Microsoft (who are working hard to challenge Google in the search marketplace) have just released a beta ‘demographic predictor’.
Enter a URL or search term and it will return the demographics of the users who serach or visit this URL.
The ‘official’ purpose of this is to allow advertisers to better target their advertising.
(courtesy of our friend The Lucid Librarian over the Tasman in NZ)
This is simply amazing. A totally new way to manage your files and utilise your desktop space.
Watch the video here:
Direct from Mike Madison’s blog
Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works, have teamed up to release a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft® Office applications. The copyright licensing tool will be available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online, http://office.microsoft.com, and CreativeCommons.org. The tool will enable the 400 million users of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel® and Microsoft Office PowerPoint® to select one of several Creative Commons licenses from within the specific application.
CC goes mainstream?
Discuss.
[update – CNet story is here.]
Ahhhh . . . . . collective ‘intelligence’.
YouTube provides the ideal place to put music videos. And Pitchfork has done a nice job of linking to what they consider are the ‘best 100’. They’ve excluded videos that were on the Directors Label series, so its the ‘best 100’ videos ever minus the top 20 best ever really.
Still, this is a nice example of community memory versus hardline IP protection (which would mean all these videos would be removed from YouTube – even though music videos are often considered by artist and label alike as advertising).
Angelina Russo put me on to this interesting short think piece from The Art Newspaper Oct 2005.
Whatever solutions are preferred, the landscape looks like this: museums will ultimately embrace file-sharing, and overcome their fear of loss of authority. Curatorial scholarship will likely find its way near the top of the information pyramid, but is best served up in a more accessible format if it has the public at large in mind. Furthermore, the way forward will likely be with a combination of free content and licensable, high-resolution multimedia content, most economically built by consortia instead of by one museum at a time. The content will have to be updated, open to folksonomy protocols that encourage end users to contribute to databases, and that emphasize live features (real-time tours of shows and behind-the-scenes experiences) that people will pay a modest amount for. Museums will begin focusing on those things that younger audiences will be prepared to download for a micro-payment or subscription, alongside ample free offerings.
Have you tried the folksonomy tools on our recently release OPAC 2.0?
O’Reilly on the recent open source release of Racoon – a web server for the Nokia phones that run the S60 series o/s.
The potential applications are quite exciting – even the factory-included remote camera operation is pretty nifty.
Now I’m just waiting for my new phone to be ordered so we can start testing this out . . .
We’ve hooked our collection search to A9’s Opensearch.
So now you can ‘subscribe’ to a search result via RSS.
Here is an example search for ‘3830’.
This is one for all you unix nerds. If you love your soccer/football and ASCII graphics, you’re going to love this.
Just type this into your favourite shell terminal 10 mins before a World Cup match and voila! watch the entire game LIVE in glorious ASCII:
“telnet diego.ascii-wm.net 2006”
Two excellent articles on South Korea following on from other pieces around the traps.
O’Reilly’s piece summarises a range of positions and posts on the way South Korea is a ‘working laboratory’ for broadband services, and how usage patterns, trends and services of the future can be seen in a fully fledged working environment.
Fred Stuzman (found in the comments of O’Reilly piece) looks at 5 new social networking services that he feels are strong contenders for the next-gen of social networking. Of particular interest are his examination of new social networking services which he argues are becoming content-centric (rather than just for the sake of it), and opening opportunities for micro-payment models (transferred over from the world of MMORPGs and online gaming).
I came across this amazing site that lets you buy and sell “all things handmade”. But before you say “big deal, it’s just another online store”, take a closer look. There are a few clever search tools that allow you to find what you are looking for in a totally unique way. You can find an item by picking a colour, clicking on a location on the world map or fly through time to find items added in the past.
* make sure you check the colour search tool.
