More acquistions, even before products are deployed, smacks scarily of bubble-time but, given the influence of Adaptive Path, I’m going to give the news that Google have just acquired MeasureMap the benefit of the doubt. For now.

I threw my email address in the ‘notification’ form for measure map a while back but have never received an invitation, so all I have to go on are a few screenshots that I’ve seen on their site and elsewhere.

Here’s what I don’t understand… if I have a blog and Google Analytics, why would I want MeasureMap?

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Happy Valentines Day Link Lovers:)

An interesting bunch for you (well, really for me, but you’re welcome to share) today.

• CSS – Navigation Magnification
  oooh, could this be the navigation effect I’ve been looking for (to solve a particular problem on a project I’ve been working on)!
  (tags: interfacedesign CSS navigation)
• GoogleCloud.com: Ajax-driven Google Zeitgeist
  interesting… at the meta level, completely useless to me, although probably v. interesting to social theorists. Combine it with friends/groups/communities of practice and suddenly v. useful (see post below for a more detailed review)
  (tags: web2.0 searchresults google mashup interactiondesign)
• Ratchet Up : How It’s Going To Work: Projection
  How are we going to transcend the tiny screen images of current cellphones and VidPods? By projecting their images onto any convenient surface…. hmmm… interesting social issues coming up if they follow this path…
  (tags: mobile usability interactiondesign)

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So, today I checked out Googlecloud which I saw via Ajaxian and which was released by the crew at Trade This. (phew! that’s my linking karma for the day!)

My first impression was not great. This was what I saw:

It got me thinking back to the Go Flock Yourself post in my daily links from yesterday regarding the evils (or really, the lack of usability) of tag clouds. I’m not concerned with purity of the representation in terms of font size, but in this case, the links that I’m actually interested in are going to be so small as to be virtually invisible… and I don’t even know if they’re there. This zeitgeist, who favour Britney Spears just over Linux Desktop, isn’t really much use to me.

But then…
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Now, this is not a political blog, and I hope to rarely mention political issues here, but sometimes a politician behaves in a manner so outrageous that I just can’t help myself. Those of you in Australia who’ve been listening/watching the news this morning will know exactly what I’m talking about. The Hon. Danna Vale MP. (Its beyond ironic to preface her name with Hon. after the way she’s been carrying on).

The background is that our Federal Government is currently debating whether or not the Government (in particular, the Health Minister) should be able to control access to the ‘abortion drug’ RU486 – whether or not the Therapeutic Goods Administration had reviewed and approved use of the drug (which they haven’t even had the opportunity to do at this stage).

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