Today Google announced that the gadgets available for Google Personalized Homepage can be embedded into any webpage. To see what I mean, take a look at this Miami driving directions gadget from Google maps, direct from Miami Beach 411:

[Hey, y’all, this is Alesh of Critical Miami, posting here as part of Miami Cross Blogination. More about it at the end.]

I know what you want. It’s not that you want to necessarily be cool, per se; you want to do cool things. You at least want to know what’s going on around town, even if you end up sitting at home all weekend. And if you’re visiting from out of town (MB411 gets the tourist traffic, right!?) and unaware of the various local publications, the problem may well be all the more acute. Sure, the Friday Miami Herald gathers up a decent “what-to-do” section, as do a couple of Thursday free weeklies. Miami Beach 411 even has its own excellent events page. But you know the feeling: that there are things. Happening. All the time. Slipping through the cracks.

Well, never fear, Flavorpill is here. They’re on Time’s top-50, recently profiled in the New York Times, and they’re coming to Miami! At heart, it’s just an e-mail blast, ok? But from cities where it’s been going the report is that it really does scrape up the best of the best, drops it into your inbox weekly, and gives you the relevant info in meaningful categories, and by date! Date, y’hear? I mean, David Byrne came to a party that they threw in New York recently. They play minimalist German techno at their office. They have Chris Anderson giving powerpoint presentations! These folks know what’s going on.

So yes, head over to their website right now, sign up for their newsletter, and just hold your breath: this is going to be amazing.

[You know who else is cool? Gus, that’s who. This isn’t something I’m typing into outlook and e-mailing over—Gus sent me login info, and I’m typing straight into the slick MB411 back-end. Gus is posting today at Discourse.net; go check out his post. As fate would have it, Critical Miami is down(!) right at this moment. I have no idea what happened, but I’m sending frantic e-mails and trying to get it sorted. With any luck, it’ll be back up by the time you read this.]

Remember last week when I talked about us swapping? Looks like the fantasy is about to come true. A group of us are switching sites for a day.

Alesh from Critical Miami will be filling in here.

And I’ll be subbing for Professor Michael Froomkin on his personal blog, Discourse.net.

A. Michael Froomkin is a Professor at the University of Miami School of Law, specializing in Internet Law. He is a founder-editor of ICANNWatch, and serves on the Executive Steering Committee of the Wireless Miami-Dade project.

Professor Froomkin’s writing is top notch, and his readers are some very smart people.

I will be discussing privacy issues, and wheather or not exposing the private lives of private persons, in the absence of public interest, is a violation.

Don’t let my amateur legalese bore you. I promise to spice up my posting with plenty of drama and sex.

Update: Here’s a link to my post.

The “Miami Vice” movie has a Google Map. The mashup lets fans browse around Miami and see an ariel view of the city’s culture and crime history.

I visited the Googleplex yesterday for the Geo Developers Conference.

Google is by far the coolest place in the world to work. They allow employees to bring their dogs to work, wear whatever they feel comfortable in, and insist the engineers follow an 80/20 rule; which means 20% of your time should be spent working on personal projects.

Because of the work we’ve done with Google maps, I’ve been invited to attend the Geo Developers Conference at the GooglePlex (Google headquarters) to meet the development team.

Just in time for hurricane season, this Google Maps Flood mashup shows you how much of your city will be underwater as the ocean rises to different depths.

Google has increased the satellite resolution for our Maps. For example, if you view our Miami hotel map you can zoom in and see the hotel’s swimming pool, it is pretty cool. Check out these birds eye views of Miami:

Are you the kind of traveler that over-packs when you go on vacation? Do you find yourself sweating it out at the ticket counter, worried that you will have to pay for overweight charges. You can stop worrying now. Technology has come to the rescue.

The customer support at Google’s Blogger seems to be dropping the ball. According to this post about website hijacking, its been about 24hrs since the distraught blogger put in a help request to get Google to help her get her blog back, but still no human has responded.

Come on Google, you should know better than this. When there is an emergency, someone needs to jump on it before things get out of hand. If your website was hijacked, how would you feel?

Read the post for the full details, and if you have Blogger and Gmail account, start taking some steps to protect yourself. Changing your password immediately would be a good start.