I tried out Google’s new Goggles app. Basically it lets you use the camera on an Android phone to do an image-based search. The examples include landmarks, book covers, artwork, logos, contact info, and places.

So I played with it for a bit at home tonight. It’s good at picking out book covers and logos, if you’ve got good lighting and a clear image. 50-50 at landmarks, at least when taking pictures of my monitor. In a couple of cases, it actually picked out the exact photo as a match. It’s not so good at objects, even obvious ones like a Coke can. I’ll have to try it out in the real world next.

It’s official: Google mows goats – er, mows with goats. Google’s Mountain View headquarters has fields that need to be kept clear of fire hazards. This year instead of mowing them, they took a low-carbon approach: they hired a herd of goats to eat the grass for a week. “It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.”

Amazing how many “people” are sending Facebook messages to the postmaster account, offering helpful links to resources for *ahem* improving uptime.

On a related note:

Google’s Social Graph thinks I own Cute Overload. It seems to treat all LiveJournal syndication feeds as one profile, and I linked to K2R’s LJ feed with XFN.