Welcome back to The netGuide, where I talk briefly about some of my findings from across the web and how they help solve old problems in new and creative ways. This week…
We’re going to investigate the idea of search and information management with searchme.com, a great search engine that has quietly made its way onto the scene, but which has unique advantages to search.
What’s special about this search engine is that when you query a topic, the websites returned to you are displayed visually (similar to Apple’s cover flow) rather than in list form. A picture is worth 1000 words so they say, so it makes sense that with 1 quick look at the preview pane of a website, you can better filter your results, and roughly gauge the quality of the website (by it’s professionalism and aesthetic, available content, and general message). It’s clear that you receive less information about all items, relative to each other, in one glance than with traditional search engines like Google, however what you do see, you are given more information about - this represents the tradeoff between these two methods of search. The obvious benefit is the handling of media search, such as video and images, which you can view in pane, as opposed to Google’s one page of smaller pictures (which does not handle video search well). The second benefit is not quite as obvious and speaks in large part, to how we interact with the Internet at large…
Joystiq, a popular gaming blog, has a post up about how EA has handled a potentially embarassing situation surrouding their video game Tiger Woods ‘08 that cropped up on YouTube. Youtube user Levinator25 discovered an issue where Tiger Woods could walk on water, allowing him to make the “jesus shot.” Levinator25 uploaded a video of what he assumed to be a glitch in the game. Check out EA’s response:
I suppose it was only a matter of time before something like this came along and I have been anxiously waiting to see how this one pans out. Launched in July, on seemingly razor-thin legal ice, it appears that beta site mygazines is still alive and kicking (not to mention enjoying the spotlight gained from a widespread AP news release).
The site provides member-scanned full digital copies of magazines, which can be browsed, shared, archived and even re-assembled to create aptly-named “mygazines”. The site is hosted by Stokholm-based PRQ, “the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company“, which is also host to (and owned by two founders of) well-known bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay.
Interestingly, the site tour appears to be targeted at publishers, pitching itself as multi-faceted growth opportunity, but most industry leaders asked aren’t exactly jumping at the “opportunity”.
Why should I upload my publication to mygazines.com?
Our article-level search and archiving ability allows your audience to find the content they’re looking for faster
Increase your distribution and advertising revenue by exposing your publication to more eyes
Keep control of your publication: Mygazines will not allow for downloading or printing of your publication. Your original source file is never accessible.
Save the trees - no paper will be used in the making of your virtual publication
Photosynth (ted talk, demo page, our coverage), a project acquired by Microsoft, made for one of the coolest tech demos to grace the internet in a very long time. The experience that Photosynth provided by inferring 3d structures from collections of 2d pictures made for a very rich — and jaw dropping — user experience. But not rich enough, it seems: Microsoft has a competing project another such tool from some people on that team, developped jointly with the University of Washington. Introducing Photo Tourism (project homepage, /. coverage). Check out the video:
Like Photosynth, Photo Tourism assembles its 3d models from photos on flickr. Photo Tourism, however, allows you to not only add your own photos to a 3d set, but “walk” between the locations where your pictures were taken, virtually. Photo Tourism also allows a user to rotate their point of view around a landmark or object, and can even determine if photos of that landmark/object were taken during the day or at night, grouping them accordingly. This results in a very high “feels like you’re there” experience, but what’s the next step? Read More »
Google Docs are not new. All the same, last week Caleb, Will, Jude, Ben and I decided to try using them for a project at the office. Up until then, I had only ever used Google Spreadsheets as an in-the-cloud host for files I was working on, or to share files with people easily for asynchronous editing. This was not the case for our project. Instead, we used it synchonously.
The project was to go through our research catalogue and back-tag existing content with a standard set of tags. To accomplish this, we needed to define the standard set of tags in a way that was easily accessible for all of us, and somehow it didn’t seem like that we’d enjoy much success copying and pasting from a physical whiteboard. So, we figured we’d try out Google Spreadsheets for an in-office project. It was awesome. Read More »
As part of my effort to help you find meaning(ful applications) in your e-life, i’m starting a regular column called The netGuide. In these blog posts I will briefly talk about some of my website findings from across the web and how they help solve old problems in new and creative ways.
