Internet archive

Google Goggles - Everyone’s Big Brother

Google likes to lead from the front when it comes to the practical application of sophisticated technology. Goggles is no exception, a nifty little programme for people with smart phones that uses Googles massive image library and fast developing image recognition system.

If you want to know about what’s in front of you, be it a landmark, painting, tree, restaurant or whatever, just take a picture and pop it into the Goggles image search, and a few moments later up comes all the information. At the launch Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra gave a demonstration by taking a picture of a bottle of wine, up came the results with tasting notes, including that this vintage had a hint of apricots. It can also ‘read’ other printed images, such as book jackets and bar codes.

The problem is that it can also recognize faces.

Take picture of someone in the street and it has the ability to pull together all the information about that person from the internet … and with millions of people increasingly living their lives online, the possibilities of abuse are enormous.

Anthony House from Google said: “We do have the relevant facial recognition technology at our disposal … But we haven’t implemented this on Google Goggles because we want to consider the privacy implications and how this feature might be added responsibly.”

Facebook has also upgraded its security this week, prompting users not to display personal information to the public.

The moral of these stories is simple, if you don’t want your details to fall into the wrong hands don’t post them on the internet.

Make your own Word Cloud

Wordle is a free web application for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide.

This rides on the back of the popular Tag Clouds you see on so many Blogs these days - words with the greatest frequency are given greater prominence in the cloud.

Simply key in your words, submit your RSS feed or delicious bookmarks account - and voila, a beautiful word cloud. You can tweak the fonts and colours to your heart’s content.

Make your own Wordle Word Cloud »

This word cloud was generated from my blog content in about 2 seconds, looks almost artistic doesn’t it? It would take a typographer a few hours to do this.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to difffer. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.

Jonathan Zittrain wants to make sure the electronic frontier stays open — and he’s looking to the Internet’s millions of users for its salvation.

Source: TED

English is the global language

Hurrah! Much to the dismay of the Germans, and especially the French - English is now the definitive universal language for our planet.

How did this tiny island achieve this?

Well, some of it has to do with our popular writers such as Shakespeare and Keats, then there are the world-wide foundations we set in law, science and medicine.

More importantly there are the technological advances; making mass communication possible at the same time that we happened to occupy two thirds of the planet (including the USA).

Fortunately, as Britain declined, the USA (which chose English above their French occupiers as their national language) came into ascendancy - with movies and music reaffirming global circulation and adoration.

Today 2 billion people are learning English.

This year China will become the world’s largest English speaking country.

If English is your native tongue, you have a major advantage over every other county for international trade and development.

Local, global, it’s all in English. Here’s great little film from Jay Walker on TED that backs up the story:

Budget web design - Archer & Stone

Archer & Stone are health and safety consultants based in Leeds, specialising in legionella risk assessment and management. Being a new business start-up a low budget web design was required, initially just to give them a presence on the web.

Times are changing, not long ago having a website was a novelty, today a company without a website looks suspicious - it’s the bare minimum; like having business cards and letterheaded stationery.

As part of our New Business Start-up Package, a logo was designed and provided in all formats for screen and print.

As there was no budget for photography, a strong graphic background was created to lift the site and give impact. Although it was a low budget web design, the site was still built to the highest international standards, Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 markup, and scoring Triple A for web accessibility.

The logo and 11 page site were created in 48 hours over a 2 week period.

View Archer & Stone website »

Read case study »

Micro-site launched for girl dance group

UDC Dance Company’s website is over 4 year’s old and required a major re-design to meet their client’s needs.

The site generates dozens of enquiries every week, with potential clients frequently asking more photographs and more information. To reduce admin, each dance theme and dance style will have its own microsite with separate gallery - PDFs will also be available to download.

The website re-design will be completed in instalments over the coming weeks. The first microsite to be uploaded was the Diva dance group, for marketing and club promotions.

Why do people Spam?

These thoughts and figures are an extract from a presentation made by Amit Singhal. If anyone knows how the web works, it’s him - he’s from Google.

His analysis goes like this:

“Users follow the results on Search Engines, money follows the users, and the spammers follow the money.”

