Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a "Takedown Hall of Shame" for what it sees as egregious abuses of digital copyright regulations.
Traditionally the champions of Creative Commons and other, more open methods of IP protection and creative sharing of content online, EFF is now calling out a bevy of big-name media corporations to make examples of them for takedown abuse. According to the EFF blog, "Some of the web's most interesting content has been yanked from popular websites with bogus copyright claims or other spurious legal threats." Read on to see who made the list and why.
Back in April, Google launched a new search feature in Labs that allowed users to find similar images.
Initially rolled out for select images only, the capability is now being rolled out for what seems to be the majority of images in Google image search. This is particularly useful when search terms include homonyms, we think; and we applaud Google for removing a major pain point in our searches for pics of Tesla the band as opposed to Tesla the scientist or Tesla the automotive brand.
If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populous country on earth behind China and India - but now Facebook thinks it can play Switzerland and lead a push for world peace. I'm not so sure that's a good idea.
Facebook and the Persuasive (no, not pervasive, persuasive) Technology Lab at Stanford launched what they call the "dot peace" campaign today. There's reason to pause before enthusiastically supporting the effort. There are other ways that Facebook could make the world a better place and there are some reasons why the company deserves caution more than trust when it comes to its political agenda.
I always looked forward to seeing new "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC" ads on television. As a long-time Mac fan and a marketing pro, I really admired these spots. They were smart and edgy, yet friendly. They were fun. They differentiated Macs from PCs. From a marketing perspective, they were appropriate to Apple's David fighting Microsoft's Goliath. And they worked really well, perhaps better than any other mass-market technology product ads.
Now I wince every time I see a new one, hoping its smug attitude and condescending tone doesn't go too far.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.
Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.
Buying a single article from a scientific journal is usually prohibitively expensive if you are not a student or teacher at a school that subscribes to the journal. Most academic journals are available only behind these paywalls, but Deep Dyve just announced a new product that could radically change the marketplace for scientific, technical and medical articles. Until now, Deep Dyve only indexed articles and directed users to the journal's own site. Starting today, users can rent articles from Deep Dyve. Accounts start with a pay-as-you-go account, by which users are charged $0.99 to keep an article for one day, and go up to an unlimited account for $19.99 per month.
The Android team just released the first official video overview of the upcoming Android 2.0 release. The video, which is geared towards developers, shows off a number of interesting new features, including an improved accounts manager, better contact syncing, easier access to the Android Bluetooth API to connect devices and support for devices with different screen sizes. The demo also shows the smarter contacts application which now features a very smart new 'quick contacts' feature. The contacts application now highlights all the different ways to get in touch with a contact when you click on their avatar.
Want to see who got part of the hundreds of billions of dollars in Recovery.gov funds near you? Now you can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients, thanks to the publication of the official data set onto the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Sunlight Labs published the marked-up information and the results are fascinating.
This may be the most accessible way to view this information yet. I must confess, I am surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in my neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road. Fire up Layar on your phone, search for "Sunlight" and you can see the effects of the funding program on your own neighborhood. This is the kind of thing that standardized data makes possible.
Exactly one week after the announcement of its nook e-book reader, Barnes & Noble today announced that it will also sell the Plastic Logic QUE proReader. The QUE will be sold next to the bookseller's own nook on BN.com and in B&N's stores. Earlier this year, B&N and Plastic Logic announced that B&N would power the QUE reader's online store. The proReader is scheduled to premiere on January 7. For the crucial holiday season, this means that B&N will be able to sell its own e-reader only in its stores, though a B&N-powered iRex eReader will soon be available in Best Buy stores as well.
Social search was in the news this past week when Google and Bing announced that they would be getting access to the Twitter fire hose. A flurry of subsequent posts speculated on what this "social search" would entail, and some expressed concerns over privacy and spam.
But social search is not something to be afraid of. It's really just an extension of behaviors that we're used to in the real world, brought online, thanks to the advent of real-time social computing.
