“[In favor of search neutrality] AS we become increasingly dependent on the Internet, we need to be increasingly concerned about how it is regulated. The Federal Communications Commission has proposed “network neutrality” rules, which would prohibit Internet service providers from discriminating against or charging premiums for certain services or applications on the Web. The commission is correct that ensuring equal access to the infrastructure of the Internet is vital, but it errs in directing its regulations only at service providers like AT&T and Comcast. Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance. The need for search neutrality is particularly pressing because so much market power lies in the hands of one company: Google. With 71 percent of the United States search market (and 90 percent in Britain), Google’s dominance of both search and search advertising gives it overwhelming control. Google’s revenues exceeded $21 billion last year, but this pales next to the hundreds of billions of dollars of other companies’ revenues that Google controls indirectly through its search results and sponsored links.”
—Op-Ed Contributor - Search, but You May Not Find - NYTimes.com
December 2009
20 posts
“On Christmas, [Amazon] sold more Kindle books than physical books. Yes, this is obviously the result of everyone who got a Kindle for Christmas (lots of folks) firing it up and ordering a bunch of eBooks on a day in which most physical-book readers weren’t shopping. But it’s still important and impressive. The Kindle’s economics are still lousy for Amazon: The company loses money on new releases and makes only a modest amount on older titles, thus losing an estimated $1 per Kindle book. That said, Amazon’s strategy is clearly to drive “ubiquity,” and based on stats like those above, it is succeeding. The more Kindle books Amazon sells, the more leverage it will have over publishers when it tries to force them to cut wholesale prices. If Amazon’s Kindle momentum continues, the day publishers have to capitulate will come sooner rather than later.”
—Kindle Milestone: Amazon Sold More Kindle Books Than Physical Books On Xmas - Amazon - Gizmodo
“When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.”
—Google Seeks to Help Children Search Better - NYTimes.com
“[Bloggers shaking fashion world] As a relatively new phenomenon in the crowded arena of journalists whose specialty it is to report the news of the catwalks, fashion bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long-held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated. After all, what is one to think — besides publicity stunt — when Bryan Boy, a pseudonymous, style-obsessed blogger from the Philippines, is seated at the D & G show in Milan between the august front-row fixtures of Vogue and Vanity Fair, a mere two positions to the right of Anna Wintour? “There has been a complete change this year,” said Kelly Cutrone, who has been organizing fashion shows since 1987. “Do I think, as a publicist, that I now have to have my eye on some kid who’s writing a blog in Oklahoma as much as I do on an editor from Vogue? Absolutely. Because once they write something on the Internet, it’s never coming down. And it’s the first thing a designer is going to see.”
—The Year in Style - Fashion Bloggers Horn In on Elle and Vogue - NYTimes.com
“[Kindles cusromers are increasingly pissed] A quick perusal of the comments shows customers repeatedly griping about poor screen quality, unattractive device design and the constraints of digital rights management software on books and newspapers. Mr. Bezos may be right when he says an e-reader is better than a book, but the customer satisfaction suggests why so many companies are rushing in to compete with his Kindle.”
—Is Amazon Working Backward? - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
“Apple’s forthcoming tablet could employ a dynamic surface that gives users tactile feedback when typing in order to identify individual keys, according to a new patent application revealed this week.”
—AppleInsider | Possible Apple tablet multi-touch tactile keyboard detailed
“[iPhone tehrefore iArt] Like many of us, Mike Nourse is both irritated and entranced by iPhones — their ubiquity, their utility, their unique power to extinguish conversation. Unlike most of us, Mr. Nourse, a co-founder of the Chicago Art Department, is in a position to do something useful with his internal conflict. And so he has, introducing a five-week class called “iPhone Art” at his nonprofit arts education organization.”
—A Class Reaches Out and Touches High-Tech Art - NYTimes.com
“[Google’s Goggles]When you snap a picture with Goggles, Google spends a few seconds analyzing the image, then sends it up to its vast “cloud” of computers and tries to match it against an index of more than a billion images. Google’s data centers distribute the image-matching problem among hundreds or even thousands of computers to return an answer quickly.
[…]
Goggles had trouble recognizing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for example, when the image was shot with several trees in the way of its suspension span. But it did recognize it when the picture was snapped with fewer obstacles in the way. Faced with a picture of a Yahoo billboard shot in San Francisco, the search results showed Times Square, presumably because of the huge Yahoo billboard there.