What I didn’t realise, is that besides the bogus sales and scams, spammers also get kickbacks from traffic to target sites as well:

“Traffic from Search Engines to Amazon / eBay – A few dollars per click.”

“Traffic from Search Engines to Viagra sellers – $6 per sale.”

“Traffic to porn sites – $20-40 per member.”

How much money can spammers make?

According to Google, there are approximately 500 million searches made everyday through website search engines. This figure is considerably higher if you include vast amount of porn queries.

If you only assume that 5% of these searches are commercially viable, and that they only make the minimum 50 cents per click  - the spammers are making $12.5M a day, or about $4.5 Billion per year.

And these figures are conservative, based $0.5c per click, they can make anything up to $40 per click.

These figures are no consolation for the frustration and inconvenience all this spam causes, but at least now you know the reason why.

Humorous tee shirts for geeks

Geeks. Nerds. Egg heads.

These are just a few aspersions cast upon sad programmers who wrestle through the night with slippery code, to create the stuff we use everyday; such as Facebook, Google and Firefox.

However, now that a chosen few are appearing on the cover of Time magazine, driving Ferrari’s and have enough loose change to buy a small country, such as Belgium – geeks are becoming the new cool.

But there are some things that money can’t buy - such as a sense of humour.

Happy Webbies is a shop selling tee shirts with hip cartoon caricatures of some of the most brilliant minds on the web and their most memorable, rib tickling lines.

It’s a geek thing LOL.

“My other browser is a Camino” John Hicks

“You obviously can’t draw, let me show you” Veerle Pieters

“You’re all a bunch of users” Jacob Nielsen

“Your CSS may be bulletproof, but your style still sucks” Dan Cederholm

You can buy your 100% cotton tee, with a design of your choice from Happy Webbies for only $20 - and if you think that is too steep you can download a desktop wallpaper for free.

Internet statistics

The latest figures from W3C Schools show a continued decline of market share for Microsoft’s notoriously bug ridden and flaky Internet Explorer series, to Firefox - and the new kid on the block: Google’s Chrome.

Microsoft neglected their browser for almost 5 years, before bringing out IE7, which made a few fundamental and long overdue improvements.

However, half a decade is an eternity on the web - and it was too little, too late, to stem the flow of people to Firefox and other browsers.

[Annotations: IE Internet Explorer / Fx Firefox / S Safari / O Opera]

2009	IE7	IE6	IE8	Fx	Chrome	S	O
January	25.7%	18.5%	0.6%	45.5%	3.9%	3.0%	2.3%
2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Chrome	S	O
December	26.1%	19.6%		44.4%	3.6%	2.7%	2.4%
November	26.6%	20.0%		44.2%	3.1%	2.7%	2.3%
October	26.9%	20.2%		44.0%	3.0%	2.8%	2.2%
September	26.3%	22.3%		42.6%	3.1%	2.7%	2.0%
August	26.0%	24.5%		43.7%		2.6%	2.1%
July	26.4%	25.3%		42.6%		2.5%	1.9%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%		2.6%	1.7%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%		2.4%	1.5%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%		2.2%	1.4%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%		2.1%	1.4%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%		2.0%	1.4%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%		1.9%	1.4%

Statistics courtesy of W3C Schools

Further reading:

• Which browser is best
• Screen resolutions

Conficker virus - Microsoft offers $250,000 reward

Microsoft has offered a $250,000 reward to find the villain behind the notorious Conficker virus that has infected over 12 million PCs wordwide.

“People who write this malware have to be held accountable” said George Stathakopulos from Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

“Our message is very clear - whoever wrote this caused significant pain to our customers and we are sending a message that we will do everything we can to help with your arrest.”

It’s good to see someone standing up to these people and taking action.

As usual, governments and international agencies seem to have no strategy to tackle this problem - which must be costing every business £1,000s in lost productivity and ant-virus software.

• « Older Entries

Archives

By subject:

• copywriting
• email marketing
• Internet
• marketing
• movies
• news
• personal
• seo
• web design

By month:

• July 2010
• June 2010
• March 2010
• February 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• July 2009
• June 2009
• May 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008