Media Technology

Yow. Ars Technica has the low-down on a yet-unannounced Google service called Google Base:

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Once again, Google proves they groks that the marginal cost of storage and file transfer is essentially free. By becoming the go-to place for everyone’s content they draw more eyeballs for their web ads and position themselves to become the best aggregation service on the Net (if they aren’t already).

(via Slashdot)

Britain’s National Archives have started putting their government-produced public information films online, starting with films from 1945-1951. Everything from a 1948 cartoon explaining the benefits of the newly formed National Insurance Act (Britain’s welfare system) to a film showing how to use the pedestrian crossing (crosswalk).

Material is released under the Crown Copyright license, which is essentially a non-commercial-use license with the added stipulation that the material is “re-used accurately and not used in a misleading context.”

(Thanks to Andy for the link.)

Osaka has great infrastructure for helping the blind find their way. Not only is the city covered in these yellow bumpy paths you can follow with a cane or your foot (with differently shaped bumps at intersections so you can tell where to turn), but they’ve also got braille signs in all the subway stairwells explaining where this passage leads. The best part is how they put the braille in the best possible place for it to be found just by feeling around: wrapped around the handrail itself.

The latest buzz buzz in FM music formats is Jack-FM, a nationally syndicated format that eliminates DJs and replaces them with essentially random shuffle-play (the rough transitions between radically different songs is part of the charm). The playlist is pulled from a library of around 1,200 songs, about 3-4 times that of a traditional station, though all songs have to have been in the top 40 in the last 40 or so years. Jack-FM’s website attributes their success to the iPod making people comfortable with shuffle-play:

Random acts of greatness “jack” radio. Several kajillion iPod™ users can’t be wrong. Thanks to the shuffle feature, hearing different styles of music one after another feels completely natural, and desperate radio programmers have taken notice. The “Jack” format—so named for its Everyman inclusiveness—is popping up in every market to save commercial radio from obsolescence.

I’m skeptical about Jack “saving commercial radio from obsolescence” — it sounds more like the blowing of taps to me. Way back when, before the days of top-40 or Clear Channel, DJs actually added value through their extensive record collections and expert knowledge of who the hot new groups were. But that was then, and by eliminating DJs altogether, Jack is declaring that the job music-radio DJs do today can be done just as well and more cheaply by a random-number generator.

That may be true, but I have to wonder if the radio stations embracing this format have thought this cynical line of thinking all the way to its conclusion. If Jack is so wonderful because it emulates my iPod on shuffle play, then why the heck do I need their advertisement-filled, frequency-hoarding broadcast at all? Sure, 1,200 songs is better than 300, but my iPod holds over ten times that many songs, lets me skip songs, lets me pick my own formats and lets me share my playlists with my friends — all ad-free. The only advantages broadcast has over the iPod are expert DJs (which they’re eliminating), installed base of radios (which iPod-like technology will eventually match), and the arcane copyright laws that give radio broadcasters a way to legally broadcast without needing to pay the RIAA or recording artists (though they still pay song writers through BMI or ASCAP.) Even in the slow and bloody copyright wars, that third advantage is also slipping away. Today I can fill my iPod from an all-you-can-eat subscription service, from Creative Commons and other legal free-download sites, or from a number of less legal sources, and other sources keep rising. Once it becomes ubiquitous, why would we as a society keep granting exclusive rights to scarce public radio frequencies for such an archaic way to transmit music?

Siemens is showing off a paper-thin electrochromic display that they hope will eventually lead to an all-in-one device that uses printing technology to lay down the display, circuits and even the battery. According to the New Scientist:

The display is controlled by a printed circuit and can be powered by a very thin printable battery or a photovoltaic cell. The goal is to be able to create the entire device – the display and its power source – using the same printing method, so that manufacturing costs would be as low as possible. Siemens expects to achieve this by 2007.

Also impressive is that the display cost about £30 (just over $50) per square meter of materials.

Update 5pm: added link to Siemens announcement.

To the surprise of few, today Steve Jobs announced a Video iPod at his “One More Thing” press conference today. The main iPod now supports H.264 and MPEG-4 video formats, with a capacity of around 150 hours worth on the 60GB. You can also download movie trailers and purchase music videos at the iTunes Music Store for $1.99 each, and it looks like ad-free episodes of shows from ABC and Disney television are coming soon.

(As is traditional after Apple announcements (regardless of how good the news), AAPL is down five and a half percent so far today.)

Update 3:09pm: TV-show purchase is now up, with episodes for $1.99 and a full season for $34.99. And they’ve got Pixar shorts up for only $1.99 too! (Not sure if JHymn will work with video like it does with audio — I’ll try it out tonight.)

There’s been a lot of buzz about Yahooo!’s new Podcast search engine, and what it means for the “new medium” to have a major search engine buy in like this.

