Web & Technology

Google and Kingsoft have just released a free translation software called “Google Kingsoft PowerWord.” The software offers Japanese, Chinese and English translation and audio pronunciation.

This is first time Google has released a co-branded product and the two companies intend to split advertising revenue generated by the free product.

The product can be downloaded here.

[via China Snippets]

Related Story: This Makes Us Feel All Warm and Fuzzy: Google Chat Translation Bots

To kick off their new ‘Data Availability’ initiative, MySpace is joining forces with a few web giants - namely Yahoo!, Twitter, eBay, and Photobucket, in an effort to give Myspace members the ability to share their profile info across the web. As Brand Strategy reports:

The system claims that this helps “open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and web identity.” It claims that this is the first time that a social website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.

Unlike the Facebook system Beacon, which tells people’s online ‘friends’ what they are buying/doing online if users choose to leave it active, MySpace claims that this initiative puts the user in charge of their own data: “Users will have control over what information they share and who they share it with.”

Myspace users can choose to share their photos, videos, network of friends, and any other publicly available profile info. While Brand Strategy wonder if this is “an attempt to make life easier for consumers or a way for corporates to gather ever more data on their users”, we’re pretty sure more than a few Myspacers will like being able to streamline the management of their public internet persona - something that most active Myspace users devote a lot of energy to.

Brand Strategy Blog: MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter get into data sharing; the future of online profiles?

Often, we find ourselves turning to YouTube when we’re actually just looking to hear a particular band or song we’re fiending for. That’s why we’re excited about the “Last.fm +YouTube = music tv goodness” mashup, a simple site that uses your Last.fm music picks (or another users’ you like) and finds videos from YouTube that match them. After entering in a Last.fm username (or even simpler, the name of an artist you want to hear), the site will start streaming YouTube videos of similar artists. The interface is clean and easy to use, with the name of the artist and clip title scrolling across the top of the viewer and a simple controller that lets users easily fast forward through clips.

Last.fm + YouTube = music tv goodness

[via Lifehacker]

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has posted a summary of his recent column in Locus Magazine, “Think Like a Dandelion,” in which he discusses the “bio-economics of giving stuff away for free”. Doctorow explains:

Mammals worry about what happens to each and every one of their offspring, but dandelions only care that every crack in every sidewalk has dandelions growing out of it. The former is a good strategy for situations in which reproduction is expensive, but the latter works best when reproduction is practically free — as on the Internet.

He offers two keys to success for creating and distributing content in the digital age:

His points:

1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans. Remember, copying is a cost-center — insisting that all copies must be downloaded from your site and only your site is insisting that you — and only you — will bear the cost of making those copies. Sure, having a single, central repository for your works makes it easier to count copies and figure out where they’re going, but remember: dandelions don’t keep track of their seeds…

2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale… I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That’s because “I should buy a copy of this book” is inevitably followed by, “Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!” and the moment, as they say, is gone.

While we find both points compelling, Doctorow’s overall argument left us a little confused. Doctorow doesn’t explicitly state it, but he seems to be saying that there are two (and only two) discrete ways of distributing content: either completely laissez-faire, in a digital form that can be disseminated like dandelion seeds; or completely controlled, in a non-digital form with no digital analog which could be consumed by capricious web users who would only half-digest the content and forget about it. Doctorow doesn’t offer much recourse for non-digital content creators (specifically publishers), seeming to suggest that the best and only way to distribute one’s creative output to the most number of “right” people is to do it freely, no strings attached. But we wonder what Doctorow’s perspective is on the qualities many people are, and perhaps always will be, willing to pay for - authenticity, quality, experience - things that physical, non-digital content provides. Doctorow asserts that we should all be thinking like dandelions but, isn’t there still a thriving lot of non-digital-content creators that must, and should, still think like mammals?

BoingBoing: Think Like a Dandelion: Advice for Understanding Reproductive Strategies in the Internet Era

A major German publisher is preparing to print a one volume “encyclopedic yearbook” of popular Wikipedia articles in September. The book will cost 19.95 euros, with 1 euro of each sale going back to Wikipedia. This is a questionable move, as there are no plans to compensate the multitudes of volunteers that produce the site. According to the rules of the encyclopedia, this is legal. Content on the site is free for use as long as you credit Wikipedia as the source.

Fair use of free content? We’re still mulling it over.

Read Write Web: Wikipedia Gets Published - Should Writers Get Paid?

Behance has introduced Creative Index as a site for creative professionals to find work, connect with each other and share portfolios. The free profiles are pretty easy to set up and the interface makes searching simple. We like that the site’s definition of creative professional is very inclusive; categories ranging from advertising, graphic design, illustration to acrobatics, costume design and ice sculpture can be found on the site.

Creative Index

A research project conducted by Britain’s Sheffield, Hertfordshire and Open universities has digitized and published the records of 197,745 trials held at London’s Old Bailey criminal court between 1673 and 1913.

Commenting on the archive, The Economist suggests that the resource allows folks to research their ancestors’ darker past:

Scouring the online archives of the Old Bailey, London’s most famous criminal court, shows that some of today’s crimes are not as new as they may seem. Take villains such as Pierre Dubois and Armand Dibon, a pair of child-sex traffickers who lured a 15-year-old French girl to London in 1902. And there is plenty of anti-social behaviour: as soon as steam trains arrived in the 19th century, the Old Bailey filled up with youths charged with throwing bricks at them… The free archive is a goldmine for family-tree growers, who may discover they are related to such unfortunates as Henry Williams, who in 1886 was sentenced to four months’ hard labour for “attempting an abominable crime with a mare”.

Fawkes only has 48 listings in the results.

Old Bailey Online

While visiting San Francisco earlier this month, a friend of ours at Current TV mentioned that they were going to set up a booth at Maker Faire and hand out video cameras to the attendees to film their favorite projects as well as provide editing assistance for them to cut the videos on the spot and upload them to a dedicated site. We immediately loved the idea of this intuitive collaboration and have been anxious to check out the results.

The event was this past weekend and you can already watch some of the videos created. Other people who were filming at the creative gathering were also encouraged to upload or embed their films too.

This video about electric cupcakes caught our eye in particular:

Iain Tait of Poke recently gave an amusing, enlightening talk about the experiences of magic and digital technology, and the relationship between the two, at Iris’ Under the Influence conference in London. In it, Tait discussed the evolution of magic, from witchcraft to “personal” David Blaine-esque illusions, and how it mirrors the progress of technological innovation from 8-bit to widgets. He draws on scifi author Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and extends upon it, arguing that technology is not the same as magic, but that it should give people the sense that they possess the powers of it. Tait explains the differences between the spectacular, larger-than-life magic made popular by illusionists like David Copperfield and the man-on-the-street, “personal” magic that’s popular today - the intimate, one-on-one tricks of David Blaine and others like him. Tait argues that the most valuable and progressive technology should follow the David Blaine approach to illusion - it should impress and mystify, but also be personal, emotional, and empowering rather than rely on spectacle and a confined, controlled audience. Watch the video below to see the entire presentation.

My Talk At Under the Influence from iaintait on Vimeo.