In today’s web wanderings we’re going deep into birdy territory with a.viary.com - a comprehensive suite of free online software that promises to be the next generation of media editing. Invites inside.
Don’t ask me how it happened. I was just planning to check my email last night, but for some reason I ended up on the United Nations website. I spent a couple hours searching through the information. It was amazing how much it contains. Dan Herman actually wrote a blog post about it a few months back.
The website is filled with research papers, news, and reports highlighting what innovative governments, businesses, and educators can do to empower the people. It also breaks them down into a variety of case studies like Debate Europe where European citizens can share their opinions, concerns and ideas on the future of the European Union. The French National Commission of Public Debate (CNDP) has an innovative site that allows citizens to debate on infrastructure projects in France. Chunceon, Korea citizens have direct web access to the Mayor’s office to submit ideas and then receive feedback on them. Seeing case studies like these can really help allowing people to interpret and to better understand the opportunities available to their countries, states, provinces, and small towns. They even have some of our own Anthony Williams’ stuff in there. Read More »
Today, games are usually released for purchase both in stores (on CD/DVD) and online for download. The disc version of the game usually has a check built-in to make sure that the disc is actually in the drive, confriming that you’ve actually bought the game. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was no different, except that the downloadable version of the game also had this disc-check left in — clearly a problem for gamers who opted for the download.
Usually, online piracy groups release “no-cd cracks” that allow games to be played without a legitimate (or any) game-disc. These groups are violating the game developers’ terms of service agreements, and enabling the theft countless games — but, they write good code! So much so, that in order to fix the disc-check issue with Rainbox Six: Vegas 2, Ubisoft released a no-cd patch that contained code written by the piracy group named RELOADED. This was revealed by a user on the Ubisoft Forums. Read More »
As popular as wikis have become, they aren’t yet in use across all mediums. Case in point: music. However, a company called Sonoma Wire Works appears to have solved this problem. Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.
Technology empowers users. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship). A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music). GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress. However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.
RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based. It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators. It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible. RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music, I wonder what it will sound like.
The same problems that plagued 1.0 resources like phone books and encyclopedias still plague even the best of their 2.0 successors. These legacy issues mainly regard reliability as it pertains to accuracy. After a phone book is published and distributed, it is instantly out-of-date as phone numbers are disconnected and addresses changed.Unfortunately, this is an issue developers have yet to circumvent.
As documented in The New York Times’ article about Urbanspoons, a free Apple iPhone application that helps users “find restaurants by neighborhood, cuisine or price,” reality may be quite different from what Urbanspoons tells you. The writer’s Urbanspoons search led him to a restaurant that had been closed for six months, yet it still appeared highly recommended in the application. Inconvenient at worst, Urbanspoons’ inaccuracy is easily forgotten over a glass of wine at a restaurant that is actually still open for business.
On a more sinister level, outdated materials can be damaging to one’s (or one’s neighborhood, and by extension, their property value) reputation. Take, for example, rottenneighbor.com, “the first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after you move so you can make a smart real estate decision.” From the get-go, many users walk a fine line between honest, albeit negative, reviews and pure defamation. So what happens to reviews of neighbors after they move? The reviews stay with the location, so the new neighbor moving in will turn up in a search as a bad neighbor. And some of these reviews are quite unsavory, think “cat killer.” In a search of my neighborhood, I found a review of a man who was a resident of an apartment in 1999. While it is highly unlikely either party still lives in the building, the building will turn up, nine years later, as the home of a “freaky porn addict and nudist.”
Users of online directory resources should beware of outdated reviews and content. It’s common sense, but that shiny new iPhone may cloud better judgment. In the meantime, I will continue posting reviews of all of my least favorite neighbors and take reviews of others with a grain of salt. You never know, they may or may not still be there.
