Media Technology

Google just upped the ante again with Google Satellite. Satellite images curtsey of Digital Globe and EarthSat.

As a side-note, the Google Maps URL includes GPS coordinates, so given a street address you can get both GPS coords and satellite map quickly and easily. You can also just erase the part from q=Blah+blah& part of the URL to get a nice clean satelite image, or just add &t=k to an existing Google Maps URL to turn it into a satellite image. (I really hope that doesn’t become an issue for some well-meaning panic-stricken patriot who thinks terrorists couldn’t get that info quickly and easily in dozens of other ways — I always missed that GPS feature when it was taken out of earlier mapping software.)

Update 7:40pm: Note that you need to click on “Link to this page” in the upper right-hand corner to get the full URL to show up in the address bar.

OK, this amused me enough I had to share. My fraternity brother Nivi just lost his voice, so he went and purchased a nice-sounding text-to-speech voice for his Mac at Cepstral and piped its output into Skype with Soundflower. Voilà — instant TTS phone.

I remember David Ross once told a story about how the Model T Ford (nicknamed the “Tin Lizzy”) was adapted to all sorts of things unexpected things, from winching wagons to pumping water. The key was the car’s simplicity: it was just a motor on wheels, and it didn’t take an expert to that motor for something besides driving. It’s a lesson that keeps repeating itself: tools made up of simple, powerful components with straightforward interfaces for linking the pieces together find their own new uses.

LinkBack looks pretty sweet:

LinkBack is an open source framework for Mac OS X that helps developers integrate content from other applications into their own. A user can paste content from any LinkBack-enabled application into another and reopen that content later for editing with just a double-click. Changes will automatically appear in the original document again when you save.

Looks like it goes about 90% of the way towards the convenience of editable embedded objects, without all the problems associated with that last 10% of trying to get everything to actually be edited in a window within the embedded document. It’s also interesting that this is an open-source project, spearheaded by 3rd-party software developers Nisus, OmniGroup and Blacksmith rather than by Apple itself.

LinkBack is currently being integrated into Nisus Writer Express, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, ChartSmith, Stone Create, Border and a plug-in has just been released to paste LinkBack data into Keynote 2.

(Thanks to Nivi for the link!)

LinkBack for OSX Read More »

Sounds like President Jacques Chirac has bought into the French National Library president Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s call to make huge swaths of European literature available online. A big nudge came from Google’s plans to put some 15M English-language books online, leading Jeanneny to write an editorial in the French paper Le Monde warning that such a service would naturally view the knowledge of the world through an Anglo-American lens. If it became the dominant source of knowledge, that perspective would become equally dominant. (You can see the full editorial in this blogger-cached copy or the Google translation).

He is, of course, quite right in assessing the threat. It’s nice to see the French respond with a call to counter-attack rather than protectionism — such a contest can only result in a race to the top, delivering the best each of us has to offer to the betterment of all. It’s also nice to see yet another example of culture as something to spread rather than something to protect — that sometimes gets lost with all the copyright wars going on.

Jeanneney also hits on something that’s not coming out much in the English press: he’s not just afraid English-language texts will be over-represented, but also that the organization of the texts will be seen only through that lens. From a March 4th Le Monde Q&A (auto-translated by Google):

Why are you hostile with the Google project?

Hostile? It is not the word right. When Google announced, December 14, its project of digitalization of 15 million volumes drawn from the funds of several large Anglo-Saxon libraries, we did not doubt that among these works would appear a great number of European titles. But their selection, their hierarchisation in the lists will be defined inevitably starting from a singular glance: that of America. The Anglo-Saxon scientific production will be inevitably overestimated. The American mirror will be the single prism. My remark does not raise of any chauvinism, I do not intend to inform any lawsuit with the opening of Google, I restrict itself to note an obviousness. I would like simply that one can have in the future another point of view, marked by another sensitivity – European – of a glance on the world undoubtedly quite as partial and even partial, but different. What I defend, it is a multipolar vision.

It’s not clear to me how Google plans to categorize the vast library they’re helping put online, or indeed if they plan to do more than add existing (no doubt US/British-centric) library classifications, offer full-text search and then let the emergent organization of the Web take its course. But the problem is a tricky one, and search-engine bias is both subtle and, honestly, inevitable. We would all benefit from multiple experiments, multiple methods and multiple points of view, and at least for a while that’s worth a little duplication of work. However, I do hope that all the sides involved come together at least enough to establish some common data formats and, more importantly, agree to share data with each other. No one would be served by multiple little fiefdoms, each hoarding their little corner of culture out of fear the other side would gain an advantage. Let’s keep this a race to the top.

