Created by Josh Mandel, who says he coded it with a broken arm, Speakable Textareas works pretty well! With just a few clicks, you can install the script in your browser and it will insert a little microphone icon you can click on to invoke the Google Chrome speech-to-text API. It's quick and dirty but it's still pretty cool.

In the meantime, this little script is a pretty cool way to hit that Google API and speak blog comments instead of typing them!

Today Rapportive is announcing a big upgrade to its baked-in Twitter functionality. You can do so much Twitter stuff in the sidebar of your Gmail now! Check out the demo video below.

I've been testing this feature for the past week and it works really well. It works so well that I've hardly noticed it - it just feels natural. And if you haven't tried tying your LinkedIn account to Rapportive, I highly recommend doing that too. Both are easy to do, just install the add-on, then click the Rapportive menu at the top of the page on Gmail and associate your social media accounts.

It's been over a year now since I urged readers here to stop what you're doing and go install this Gmail plug-in. The email CRM plug-in space is a crowded one, but all the competition is just making it better.

A quick little experiment for you if you haven't tried this before: Go to Google Maps and ask it for directions from San Francisco, CA to Beijing, China. Now, you wouldn't imagine any other way than to hop on a plane, right? Instead, Google figures you'd like to drive, takes you to the beach and then, somewhere around step 32, advises you to make the 3,879 kayak trip across the Pacific Ocean. While the cross-Pacific directions are a perennial joke, they're literally useless for travelers.

Rome2Rio, a site built on top of the much-loved Google maps interface, offers up directions by plane, train and automobile rather than telling you to hoof it to the beach and get to paddling.

The site is launching today and, while it offers a number of flights for each trip, it doesn't appear to have a simple on-site booking functionality, which is a bit of a shame. Nonetheless, it quickly nails down the basic part of directions, letting you handle the rest from there. At least it isn't telling you to take a kayak, right?

The most useful place for Rome2Rio, it would seem, will be where it has train schedules in addition to planes. Knowing the alternatives is always great when traveling and trains can be a great (and sometimes cheaper) alternative to zipping over the landmass in between two spots.

Founders Michael Cameron and Bernie Tschirren explain the site a bit more in the following video and Cameron told us that Amtrak and Greyhound itineraries are in the plans for the future. If you have itchy feet like me, I'd bookmark this site and keep it in mind for future travels.

Here's the challenge: use any open social media API, like from Flickr or Facebook, mash it up with any of the APIs from the five genealogy companies that offer them to create something which "demonstrates increased value to family historians."

Fast and Dirty

RootsTech itself is pretty much the first of its kind, quickly arranged and feeling its way along. So its sponsors, Family Search, put the word out with only 48 hours to spare, a sort of bar camp or hackathon approach.

Unfortunately, the developers who did attend did not seem comfortable with that quick-fire development approach. One dev in the audience stated in no uncertain terms that 48 hours was not enough time to produce anything functional. However, as Jim Ericson, the Family Search marketing manager in charge of the challenge, said they "didn't want to pull developers out of the sessions." It showed.

Out of the 45 or so developers who came to the initial challenge session, only six or seven individuals or teams signed up and today, only three came to the session. Of those three, only two had functional mashups and, frankly, neither were worth covering in any detail.

One was a mashup that pulled down genealogical information onto your desktop from Twitter, but the hashtag gymnastics were pretty awkward and the question stuck out: why pull information onto your desktop at all given the increasing primacy of the cloud. Even if you did want to do so, wouldn't an RSS feed and right-click save-as be easier? The other presentation felt like a commercial for the developer's software company. If there was a mashup in there somewhere, I couldn't find it.

The Take Away

For me, the take-away from this challenge was a renewed realization that if you want developers to take an interest in your industry, in your conference, in your passion, especially if it is one that is under the normal developer radar, you need to court the community. You need to get out in the community and make yourself known. You need to invite and entice. You need to vet the participants. You need thought leaders to act as attractants for other developers. You need to get the word out. And you need to sacrifice session attendance if you want a lot of quality developers to jump in headfirst.

The baby boomer generation is growing by the day and its members are moving into genealogical activities. Developers who are already in the genealogy space, or who get in soon, and who create appealing applications that make family historian's work easier or more efficient, will see their users grow. But next time, RootsTech will need to make them a priority.

