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Wow, everyone seems to be getting all… visual, all of a sudden. First Google buys Picasa, then CNET purchases Webshots. Needless to say, this is driven by the growth in broadband access along with the further development (and price-lowering) of digital cameras and cameraphones.

Along the same lines, Dick Costolo of FeedBurner turned me on to an interesting deal his company did with photo sharing firm Flickr. (Flickr seems quite similar in mission to Picasa.) The gist of it is this: you can “splice” your blog’s XML feed with your Flickr public photos’ XML feed to create a unified entity. Subscribers can then follow your every little XML move — be it visual or textual.

As Dick said:
Basically, we’ve created a feed splicing service that allows
anybody with a flickr account to splice their public photos with their
blog’s rss feed so that they have one resulting feed with all their blog
posts and their public photos. It’s a request we’ve heard from a bunch
of people and we really liked the way the team at Flickr was innovating
around photo sharing, so there you are…

UPDATE2: Have just tried it out (http://feeds.feedburner.com/the-river/testblog is my playground) and it is really fascinating. It really brings the whole “the feed is the thing” reality to the fore. After all, your Web presence — blog, flickr public files, etc. — are completely separate, but on the feed… it all comes together. The mythical unified blogging tool will solve all these problems, of course, but until then….

UPDATE1. Also very interesting from the release:

The two also announced co-development of syndication namespace extensions for richer photo display and metadata. The draft specification is undergoing final internal review and will be published for public comment shortly. The namespace extensions will facilitate the emergence of next generation RSS clients that enable sophisticated display and sharing of photos.

Here’s what greeted me on Amazon.com this morning:

• OXO Good Grips 73191 Medium Spoon Spatula, Vanilla was released today; We thought you’d be interested because you bought OXO Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher.
  
• My Life was released today; We thought you’d be interested because you rated The South Beach Diet Cookbook: More than 200 Delicious Recipes That Fit the Nation’s Top Diet.
  

Yes, Amazon has apparently taken “Plogs” out of beta. Gotta love the recommendation-engine juxtapositions. I’m not sure how this is so different than the previous recommendations that topped my Amazon.com home page, but I guess they can get into more detail with a Plog. Presumably different types of content will be forthcoming, as well.

FYI, I’m on vacation as of post-work today so things have been a little crazy. Heading out to Seattle for a family outdoor extravaganza. Was going to stop by Redmond but apparently MSFT is in disarray (everyone’s on vacation) post-World Wide Partner Conference. Will visit the folks at aQuantive, though, which should be fun.

Philipp at Google Blogoscoped takes the natural next step after the search player’s Picasa acquisition and predicts what’s next for Google. One of the things I think a lot of folks have missed here is that Picasa’s Hello is basically a peer-to-peer instant messaging application that permits shared browsing of photos. (It can also easily create and send screenshots, which is interesting in a completely tangential way.)

Is this a platform Google can build into a full-fledged instant messaging application? Don’t know. I’m not that much of a techie, but it’s an interesting topic for speculation. A Google Photos (along the same lines as, but better than, Yahoo! Photos, I’d hope) is an obvious move, of course.

The forum has some interesting links on what we can expect from Picasa 2.0 — scheduled for a “summer” release.

• Exporting of pictures to CD
  
• Support of IPTC keywords(same link as above).
  
• Enhanced integration with TiVo
  

The WSJ today explores the systemic forces (free link for 7 days) that make ditching your landline unattractive. Still trying to decide what to do when we make the move to the Bay Area. It’ll probably depend largely on what we do for television (if anything) and high-speed Internet (a necessity). I guess it’ll also depend on how crappy our T-Mobile reception is wherever we land.

Walt Mossberg’s vacation-time replacement, Thomas E. Weber, introduces WSJ readers (free link for 7 days) to news readers in today’s Journal. He especially recommends Bloglines for beginners. That’s my reader of choice, too.

Bloglines just underwent a nifty new redesign. Have just skimmed the surface of the blogging features and find them pretty basic (and this from someone who uses Blogger). I’d anticipate this kind of integrated reader/blogging software would be handy for link posting, but it’s unlikely to be able to compete with the more full-featured blogging software like that from SixApart.

I dream of the unified blog tool, but for now it seems there are those that are best for pictures (for me, my T-Mobile Photoblog), those that are best for links (Bloglines), and those that do everything else. Then there are things like FeedBurner, the features of which I could see being incorporated into a full-fledged blogging service at some point.

Well, here I am in the Bay Area (and up a little early by vacation day standards). Flew in last night on one of those JetBlue flights that I suspect will become a routine. JetBlue has discovered something the other airlines are picking up on: television is a fantastic sedative. No unruly passengers in need of incentivizing here. Just a TV-watching cabin full of people soothed out of their Treo- and Blackberry-withdrawal. (I finally started reading The Tipping Point on the plane, but then went and left it in the seat-back pocket. Damn.)

Anyway, we are house hunting today and generally this weekend — trying to get a feel for the neighborhoods, etc. We’ll be testing my current idea (am I completely delusional?) that my virtual house hunting on the likes of Realtor.com has given me an honest-to-goodness sense of nice areas we can afford. (Note: “afford” is a relative term in the San Francisco Bay real estate market.) With virtual tours (sometimes Java-based, sometimes Flash), neighborhood profiles, Yahoo! Smart View, e-mail watch lists, etc., real estate marketers are getting pretty good at this. Yes, it’s still cumbersome, partly because neighborhood look-ups are done by zip code — not the most natural of boundaries. Still, it’s pretty amazing how wholeheartedly realtors are embracing technology. (I’d link to Yahoo!’s great real estate channel, but it seems to be down. Hmm…)

Interesting to see that my husband’s company’s apartment (his temporary home until the house hunting comes to fruition) is outfitted with Yahoo!/SBC DSL — not to mention a fax machine, a digital camera and one of those HP “all in one” printers. Not bad. (No technology withdrawal for me!)

Later in the process, we’ll be testing just how technology-savvy these realtors are. I saw one Web site claiming to do all the contract-signing, etc. using .PDFs. Gotta like that.