The Daily Thing

Google unveiled it’s Knol service yesterday - a Wikipedia-eque service that allows users to write topics and post photos on a specific topic for money.

WSJ.com: “By trying to provide such content, the service is likely to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia, whose articles tend to rank highly in Google search results.

In an interview, Cedric Dupont, a product manager for Knol, described the service as a way to improve Google’s search results by making the ‘information in people’s heads’ searchable. While Knol entries won’t be given any preferential treatment in Google’s search algorithm, Knol entries that are highly ranked by users could surface higher in search results if they are established to have quality content, he said.

Google’s service differs from the user-generated Wikipedia online encyclopedia in a number of ways. In particular, rather than stick to one article on a topic, Knol will allow many articles — making it as much a collection of individual blogs as an online encyclopedia.

Users also attach their names to Knol entries. Others can comment on, but not edit, their work. (Wikipedia allows some users to edit others’ entries.) Users can also elect to run ads sold by Google on their entries and can share in the revenue from them.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said it ‘is a bit early to tell’ whether Knol will generate the sort of content that would make it a Wikipedia competitor. He said it seems ‘far more like a collaborative blogging platform’ that he expects will generate ‘a lot of opinion pieces rather than encyclopedic content.’

Google’s service is just one of a number that try to make it easier for users to self-publish articles and establish their authority online. But many such services have struggled to gain scale and to give users incentive to post content.”

If you’re interested in publishing your own Knol check out the Google Know page at http://knol.google.com/

Tags: From the Blogosphere, From the Web, In the News, Making Money by admin
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Joey the Accordion Guy has a write up on a bill going through the Canadian legislature right now that would essentially make it illegal for anyone to copy videos or music to their ipod or as a backup copy. It would also mean everyone with a PVR would have to use the crappy “broadcast flags” and wouldn’t be allowed to tape shows if the station had a show flagged. This sucks because this is a law that we told them to “go screw yourself” when they tried it here now our government is ramming it down someone elses throat. Have a look at Joey’s breakdown and make up your own mind. If you’re Canadian (and I know there are some who read this blog) talk to your MP and tell them “no way Jose. Not in America. Not here.”

Joey Devilla: “The new Canadian copyright bill, Bill C-61, was not written for you and me. Canadians with a stake in this law, ranging from customers (I try not to use the term ‘consumer’) to libraries and educators to artists, record companies and other entertainment industry groups — were not consulted. Bill C-61 was written to the specifications of U.S. officials and American entertainment industry lobby groups, who pressured the U.S. government of approving the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that has been used by the music and movie industry as an excuse to harass customers and turn litigation into a profit center.

One of the provisions of Bill C-61 is that you are allowed to make a backup copy of a legally-purchased CD or DVD or transfer it to your MP3 player or computer for personal use — if and only if there isn’t a digital ‘lock’ that prevents such backups. If a song or movie has some kind of copy protection scheme, that allowance is gone.

The practical upshot of this is that the watching your DVD of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is perfectly legal if you pop it into your DVD player, but illegal if you copy it over to your iPod for viewing on your next business trip. The movie studio would rather you bought another copy, which would only be authorized for play on your iPod. And that mix CD you were planning to make for the car for your roadtrip to the cottage? You’ll be breaking the law for each song that you transfer from copy-protected sources. Want a backup copy of your hi-def The Seven Samurai DVD because you love the film so much and want to keep the original in a safe place? The industry has a simple solution: buy another! Making a backup copy’s illegal, after all.

…Another provision of Bill C-61 allows you to record television shows on your PVR. That is, if the broadcaster doesn’t disallow recording, which it can do by embedded a ‘broadcast flag’ within the signal — a digital signal that tells your PVR that it’s not allowed to record the show, because that will cut into sales of the DVD box set of the show that they’ll eventually release. In other words, in many cases, your PVR will actually be less capable of recording shows than its clunkier, lower-fidelity predecessor, the VCR.

