I was shocked when I heard there was a place which pays you for submitting your photos online. My curiosity drove me to the website and made me aware that even I could earn a little without investing too much time and effort. After all who wouldn’t like a little extra money?
I wanted to know [...]
Now you can take that round-the-world trip from the comfort of your home, and see not just the obvious tourist sites but people having parties or playing with their kids in the back garden. All you need is a web browser and Earth Album – an online photo album that covers the whole world.
Earth Album doesn’t actually have any of its own photos, of course: it takes them from Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website. Nor does it have a map of the world: it uses Google Maps with a hybrid satellite view. What Earth Album does is take these two giant internet properties and link them together in what’s called a mashup.
It’s easy to use. You start with a map of the world and zoom in on the area you want. Earth Album takes any Flickr photos associated with that place – perhaps by geotagging – and displays them in a scrolling strip across the screen. You can click on any photo to see a larger version, along with its caption, if it has one.
The results vary according to what’s available. If you focus on a small or desolate region you may not find anything. Zooming out increases the chance of finding at least a few images, and the country-level views have some stunning images. The major cities and tourist spots are well covered, as you’d expect, but some areas are very badly served. Google Maps’ coverage of Georgia, for example, is poor, and it can be hard to find many photos except for Tbilisi.
There are shortcuts, and you can find a place by typing in the name or entering an address. If you want London Ontario, Paris Texas or Boston Lincs, you have to be specific. Curiously, York takes you to New York instead of the city in Yorkshire.
You can also search by keywords and find things like mountains and sunsets. In this case, Earth Album seems to be picking up cues from titles and captions.
There are one or two annoyances. The main one for me is the scrolling of the picture selection. This works well as you go from right to left, bringing up more photos, but clicking the left arrow takes you right back to the beginning. This seems bizarre on a site that has been around for two years.
A very minor complaint is that there should be a more obvious way to jump from any photo to its home on Flickr (clicking the title works). Flickr often gives you the background to a picture, and access to a stream of related images.
Earth Album’s results may seem somewhat voyeuristic, because they can include personal snaps taken at parties and weddings, at work, at home or in pubs. On the other hand, it’s interesting to see the same sort of snaps from Santiago, Singapore, Sapporo and similar places. In the end, Earth Album is giving us the chance to see and share our common humanity, and that must be a force for good.
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How do I stop them?
John Kirkham
JS: You can’t, but they should be sorted into your spam folder. If not, create a rule to do this. These emails are not really from CNN, though they are a good imitation. Click a link in the latest version, My Custom Alert, and it takes you to a Russian website, where you are asked to download a malware version of Adobe’s Flash player (adobe_flash.exe). This installs a Trojan downloader which runs a service called CbEvtSvc and connects to a remote host. Your anti-malware software should remove this. If not, try running SuperAntiSpyware.
I have used Nikon Fotoshare to send photos by email. It was very quick and easy. Nikon is now offering My Picturetown. This is very slow to upload, and I cannot find out how to email the photos.
Robin Hood
JS: Fotoshare is an online photo album. Nikon plans to close it on September 10 and will then delete all the photos people have uploaded. MyPictureTown.com is similar but has drag-and-drop uploading and is claimed to be easier to use. There are a great many alternatives, including Photobucket (owned by MySpace), WebShots (American Greetings), Flickr (Yahoo), Picasa (Google) and Windows Live Photo Gallery (Microsoft). SmugMug is good but not free.
They all have their fans, many of whom use more than one, so now there is framechannel.com to manage multiple services. There are even more sites that cater for people who want to upload one or two images, such as Imagevenue.com. You can use them without opening an account or signing in. When you upload a photo, these sites usually provide several links to cater for web pages and different types of message board.
Unfortunately, many of these sites make their money by displaying popup adverts, and some may even try to install malware. The best rule is to copy the “direct link” and email that instead of the photo. Avoid any links that contain the letters php.
I have installed the BBC iPlayer, but every time I activate it, a program called Kontiki pops up.
