SEC Football Stadiums on Google Maps

Listed below are all of the SEC stadiums separated by the east and west divisions.

SEC East

University of Florida, Ben Hill Griffin Stadium

University of Georgia, Sanford Stadium

University of Kentucky, Commonwealth Stadium

University of South Carolina, Williams-Brice Stadium

University of Tennessee, Neyland Stadium

Vanderbilt University, Dudley Field

SEC West

University of Alabama, Bryant-Denny Stadium

University of Arkansas, War Memorial Stadium

Auburn University, Jordan-Hare Stadium

Louisiana State University, Tiger Stadium

University of Mississippi, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium

Mississippi State University, Mississippi State Bulldogs

Google Putting Their Money Where Their Mouth Is

In cased you have missed it I will start from June the 20th when Google posted this blog entry starting they had sent the FCC a letter requesting they implement open standards with the 700mhz band that will soon be up for auction.

Well today Google has put their money where their mouth is, and stated they will put up an initial bid of $4.6 billion dollars for the FCC to inherit these open standards. They have set the bid at $4.6 billion dollars, because this is the reserve price the FCC has set on the auction. This will give the FCC no reason to not inherit these standards, because now they can rest assured the spectrum will be sold even with the open standards. Google is also not stupid, because they know they will be outbid on the auction, or getting the spectrum for the reserve price would be a steal and open them to many possibilities as a wireless provider.

So now we have to sit and wait for the FCC to respond to Google's latest offer.

5 Things Blogger Need (Or Needs to Improve On)

This is list contains 5 items I feel would make Blogger a better experience for all of its users.

1. Bloggers comment system needs some serious work. One thing that frustrates me the most is that when you leave a comment you are required to do so from your Blogger profile or anonymously.

2. The ability to upload a robots.txt file, or have some type of site mapping system would be great. Google should really want to add this as it would help people take Blogger more seriously by giving Blogger users the ability to optimize for search engines.
   

3. More default templates would attract new users, and at least add some 3 columns default templates. Blogger could also encourage more users to create free templates with some form of notoriety
   

4. Live stats that allow you to view where visitors are coming from, and allow you to view page views, new visitors, and length of visit.
   

5. More options that allow you to remove the dashbar, or an easier way to change the favicon. Personally I do not mind putting up some link that says powered by blogger, but the dashbar is just annoying as is the favicon. Giving your users the ability to personalize their pages more encourages participation.
   

In all the free version of Blogger is not all that bad, but these are 5 things that could help improve the user experience on the free blogging platform. Blogger’s free version is much better to me than Wordpress free blog system, due to the fact you are able to add more scripts plus put ads up. If the free version of Wordpress allowed more scripts, and ads it would be a much better free blogging system.

Adsense using Site Authenication

For a long time the Adsense crawler has had problems reaching sites that are password protected, but not anymore. Google is offering site authentication through Adsense that allows you to enter your authentication information into Adsense, and this will allow the Adsense spiders to crawl freely through your password protected site.

This is great for those private forums that require you to provide authentication before viewing, and will allow Adsense to provide relevant ads based on the data on the pages.

Major League Baseball Stadiums on Google Maps

Listed below are links to all of the current Major League Baseball fields in Google maps satellite view.