Here’s another way the VCR has an edge over the modern PVR: with a VCR, you can keep a permanent library of your favourite shows, which will last as long as your tapes do. No such luck with a PVR under Bill C-61: PVRs built in compliance with the bill are not allowed to keep a permanent library of your shows. They will be built with a limited amount of storage and with no backup capability, and just to be safe, all shows recorded on a PVR will be deleted if they are kept for longer than a pre-specified amount of time.

Tags: From the Blogosphere by admin
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Warning: Watching this video while drinking any kind of beverage (I was drinking coffee) may cause you to do a spit take and choke. Drink responsibly laugh like the person in the next cubicle is getting fired and you’re the only one who knows it.

Got this one from The Accordian Guy

Here’s Bo Burnham singing his nerd-folk/filk song, New Math:

In case you were wondering what the lyrics were, here they are:

What’s a pirate minus the ship? Just a creative homeless guy
And an anteater plus a large hungry mutant ant? An ironic way to die
And what’s domain, domain, range (x, x, y) — a kid with too much in his pants
and two balls minus one, six titles at the tour de france.

Split a decision with long division,
Take the circumference of your circumcision
Live like your data and when you’re all ‘set’
Put it all together and whatever you get…

Is new math

What’s a bag of chips divided by five? That’s a Nike worker’s meal
And Santa Claus mutliplied by i? Well, I guess that makes him real
And the square root of the NBA is Africa in a box
How do you trace a scatter plot? Give the pencil to Michael J. Fox

Take the approximate moral proportion of the probable problem of a pro-life abortion
Live like your data, and when you’re all ‘set’
Put it all together and whatever you get…

Is new math

And if you made a factor tree of the factors that caused my girl to leave me you’d have a tree
…full of Asian porn.
C-A-L-C-U-LATOR (see you later) mathematical minds make industrial smog
and whats the opposite of ln(x): Duraflame, the unnatural log

Support the farmers with a pro-tractor
Link Kennedy and Lincoln with a common factor (fact, or)
Live like your data…blah blah

Word problems

If there’s a fat guy in a pastry shop with a twenty dollar bill and he’s ready to buy
In order to predict his volume change you need to know the value of pi (pie)
And theres a metal train that’s a mile long and at the very back end a lightning bolt struck her
How long ’til it reaches and kills the driver, provided that he’s a good conductor
And if ten percent of men are gay and twenty percent of men are Chinese
What are the odds that a man chosen at random spends his free time and mealtime while on his knees
And if Kim is half as old as Bobby who is two years older than twelve year old Tori
For how many more 30 day months will their threesomes be considered statutory rape

Cause havin’ sex is like quadratic expansion: if it can’t be split then it’s time to stop
and havin’ sex is like doing fractions, it’s improper for the larger one to be on top
And havin’ sex is like math homework, I do it best when I’m alone in my bed
And squarin numbers’ are just like women, if they’re under thirteen just do them in your head

And new math”

Tags: From the Blogosphere by admin
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Have you had a chance to check out Daylife yet? I’ve been using it for little over a day now and already I’m impressed.

Daylife: “We gather stories of all shapes and sizes from countless perspectives around the world, and then present them in a rich browseable landscape, helping you make connections you never knew existed. Our goal is is to aid your journey through the events that shape your world.”

Tags: From the Blogosphere, In the News by admin
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What’s wrong with copyrighting your work? Nothing. Copyright offers incentive to be creative. Unfortunately there’s an ongoing battle to extend the amount of time a work can be copyrighted for that has led to parties involved into pulling some sneaky tricks. The very astute Larry Lessig noticed that not EVERYTHING was legit with some of the signatures on the petition.

Larry Lessig’s Blog: “If you read the list, you’ll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead”

By the way, if you don’t know who Larry Lessig is you should read his bio. Here’s a short snippet for those that won’t follow the link.

Larry Lessig’s Bio: “Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.”

Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He is also a columnist for Wired.”