A little while ago I wrote a two-part series called “Looking into the blogosphere through a sporting lens” (part 2 is here). The purpose of the series was to look at some questions underlying a Costas Now program, which itself was supposed to be an insightful look at the role of the blogosphere in relation sports reporting. While the video itself devolved into something far less thoughtful then it could have been, the questions it raised about the role and value of comments in the blogosphere continue to be quite interesting to me.
What leads me to bring this up again is blatant self-promotion are two very interesting posts, with wildly divergent perspectives on the comments issue. The first is from social media expert Chris Brogan, entitled “Musicians play for tips - The importance of comments“. In the post Chris reminds readers that comments are important, presents his rough calculations on the percentage of readers who comment (roughly 1/4 of 1%), and admits that his own personal commenting habits are roughly in the same ballpark.
I’m going to come right out and say it: people can get a little obsessive sometimes. And premium cable movie network Showtime has wisely decided to harness the power of their shows’ loyal fans by allowing users to create the content of their shows’ sites.
Showtime launched the first “Fan Wikis” about a year ago, and has since added pages for each of its shows. Since that time, pages have grown from basic content such as user-created cast bios and episode guides to complete guides of, well, everything related to the show.
Tudors’ fans maintain wikis from everything from costume design to a complete list of Tudor executions. Weed’s fans meticulously study characters’ wardrobes and post where to buy the exact article of clothing online. And it’s not a rogue few participating, either. The L Word wiki boasts more than 7,000 members.
Participation is simple. All a fan must do is register with Wetpaint and then check out what tasks are listed on the wiki To-Do list.
I haven’t decided what I think is more genius: Showtime outsourcing website content development to volunteers, or enabling fans to create fan sites on the actual Showtime site, keeping precious traffic right where they want it.
Showtime’s Fan Wikis are powered by Wetpaint, which describes itself as a place where “you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks off.” The company announced May 19 it had raised $25 million to “accelerate the company’s growth.” According to TechCrunch, Wetpaint has now raised more than $40 million in all. On Wednesday, Wetpaint announced that more than 1million free social Wetpaint pages had been created since July 2006.
I’d like to see how Ben Letalik would grade Showtime in his weekly Wikinomics report card. Fan wikis combined with The Tudor’s multi-platform campaign launch of Season 2 (Showtime aired the entire season premiere for free on more than 60 sites, including Netflix and MSN) are very good examples of openness and sharing.
I started watching The Tudors (and subscribed to Showtime) after watching the Season 2 premiere on Netflix for free. I fell for Showtime’s 2.0 marketing plan hook, line, and sinker. Will Showtime’s innovative strategies and social networking features help it get an edge on long-time enemy (and market leader) HBO?
What interests me most about the Internet is that it is a reflection of the physical world, and the same people, information, and problems inhabit both worlds. In the physical world it’s easy to experience information overload but because we approach this world in a linear, case-by-case fashion (time structure), it can serve to temper how much information we are exposed to all at once. In the virtual world, everything is non-linear (no time structure), which means that you can get access to anything you want at any time, but because of this, it’s much harder to manage information because there’s so much of it coming at you. Enter Dipity – this free, and easy to use application proposes that time can work for you on the Internet, and I’m inclined to agree. Dipity timeline tools allow you to manage online media by ordering related content chronologically. By using Dipity you can create a slick timeline interface that allows you to keep track of videos, pictures, blog posts, and RSS feeds, and I suspect that these applications are just the beginning. We’ve created a timeline for the Wikinomics blog, and it’s easy to see how having visual feedback helps in the way we view and access information.
Derek Dukes, CEO and co-founder of Dipity was kind of enough to sit down with us to talk about this quickly growing company, and what follows are excerpts from that discussion.
Last week in my post about the evolution of entertainment I used a quote from Will Wright, the co-founder of Maxis, who said “…I think the most important thing that computers do for us…is that they extend our imagination.” And Mr. Wright and his team of programmers have indeed created a computer generated world that extends our imagination, while also being a world that grows and thrives by virtue of how imaginative its users are. This is the world of Spore, a game that is being developed for PC, Nintendo DS, iPhone, and with plans underway for the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. Read More »
How Does America’s PASTime Fare in the World of Wikinomics?
