mulitmap will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, as part of the Virtual Earth and Search teams in the Online Services Group. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

 The Satellite tab in the meantime received a checkbox which allows you to toggle off the display of labels on the map.

Anders, who discovered this change and shared it in the forum, notes that the new Terrain view “is mostly interesting to those of us who love geospatial data. The elevation looks like shadows.”

Anders notes another amendment to Google Maps, saying “search for a location and in the pop-up bubble, a Street View still image appears if there is Street View available for that location.” To reproduce this, you can search for e.g. N North Park Ave, Chicago, IL. Google Maps Street View allows you to view (pan and zoomable) panoramic photos of a limited number of US cities.

I can see this change live for other country’s Google Maps versions as well, like German maps.google.de, though as is often the case the map tiles don’t load properly here. Google Maps China on the other hand doesn’t have any satellite or terrain view, likely due to Google following censorship instructions from Chinese authorities.

[Thanks Anders!]

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• view:timeline – displays a graph indicating the number of results by date so you can track trends, e.g., coldfusion view:timeline
• view:map – displays a map highlighting top search results, e.g., sean corfield view:map
• view:info – displays additional ways to highlight parts of the results based on dates, measurements, locations and images, e.g., sean corfield view:info (then select "Locations")

In addition, from the experimental page you can choose keyboard shortcuts (to navigate your search results) or left-hand / right-hand search menus (they’re slightly different).

You can choose to "join" one of the experiments which makes it your default Google results format (assuming you’re logged in). I picked the left-hand context menus which seem to be richer.

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Actually, a map of the area shows that about four miles should separate the two corporations.  Which begs the question: would a nearby state park or an adjacent country club make the better battleground?

Okay, okay.  In all seriousness, it appears that Yahoo made a very intelligent move.  “The lease includes the right to put a big Yahoo sign on the building, overlooking Interstate 405,” notes Todd Bishop, who broke the story.  Also, “[a]mong other things, the new office could put it in a better position to recruit Microsoft employees.”

Yahoo’s been losing employees left and right as of late, so that second point could be especially important.  But Bishop states that around 500 people will be able to inhabit the new offices, and since there are currently less than ten Bellevue-specific Yahoo job listings, we may have to just see what happens in that respect.

In a broader sense, any sort of expansion looks good for Yahoo.  With the company so often coming in second or third behind its competitors, this shows it can still make bold moves.

Twenty-five years ago, the Internet neighborhood resembled a small subdivision. Only 315 addresses had been allocated.

The subdivision is more like William Gibson’s ‘Sprawl‘ these days. In the first census that’s likely been conducted since 1982, according to researchers at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, more than 2.7 billion addresses have been allocated globally.

As noted by PhysOrg, the researchers’ work involved pinging every address assigned on the Internet. Many of these pings, 61 percent, returned no information.

Over time, the researchers obtained a clearer picture of the Internet, as other machines responded to those ICMP packets. They have been able to render this in a color map, gradiated in color by the percentage of responses.

Addresses matter because this iteration of them, IPv4, could run out by 2011. The next Internet Protocol, version 6, will alleviate this shortage.

Obviously we think this is extraordinary, as we are essentially doing the same thing, and learning as we go. When we started launching the online side to our businesses, we realized pretty quickly we needed to learn more about Internet Marketing, and specifically more about SEO. We started reading SEO blogs, found all kinds of research tools, and as you all know eventually developed SoloSEO, which then brought on even more questions on what to do to market SoloSEO. At that time we wisely hired Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame as a consultant, and it was money very well spent. We learned much from Andy, and were introduced to many brilliant SEO minds, one of those was Aaron Wall while we were attending PubCon last year. Aaron leaves quite an impression. I still diligently read both Marketing Pilgrim and Aaron Wall’s blog daily, I suggest everyone should.

Today Aaron Wall has taken time, and probably too much time, to put together and post what I am going to term an impressive, semi-comprehensive overview of all things online marketing (he left SoloSEO out, but that is why it is only a semi-comprehensive overview ). He has presented this overview in a Mind Map format, and it is huge, I mean goliath, mammoth, ginormous big. I will warn you, if you are just getting started with online marketing, I would avoid viewing the mind map, it might scare you away from online marketing for good (But please keep it in mind, and perhaps visit it at a later date). It would be similar to giving a CPA exam to someone who just majored in English, not good. I consider myself to have slightly better than average intelligence, I have an undergrad Economics degree, an MBA, and am working on my dissertation for my Ph.D in Organizational Management, so I have seen some stuff, but Aaron’s mind map thing is just mind boggling, I feel dumb.

After looking the mind map over, and eventually regaining my senses, I eased back into “chunking” through my daily blog reads and came across Seth Godin’s reaction to Aaron’s Mind Map. I must say, few can say it as eloquently as Seth often does, and what Seth states here is perfect. Aaron’s Mind Map is essentially an online marketing check list, it is a really big check list, but a checklist nonetheless. I very much enjoyed Seth’s closing paragraph, as he states,

“Three we can handle. Three is manageable and memorable and actionable. Give me three things and I can find a place for them in my brain. Each of those three things can probably have three subthings if you like. And then, at least for now, that’s it.”

I personally prefer just one thing at a time, but I am a simple-minded boy.

The message to all those getting started with online marketing. Don’t get overwhelmed, it really isn’t as hard as it may look at times. Bite size the process. Start small, work on a few things, just get online. Then we can work on keywords, links and content, then we can analyze the online competitive market you will function within, then, little by little, we can make good progress. We must remember that we have business to run, which have done well all this time without being online, and they must continue to do well. Online marketing can really bolster what we have created, but it can’t replace it entirely, it shouldn’t. Treat your online marketing efforts as just another must do on your must do list, we all have them. We must watch our cash flow, must keep inventory levels maintained, must get the invoices out, must pay the employees, must work on collections, must pay our taxes, etc. And we now must must spend time getting our site online, and then we must work to make our site relevant.

Ahhh… now I am off for a nap, that mind map has my mind all lost.

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This permits the mapper to select a point to pass through on the way from A to B. Someone going from a subway stop to a museum may want to pass by a certain coffee shop that isn’t directly on the way, for example.

Ask City lets the visitor adjust the directions to include that new stop. A hyperlink to “Adjust Route” appears at the bottom of each step of the directions, for access to this feature.

The bigger update follows a similar, recent move by Google to provide embeddable maps. Site and blog publishers who want to highlight some location, and relevant places within that area, can make a map on Ask City to bring to their sites.

This feature is an evolution from Ask’s earlier debut of the “search inside” feature of Ask City, according to Gary. It gives the mapmaker/site publisher the ability to present the map to visitors, rather than just a link to the map.

More importantly, embeddable mapping demonstrates in vivid fashion that not all the nifty features in search come from Google’s Mountain View labs. Google may be the most familiar search site in the world, but searchers should give the Asks, Yahoos, and even Microsofts a try. They might be pleasantly surprised by what they find.