Programmer photo by Cory Doctorow | BarCamp photo via Wikimedia Commons

Editor's disclosure: RootsTech covered Mr. Hopkins' airfare and hotel.

Twitter is a remarkably easy way for small business owners to use SMS or Facebook to publish their specials, event promotions and other information that makes it easier to identify spots that you might want to patronize. BarBird is like a geo-aware, semantically smart, venue-update browser on your phone. I like it. It's been fun to test so far.

Hopefully more kinds of filters will be made available in the future. I'd love to be able to view Tweets near me concerning particularly exciting meals. I'm really into hyper-local news, as well as food and drink - so this seems just like a little neighborhood newswire and real-time guide to me.

You can also view the updates in list form and the app makes it easy to access all a venue's Tweets, their Google Places information and reviews (look out, Yelp) and get directions to the venue.

Saying these kinds of combo-apps are more appealing than Yelp is no exaggeration. It's one thing to read long-form reviews of a restaurant, it's another to be able to read tonight's updates from a bar that posted by SMS or Twitter app. This combination of technologies really lowers the barrier to publishing updates for small businesses.

Of course all of this presumes that small businesses will use Twitter. If they get results, presumably they will. Apps like BarBird, or integration of this kind of feature into other apps, could help make that more realistic.

Building the Listings

How did BarBird index 10,000 venues from 44 US cities and 6 cities outside the US? That's an interesting part of the story as well. Co-founder Pierce Lamb says that craftiness went a long way.

The company was able to build such a large data set so quickly by leveraging user-generated categorization on Twitter, in the form of Twitter Lists that users curated for their own uses on Twitter. By finding collections of Twitter accounts labeled with titles like "Portland bars," (or whatever the city might be) BarBird was able to collect a large number of likely topical Twitter accounts at least ostensibly connected to a type of business. The team then queried Google Maps to see if each Twitter username captured returned a street adress; if it did not, then it was tossed out.

The self-funded team plans to offer venue owners a free analytics package and rely on advertisements as their business model. The nice thing about BarBird is that the Tweets are already out there - this app just finds them and organizes them in a relavant context.

ICantFindMyPhone.com is an adorable little website made by New York graphic designer Dave Dawson (whose personal site, IAmDaveDawson.com, implies that he has a habit of personal declaration URLs). The site simply calls your phone, so you can find it.

The site was highlighted by design blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg today and in comments there Dawson explains that he built it using the API of upstart popular telephony service Twilio. Update: It appears that Dawson may have run out of Twilio credits again...

Banned Books Week has been running for 28 years now and is backed by some very reputable organizations, but the campaign's Web presence is very simple. It's great that Google Maps makes it so easy for anyone to display sets of information on a map like you'll see below. As more and more content becomes available online, how will that impact banning of and access to literature?

It would be nice if the points on this map were color coded to make bans and challenges distinct. This feels like just the beginning of what could be done, but it certainly is a good beginning.

Banned Books week is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Banned Books Week is also endorsed by the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress. This map was found on Google Maps Mania, a great place to learn about lots of creative uses of Google Maps.

Arduino is one of the best known companies enabling others to create what's called the Internet of Things, network connected physical-world devices with web interfaces. The organization announced a number of new hardware and software developments forthcoming in the short and medium term in a blog post on Friday.

TRAILER Arduino: The Documentary (available on HD) from gnd on Vimeo.

The addition of ethernet will be based on "a new bootloader that lets you upload code to the board via TFTP and discover them on the network via a broadcast protocol," the blog post explained. "This board can be powered over the ethernet cable through an optional PoE power supply module that's standards compliant. We'll demo the board at Maker Faire and it will be available later in the autumn."

The Web Store of Arduino-built products will be a curated collection of the best products built on the platform and will launch on the 18th of October. There's nothing like a good App Store to make the value of a platform clear to consumers and to inspire further development by developers.

Open source hardware, network connected physical devices and sensors that can facilitate the control of real-world systems are fast becoming more accessible outside the mega-geek-o-sphere. The blooming of new data streams, like the physical location of mobile device users, and the proliferation of new publishing platforms for updates from devices (Facebook, Twitter, think clients) could converge with platforms like Arduino to further dissolve the hard line around what constitutes a computer and computing in the future.

