The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) has provided an RSS feed with the latest updates on bush fires in NSW for a while now, and it’s a geoRSS feed with lat/long data included so you can see where each incident happens.  However it wasn’t until this week, when their incident and major updates feeds were included in the data.australia.gov.au repository that I noticed something else.  They don’t just have a location point for each fire, they have the actual boundary coordinates included.

This means that Google Maps can create a polygon overlay of each fire, showing its size and location.  I’ve included it in Google Maps, you can see it here.  Each place marker includes useful information like description of the location, what council area it’s in, what type of fire it is and the latest updates.

But additionally, if you zoom into one of the incidents, you can see the outline of the location of the fire and really get a feel for its size and what property it’s near.

After the devastation of last season’s bushfires, and the fact that this season is expected to be very bad, this service is one of many tools people can use to keep up to date.

It’s also worth giving props to the NSW Rural Fire service. They’re the only fire service in the country that is providing this level of detail in their public news feeds, and keeping it updated.  Additionally, as far as I can see, theirs is the only dataset on the data.australia.gov.au that is actually a live data service rather than a CSV or Excel file download.  If the government wants the data provided to be used they’re going to need to provide more live data. Or at least more up to date than last years crime data.

The map below has the RFS incident feed embedded, so it will update as the RSS feed from the RFS is updates. You can click on the link at the bottom to go to Google Maps, where you can add this map to your ‘My Maps’ section for later.

View Larger Map

While this post makes me worry a bit, it in no way suprises me.  The lack of knowledge that the general public has around the technological tools they use every day is still incredible.

Official Google Blog: What is a browser?.

The little video that Jason has done up for this post is well worth pointing people to when they get confused, it’s a very susinct explaination of the difference between an operating system, a search engine and a browser.

It reminds me of this video where they randomly asked people “What is a browser”

So the latest news is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has nabbed 10% of the US search engine market and is now the fastest growing search engine. If Jason Calacanis is right, and every 1% of the search market is worth US$1billion then this is a nice chunk of change for Microsoft. 

However I contest that these results should not be encouraging for Microsoft, for a couple of reasons.

1. They’re still in a bit of a honeymoon phase with Bing.  They’re still releasing new functionality (You need to switch to United States to see that) and people are experimenting with it.
2. But more importantly I think, a lot of IE6 users had their default search set to Bing (and for a while there, couldn’t change back).  But none the less a significant proportion of the browsing public still use IE6. Around 25% at last count, and a significant proportion of these will have the default search engine set.  Defaults matter.  Also, a fairly large chunk of these IE6 users will be corporate users who cannot change what browser they use due to (often misguided) corporate IT rules. 

   

What this means in practice is that a lot of those using Bing aren’t choosing to do so (or are just giving it a shot), and if & when they are able to choose, they’re likely to go for Google.  As corporate environments ever so slowly upgrade, they’ll allow users to at least move to better versions of IE, and possibly other browsers.  When you install IE8 it asks you what search engine you want to use, and browsers like Firefox just set it to Google.

So while the month-on-month growth that they’ve seen over the last few months may be real, I’m not convinced the base numbers are really representative of persistent usage.  If overnight people dumped IE6 for something better (oh please, Dear Lord, make it so) I think you’d see Bing’s usage numbers go through the floor.

This image is part of the signup form for the now Fairfax-owned site Essential Baby, an Australian parenting and pregnancy website. To register for their site you have to fill in a surprisingly convoluted signup form, which includes this ‘Your stage of life’ option.  The available choices seem lacking somewhat, especially considering that two questions earlier it asks you for your gender.

So I can say I’m a male, but I have so say I’m either a ‘Curious Onlooker’ of my family (man, doesn’t that sound creepy) or ‘Other’.  Seriously?  I mean you couldn’t add ‘Dad’ or just say ‘Parent’?

What’s even funnier is this is that these are two of the lead articles:

So we’re ok as something to read about, but they don’t really want us around there.  Come on Fairfax, get it together.

After writing my last post I remembered that I’d done up a send-to option for FeedDemon itself too.  It’s pretty simple just download this XML file and save it to the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\SendTo\ folder. Restart FeedDemon and you can then use the Send To option to clip an item to Evernote. Same as the Google Reader version, this will clip the whole page that the news item is from, not just the news feed item, and it will open up a page that will let you tag or move the clipped item.

Unfortunately at this point there’s no way to set the icon next to custom Send To items (that I’m aware of anyway)

While I’m not a big Google Reader user, preferring FeedDemon, the fact that FeedDemon now syncs with Reader is really handy when I’m not using my own computer because it keeps up to date with all my stuff.  This week, the Google Reader team announced a couple of new features (one of which was inspired by FeedDemon’s Panic Button) including the ability to send a news item to other services.

It comes with a list of pre-defined options such as Delicious, Digg & Facebook, but it also has the ability to add custom ones using the substitution tags provided

Because of this, we can set it up to clip stuff straight from Google Reader into an Evernote notebook.  Stealing from the Evernote Web Clipper bookmarklet, you can create a custom ‘send-to’ destination like this:

1. Go to Google Reader and click on ‘Settings’ then ‘Send To’
2. Click on the ‘Create A Custom Link’ button
3. In the form that appears put ‘Evernote’ in the Name field, http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?title=${title}&url=${url} in the Url field and http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico in the Icon Url field
4. Click ‘Save’

You’ll then have Evernote in your send to menu

This will automatically clip the whole page that the news item links to into Evernote, so even if the RSS feed that you’re reading only does partial feeds, this will grab the whole original article from the site, great if you want to read it later when you’re offline with your iPhone or PC/Mac Evernote client.  Once it’s clipped the page it takes you to a page where you can move the clipped item into a different Notebook & add some tags to it, but this is optional, the item is already stored in your default Evernote notebook

So there you go, a really easy way to grab anything from Google Reader & stick it into Evernote