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Google News is a great service, probably the single best feature of Google News is that it aggregates news stories from numerous sources into one place and then condenses them, so as a user you don’t need to be bothered by or read the same story more than once. As with everything else Google related, its driven by clever algorithms in how it decides what to collapse/consolidate, the snippets to show and images to associate with a given topic or news item.

When viewing the Australian Google News page today, I stumbed across something that I thought was quite funny. In a moment of algorithms acting badly, they had managed to associate an image of Pamela Anderson against a collapsed set of news items related to regional council mergers in the Northern Territory. Clicking on the Pamela Anderson photo took you to the appropriate story, so that part of the system was behaving correctly - just that she was being associated to Northern Territory council mergers wasn’t!

Software development relies on source control management software such as CVS, Subversion, SourceSafe, Bitkeeper, Mercurial, Git and the like to track and manage the changes in the source code over time. As a project progresses, developers come and go, contractors come and go and the activity on a given project ebs and flows as required.

Attempting to visualise who, what and how much of a project is changing is quite complex as there are so many variables - however Michael Ogawa has built a project named code_swarm which does just that. Instead of providing tabular or static images to help visualise a projects changes, he has managed to animate it into something quite spectacular.

Following are five different code swarm visualisations of popular open source projects:

• Apache
• Django
• PostgreSQL
• Python
• SQLAlchemy

The amazing thing that a visualisation such as code_swarm provides, is to show just how many people actively participate in a given open source project, how much each of them participates and what sort of tasks they are normally performing on that project. As an example, comparing the number of different people in SQLAlchemy compared to Django isn’t a competition - Django is ahead by a mile, though compared to Apache, the others seem insignificant.

Automattic, the fine folk behind the WordPress blogging engine, wordpress.com and Akismet have started merging accounts between wordpress.com and Gravatar.

Toward the start of 2006, I signed up for an account with wordpress.com and for obvious reasons, I’ve never needed to use it. Not that long afterward, I used the API key that was provided with my wordpress.com to fight spam using Akismet.

Today I signed into Gravatar, a web service acquired by Automattic late in 2007 to check some settings and was presented with some information about upcoming changes to my existing account. Not having used my wordpress.com account actively, I had to go sifting through signup emails from two years ago; not unsurprisingly, my account still had the randomly generated password!

Within two minutes of finding my wordpress.com account information, I’d followed the prompts and merged/associated it with my existing Gravatar account. The way in which this is being handled is great, it’s a passive change that happens when you next sign in and if you do have an existing wordpress.com account - you can associate them together.

The best thing is now I have one less login to worry about and I can see all of my information for all Automattic assets in one place!