Hans Scharler's thermostat keeps dibs on his location, the outside temperature and the temperature inside the house, and decides when to kick on the air conditioning or heat.

We've written about ioBridge (see Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009) and ioBridge implementation before (see Automate Your Home Using ioBridge and Twitter).

Scharler wrote the project in Perl, which he said is "perfect for parsing lots of data, pushing data into databases, and connecting services together." He can also manually control the thermostat using an ioBridge Application Programming Interface, or API, that sends commands to the thermostat controller.

Now that the system is functional, Scharler said he's had "a flood of ideas" for location-aware apps mashed with Internet-connected objects. Your house could come alive when you pull into the driveway - thermostat clicks on, garage door opens, coffee starts brewing, your burglar alarm deactivates.

What applications do you see coming out of location awareness and networked things? Do you think these applications are neat, or is Scharler's project a Rube Goldberg machine, performing a simple task with an impressive but overly-complicated mechanism?

At first glance, the Nearby Friends app didn't really impress. Facebook friends on a map - haven't we seen that before? But after further testing, the true purpose of the app became clear: this tool is ideal for cyber-stalking your Facebook friends. Whether or not that was the developer, Matt Hodan's, intention is unclear. His background as an entrepreneur, web developer and financier at companies including J.P. Morgan, Genstar Capital and Y-Combinator, hints that this app was likely just something he thought would be cool, without considering its greater ramifications.

(Update: Matt tells us that the app Nearby Friends "is no more for cyber stalking than Facebook is, which is to say, that that is exactly what it is designed for at some level." He explains that "the only people who appear on Nearby Friends are people who choose to publish their location by checking-in. It encourages friendly interaction by making it easy to see what your friends are doing and where. That said, there are certainly valid concerns with publishing this kind of information. Could someone rob your house because they see you're out of town? Sure. My recommendation: Don't announce that you're out of town by checking-in if doing so puts you at risk!")

Now granted, the tool can't track anyone and everyone using Places - it only displays your own friends, meaning you and the person tracked already have a relationship of some sort. In addition, not all users on Facebook do or ever will use Places. Most users are still hesitant about location-sharing technology, as the New York Times reported this weekend, citing research we wrote about in July.

The Impact of Facebook Places on Privacy

That being said, it's worth considering how an app like this could possibly be used for less-than-savory purposes. The Facebook Places feature has been launched with a confusing array of privacy settings, which apparently allow friends to check you in to a venue ("check in," meaning announce that you've arrived at a particular venue, like a restaurant, bar, club, business, etc.) even if you never authorized the service to do so. To be excluded from check-ins like this, you must explicitly turn the feature off in your Facebook settings.

This is Facebook's M.O. when it comes to launching new functionality: everything is generally turned on by default. Why's that? Because the company understands that the majority of its user base neither knows nor cares about how each new feature impacts their privacy. For example, even when the Facebook privacy backlash was underway earlier this year, the service continued its unparalleled growth.

Common Sense and Checking-In

As Facebook becomes more heavily used for associating with people beyond just close friends and family, the consequences of publicly sharing your location become more important to thoroughly understand. As Hunter Walk recently explained via blog post on technology news website TechCrunch, there are a number of reasons some check-ins need to remain private. Although his post was an analysis of rival check-in service Foursquare's "off the grid" feature and its use cases, the examples are true for any location-based app. For instance, you don't want your boss knowing everywhere you check-in (interviewing in another city? not actually sick?) and you don't want everyone to know about your private moments out in the world at large.

Sure, you could simply not check-in, but then you lose some of the benefits of these new and growing services. Benefits that include everything from mobile coupons to a virtual location history that could eventually be used to surface recommendations for you. (Loved that seafood restaurant? Then you have to try this other one!)

"Who Cares?" or "What Were We Thinking?"

With Facebook's large user base - now half a billion strong - there are going to be a number of people who start using Places without thoroughly understanding the privacy settings and what they mean. This raises several questions: how much of the burden of managing privacy should be placed on the user and how much on the service? Is cyber-stalking really and truly a threat? With increased awareness of location-based sharing, will users in turn learn to better understand when and where it's appropriate to share?