Denis
JS: When you download TV programmes using iPlayer - as distinct from watching streamed versions online - they are downloaded using Kontiki. This is a peer-to-peer file sharing program, which is also used by similar services such as Sky by Broadband and Channel 4’s 4oD. Kontiki seems to load and use your bandwidth, even if you are not using iPlayer: use the Windows Task Manager to see if Kservice is running.
The BBC has a page that explains how to stop it running on startup and when you are not using iPlayer. You can remove it altogether using the kclean.exe program. However, if you do, any Kontiki-based programs such as iPlayer will stop working.
I have a not-that-old HP OfficeJet 6110 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier which I’ve recently replaced. It works, but is a little streaky on some printing. I’ve been trying to get rid of it in an ecologically sound way, but to no avail.
Chris Rowbury
JS: You could offer it on eBay, noting the fault and offering it as for “spares or repair” and probably “collect only”. Otherwise, try Freecycle.
· Paul Niemiec wanted a cheap way to digitise cassette tapes, and I suggested using the open-source Audacity software. John Blackburn suggests the shareware CD Wave instead: “This software is simpler than Audacity and has the very useful (and, indeed, important) feature of being able to split the music into tracks, either automatically or with manual assistance. CD Wave will save the resulting tracks as WAV, MP3, OGG or FLAC files. WAV is for making audio CDs and MP3 is for the car. FLAC files are lossless, as you say, and are about half the size of WAV files.”
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theodp writes “Recently, Google debuted its new Google Docs Template Gallery, showcasing a Shared House Expenses spreadsheet template in a pretty elaborate YouTube Video as an example of ‘tools that just work.’ Only problem is, the popular five-star template still doesn’t work correctly. Thanks to its doesn’t-handle-zero-correctly bugs, the spreadsheet fails to always divide expenses properly, allowing one roommate to get away with contributing far less than his “Fare [sic] Share.” So did Google release the spreadsheet to gazillions of users without bothering to verify it worked, or did all those Googlers fail to recognize some pretty obvious mistakes?”
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There’s been a bit of buzz going around the blog/social media world over someone who made a photograph that shows a snapshot from every second of the movie The Big Lebowski (most of the posts about it erroneously claim that it’s every frame of the movie, but a quick scan through the images shows that it’s more like one frame every second — i.e., approximately 1 frame out of every 30). What’s interesting to me, though, is that the photo is listed under a Creative Commons license — and I’m wondering if Universal Studios (NBC Universal) knows about this, and if it would freak out. It’s difficult to see how this photo could possibly hurt the commercial viability of The Big Lebowski. It’s quite clear that, if anything, it’s a celebration of the movie.
And that’s one of the key points of conflict that people run into with copyright these days. So many efforts by fans to celebrate, promote or otherwise share some aspect of a movie is often viewed as copyright infringement by the copyright holders. Hopefully, Universal chooses to overlook this creative endeavor — or, even better, help promote it. But, given the way NBC Universal has reacted in the past, somehow that seems unlikely.
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BT is in talks to buy Silicon Valley internet-phone software developer Ribbit as it looks to create a one-number web-based communications platform to take on the likes of Google and Skype in the burgeoning online telecoms market.
Ribbit, founded two years ago and based near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, claims to be “Silicon Valley’s first phone company”. It has created software that allows programmers to design applications that tie together mobile phones, fixed-line phones and even social networking sites into a single online communications hub.
Ribbit allows any software developer to use its technology to create applications, in the same way as Google has opened up its soon to launch mobile phone operating system android and Apple has allowed other people to develop software for the iPhone.
There are a number of communications tools such as Evernote - which allows forgetful iPhone users to access their “to do” lists from their phone or computer - which are designed to integrate the mobile phone with internet-based services.
Bringing together the information stored on the web with mobile phones, a trend known as unified communications, has been mooted for many years. But the take-up of broadband and the creation of fast mobile phone networks has made it easier to achieve. Last year Google snapped up another Californian company involved in this area, called GrandCentral, for about $50m.