Tags: From the Blogosphere by admin
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Looks like some mob justice is about to break out.

Anil: I’d been following Judith’s story of her lost camera with great interest until the latest update shocked me:

“Well,” she said, “we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he’s been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can’t bear to take it from him.”

Judith’s not the mob justice type of person, but if ever there were a good reason for a bunch of nosy curious bloggers to track someone down and make them do the right thing, this would be it for me.

I feel bad for a kid whose parents are that lost and misguided.

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing Blog says:

I agree with the commenter on this post: she should post this family’s name and hold them up for shame and ridicule. This is theft.

and commentor Erikerikerik says:

People who have no sense of right or wrong need to be shamed into submission. Seriously. They really do need thousands of letters telling them that they are doing the wrong thing by keeping something that belongs to someone else. This isn’t a gray area: this is something that really all people should believe in– “People should be entitled to the things that they paid for.”

Yup, gonna be a fun time tonight. Anyone got a rope?

Tags: From the Blogosphere by admin
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I have yet to try this but I found an interesting article Kottke was pointing to on Shiny Dorodangos. Shiny Dorodangos are evidently shiny balls of dried mud Japanese school children have fallen in love with making. Check out the article. [Go there now]

Should you want to make your own the article also included instrductions which I’ve mirrored here. Enjoy

 How to Make a Shiny Dorodango

1. Pack some mud into your hand, and squeeze out the water while forming a sphere.
2. Add some dry dirt to the outside and continue to gently shape the mud into a sphere.
3. When the mass dries, pack it solid with your hands, and rub the surface until a smooth film begins to appear.
4. Rub your hands against the ground, patting and rubbing the fine, powdery dirt onto the sphere. Continue this for two hours.
5. Seal the ball in a plastic bag for three or four hours. Upon removing the sphere, repeat step 4, and then once again seal the sphere in a plastic bag.
6. Remove the ball from the bag, and if it is no longer wet, polish it with a cloth until it shines.
   

Tags: From the Blogosphere by admin
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Guy Kawasaki is awesome and I really dig what he has to say. Take for instance one of his most recent posts, “How to get a standing ovation.”

Guy Kawasaki:

1. Have something interesting to say.
2. Cut the sales pitch.
3. Focus on entertaining. Understand the audience. 
4. Overdress.
5. Don’t denigrate the competition.
6. Tell stories.
7. Pre-circulate with the audience.
8. Speak at the start of an event.
9. Ask for a small room.
10. Practice and speak all the time.

Go to his blog to check out how he uses these 10 simple rules to get the greatest return from his audience. I’m sure glad he’s blogging. I really enjoy his blog.

[Go there now]

Tags: From the Blogosphere by admin
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Here’s a site that’ll keep you coming back again and again and again: Parent Hacks. I think the description of the site gives you the general idea.

“Parent hacks is…
…everything they left out of the instruction manual. oh yeah. there is no instruction manual.”

As a parent I can’t help but smile. Good stuff.

[Go there now]

Tags: From the Blogosphere by admin
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Christmas time is here and with it scores of people shopping online. But if you’re shopping for a new camera this holiday season it’s buyer-beware as this blogger found.

Thomas Hawk: “I will make sure you will never be able to place an order on the internet again.” “I’m an attorney, I will sue you.” “I will call the CEO of your company and play him the tape of this phone call.” “I’m going to call your local police and have two officers come over and arrest you.” “You’d better get this through your thick skull.” “You have no idea who you are dealing with.”

These are all direct threats that I received today from an individual who identified himself as Steve Phillips, the manager of PriceRitePhoto in Brooklyn, New York when I called to inquire about my order with them. My crime? Telling him that I planned to write an article about my unfortunate experience with his company regarding the camera order I had placed with him yesterday.

Be sure to read the rest of the article. It’s very interesting. The operator of the business in question has even taken it upon himself to call the bloggers boss.

[Go There Now]

Tags: From the Blogosphere, Photography by admin
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