Google Maps and APIs are powering rescue workers logistic teams in aiding Katrina’s victims. They have maps that can tell you the depth of flooding! Feedmarker has a way of bookmarking Google Maps.

Greg talks sensible about RSS security:

“We don’t need more protocols. We don’t need yet another encryption standard. We don’t need yet another authentication mechanism. Use what works today - it’s proven itself already.”

Editors weblog has a thoughtful post on how citizens initiatives replace newspapers initiatives.

Molly has a run down on how even some of the most popular search engines evade standards.

Dunstan checks out. The ubercool designer, well known for his panorama header that has more than which meets the eye, the co-designer of Odeo, says it’s time to say good bye to blogging.

Vint Cerf, the co-inventer of TCP/IP, joins Google. Google must be feeling on top of the world. They just adopted father of the internet.

Paul Graham on howto start a startup.

I just found a breathtaking panorama of the very awesome Millau bridge.

iPod nano gets my adrenalin pumping.

Seth Godin has a new eBook up for grabs. Free. Download away now.

LAMP doesn’t scale? You’ve got to be kidding me. How do you think Flickr is powered?

Get well soon, Nick.

DesiPundit can be found here: http://desipundit.com

DesiPundit has a sense of belonging among us Indian bloggers. It is absolutely fantastic to see hindi posts along with the normal english ones. I personally think it’s very warm expressing thoughts in our national language as well.

And guys, I’m sorry for being the last one to mention Desipundit (or was I the first one?).

I’ve known Patrix, one of the contributors for a while (is that for over two years now?) via his blog Nerve Endings Firing Away. When I visited the first time, I thought the title was catchy. Not just the title, his posts have been quite wonderful as well. In fact, I was browsing through his archives yesterday and noticed (to my surprise) that I’ve been consistently commenting on his posts. Not because he’s a blog friend (whom I’ve never met), but because he writes on engaging and interesting topics [Update: Well, there you go].

Disclaimer: He’s also the only one who links to my non-sensical posts =) on DesiPundit.

His team has a variety too. The team does a terrific job showcasing wonderful and insightful posts from a huge number of Indian weblogs out there in cyberspace. It’s just like the entire Brazil talking on Orkut, if you know what I mean. And freely. To me, it’s a fun read not to mention the eagerness to know about the first hand information from your compatriots.

Because we’re so many, we need a platform. DesiPundit is a superblog that provides us a 5-minute airtime. It’s our own Indian Boing Boing.

Hats off and goodluck. IndianWriting sums it up extremely well.

Microsoft to support RSS natively in Longhorn. This would probably make it much easier for those common users who think that, that blue e is the internet. Update: More insightful (read deep-geek thoughts) from Phil Ringnalda on MS embracing RSS. I do wonder if MS would push the existing current crop of feed software out. I hope not.

Technorati really listens to comments from users. They did take my suggestion about serving the font-type and changed it to Verdana for non-Mac users in the font-family sequence.

Since using Odeo, I’m tempted to push for a podcast. Listening to people, whose blog I have read for some years and whose voices I thought I’d never get to hear, was a new dimension I really enjoyed.

Del.icio.us Direc.tor is amazing! This is something similar to a super archives plugin for WordPress.

It was amusing to read comments to Uma’s post about Air-mothers (as DesiPundit calls them), and this particular hilarious comment by Ferrari:

One of my friends asked for a 3rd round of whiskey, and you know what the lady replied?
‘Beta itna mat peeo’ (Son, don’t drink this much).

Dan Gillmor asks you to sign-up for citizen journalism.

I added text-highlight to subtly capture the context of long posts so that quick skimmers can rush through, as I’d do myself for reading later. A couple of examples here and here.

Blogger now provides you 300 megs of photospace for your picture uploads. Not a match to Flickr, but takes away the extra work needed to copy URI and use for image earlier on (unless you’re posting to your blog from Flickr itself).

Yahoo!’s got an API thing going for it’s search. Scoble takes a dig. Ross Mayfield points out that Yahoo!s developer network is powered by Kwiki.

Wists, the visual bookmarker looks interesting (via Lifehacker).

If you like Fontleech, you might like dafont too.

Zeldman is on Google’s autolink. So is Time magazine.

“Happy Birthday” is owned by Time Warner? How can they do that?