Category: Content Indexing & Navigation

Record Your Day With SenseCam

There is a certain someone here at Digital Lifestyles who records everything – and I mean everything. He even records conversations with me. Whether or not he listens to them afterwards is a different matter, but he archives everything. When I saw the SenseCam this morning, it was clear that it’s his Ultimate Gadget.

With an accelerometer, passive IR detectors, light sensors and thermometer and wide angle-lensed camera, the SenseCam isn’t next year’s mobile phone, it’ a wearable device to help people with memory problems or assist obsessives in blogging their entire day.

The SenseCam has been developed by Microsoft Research Labs in the UK, and will be trialled at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.

The device captures 2000 images a day onto its 128mb Flash memory, and all sensor data can be fed to a system like Microsoft’s other archiving project, MyLifeBits.

MyLifeBits can then organise the data so you can go over the days events, or perhaps work out how you got into that lap dancing bar in the first place.

Future plans for the SenseCam may include heart rate monitoring or other physiological metrics – and no doubt there will be some military applications along shortly.

SenseCam

MyLifeBits

British Library to Put 100 Years of News Online

The British Library is spending UK£2 million to put a collection of 19th century newspapers on line. The million or so pages of British newspapers will be published on a searchable website in 18 months time. All the material is out of copyright, and is thought to include The Morning Chronicle, famed for employing Dickens and Thackeray, and the Morning Post who featured articles by Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Ed King, Head of the British Library’s newspaper collections in Colindale commented, “The British Library is committed to making our collections accessible to as many people as possible. Before the world wide web existed, readers had to visit the newspaper archive in Colindale to look at all aspects of the collections … This means that digital copies will be available for web users who can explore these early out-of-copyright editions in their entirety.”

Ironically, the British Library auctioned off most of their newspaper collection, housed in Colindale, in a blind auction in 1999 after digitising them.

Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine, voices his concerns about libraries digitising newspapers in his book “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper”, as often the process does not capture the text clearly or accurately, or even feature enough resolution to properly reproduce the beautiful illustrations of the time. Often, limitations in scanning hardware mean that publications have to be cut up to be scanned, before being destroyed.

The opening up of this historical archive is very exciting indeed, and is bringing us a step closer to free online texts and books – “libraries without walls for books without pages”.

The British Library

Archivists respond to Nicholson Baker

eBooks on the Rise?

For as long as there has been ASCII, there have been electronic books, but every attempt to make eBooks into a commercial product with mass-market appeal has been a disappointment. However, new sales figures from the Open eBook Forum point to a 46% rise in eBook revenues in the first quarter of this year.

Additionally, Forum President Steve Potash claims that “eBooks represent the fastest growing segment of the publishing industry.”

Sadly, the titles that are shifting are not the forward-looking science, philosophy literary masterpieces I’d hoped for: Dan Brown’s nonsense numerology pot boiler The Da Vinci Code leads the bestseller chart, followed by Van Helsing by Kevin Ryan at number two.

Figures are still modest: 421,955 eBooks were sold in Q1 2004, compared to 288,440 for the same period last year. This translates into US$3.2 million (€2.6 million) in revenue, opposed to US$2.5 million (€2 million) for Q1 2003.

The market is still dogged with issues: competing formats, lacklustre content, over-priced products and expensive reading devices. People still prefer reading printed books, but the sheer convenience of being able to carry a number of titles for consulting at will has prompted people to experiment in the format. There’s still no “killer application” for eBooks (like iTunes was to the iPod), and certainly no “system seller” (for example, the Matrix DVD prompted many thousands of people to buy a DVD player), and there possibly never will, but we hope that this important media format gets the attention it deserves.

Open eBook

Mobile Peer to Peer File Sharing with PDAs

Simedia, a small software publisher in Bucharest, has ported a clone of Apple’s Rendezvous application to PocketPC and teamed it with a web server. The result? A mobile P2P file sharing program.

The application discovers other devices on the same WiFi network and allows people to share files and documents. And of course, music.

Simedia themselves give various uses for the application, including using it to “share your music collection with passers-by or listen to their collections whilst sharing a ride on the bus”. Features like these will no doubt have music execs jumping out of windows, whilst RIAA lawyers will be lighting cigars with $100 bills.

The software will be available from 16 June in two versions: a free version, and a paid version with corporate functionality.

Simedia already have a history for off-beat PDA products – they are well known for their SounderCover application which plays background noises (trains, the dentist, a errr, circus parade) over phone calls for those wishing to deceive spouses and employers that they somewhere different to their real location.

Simedia

Ofcom’s Media Literacy Strategy

Centring around the principles of research, partnering and labelling, Ofcom have published a report outlining a strategy for media literacy in the UK.

Ofcom recognise that the public are now faced with a huge choice of media, and that familiarity and media awareness are essential to managing this choice, protecting children and understanding the world around us. The regulator wishes to promote media literacy as “A media literate person will have the potential to be an efficient worker, an informed consumer and an active citizen. People who are not able to use effectively the new communications technologies will not be able to take full advantage of the benefits they bring and may become marginalised in society.”

