- Working Audio Data Demos — the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter)
- Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation — [T]he revenues and profits of the publishers who believe themselves to be most aggrieved by GBS, as measured by their willingness to file suit against Google for copyright infringement, increased at a faster rate after the project began, as compared to before its commencement. The rate of growth by publishers most affected by GBS is greater than the growth of the overall U.S. economy or of retail sales.
- In History-Rich Region, a Very New System Tracks Very Old Things (NY Times) — Getty built a web database to help Jordan track its antiquities sites (and threats to them) with Google Earth satellite images. (via auchmill on Twitter)
- What Women Want and How Not to Give it To Them — thought-provoking piece about the ways in which corporate diversity efforts fail. Must read.
"Google Book Search" entries
Getting Google to notice your ebook
3 book SEO tips and why metadata and book covers matter to Google.
Matthew Gray, lead software engineer of Google Books Search Quality, discusses general signals Google uses to rank and display books. Plus: Three best practices for getting Google's attention.
Four short links: 27 August 2010
Audio API, Book Search Helps Publishers (Gasp!), Tracking Antiquities, Guaranteeing Diversity Fail
Four short links: 8 July 2010
Book Law, Ubiquitous Touchscreens, Asymmetric Reputation Warfare, Data Liberty
- Copyright and Other Legal Issues Posed by the Google Book Search Settlement (Pam Samuelson) — slides from a talk that comprehensively runs through the questions posted by GBS settlement. Staying in GBSS means authors give up possible claim to 100% rights in e-books, which they might o/w have under Random House v. Rosetta. Lots of angles I hadn’t thought of before.
- Turn Your Kitchen Counter into a Touchscreen (Gizmodo) — researchers [at Intel Labs] have created a rig with two cameras, one to capture the image of the objects and the other to capture depth. The depth cameras help recognize the objects and the difference between the hand touching the table or hovering over it. A pico-projector helps beam the virtual menus. The cameras and the pico-projector can be combined into devices just a little bigger than your cellphone, says Harrison. Sprinkle a few of these in different rooms and point them on tables, and the system is ready to go. (via RDiva on Twitter)
- Hypocrites and Pharisees — Or consider Fast Company, which posted a picture out of context of me holding a bag of white powder. This bag of white powder was something called Piracetam. It is a perfectly legal nutritional supplement along the lines of Ginkgo Biloba- it improves memory. It was in a thread with me asking people what nutritional supplements they take. Out of context, it makes me look like a drug dealer. Such deliberate dishonesty has become a matter of course for “journalists” who have a personal dislike of me. It’s bloody hard to fight Big Media on credibility and win, because Big Media have years of “oh, it’s in print, it must be true” behind them. As is often said, you only need to see a newspaper story on a subject you know something about to question every other story too.
- Poyozo — Poyozo is an automatic, personal diary system to help reclaim and consolidate your ever-expanding digital life with simple visualizations that you can use every day. (via jonrb8 on Delicious)
Four short links: 8 September 2009
Mobile jQuery, API to Google Book Search, Open Learning, Popularity Algorithms
- jQTouch — jQuery library for mobile web app development. (via brian on Delicious)
- GData API to Google Book Search — search full text, get back metadata, modify “my library” collections, etc.
- Open and Free Courses at the CMU Open Learning Initiative — rather than just a lecture and handout dump, it has interactive exercises and questions to help you practice and figure out whether you’ve learned the subject. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You Can Be Proud Of — description and brief analysis for the popularity algorithms in Hacker News, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Linkibol. A basic collective intelligence technique that’s not obvious. (via Simon Willison)
Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales
BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times: Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said Google's program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. "We…
Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books
Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search: Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the…
Magazines Now in Google Book Search
Google is adding back issues of magazines to its Book Search index. From the Official Google Blog: Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet. Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see…
EFF Attorney: Google Book Search Settlement Weakens Innovation
In an editorial in The Recorder, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says Google's settlement with publishers and authors signals an implicit abandonment of Google's legal team working on behalf of innovation across Silicon Valley: .. By settling rather than taking the case all the way … Google has solved its own copyright problem — but not…
Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM
In the first part of a point-counterpoint exchange, Peter Brantley outlines reasons why DRM is bad for book publishers.
Slides from "What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization" Webcast
Slides from the "What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization" webcast.