Dialog Box

CNN has decided to sell custom, on-demand t-shirts featuring headlines from their website. No, I’m not making this up.

There seems to be very little rhyme or reason behind their choices of which headlines are permissible for t-shirts — not all of the daily gems can be plastered onto an oh-so-esoteric cotton tee.

And, of course, it has to be “Beta,” since that term has lost all meaning.

Sarcasm and condescension aside, Woot has a far more entertaining way to look at this marketing misstep:

PS: I guess I shouldn’t expect too much from a website that still posts such sensitive, journalistic links as:

Ah, yes. I suppose sensationalism’s best friend is voyeurism.

Matt Pestinger, 18, started his group, “Your relationship doesn’t count unless it’s posted on Facebook,” as a commentary on today’s world, he said in an e-mail. …

“Our generation is much more open with these types of things being on the Internet, Facebook and MySpace,” [Ashley] Shinn said. “We don’t have any secrets or anything. We don’t hide anything. We show everything to each other. Since we don’t have any shame in anything, we don’t hide it.” …

“I’m not sure what they did before Facebook,” [Taikein Cooper] said.

Read. Discuss.

Have you ever wondered what wild animals do all day? Now, through the magic of modern technology, you can follow the life of a deer in Eastern Pennsylvania.

The deer has been fitted with a special collar with GPS device and and cell phone (to transmit SMS messages with the current GPS location). A clever system captures the data from the collar every few minutes, and saves it to a spreadsheet. The data is then automatically made available on the web in Google Maps/Google Earth format.

It’s fascinating to take a look:

(Via Google Earth Blog.)

If you haven’t yet seen it, it is well worth your while to take a look at Buzzword, Adobe’s newly-aquired, still-in-beta, Flash-based online word processor.

It’s a very slick, desktop-feeling web app.

Accounts are free, and fun to try. Especially given its import and export to MS Word format, it might be a nice solution to group editing.

A fun idea, well executed.

In case you feel nostalgic, or have never seen it, you might want to jump back half a year to coverage of the release of the ‘Street View’ function on Google Maps. I’ve got some comments and links in a post right here on Dialog Box, as a matter of fact.

(Thanks, Google Earth Blog)

There goes the neighborhood. The world-organizers at Google have introduced an impressive implementation of street-level mapping in Google Maps. They’re calling it Street View, and it allows users of Google Maps to get a virtual-reality view of selected city streets.

The photo-based VR experiences are similar to previously announced products from Microsoft and Amazon, but have a very fluid, natural, and (I must say) cute interface.

Clicking the ‘Street View’ button at the top of the map (in areas with this feature — including San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Denver, Miami, NYC, and Las Vegas among others) produces a little orange person-shaped figure, that falls onto the map (complete with a slight bounce!). From the orange person’s head emerges a familiar Google Maps balloon, filled with a draggable, 360° panoramic photo of that location.

Street information is superimposed, and arrows allow you to go for a virtual ‘walk’ down the street. Dragging the photo allows one to pan and tilt the view, and causes a green marker under the orange person’s feet on the map to rotate and point in the direction of your current view for reference. Double-clicking or operating the slider allows the viewer to zoom in and out in four steps.

My favorite interface touch comes when you click and drag the orange person icon to move “him” to a new location for a different view. Rather than just moving under your cursor, the little figure bends as if flying or being lifted by the hand of God with an ‘X-marks-the-spot’ cross on the ground below to indicate his intended drop point (when you let go of your mouse button).

There’s a surprising amount of detail in the photos, especially at full zoom. Though the quality of some of the VR constructions is a little lacking (sun flares abound, VR seams are often sloppy, and busses and other passersby often block views), the speed of the implementation makes the experience satisfyingly fluid.

Already, however, the level of zoom detail has unnerved the privacy-conscious. BoingBoing reports on many discoveries of interesting things in the Street Views, including a woman who reports that the detail around her apartment is good enough to look through her window and see her cat inside! (Take a look at the cat for yourself »)

Much discussion is taking place regarding Google’s use of images without making an effort to obscure faces and other details. Similar controversy surrounded Amazon’s now-gone¹ A9 block-level photos. Interestingly, Yahoo and Microsoft go on the record to say that they would never do something as privacy-invading as Google’s implementation.

Is it an invasion, though? Google argues that the imagery is all taken from public spots, and is no more invasive that walking down a street with a camera. Further, they are quick to point to a form available to request that an image be removed from the database.

Perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps Microsoft is right when it argues that the utility for such imagery is just not there (Erik Jorgensen tells CNET “The feedback we got was that people like visuals as cues integrated into driving directions” but not to explore a ‘virtual world’).

Time will tell. For now, though, I’ll leave you with one last bit of interesting info — the car and patented 11-lens camera that captures some of the content for Google’s Street View. (Link »)

Be sure to smile if you see it coming down your street.

Update 6/2: GrokDotCom has discovered that Street View features seemingly illegal photos of the inside of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in NYC… Link »

Update 6/2: I hate to update yet again, but this archive at Threat Level is worth a look — it’s a reader compilation of odd (and/or scandalous) images in the Street View database. This is like one big scavenger hunt… Link »

It may well be a watershed event for Web 2.0, or at least a significant test. Things have been bubbling for a few days, but today (5/1), it finally boiled over.

In case you haven’t heard — a few days ago the hex code needed to crack HD-DVD encryption was posted to the internet. It probably would have died out after a short, bright flare of blog attention, once the requisite number of geeks capable of actually using the code obtained it (and after the requisite number of geek wannabes posted chuckles about it on digg).

