The latest for that James-Bond or Peeping-Tom wannabee:

• The Nokia Spyphone, which looks like a normal cellphone but will silently turn on and act as a wireless bug whenever called from a particular phone number. In another mode it can seem to be turned off but silently take calls and listen in (say, when you take a break during a business meeting).
• The Nokia Observation Camera, which will send pictures to any MMS-capable mobile phone or email address at a certain time, when triggered by a motion sensor or when the temperature goes out of a set range.
• The Nokia Remote Camera, which includes capabilities of the Observation Camera plus the ability to capture video clips with sound, ability to call and listen in on the microphone, remote control with compatible mobile phone and night-picture mode using its own infrared light source. (No word on whether the night-picture mode has the side-effect of giving you a see-through-clothing mode like with the Sony Nightshot…)

(Thanks to Thad Starner and Ellis Weinberger on the Wearables list for the links…)

(By way of SlashDot) The Wikipedia entry on Sollog is an interesting example of how a community can protect a shared collaborative space. Sollog is a self-proclaimed seer/prophet, who a little over a week ago was the subject of a new anonymously-written Wikipedia entry touting his books and otherwise proclaiming his powers. Since then the entry has been edited, vandalized & blanked back and forth 194 times (several of the vandalizations from the same IP address that wrote the original article), put to a vote on deletion by community members (who decided to keep the article, though in edited form) and finally protected from further edits to keep it from being vandalized.

The part that impresses me most is the amount of work and calm rational discussion that’s gotten done over at the discussion thread on the topic (and even pre-refactored version). I wish I had a metric for how much the success of an online community owes to the communication tools at its disposal (protection, easy version-handling, IP-blocking, etc.), a clear mission statement / rules of engagement and smart dedicated people, but I’m betting the breakdown is something like 20% / 30% / 50%…

Google just announced a new partnership with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library to digitally scan library books and make them searchable online. In one sense they’re playing catch-up with Amazon, who started putting text online some time ago and is in a stronger position to turn that into more book sales. I’m speculating a bit here, but I expect Amazon is also in a better position to negotiate for the right to make more copyrighted text available than Google, given the easier read-it-to-buy-it pipeline.

One thing that really strikes me about Google’s project is this bit:

Users searching with Google will see links in their search results page when there are books relevant to their query. Clicking on a title delivers a Google Print page where users can browse the full text of public domain works and brief excerpts and/or bibliographic data of copyrighted material. Library content will be displayed in keeping with copyright law. For more information and examples, please visit http://print.google.com/ [URL corrected — ‘Bug].

I’m a little biased since my PhD Thesis was about this kind of application, but I can easily see this sort of show me information related to what I’m doing now app being the next big thing interface advancement. (At least once it’s integrated with good search, the right data, and most importantly a company that doesn’t try to integrate it with an all-too-helpful cartoon character.)

It’s a small feature, but just one more thing from the “those guys at Google really get it” port: Google Suggest. Autocomplete of common search terms as you type into the Google bar, along with the number of terms listed.

PalmSource just announced that their next version of Palm OS will be built with Linux at its core. To this end, they’re purchasing China MobileSoft (CMS), which has a phone platform already built on top of their own Linux variant. As the Register puts it:

Like Apple with Mac OS X, PalmSource will keep all the top-layer code proprietary, but it will release any changes it makes to the underlying Linux code — for faster boot times and battery life preservation systems, for example — available to the open source community.