Ofcom’s strategy is based around three main work strands:

“Research. Key to the success of our early work and in defining future priorities is to develop an evidence-base of research. This will help us to identify the issues, to direct our work and inform progress towards achieving our goals.

Connecting, partnering & signposting. We aim to add value to existing media literacy activity, to stimulate new work and to promote and direct people to advice and guidance concerning new communications technologies.

Labelling. Viewers and listeners need to have clear, accurate and timely information about the nature of content so that they can make informed choices. Our prime concern is to ensure consistency in the presentation of information related to possible harm and offence, in particular to help protect young and vulnerable people from inappropriate material. This advice can be effectively delivered using a content labelling framework. Ofcom will work with industry players to explore the possibility of creating a common content labelling (information) scheme for electronic audiovisual material.”

Of primary interest to many, the call for a universal e-content label covering TV, internet, mobile products and games presents a considerable challenge to industry. Ofcom isn’t even sure it can be done – and of course the regulator has no remit when it comes to internet content.

Ofcom’s strategy and priorities for the promotion of media literacy

California Approves “Anti-GMail” Bill

The California state senate has approved Liz Figueroa’s email privacy bill, with some revision. “My legislation guarantees that our most private communications will remain just that – private,” said Senator Figueroa.

The bill was revised at the last minute – it originally required ISPs to seek permission before scanning emails. As it stands, e-mail and instant messaging providers can scan emails to build a profile for delivering adverts, but must abide by strict limits on how the data is used. The data cannot be shared, kept or shown to a “natural person”. We take this to mean that humans are not allowed to peek at your mail, but bots can. GMail now has to permanently delete any email at the request of a subscriber.

Anti-spam and virus filtering are covered in the bill, and as this is done automatically by software agents, it has never really been a privacy issue.

GMail

Google Names 31 Underwriters For IPO

Google has named another 29 underwriters for its forthcoming IPO – these are in addition to the two lead underwriters Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston. Amongst the new crop are JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and Deutsche Bank.

The sale is expected to raise US$2.7 billion (€2.26 billion) later this year, the biggest new technology stock sale since the wheels fell off the new economy in 2000.

Google’s sale will be unusual in that they are going to use a open auction process – investors will be able to bid for shares at a price they are willing to pay, a method that Google believes will be fairer to small investors. Since whoever pays the most still wins, that remains to be seen.

The Unofficial Google IPO Site

Lycos Beat Google With 1gig Email Service

Lycos Europe have launched a 1 gigabyte email service whilst Google was embroiled in the privacy protests surrounding their GMail offering.

The Lycos Inbox costs a quite reasonable £3.49 (€5.18) a month, includes 50 email addresses and features 1 gig of space. Subscibers can even make use of their own domain name, which is a very tempting feature. Subscribers can also send 50 free SMS messages per month too.

“The research we’ve done shows that privacy and security is incredibly important to consumers,” said Lycos Europe Portals and Communications Vice President Alex Kovach.

Google have yet to launch GMail in Europe because of concerns over the automated scanning of email content to provide targeted adverts.

More details on the Lycos Inbox

When Search Engines Strike Back: Yahoo and Google Block Adware Company

Influential search engines Google and Yahoo has disabled links to WhenU, a adware manufacturer that they’ve accused of using “cloaking” to trick search engines into favourably ranking decoy pages that redirect visitors.

Avi Nader, chief executive of WhenU said that the questionable practices were the result of an external search engine optimisation company, and that they expected to be relisted now that they’ve stopped working with that organisation.

WhenU produce an application that keeps tabs on browsing habits – they’re currently embroiled in a debate as to whether this practice is in fact legal.

Adware, sometimes called spyware, are applets that are installed on your PC, sometimes without your consent or even knowledge, and can do a number of things: they can tell companies which webpages you’ve visited, what you’ve been typing on your keyboard (including bank details and credit card numbers), flash ads up on your screen or redirect you away from competitors products. Some people install them by choice (it’s the old “people will do anything for a discount thing”) but often the applications are malicious. There are a number of free tools for ridding yourself of these pests, and we’ve linked to a good one below.

Scan and get rid of adware on your PC free – Ad-aware 6

Google Revamps Blogger Service

Google has completed a revamp of its Blogger site, adding a number of new features and another 27 design templates to the service.

Possibly the most exciting feature is the addition of email posting, so now bloggers can update their site from anywhere where they have email – handy for updating blogs whilst on the move if you have a PDA.

Google are keen to build a community between bloggers with new facilities for adding comments to blogs and setting up blogger profiles. Profiles can automatically link to other bloggers with similar interests.

Evan Williams, Blogger program manager at Google said: “We are focusing on helping users connect to one another, and that has always been a core part of blogging, with the combination of profiles and comments, we make it more built in than it’s ever been before.”

Blogger