Archives for January 2006

Jeremy Clarkson opines thus in The Sunday Times:

". . . the worst word. The worst noise. The screech
of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the
squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re
hungover, is ‘beverage’."

It’s a fun article, but I am forced to disagree: having spent far too long in the technology industry (in one capacity or another, I must say that if anyone ever comes up to me at a party and tells me about a new technology "solution", I’m going to beat them to death with my shoe. I hear that word and I see red. An urge to kill rises, and one day I’m not going to be able to control myself. Software (and many kinds of hardware) is not a solution . . . more often than not, it’s the problem that requires the solution. So while I respect Mr. Clarkson’s opinion, I think the worst words are invariably buzzwords. They’re great ad copy but they rob real words of any meaning they contained.

Well.  I’m glad I got that out in the open.  It’s Friday.  Time to drink.  (59 minutes and counting …)

Found this on SearchEngineWatch.com: Hot:Real Estate Industry Uses of Satellite/Aerial Imagery. It’s a longish post with about a million hyperlinks, but it’s worth it if you have the time. The databases that are being developed in this area are huge:

"The combo of online maps, satellite/aerial imagery, and real estate are a hot combo these days. This new Reuters article, Every inch of Netherlands viewable online, offers a profile of Funda.nl
a database that lists 75 percent of the Dutch property for sale and
gets 2.6 million visitors every month. It will soon provide 15 million
photographs growing it to 21 million images by year-end."

I’ll point out for those who haven’t figured this out yet (all six of you and you know who you are) that these are tools that until very recently were available only to the military. Even then, an object the size of an airplane hangar or a ICBM silo was just big enough to capture in any detail. Not anymore.  Imagine seeing how a plot of land you’re considering buying in another city (or another state or another country) is affected by local roads, access to other towns, or changing coastlines in five minutes with a mouse click or two. Imagine planning a town (or even a city)  from the ground up in advance based on the topography available through this medium. Imagine what will happen in the not-too-distant-future (somewhere in time and space) when the imaging and metadata tools get even more powerful.

I’m nowhere near smart enough to imagine all the ways this infrastructure can be used (an awful thing for a guy who writes scifi in his spare time to admit), but I have faith that plenty of others are that smart and will come up with amazing stuff.

Will Femia, author of the "Clicked" blog on MSNBC.com, declares today that:

"Lessig is wrong — Lawrence Lessig
is a champion of the Creative Commons movement and an advocate for
loosening copyright restrictions.  His current battle is over the
digitization of books.  Google wants to scan books into a database to
make the text searchable.  You wouldn’t get the whole book in a search,
just an excerpt.  Ignoring whether this is a good idea or a handy
utility, this blogger makes a good argument against Google’s plan.  For
what it’s worth, there is a larger issue at play as well, which is
whether search engines and other services that surface material from
the Web (like RSS aggregators) are taking advantage of the original
content holders."

There’s more to it than this excerpt, so check out the whole thing if you have the time. Actually, you should probably make the time regardless.  This issue will not go away any time soon.