According to Wayne Sutton, a partner and Business Development Marketing Strategist with location-based service TriOut (and who also kindly allowed the above screenshot's use), cyber-stalking is a real concern that everyone should think about. However, he says, most of the time it can be avoided using "common sense" and taking advantage of the privacy settings within your app of choice. "Every individual will have to consider their surroundings, friends approval, app settings and relationship status with potential stalkers before checking in," he explains. "Sadly I don't think enough people consider who they should friend and/or manage their friends list to prevent cyber stalking from happening."

Perhaps it's still too early to thoroughly understand the greater impacts of all this social, location-based sharing. Will we look back wondering why there was ever such a fuss about all this to begin with? Or will we wonder, as a recent commenter points out on a previous post about Places, "what were we thinking?"

Try it out: Highlight any word, phrase or name on this page. Now click the little "search" button that pops up. This is a good one: Krishna Bharat.

Pretty cool, huh? Apture's new contextual search feature was incredibly easy to add to our site (one line of javascript) and we think it adds a whole lot to the reading experience here. So find a word or phrase here that you'd like to learn more about - and highlight it. You'll see a web of multi-media connections swirling around our written content at the snap of your finger.

Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Crunchbase and more sources are intelligently queried to offer up all kinds of information about your search terms in Apture. We try to make our writing here accessible and offer some definition of terms and introductory explanation of companies or technologies familiar to advanced readers, but sometimes that's easier said than done. Now there's even more information than we can offer - built right in.

We named Apture one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 and this Summer, government technology site WashingtonTechnology.com offered it as an example of the semantic web, one of what it called the top 5 technologies that will change how government works. I first saw Apture at Foo Camp several years ago, before it launched, and everyone there was wowed.

We haven't mentioned the addition of Apture to our site yet, but thousands of you have already used it here to search for everything from phrases like "assessing cloud performance" to the name Justin Bieber. (We are proud both that RWW is the leading tech blog that makes the most Justin Bieber jokes per month and that we have readers who don't know who he is.)

Let us know how you like the feature. We haven't decided yet how to best let people know that highlighting a phrase here to search for it is an option, but we're pretty excited that it is.

A new mobile website, called MisoTrendy, wants to help with that problem by showing you the trending places wherever you want to go, not just where you are.

According to Andrew Ferenci and Rakshith, the site's creators, the problem with the Foursquare iPhone app is that it only shows trending locations withing a 1-mile radius of your location and most of the time people want to find trending locations away from them before traveling there. Rakshith described how MisoTrendy solves this in an email:

MisoTrendy solves this problem by letting you choose any city/address and find venues with foursquare checked-in users. The app lets you find popular locations, list of people checked-in, number of men/women checked-in, tips and stats about the venues. The app also lets you filter out location like coffee, bars or parks and find checked-in users and tips from foursquare.

Clicking on a location shows historical details, such as total number of check-ins, number of tips and how many people are currently checked-in there, and also offers a full list of people currently checked-in. Clicking on a user brings up links to both their Foursquare and Twitter accounts. The mobile website mimics the full browser functionality quite well and can pull up your current location as well as allowing you to search by city name and zip code.

Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.

So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.

When you first sign up for miio, you can search for friends across your social networks and email accounts or you can skip that step and just search for other miio users who share your interests. This is perhaps the key feature in miio that differentiates it from many other social networks: it's not yet another site where you have to (either manually or automatically) re-create your social graph. It's a place to meet new people who share your interests.

Now whether you're supposed to chat them up or hit on them when you meet them is something I wasn't too clear about, given that miio asks for your "relationship status" and what you're "looking for" (friends, dating, chatting, "whatever") via your profile page. Those seem like features borrowed from Facebook, and frankly, if miio just wants to be discussion site, it could do without them.

Miio's Twitter-Like Dashboard

The miio Dashboard is reminiscent of Twitter, with its "replies" and "messages to me," the latter very much like Twitter's own DMs (direct messages). But unlike Twitter, you don't just follow tweets, err...posts, limited to 140 characters or less. Users can write as much as they want. And like Facebook, those status updates can be links, photos, videos, etc. as well. They can also be questions, which then puts miio up against Q&A sites like Quora, for example.

