You may have come across a Google Street View shot of a fellow getting caught counting money. Some folks over at reddit have done some sleuthwork to uncover multiple angles, and multiple different deals done by the same fellow. With multiple license plate numbers.
I swear that every week is an NPR pledge drive. I know they say they only do it a few times a year, but every time I feel like one just ended. Every time my response to the whole affair is, “if you really want me to pledge, give the option of paying my way out of this radio hell you call a pledge drive.”
I think the technology has come far enough that they could. I connect to WNYC through a web stream anyway, and I like my local channel (especially Soterious Johnson). I would easily pay $50 if they provided me with a unique stream that had a maximum of 1 connection and expired when the pledge drive ended. This stream could default to national programming when they’re yammering on about matching funds and special offers. I’m guessing that there would be a whole bunch of people just like me that would pay to make the pain go away.
The Echonest, a startup out of the Media Lab located in Somerville, MA, just launched an Audio Analysis API which processes MP3s and returns an XML document with a number of features including tempo, loudness, time signature, fades, timbre and a whole lot more. These can be used in a number of different cool demos that they are providing as reader exercises
Google has published slides and videos from a 2007 tutorial series for new interns covering distributed computing, MapReduce, GFS and a few algorithms. This seems to be part of Google’s efforts to engage universities in their code, probably to give future Googlers a head-start. (via Geeking with Greg)
Have you ever spent hours looking for the auto-keypad-locking feature on your Nokia phone? Wondering why you have to manually engage the lock function on a Blackberry? It turns out that Sony-Ericsson has a patent on the “activation and automatic inactivation of keys on a mobile telephone terminal keypad.” Please Sony and Ericsson, for the love of god, and the eradication of pocket-dialing, give this patent up.
I’m not one for being rash and I am not particularly worried about privacy online. I used Friendster frequently for a couple of years and I remember when people’s accounts started mentioning “moving to MySpace because it’s better,” and frankly I can not remember for the life of me what the argument was. Nonetheless, I eventually created an account for myself and all of my musical identities, and I befriended some 50 or so people which were at least 50% musical entities.
I never really “got” MySpace. Not many of my friends use it regularly, except those who enjoy dating and of course those with bands. I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by the site design and the resulting profile pages that people create there. I still use it to promote my music and I see the value as a publishing tool and media hosting service. However, for the last year I have not logged in to MySpace under my own identity once, and I receive at least 10 spam friend invitations per month.
So today I cancelled my MySpace account.
Unlike so many web brands that I identify with (Flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, and Facebook, to name a few), I see no long term value for remaining a MySpace member. Here’s my reasoning:
Which leaves me with zero reasons to remain a member. So long MySpace, and thanks for all the free webcam girls.
There are a lot of angry people in the world. These people typically have a number of gripes, and sometimes one of them stands above everything else. Those who have web savvy might even take it to the rest of the world through a passionate blog or unifying community website. I was interested in what Google thought the most hated things were, and this is the list:
From this logic, I present a highly unsuccessful personals ad:
Part-time clown seeks cilantro-loving emo kid. My house in Brooklyn , my cubicle in Manhattan (selling SBC Yahoo), but my heart is with Austen (die hagglers!). Let’s grab a Starbucks or just chat on our powerbooks!
Surprisingly, I find myself being quite a big fan of most of them. Maybe people just hate the things I like, but probably these things get more attention because they are highly divided topics.
I received a strange email this morning, addressed to my blogdex email address which has nothing to do with Flickr, but exceptionally high SpamRank:
From: Dee (Barry@nishikoi.com)
To: blogdex@media.mit.edu
Subject: question about your photoI’ve accidently found your photo at a flickr and i’m very
interested in it.Can you tell me what place i can see in the background of
it?
—
wbr, Danny
Where “your photo” is a link to http://www.fri91.net/flickr,html. At the outset this appears to be a Flickr phishing scam; while on the train without a connection I was convinced I’d find a Flickr login screen when I followed the link to “my photo.” And you know that when your service is getting phishing scams, you have arrived.
The truth is much stranger. Go ahead, click the link. It’s not going to hurt you. In a sort of janky way, Barry has copied some of Flickr’s code and design along with some of his own “edits.” The page is hosted on a Norwegian soccer club’s website. The links on the page lead to tjhallett1’s Flickr data. The email domain is a fish food company. This piece of spam is a stumper.
