The Wall Street Journal Online has a story by Katherine Meyer, The Best of the Worst (May 3, 2006) about dot-com duds that failed like Microsoft’s iLoo portable toilet with an internet connection. (Yes, it was supposed to have a waterproof keyboard and would be used at UK music festivals.) Other duds include CyberRebate.com, Flooz.com, iSmell, and the CueCat. The last dud mentioned is PointCast which offered a custom browser for push content which I actually tried for a while. This came from Slashdot.
CNET Story Visualizations
CNET News.com has two interesting types of visualization available alongside their stories.
The Big Picture is bubble graph that shows links out from the story you are looking at.
What’s Hot shows the hot stories in coloured boxes where size shows popularity and colour shows how recent the story is.
It’s not clear how they measure “hot”. Is a cool story hot?
Canadian Music Creators Coalition
The National Post has published an opinion piece by Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies about the state of Canadian copyright law. He and othes have formed the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. See A Barenaked guide to music copyright reform. In the opinion Page lists three principles for copyright reform:
- First, we believe that suing our fans is destructive and hypocritical. We do not want to sue music fans, and we do not want to distort the law to coerce fans into conforming to a rigid digital market artificially constructed by the major labels.
- Second, we believe that the use of digital locks, frequently referred to as technological protection measures, are risky and counterproductive. We do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music, nor do we support laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures, including Canadian accession to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties. These treaties are designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies.
- Third, we strongly believe that cultural policy should support actual Canadian artists. We call on the Canadian government to firmly commit to programs that support Canadian music talent. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms such as the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent.
Good to see such a new voice.
Note Taking Tools
From Solution Watch, a blog of longish entries about solutions to issues, a list of Fifty Ways to Take Notes. Obviously others are thinking of blogs and similar tools as ways of keeping open research notes (which is, after all, the point of this blog.) This and the previous posts are courtesy of Humanist.
Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders
Distributed Publishers is an official Project Gutenberg site that supports “the digitization of Public Domain books.” It provides a web document management system for proofreading and editing Public Domain books and claim to be the main source of Project Gutenberg e-books. As far as I can tell they don’t provide their software for others to adapt.
Lazybase.com – Free web databases
Lazybase is one of those clean neat ideas. A site that “allows anyone to design, create and share a database of whatever they like.”
Pixels + Pitches
This is the time of year when I see lots of great undergraduate projects in multimedia. One of the best ones that is online is pixels pitches by John Smith. It needs Flash and the sound on.
Narus: Data-Mining IP
Who creates the software for real-time IP traffic monitoring? Narus is a company named in a Wired story about Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room. The page about NarusInsight says they provide,
CALEA- and ETSI-compliant modules for lawful intercept featuring a robust warrant management system. Capabilities include playback of streaming media (for example, VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mails and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols.
The Wired story is about an EFF Class-Action Lawsuit Against AT&T that accuses “the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.”
English Hits 1 Billion Words
A story by Suevon Lee, English Language Hits 1 Billion Words in My Way News talks about the Oxford English Corpus and how their “massive langauge research database … has officially hit a total of 1 billion words…” The corpus is collected by a crawler and is analyzed by Sketch Engine. I can’t figure out if people can access the Oxford Corpus, but one can get an account to try Sketch Engine.
Quaero: French Google Challenger
According to Guardian Unlimited story, Does France really need its own search engine?, by Bobbie Johnson (April 27, 2006), France is backing a Franco-German challenger to Google called Quaero. If they build it will users switch? How could Quaero duplicate the success of Baidu.com in challenging Google in China? I’m guessing that if Google’s search techniques is based on features of English, Quaero could compete by handling French searches better. The Wikipedia article on Quaero says they will focus on multimedia search.