Arizona Diamondbacks Chase Field

Atlanta Braves Turner Field

Baltimore Orioles Oriole Park at Camden Yards

Boston Red Sox Fenway Park

Chicago Cubs Wrigley Field

Chicago White Sox U.S. Cellular Field

Cincinnati Reds Great American Ball Park

Cleveland Indians Jacobs Field

Colorado Rockies Coors Field

Detroit Tigers Comerica Park

Florida Marlins Dolphin Stadium

Houston Astros Minute Maid Park

Kansas City Royals Kauffman Stadium

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Angel Stadium of Anaheim

Los Angeles Dodgers Dodger Stadium

Milwaukee Brewers Miller Park

Minnesota Twins Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome

New York Mets Shea Stadium

New York Yankees Yankee Stadium

Oakland Athletics McAfee Coliseum

Philadelphia Phillies Citizens Bank Park

Pittsburgh Pirates PNC Park

St. Louis Cardinals Busch Stadium

San Diego Padres PETCO Park

San Francisco Giants AT&T Park

Seattle Mariners Safeco Field

Tampa Bay Devil Rays Tropicana Field

Texas Rangers Rangers Ballpark in Arlington

Toronto Blue Jays Rogers Centre

Washington Nationals Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium

Google Acquires GrandCentral Communications

Google has acquired communications company GrandCenral, and this could be an amazing service in due time. Right now they are in the process of moving everything over to the Google's network, but I see some amazing possibilities integrating this into other Google services. One possibility I'm thinking of is the ability to search your voice mail using Google search.

They are already using voice recognition with products such as Goog-411, so utilizing this same technology within your voice mail shouldn't be that far out. Privacy groups will probably be speaking out about this soon, and you can't help but wonder if they will feed ads based on your voice mail in the same way the serve ads in Gmail.

Goog-411 Improvements

One of my favorite Google services, Goog-411, has added an awesome feature, maps. When you make the call just say "map it" during the call and Google will send you a text message with a link for the directions plus the information about the location.

Google seems to be integrating into my everyday life more and more every day. They not only make applications you can use on a daily basis, but they continue to improve on them. Keep up the good work Google.

Adsense Expands Referrals

Google has expanded the Adsense referrals program to include many other products. The image posted in the Adsense blog shows categories such as automotive, photo & video, and travel to name a few. Previously the only option you had for referrals were Google products or Firefox, and this isn't going to appeal to someone, for example, on a cooking site.

Options are not available to all Adsense accounts as of yet, but they should be rolled out to everyone very soon according to the blog post.

Current NASCAR Tracks Satellite Images

I'm not a big race fan, but I thought it would be pretty cool to put together a list of all the current tracks in use by NASCAR with links to all all the images in Google maps and Microsoft Earth. So here are the sites in alphabetical order with their respective links. Most of the information was found through Wikipedia, but there were a few tracks that didn't have the image link.

Atlanta Motor Speedway
Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez
Bristol Motor Speedway
California Speedway
Circuit Gilles Villeneuve
Chicagoland Speedway
Darlington Raceway
Daytona International Speedway
Dover International Speedway
Gateway International Raceway
Homestead-Miami Speedway
Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Infineon Raceway
Kansas Speedway
Kentucky Speedway (Not a good image)
Las Vegas Motor Speedway
Lowe's Motor Speedway
Mansfield Motorsports Park
Martinsville Speedway
Memphis Motorsports Park
Michigan International Speedway
Nashville Superspeedway
New Hampshire International Speedway
O'Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis
Phoenix International Raceway
Pocono Raceway
Richmond International Raceway
Talladega Superspeedway
Texas Motor Speedway
Watkins Glen International

Lost Subscriptions in Google Reader

A couple of months back I switched from Wizz rss news reader to manage all of my rss feeds to Google reader. At this moment I regret that decision, because it seems (for at least right now) all of my subscriptions are missing. Typically feeds are added through finding and article I like then adding that paticular site to my feeds. So as you can imagine there are quite a few subsciptions in the list, and this is the only place they are stored.

Hopefully this isn't just a problem I'm having right now, and this is a mass outage on Google's part. If anyone else is having this problem please leave a comment.

Blogger Issues

Seems as though Blogger has been having some issues today with stability. Techspews was up and down for a number of hours. The only problem with using a free blogging and hosting service is when you are down no one really cares and you can't gripe at anyone.

The really upsetting part is I just posted a blog about an hour before the problems started happening endorsing blogger as a great service. Hopefully they have resolved all of the issues for now. The worst part about it is whenever blogger is down Google Apps for your domain is down as well so you can't get to email for your domain or anything.

I guess you get what you pay for and when you don't pay anything you can't expect much.