[…]
It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings. It is also easy to think of scarier possibilities down the line. Google’s goal to recognize every image, of course, includes identifying people. Computer scientists say that it is much harder to identify faces than objects, but with the technology and computing power improving rapidly, improved facial recognition may not be far off.” —Ping - Google Goggles, Searching by Image Alone - NYTimes.com
[…]
Goggles had trouble recognizing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for example, when the image was shot with several trees in the way of its suspension span. But it did recognize it when the picture was snapped with fewer obstacles in the way. Faced with a picture of a Yahoo billboard shot in San Francisco, the search results showed Times Square, presumably because of the huge Yahoo billboard there.
[…]
It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings. It is also easy to think of scarier possibilities down the line. Google’s goal to recognize every image, of course, includes identifying people. Computer scientists say that it is much harder to identify faces than objects, but with the technology and computing power improving rapidly, improved facial recognition may not be far off.” —Ping - Google Goggles, Searching by Image Alone - NYTimes.com
“[News by topics at Google Labs] At the top of the page for a given subject is a summary, a timeline of major events and some pictures, followed by the opening sections of a series of articles, in reverse chronological order. A set of buttons allows the reader to narrow the topic by several criteria, including looking only at images. One of the more appealing features is that a reader can call up the entirety of an article without navigating away from that subject page, reading one piece after another without using the “forward” and “back” buttons. In various ways, the experiment duplicates, expands or improves on what can now be done on publishers’ own sites, through a search engine’s news function, or even on Wikipedia. Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, said that if it worked well, Google would make the software available free to publishers to embed in their sites, much as those publishers can now use Google Maps and YouTube functions on their sites.”
—Google Unveils a News-by-Topic Service That Newspapers Can Adopt - NYTimes.com
“[Google goes realtime] As part of its much-anticipated entrance into the field known as real-time search, Google said that over the next few days its users would begin seeing brand-new tweets, blog items, news articles and social networking updates in results for certain topical searches. Previously it took a few minutes for updates from social networks and blogs to filter into Google’s results. “Clearly in today’s world, that’s not fast enough,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, said at a press conference at the Computer History Museum here. “Information is being posted at a pace we’ve never seen before, and in this environment, seconds matter.” A search for “Copenhagen” on Google, for instance, where global climate talks are under way, produces the standard Web results, but with a box in the middle of the page where blog items, press releases, news articles and tweets scroll past.”
—Google Is Adding Live Updates to Searches - NYTimes.com
“[Barcoding places] If you walk past the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles, or Cheeseburger Baby in Miami, the chances are that you will see a sticker in the window that has a Google Maps logo and a one-inch-square with a series of pixelated black-and-white cubes called a QR Code. In the coming weeks, Google plans to send out 100,000 of these stickers, each with their own QR code, to a new demographic of businesses Google is calling “Favorite Places”. These favorites are based on search results from users interacting with local business listings on Google Maps.”
—Putting a Bar Code on Places, Not Just Products - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
“[GPS to help migrants cross te border] A UC San Diego professor said he has developed a cell phone tool that may help guide illegal immigrants safely across the border. Similar to the way hungry drivers can find a restaurant through the global positioning system devices in their cars and cell phones, illegal immigrants soon may be able to plot their ways across the treacherous border between the United States and Mexico. “It shares some aspects of the GPS systems that people have in cars,” said Ricardo Dominguez, a professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. “It locates where you are in relation to where you want to go, what is the best way to get to that point and what you can expect when you reach the endpoint.” Dominguez, an activist and artist, said the reason for developing the technology, which he calls the Transborder Immigrant Tool, is to keep people safe.”
—Futurismic - near-future science fiction and fact since 2001
“The eBook “Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown has sold more copies than the actual book in Amazon.”
—eBook sells more copies than book | Mobility Site
“e-reader buyers may be sinking cash into a technology that could become obsolete. While the shiny glass-and-metal reading gadgets offer some whiz-bang features like wirelessly downloading thousands of books, many also restrict the book-reading experience in ways that trusty paperbacks haven’t, such as limiting lending to a friend. E-reader technology is changing fast, and manufacturers are aiming to address the devices’ drawbacks.”
—Some E-Readers May Become Obsolete or Lack Compatibility - WSJ.com
