Blogger launched a new feature that shows the latest uploaded photos in a never-ending slideshow. Blogger Play is addictive, like many other real-time visualization tools, and could be a pretty good screensaver. The slideshow leaves out vulgar pictures, so the screensaver would be safe-for-work. "Blogger Play is (...) a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now" and it expands the stream of recently-updated blogs from Blogger's homepage.
To create a screensaver from a web page, you can use RunSaver for Windows and IdleWeb for Mac (both are free, but there are more polished commercial alternatives).
Blogger Play was developed two years ago, but it remained a cool toy for Google employees. "Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn't stop watching. Over the years we've kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs."
Technorati has recently launched a real-time visualization of the most recent posts from the blogosphere, but it only shows posts from popular blogs. Now that Google indexes web pages really fast, it would be interesting to search for something and see the new web pages added at the top of the search results as soon as they're indexed.
"Now that Google indexes web pages really fast, it would be interesting to search for something and see the new web pages added at the top of the search results as soon as they're indexed."
ReplyDeleteNow THAT truly would be fun to watch...new web pages as they are indexed, sounds pretty neat - almost like a variation of Stumble.
I think I had an out of blogger experience - while I was watching a bit of the photo stream, someone uploaded a screen shot of the Blogger Play start screen.
ReplyDeletenow we just need someone to add it to google ig.
ReplyDeleteOK, here's a gadget that shows the page. It looks better if you edit the tab and choose a 2-column layout.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget about Bloglines Image Wall that shows images from all kinds of blogs. Unfortunately, Bloglines wasn't smart enough to provide an adult image filter:
ReplyDelete"The Image Wall is comprised of dynamically generated images from user feeds and may contain material of an explicit sexual nature or other adult content."
The official iGoogle gadget.
ReplyDelete