for developers

It looks like Google is about ready to launch Google Base. In fact the site was up earlier, but was soon taken down. You can find a screenshot on Flickr. The text on the screenshot reads:

Post your items on Google.

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.

It appears to be an interesting application, but I worry about the amount of personal data that Google has access to. For example, they have all my emails (gMail) and my Blog reading list (Google Reader), they are storing my search history, and now I can store any type of structured data for me! Keep in mind, that I have allowed Google to do this, so I’m not complaining about them, but it is food for thought – How much data do we want them to store for us by way of a Google database?

A nice HTML & XHTML Character Entities reference is available at cookwood.com. It’s a pretty good go-to reference for web developers, I have to say. The site is the official site for HTML Visual Quickstart Guide and offers many other HTML related references.

As nice as this reference is I’ve been thinking about a better way to present HTML and a XHTML character entities in a chart that is inspired by the periodic table of elements. I’m actually moving forward with this project so look for an announcement on Digital Media Minute soon when I get it finished; hopefully people will find it has some general usage.