January 31st, 2005:

“A9.com”:http://a9.com/, (an amazon.com company) has unveiled a new Yellow Pages. They sent trucks with GPS devices and cameras down the streets of many metropolitan areas associating actual images from street level of the businesses listed in it’s directory.

To get an idea of how interesting this is look at “this result for a search of BWC”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/yp/B0003UVG6Y/002-4696393-8970452 in Dallas, TX, or perhaps, “this search for The Curtain Club”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/yp/B0003WKRC6/002-4696393-8970452.

Of course it needs a little work. The interface allows you to walk up and down the street, but. for businesses that are on street corners it can be difficult, sometimes, to see the business from the images without going down around the corner.

Regardless, it’s quite fascinating. Use A9.com to find your favorite place in your favorite metropolitan area and see how neat it is.

“GMane”:http://gmane.org/, everyone’s favorite mailing list reader/archiver, has released a “Blog interface”:http://blog.gmane.org/ to the mailing lists it handles. Initial messages to the list appear as posts. Replies to that message appear as comments. One can reply from the blog site and that comment will be sent back into the mailing list.

I think this interface is fantastic. It looks great, and is very usable. I’ve always wanted my personal blog to be capable of accepting posts and replies via email. Of course, neither of these tasks are that difficult, I’ve just never gotten around to it.

My only complaint is that the RSS feed for the Blog is the same RSS feed for the mailing list. This means that all the messages (initial messages and replies to that message) appear as items in the RSS feed. It’s like getting all the posts and comments in the same feed.

Regardless of that, it’s a great new feature from an already kick-ass service.