But, “the owners of this intellectual property” (cough, MPAA, cough, cough, AACS, cough) decided to descend with cease and desist orders in an amazing show of hubris. Aside from confirming that the code is legit and will indeed crack HD-DVDs (in and of itself, increasing attention), these desist orders immediately inspired indignant posts of the code on blogs and comments around the net yesterday. (I first saw it in Wil Wheaton’s cleverly oblique post Monday, but Boing Boing, and all of the notable blogs have posted — and some have removed it — it seems.)

And then Web 2.0 truly kicked in — inevitably, those posts were dugg, and soon, many Digg posts repeated the code. Not surprisingly, once “the owners of this intellectual property” saw the growing numbers of posts, Digg itself was sent a cease and desist order.

Here’s where things got interesting. Digg decided that their best course of action was to comply, and they removed the posts and suspended the accounts of the posters, in accordance with their Terms of Service.

Fire, meet fuel. Soon, it became clear that Digg would need to suspend a significant portion of their entire user base and block nearly all new diggs, as angry, DRM-hating diggers championed the cause of their fallen comrades in what has become known around the net as The Great Digg Revolt.

So, Digg, with a melodramatic post to end all posts, proclaimed that it was (finally) making a stand in favor of Web 2.0 values in the face of overbearing corporate interests (DRM), and that if that caused them to be shut down, at least they will have gone down swinging.

The same activities have transpired around the net at Web 2.0 sites (Wikipedia has gone on Protect mode for HD-DVD, etc. – Wired Story »).

Like a whack-a-mole game, “the owners of this intellectual property” order sites to take down the code as soon as they see it, and web denizens continue to repost it even more quickly. Google and other hosters/providers seem to be complying with requests to remove or issue take-down notices to users. So far, Digg seems to stand alone, testing the waters.

Will Digg die? No. It will be interesting to see if “the owners of this intellectual property” (I refuse to call them by their proper acronym) actually do sue, though. A court battle would inevitably outlast the urge to post and repost the code, but even if “the owners of this intellectual property” were to prevail, how code the code be removed from every nook and cranny that it now occupies? It can’t be stripped out of our memories and imaginations.

This is the first step. With any luck, The Great Digg Revolt and the wide posting of the code will draw enough attention to this subject that a national debate ensues.

DRM is, and always has been, a ridiculous construct. The idea of protecting authors’ rights is important. Doing it with a code that restricts audience members from using the works they have rightfully purchased from “the authors” is silly, though — it is often fraught with compatibility problems, makes implementation more difficult, makes customers mad because of unnecessary restrictions, and, in the end, can never remain secure for very long. As Steve Jobs pointed out in his “Thoughts on Music,” a great deal of time and resources must be devoted to protecting and changing that code.

What is the solution? I don’t pretend to know at this stage. There must be a way for authors and artists to receive fair compensation for their work and protection from exploitation without so severely restricting the rights of end users. For now, I plan to sit back and watch the fallout from the coming clash between average users and the omnipotent-seeming forces of “the owners of this intellectual property.” It’s sure to get more interesting from here.

(Thanks, Wil, Chris, Joel, and Sion; photo parts by Steve Woods)

Imagine if your digital photos could be arranged in a collage and merged into a panoramic shot of a place. Cool, right?

Now, imagine if your pictures could be arranged in a collage and merged into a 3D representation of the pictured place, that you could take a virtual stroll through. Amazing, right?

Now, imagine the possibilities if all of your pictures, and all of my pictures, and all of everyone’s pictures could merge into a constantly improving and evolving 3D virtual Earth. (Who needs a satellite map?)

Well, it’s not quite that far along yet, but a crew of coders in Microsoft’s Live Labs are developing an amazing project called Photosynth that could one day do all of that, and more. The technology, developed in collaboration with the University of Washington and now rolling in visualization from Seadragon (a company acquired by Microsoft), can already do most of the above.

Photosynth works by analyzing each photo in a collection fed to it, determining features of interest in the photo and drawing a map of these points. The points act as a signature for the objects in the photo, and when compared with the feature points of the same objects in other pictures, allows the computer to map the photos in a three-dimensional space, in a similar way to how two images provided by our two eyes allow us to perceive depth.

As the team points out, the analysis of the photos also has the added benefit of establishing a ‘fingerprint’ for the photo that computer systems could use to identify the subject of the photo. This could lead to some really usesful applications, like the ability to photograph a landmark with your cell phone and have Photosynth technology match it and provide identification or other desired information about the landmark from the web.

Imagine a massive web-based Photosynth virtual world, where submitted photos are put together in a walkthrough globe. Google Earth is already taking steps in this direction, with 3D models that approximate buildings, and community-built markers, overlays, animations, and 3D models. Technology like Photosynth have the potential to take the idea to a whole new level of realism and utility.

(I’m a little late to the party, but a hat tip to Scobleizer for pointing this out!)

A ‘proposal’ from veteran web designers Hop Studios asks “What if news sites were built for sharing instead of for telling?” and then answers the question with tickr — a proposed mashup between flickr‘s celebrated Web 2.0 community interface and traditional news outlet content.

While they allude to sites like Wikipedia, they focus on flickr‘s model, because they feel it is highly influential and has innate loyalty-building properties. To me, though, it looks like there’s a heavy wiki influence here.

The observations about the most useful (and popular) UI elements of flickr are interesting to consider, though. Sites like Wikipedia could certainly be improved by some of their logical suggestions, and it would indeed be interesting to see a working news wiki community site like the proposed tickr.

(Thanks, Magnetbox — a blog with one of the most creative looks I’ve seen!)