It looks like Ben Stanfield started a blogstorm this weekend by pointing out a new(?) clause in AOL’s AIM terms-of-service that states “In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.” AOL has been trying to stamp out the fire, and say the terms aren’t meant to apply to person-to-person instant messenger, only to posting in public chat rooms, message boards and other public forums.

I think AOL is telling the truth here, but the more I think about it the less I think that matters. In the end my privacy over AIM relies on my trusting AOL; trusting them not to change their privacy policy without my noticing, trusting them to stand up for my rights if they receive an overly-broad subpoena and trusting them to secure their networks from snoopy employees. Over the past 10 years I’ve learned to be sparing in my trust of Internet companies. Luckily, there are alternatives that don’t require that kind of trust. Time to get off my butt and finally start using that Jabber server I set up a while back, and to see how well Skype‘s encrypted IM and voice-messaging really works.

Update 3/18/05: I had thought only the Enterprise version of AIM supported encryption (and that may be AOL’s intent), but apparently you can just create your own certificate and that’ll work too. Thanks to Aleatha for the comment (and also for pointing out that the TOS has, in fact, been around for a year or so in this form).

On a related note, I also notice that iChat 3.0 (shipping with Mac OSX Tiger) will support Jabber as a standard protocol. Yay!

Mitch Kapor has two posts about Microsoft’s purchase of Groove Networks. Mitch was founder of Lotus and more recently the Open Source Foundation and was also the first outside investor in Groove, so he has several good insights into the software and how / whether Groove would be as Open Source if it were done today. The quote that got my attention the most was this one though:

With the prospect of open source-based server capabilities of all kinds becoming more like the electrical power and distribution system, universally available on demand in whatever amount is needed, a whole class of objections to client-server architectures such as dependence on non-local, unreliable and inconvenient infrastructure diminishes. Groove’s peer-to-peer architecture performs uniquely well in areas where the telecom infrastructure is weak, such as conflict-ridden areas of the Middle East and Asia where both military and humanitarian aid groups have deployed it successfully, but this alone is a niche application.

I like peer-to-peer technology for a whole host of reasons, but I think he’s right that the infrastructure arguments for P2P are (and always have been, IMO) weak except in niche applications (bandwidth saving via BitTorrent being the notable exception). But the driver for P2P technology hasn’t been about limiting the effects of technical infrastructure failure — it’s been about limiting active efforts by an adversary to stop communications. The adversary might be an opposing army, an oppressive government or the RIAA, but the goal is the same — and that’s a need hasn’t changed in the past 10 years.

The folks at Better Bad News have done a wonderful remixed video mash-up of a bunch of blogsphere commentary on the Google Autolink feature. These guys are great:

Unbalanced and Half-true News Opinion and Commentary What would people be talking about if you controlled the newsroom teleprompters? Choose a professional talking head to speak for you on a freewheeling moderated panel discussion by accessing our dedicated web connected teleprompters.

I love this sort of remixing art. I wonder if I could make a toolbar that could make their talking heads read all my blognews?

Google’s Auto-Link feature is generating all sorts of commentary, most of it the perennial “have they crossed the line into scary all-your-base-are-belong-to-us mode yet” type.

I’ve not seen the interface yet (it’s Windows-only, and I’m, well, not). But assuming (a) it’s easy to turn on or off and (b) users can tell what’s an auto-link and what’s original to the webpage I see the application itself as just one more shift in power from the author to the audience, just like TiVo, ad blocking, style-sheet overrides, those DVD-reediting kits for people who don’t like the dirty bits, the remote control and the highlighter pen. I’m in favor of all of them.

There is one thing that does concern me though, and it’s not the application itself, but the bundling of the information source with the Google Desktop app itself. There’s not much they could do about that (and I trust Google a lot more than I trusted Microsoft when they tried this same trick), but I would feel much better if this were a generic open API in my Firefox, where I could pick and choose who handles each of my rewrite rules. Even a benevolent hegemony is dangerous, both in case it stops being benevolent and because it lacks genetic diversity.

So, who’s up for writing an auto-link Firefox plug-in?

National Journal has a great historical look at the National Association of Broadcasters’ battle to keep the “beachfront property frequencies” they’ve enjoyed for free for over 80 years. Well worth the read.

Mitsubishi just announced its Pocket Projector, which is about the size of your hand and can project a 20″ image from just over a foot away. The press release doesn’t say how bright it is or whether you’ll need lights out to see it well — it uses three colored Lumileds LEDs. SRP $699.