Hello Wikinomics blog readers! I’m a new summer student with the Wikinomics team. I have decided to do things a little differently and profile a different business each week and grade them through the Wikinomics Report Card™. I will try to focus mainly on older businesses and organizations and analyze how they are utilizing the wikinomics principles such as being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
Background: Major League Baseball (MLB) was originally founded in 1876 and the current structure of the American League and National League has existed since 1903. Baseball is a game ingrained in American culture, and is frequently referred to as America’s pastime. Although attendance has grown steadily since the league’s inception (ignoring strikes and lockouts), the game is slowly fading away from the public consciousness.
“You can take any core human technology and kind of understand it as an extension of the human body. So in some sense, cars are an extension of our legs, television extends our eyesight, telephones extend our voice, and a house and clothing extend our skin and our body. Computers really do a lot of these things, but really, I think the most important thing that computers do for us…is that they extend our imagination.”
- Will Wright, co-founder of Maxis
I like this quote because it really captures the essence of technology, in relation to how we, as people, interact with it – we are using technology to extend our senses. Humans have always developed tools to enhance their physical and mental abilities, but as technology progresses, we are experiencing an increasingly sophisticated level of sensory feedback that changes the way we entertain ourselves. Read More »
Unlike his official campaign colors, which are predominantly a rich blue, the sign behind McCain was green. That may have been an unfortunate choice. Unwittingly no doubt, the green background provided a crude “green screen,” the background used in television to project video behind the reporter. In McCain’s case, the green background allowed Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert to issue one of his famous “Green Screen Challenges.”
“By speaking in front of a green screen, John McCain issues a bold challenge to Americans to make him seem interesting,” the political satirist said. Read More »
Nicholas Carr has written an unreadably long article (just kidding, it’s worth the read) about the effect that the Internet is having on our ability to concentrate. His argument is that for the Internet to be useful, it needs to appropriate new content, and integrate this content its existing body of knowledge. This newly assimilated content is then changed by the Internet to be displayed as all media online is displayed: surrounded by ads, on top of layers of other content, and endlessly interlinked with other content. The process of gathering and processing information has become an exercise in distraction.
Public domain audiobooks from LibriVox.org, what a great idea! From their site:
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and publish the audio files on the Internet. Our goal is to record all the books inthe public domain.
Last year I took a cross-country road trip with my 10-year-old daughter, and we were greatly entertained by the free public domain audio books available from LibriVox, an online forum which connects readers (as in those who voice the text) to books, then makes the resulting audio files freely available to all. The library is strictly public domain material, but is very extensive. Most of the books we listened to were read by just one person (”going solo”), but readers can volunteer for individual chapters of books in progress. We listened to The Prince and the Pauper, The Mysterious Island, The Wind in the Willows, Five Children and It, and several selected poems and short stories. (Kudos to Timothy Smith for The Mysterious Island — a tour de force!). Online coordinators organize the readings, which are generally excellent. Some readers provide wonderful voices for each character; some simply read the text. The books are available for download from the website, or can be downloaded via iTunes, which we did and then listened to from the iPod in the car
PC Pro (via Slashdot) is reporting that the Encyclopedia Britannica is experimenting with a wiki approach to content. Britannica is doing it on their own terms, however:
Indeed, under the new Britannica scheme those who wish to contribute will need to create a profile outlining their qualifications and expertise in the area they are commentating on. They will then be able to add comments to encyclopaedia entries, or write their own. This content will then be reviewed by the expert editors of the site, and if any of it is deemed worthy of inclusion, added to the main article with a credit.
I’ve certainly got an intuition as to which articles will be ‘commented on’ first. While this seems like a sensible move for Britannica, it will be very easy to paint them as hypocrites given how critical they have been of Wikipedia in the past. People want to be engaged, so I think that Britannica’s real challenge will be fine tuning the process: submitting a comment or revision, only to have it disappear into a bureaucratic black hole is not a good way to encourage participation and engagement. At the same time, editorial standards are important to keep uselesscontenttoaminimum. Read More »
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