The full email is here.
Update: Andy explained to me that this is, indeed, a scam. DO NOT visit the link in IE, it is some sort of Activex control hack. More details here and a virus definition describes the functionality on AusCERT.
It appears that this email is using the credibility of a site like Flickr and its community to get people’s attention and clicks. It’s no different than preying on people with the possibility of Anna Kournikova pictures.
I’ve been a long-time user of Google news and news alerts. For certain topics, it’s the only way for me to stay informed, and the quality of their index has generally kept these updates to high-quality, on-topic news that matched some keywords. Over the past six months I have noticed a diminishing returns on the value of their search, especially in the case of alerts. While the amount of information has increased, the average quality has been diminishing. This decrease in relevance can be attributed to certain publications in their corpus:
Small publications: as more college newspapers, trade publications, and otherwise non-authoritative sources become primarily web-distributed, they have also started to overwhelm the news index. It’s rare these days to come across a story from a mass media publication.
PR announcements: some readers may remember a few months back when a 15-year old boy wrote a press release about how Google had hired him, and the entire affair turned out to be a hoax. Press releases seem to be a media that is not well policed, probably because they mainly come from
Blogs: The boundary between mass media and blogs has certainly blurred over the past few years, but the selection criteria for news indexes does not seem to follow any rules. Presumably the site maintainers take submissions to the site and decide based on internal editorial guidelines what to let in. Some of the blogs I have seen do not seem to make the cut, but maybe their inclusion of blog search into the interface suggests they are working on a better solution.
Syndication sites: a few news sources indexed by Google are actually sites that aggregate news from other sources. Try a search for any of your favorite spam keywords, such as “viagra,” you will find some surprising results. Spam?! It seemed absurd to me that spam could get into the news index, where every source was hand evaluated, but lo and behold, there are more than a few pages trying to sell viagra:
What each of these examples points to is the need for a ranking mechanism that takes into account the reputation of the source. At last count, the US version of news is indexing over 10k sources, and as this bar gets lower, our collective trust in this site becomes more and more important. Unlike web search, which can be indexed and updated over the course of months, the news index has to be extremely fresh; for this reason, algorithms like PageRank cannot function properly. Attention indicators like del.icio.us, Digg or Newsvine might help, but each of these sources comes with an inherent bias that might not reflect the audience of Google News.
It seems much more likely that the sources of news will become the harbingers of trust. I am not advocating a return to old media, but the index could be built to reflect the current opinion of the web at large. If most sites trust the New York Times or the Washington Post as an authoritative host, so could a news search index. Andy Baio did an experiment around host ranking using Metafilter as a source, and the results from 1999 to 2006 are quite interesting: many sites appear out of nowhere (Youtube, Wikipedia) while others maintain rank over the years (New York Times, BBC). My guess is that standard news results run through this filter would provide a substantially better experience, especially for ranking results within a given news cluster. I guess we’ll see what the big G ends up doing to rectify the situation.
I usually avoid the initial release candidates of open source software, but Firefox just released their beta 2 candidate about a month ago. I finally got around to installing it this week and I have to say it’s not that mind-blowing. They’ve added cleaner RSS support, more intelligent tabs, and a number of features that mimic former plugins.
While I was test-driving this new toy I went to some new ajax-spiffy application and was completely blown away by their inline spell checker, until I realized that it’s a standard feature on the new Firefox:
Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a seperate application.
It’s essentially the same spell checker that has existed in more serious writing applications (word processors, email clients, etc.) for years, with red dotted lines under misspelled words and right-click action to suggest correct spellings. It appears that the authors of the above quote were using a previous version of Firefox as the word “separate” is spelled incorrectly. Of course I only noticed this because it has red dots below it in my browser.
Most good social software currently support spell checking, but the inline version it isn’t the sort of task that can be done in real-time by a web app. It makes perfect sense that this sort of functionality would migrate to the browser, given the amount of general text editing that is happening now on the web. We’ve moved from a world of web browsing to one of web editing, and our tools for manipulating this environment will reflect this shift.
I can say that I’m pretty helpless without a spell checker, and I am usually too lazy to use online tools like spellcheck.net, so this will generally raise the bar of my online participation. Oh, and I won’t look like an idiot. As much.