BT is understood to have offered as much as $55m (£28m) for Ribbit, although a deal has not yet been signed. BT refused to comment yesterday.
Ribbit’s technology has already been used by a number of third party application developers. American business communications group Salesforce.com has a Ribbit-based application that lets the company’s sales people keep track of all their calls and contacts through a single web page.
Ribbit is also testing a consumer platform called amphibian, which looks like a social networking site with a phone attached. It allows users to convert voicemail messages left on their mobile into text which can be read online, so users can search for keywords. Calls can be patched through from a mobile to a computer; not only will the caller’s number be displayed but amphibian can pull up their profile and latest postings from sites such as Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter. Calls from other web-based telephone services such as GoogleTalk and Skype can also be accessed.
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BT is in talks to buy Silicon Valley internet-phone software developer Ribbit as it looks to create a one-number web-based communications platform to take on the likes of Google and Skype in the burgeoning online telecoms market.
Ribbit, founded two years ago and based near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, claims to be “Silicon Valley’s first phone company”. It has created software that allows programmers to design applications that tie together mobile phones, fixed-line phones and even social networking sites into a single online communications hub.
Reports in the blogosphere said that BT is spending $55m (£28m) on the company. No actual deal is understood to have yet been signed off, and BT refused to comment today.
Bringing together the information stored on the internet with mobile phones and computers, a trend known as unified communications, has been mooted for many years. But the take-up of broadband and the creation of fast mobile phone networks has made it easier to achieve. Last year Google snapped up another Californian company involved in this area, called GrandCentral, for about $50m.
Ribbit’s technology is open to any software developer to use - a model known as open source - so they can build their own applications. London-based Square Circle, for instance, has created a web-based phone application that looks like a chalkboard. American business communications group Salesforce.com, meanwhile, has a Ribbit-based application that lets a company’s sales people keep track of all their calls and contacts through a single web page and costs $25 per user per month.
Ribbit is also testing a consumer platform called Amphibian, which looks like a social networking site with a phone attached. It allows users to transcribe voicemail messages left on their mobile as text on a web page, meaning they can search for keywords in a message. Calls can be patched through from a mobile to a computer; not only will the caller’s number be displayed but Amphibian can pull up their profile and latest postings from sites such as Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Because the system is open, calls from other web-based telephony services such as GoogleTalk and Skype can also be accessed.
Google, too, is experimenting with open-source mobile communications with its Android mobile phone operating system, due to start appearing in the first generation of handsets towards the end of the year. Application developers are likely to use the platform to create unified messaging services. Apple, meanwhile, is also letting developers create applications for its iPhone device and a Ribbit service has already been created.
Ribbit has raised about $13m from venture capital firms Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures. It was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ted Griggs who serves as chief executive, former AT&T product development head Crick Waters and two of Griggs’ colleagues from his previous company, telecoms software group Syndeo Corporation: Peter Leong and Ramani Narayan, Ribbit’s head of marketing, meanwhile, used to be head of marketing at another Californian start-up in the web telephony market called Jajah. He previously worked for Apple.
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theodp writes "Microsoft was just granted U.S. Patent No. 7,392,326 for Text Entry in an Electronic Device. From the patent: ‘the invention may automatically add a ‘www.’ and a ‘.com’ to the text the user is entering and display this combined text’. To get the point across, Microsoft included an illustration showing the ‘invention’ in action, transforming ‘foo’ into ‘www.foo.com’. Sure it’s not sorcery we’re dealing with?"
The specifics of the patent show it to be for easier data entry on mobile devices, but it’s difficult to see how this qualifies as either new or non-obvious. Basically, the concept is pretty straightforward and has been done on desktop browsers for some time. To simply add “and on mobile devices” doesn’t seem deserving of a patent. Does anyone really believe this functionality wouldn’t have been developed without a patent?
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Yahoo is accused of censorship on photo site Flickr in a row over an online gallery selling pictures.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. is shutting
down Yahoo Photos, an online photo storage site, and asking
users to move instead to its Web 2.0 photo sharing site,
Flickr, a Yahoo official said.