Ignore the fact that podcasting isn’t a new medium (it’s called audio guys, it’s been around a while). It’s also not that different from seven years ago when people just linked to MP3s on their webpages, and search engines like Scour.net and Lycos MP3 Search would find them for you. Technologically the only difference is a little bit of XML to help machines know what’s being linked, plus a few tweaks (like RSS subscription) that make the experience more user-friendly.

What I think has changed in the past 7 years is the number of people producing and distributing their own amateur and semi-pro content, and the accompanying infrastructure to support them. In 1998 almost all the MP3s available on the web were copyrighted songs people had ripped from their CD collection, and so the RIAA and other members of the content cartel could squash whatever infrastructure cropped up in the name of stamping out piracy. Today there’re countless MP3s online that are completely legal to download, and that primes the pump for for inventing the infrastructure to make it even easier. Moreover, piracy has largely gone to the P2P networks, so now MP3s on the web are harder to paint with the sweeping “it’s all piracy” brush.

And that all leads to podcasting, which I’m hearing the media describe as “making your own radio programs for broadcast over the net.” This is, of course, the big long-term competition for the content cartel — their big-advertising, mass-produced one-size-fits-all model will have trouble competing with thousands of niche narrowcasts that each have a small personal audience. More importantly, podcasting is online audio that finally isn’t being linked with piracy — it’s good, happy audio on the web, not at all like those nasty pirated MP3s in the previous decade.

And just think, it only took us seven years to get here…

E Ink just announced it will be offering prototyping kits that include a 6″ diagonal, 170 pixels per inch, 4 gray level e-ink display. Like all E Ink displays, it only needs power to change the display, not to maintain the image. The kit also includes a development board with a 400 MHz Gumstix single-board computer as well as I/O boards for MMC, Bluetooth and USB.

No word yet on prices, though their kits page says order forms will be available soon. Kits will begin shipping November 1st.

Update 9/27/05: fixed typo (I’d said it needs power to change the display but not to update it, which makes no sense).

Update 9/29/05: As Andrew points out in the comments, they’ve now posted their order form and the kit is $3000. Not cheap, especially considering you can get your own Gumstix for $159 and a Sony Librié for $419. (You could also get a Toshiba DCT-100 for just $229, though I believe that’s using one of Kend Displays’ ChLCD display.)

Lately I’ve noticed a rise in the number of Google search results that just lead to a bunch of ads plus some automatically-generated content copied from other web pages, rather than pages with the original content I’m looking for. This is the latest step in an ongoing arms race between the search engines (and their users) and so-called search engine optimization companies that try to funnel searchers through to their customer’s ad-laden sites rather than going direct to the site they want. The SEOs are essentially using Google’s own infrastructure against it, creating Google-hosted blogs, generated using content from (I’m guessing) the results of Google searches, all sprinkled with links to pages containing nothing but Google-supplied Ads.

Google’s trying to stop folks from gaming the system like this, but I expect there’s some kind of fundamental limit to what can be done to stop it. You could probably even describe it as a theorem:

For any automatically-indexed search engine of sufficient size, it is possible to construct a document that has a high page rank for a given query even though the constructed document adds no useful information beyond that which would have been returned without it.

A corollary would be:

The more complete a search engine is in terms of documents indexed, the lower the relevance of its search results will be in terms of the ratio of documents with original content vs. documents that simply copy information from other pages.

If this does, in fact, wind up being a fundamental theorem for search engines, I have a humble suggestion for what we should name it: Göögel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

Semapedia is a project to annotate physical locations with 2D barcodes that link to Wikipedia articles. With the Semacode software running on your PDA/cellphone, you scan a barcode and it’ll take you to the linked-to article. There’ve been a lot of attempts at this sort of physical annotation of the world, WorldBoard being one of the earlier ones I remember.

I like the concept in theory, but I’m always disappointed by the quality and variability of the links. Do I really want a link about privacy just because I see a no-tresspassing sign, or about the Hofburg Imperial Palace just because I’m standing there? Perhaps, if I’m in the mood for ironic social commentary or I’m a tourist with an interest in architecture, but most people won’t be the right audience for any given link. One man’s art is another man’s graffiti, and the world-annotation systems I’ve seen are currently little more than virtual spray paint.

The variability is the real key. If 90% of the tags I come across link to something interesting to me, I’ll probably follow every one I see. If only 50% link to something interesting, I might look at the human-readable title printed on the tag and then decide whether I think it likely that the article will be well-written and interest me. If 90% of the tags wind up being useless, I won’t even bother reading the title — and then it won’t matter that there are 10% that I would have enjoyed if I had bothered to look.

I’m not totally pessimistic about this sort of technology though. With the right combination of filtering (to make tags I don’t care about completely invisible), subtlety (to make the tags I might care about still be unobtrusive in case I don’t want to be bothered) and community support (to insure relevance to me and to bond me to my community regardless of the link quality), I could see something like this finally taking off.

(Thanks to Eugen Leitl on the Wearables mailing list for the link!)