Media Technology

It took them longer than I expected, but it looks like Google has finally come out with a Related Links feature that people can add automatically-updated links to related searches, news or web pages on to their sites. Think Google Adwords only with search results instead of pay-for-placement advertisements. The text-box is simple to add to any webpage (it took me all of 30 seconds) and gets updated to whatever info is current when the page is viewed — essentially adding dynamic related content even if your page remains static.

I’m pleased to see this concept finally becoming mainstream, especially since the Margin Notes system I developed back in 1999 was a pioneer in the area. One issue that was tricky to figure out is what scope to use as the automatic search term. You can see the problem if you’re viewing this post in an aggregator like LiveJournal or even on my own main page — the search results are probably related at least in part to other posts on the page and not just this one. It’s a hard problem in the general case, but they should be able to get it to work most of the time. (I’ve not yet looked at their code to see what they’re actually doing — more after I check it out.) [Update 12:45pm: actually, LiveJournal strips out all Javascript so it won’t show up anyway… click here to see the actual post if you’re in LJ and have no clue what I’m talking about.]

One thing I didn’t have to worry about with Margin Notes was how to keep the system from being gamed by spammers and Google-juice stealers, though I did have to worry about relevance to individual readers. Something I’d like to see is a similar system that uses my own RSS subscriptions as the core source of info, plus perhaps one level of linkage out (e.g. take my blog-roll & RSS subscriptions plus the blog-roll and RSS subscriptions associated with each of those sites). That would give me some amount of personalization as well as make it harder to game the system.

(via Google Blogoscoped)

Update 12:30pm: I took a quick peek at the JavaScript, and as you probably could guess all it does is send a specially formatted request to http://www.googlesyndication.com/relcontent/content?… that includes the page’s URL. Sure enough, one second after I loaded the page in my browser I saw another retrieval from Google. Makes sense — you don’t want to have to deal with parsing the source document in the JavaScript itself — though it does mean the feature probably won’t work at all on pages that are behind a firewall. (That’s probably all for the best, as otherwise it’d be all too easy to slip up and start broadcasting supposedly-secure information out to Google.)

That said, I’m surprised at how lousy the results are. It looks like they’re relying on their cached copy when available, which for a blog post is, of course, almost guaranteed to not be related to the current post. As for the post-specific page, I’m getting lots of related links about blogs in general, which makes me suspect they’re doing a bad job of distinguishing actual page content from my page’s window dressing, Javascript and navigation bars. That really surprises me (if in fact it’s where the trouble lies) since that’s a problem they clearly know how to solve for their normal indexing.

Dang, I’m late to the party as usual. In case you haven’t seen it yet, as cures for information overload go this looks like it has potential…

(Thanks to Jim for the link.)

Long before flash mobs became the phonebooth-stuffing of the naughts, science fiction author Larry Niven speculated how the invention of teleportation would cause sudden flash crowds of gawkers to appear wherever a newsworthy event is taking place. Over at Searchblog, John Battelle suggests we’re bound to see something similar happen in couch-potato-land once channel surfers can automatically see what show or media event everyone else is watching…

Image credit: Jeff Han

Jeff Han at NYU has a very nice demo video of what you can do with a multitouch-sensitive screen (video is also cached at youtube). This is using Frustrated total Internal Reflection to sense both pressure and location of multiple simultaneous touches.

(Thanks to /amq for the link!)

In many ways I see the problems with Google’s centralization as just another facet of a tension that has existed since the Internet started: the tension between the decentralized “every end-user is his own service provider” model and the centralized fiefdom model where you sign up for one of a handful of service providers. I think it was the coming of the Web in the early ’90s that finally tipped the scale in favor of the decentralized model, and as a result we saw an explosion of URLs and email addresses that weren’t only from AOL, CompuServe or Prodigy. This, I think, was all for the better. But now the proliferation of GMail addresses and Google Base scare me precisely because they smack a little too much of the fiefdom model we so wisely avoided 15 years ago.

From CNN Money:

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) – Aiming to increase access to the Internet, particularly for people away from home, Google, Skype and other leading Internet investors Sunday announced a $21.5 million investment in an innovative new Internet access network called Fon.

The company, founded by Spanish entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, aims to build a network of WiFi hotspots far larger than those from companies like T-Mobile and Swisscom, none of which have more than 30,000 hotspots worldwide.

Fon aims to exceed that in its first year, and to have one million hotspots in four years. It hopes to achieve this by getting individuals and businesses to contribute their own hotspots to the network in exchange for getting access wherever they go. Those who contribute access get to use the access of others.

If Fon comes through with a simple-to-install and manage setup I can see this idea really gaining traction — it sounds like he’s got the right level of incentive to end-users who donate their bandwidth, and the technology for charging non-members for hotspots is already tried & tested. (Heck, if it works well I’d pay $25 just to get his “use only 50% of your bandwidth on outsiders” software; I keep thinking something like that must exist, but I’ve yet to find one.)

Long as he can jump-start the process and can convince ISPs to let him in on a racket they’d love to control themselves I’d say he’s got a good chance. (I see he’s already signed on Speakeasy in the US, though they also have one of the most liberal wireless sharing policies around so others may be a harder sell.)

Quick plug: Misprinted Type has several nice freeware fonts (plus a few commercial ones) available for download for Mac and PC.

I’m not sure yet what I’d do with it, but the Optimus mini-three keyboard looks very fun: it’s an auxiliary keyboard with three keys, each with its own little OLED screen displaying the current function (potentially animated). The most compelling examples are where not only is the button’s function displayed but also what effect it’ll have in the current context, like what image, song, or PowerPoint slide is coming up next when browsing through media.

USB 1.0, currently Windows only for the configuration software but others are coming. Pre-orderable for $100 until April 2nd, shipped to arrive on May 15th. This is coming out of the Art. Lebedev Studio in Russia — looks like they’ve also got a complete keyboard coming soon too.

(Thanks to Nerfduck for this link too!)

Via Reuters: UC Irvine professor Beatriz da Costa will be releasing 20 pigeons into the San Jose skies during this year’s International Symmposium on Electronic Art. Each pigeon will be equipped with a camera, GPS, air-polution monitor and cellphone, and images and location-based polution data will be automatically posted to a PigeonBlog. (No word on whether PigeonBlog will comply with RFC 1149.)

Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!

Almost exactly a year ago I made fun of the UK newspaper The Times for suggesting Google was gearing up enter the Voice Over IP space. Now it’s starting to look like they were right…