Miio RSS

In fact, updates can even be RSS feeds thanks to a profile setting which lets you publish RSS to miio. Already a number of "members" have created miio accounts with RSS feeds - as you can see here by searching for *rss*. However, given the high profile nature of some of these accounts (ABC, AP, BBC, CBS, Huffington Post, etc.), it looks like miio created these accounts itself for others to follow, which is actually a handy feature.

From the Public Timeline or Search page, you can filter out whether or not you want to see RSS updates or whether you want to see just text updates, just photos, just videos, just questions and so on. If you switch the setting to "RSS only," miio could effectively function as a lightweight RSS reader for those who don't really do RSS.

Miio Groups

There are also groups within miio, where you can discuss items of interest to you whether that's sports or iPads. But given miio's "early adopter" mindshare, the biggest groups seem to be tech-focused ones like those discussing iOS, startups or even miio competitor Google Buzz.

Final Thoughts: Too Much of a Good Thing, miio Needs to Diet

Although miio gets some things right, simplicity is not one of them. It's not clear yet what exactly miio wants to be when it grows up, why there's a need for this service and who should use it.

Our advice to miio, ditch the advanced feature set (it's overwhelming!) and focus on doing just one thing and doing it well. Groups, perhaps. Google Buzz lacks a "groups" feature and although FriendFeed has them, that service lost quite a few members after its Facebook acquisition. Do discussion groups and do them better than anyone else. And don't allow top followed members to dominate discussions like on Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and every other "social" service out there today. Make it more democratic.

And simplify, simplify, simplify. Twitter worked because it was basic and easy. That's how miio should start too. It can add in advanced filtering, location-based services, metadata and all the rest later on, if necessary. (Or perhaps not at all).

With a redirected singular goal like this, miio could have a chance at attracting not just the tech geeks who sign up for anything shiny and new but those who just like to go online and chat about things they're into, no matter what those may be. Obviously, the folks behind miio have the technical know-how to build a great service, now they just need to establish a sharper focus. Good luck, miio!

When Google Maps launched -- with maps assembled client-side, in JavaScript! -- I was one of the band of tinkerers around the globe who poked at Google's obfuscated code until we figured out how to embed their maps in our own pages. It was a ton of fun, not only doing the reverse engineering, but seeing the various discoveries and hacks other people were making: embedding multiple maps in a single page, swapping out the map tiles, using custom map markers, making markers move, loading real-time data onto maps...These days, it's hard to fathom a Web without embeddable maps. Wasn't it always that way? To Google's eternal credit, instead of shutting these hacks down, they recognized the demand and legitimized it in the form of their mapping API.

According to the Google Geo Developers Blog post, nearly half of the almost 5,000 mashups on Programmable Web's dashboard use the Google Maps API. In an effort to show the widespread influence of the API, Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania created a mashup of mashups that we've included below. From real-time tracking of buses in NYC to mapping out news down to a block-by-block level, the mashup shows where across the world Google Maps mashups have been created using the API.

To that end, here is a survey of mash-ups that unite mapping, photos, street views, video and documentary photographs from ages past. Historypin, Then and Now, There and Then and SepiaTown all give the individual the opportunity to add depth of field to the mind's eye.

Historypin is a self-building site where users upload and "pin" their historical photos to maps with geo-tags. They accompany their photos with their own words. The emphasis is on telling using this new media to create history. It gives a sense, using Google Maps and Google Street View, of how a location has changed. Historypin is a part of We Are What We Do's Generations campaign, to keep different generations in dialogue.

Then and Now

Then and Now matches Flickr Commons photos with map locations and renders them with Google Street View. This is a project by Paul Hagon, the Canberra-based Senior Web Designer at the National Library of Australia. In addition to Australia, there are also New Zealand and New York versions.

There and Then

There and Now is a Google Maps/YouTube video mash-up. It derives extra value from the division of locations into historical eras, from pre-1900 to post-2000. Watch a video of a horse-drawn streetcar turning a corner in Chicago in 1897 overlaid onto the Street View of that same corner. So. Very. Cool. The creator, Keir Clarke, contributes to the (unofficial) blog, Google Maps Mania.

SepiaTown

SepiaTown is another user-built site. Registered users map their own historical photographs in a shared environment. Plans have been announced to add film and audio. Given that the site can't guarantee the provenance of the photos, users have to "electronically affirm that the image is either owned by them or free from restriction."

Astrolabe by Paul K