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Google is now letting its users geographically tie YouTube videos to specific places on Google Earth, the company’s satellite imagery mapping service. A new YouTube video layer has been added to Google Earth, which allows Google Earth users to see videos of places they select. More information can be found at this link.
This is an example of “geotagging,“ which means giving data geospatial attributes. Yahoo’s popular photo site, Flickr, allows geotagging of photos, so that user-uploaded photos can be tied to geographical points on a map. Nearly 30 million photos on Flickr contain geospatial metadata.
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The Associated Press reported on October 10 that Internet 2—the federally-funded research network that is used by universities, research institutions and some companies—has been running at 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) since late August, and plans are in the works to bump speeds yet again in another 12 to 18 months, to 400 Gbps.
Internet 2 is run by a consortium of university partners, and managed by Level 3 Communications, the Colorado-based Internet backbone carrier.
The AP story notes that the 100 Gbps network allows Internet 2 participants to use a single, dedicated 10 Gbps channel for specific applications. The article mentions that physicists who want to acquire enormous datasets from the new Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research are likely to be among the early users of such channels.
A 10 Gbps channel can download 1 megabyte of data in 0.0008 seconds; a typical movie in uncompressed digital format could be downloaded in about 5 seconds.
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AT&T today bought into the 700 Mhz market by purchasing Aloha Partners, a move that gives AT&T potential broadband wireless coverage of 196 million people in 281 markets, according to the news release. The spectrum covers 72 of the top 100 and all of the top ten markets in the U.S.
As Om Malik noted today, the purchase appears to steer the price of the 700 Mhz auction scheduled for January 24, 2008, when the A and B spectrum blocks will be auctioned off by the FCC. Verizon, Google, eBay and other companies are considered likely bidders. (The FCC moved the auction date from January 16th to January 24th yesterday, October 8.)
Aloha Partners has been the country’s largest owner of the lower band of the UHF-TV spectrum, channels 52-59. Aloha had planned on using channels 54 and 59 to broadcast television to mobile phones, via its HiWire subsidiary. But so far it’s not clear what AT&T will do with this spectrum. Some of it is occupied by television broadcasters in specific markets, but they are supposed to give it up by February 2009. If and when AT&T clears out the spectrum, it can support up to 50,000 watts of power, meaning AT&T could quickly have a national broadband wireless network.
UPDATE: One wonders if this was part of Apple’s consideration for signing up with AT&T for the iPhone. Did Apple know something in advance?
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Wired is featuring a story on Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a nonprofit organization “with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.“ One of the PCF’s main projects is Miro, a free and Open Source video player for digital files. The Wired article notes, “Ultimately, the foundation’s goal is to promote and build an entirely new, open mass medium of online television.“ The nonprofit group has 12 full-time employees and is supported by grants from a variety of supporters, including Skyline Public Works and the Mitch Kapor, Surdna, Mozilla and Knight foundations.
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ThinkGeek is now selling ($30) a T-shirt with a visible wireless network detector on the front of the shirt. A patch on the shirt (removable for washing) glows when it is in the presence of a WiFi signal, and shows the signal strength too. The patch runs on three AAA batteries that are stored in a small pouch inside the shirt.
]]>“Today’s version of the web, whatever you want to call it,“ she writes, “is notable because people and hardware and information and software and conversation are all mixed together into a hyperconnected network. Maybe instead of getting tangled up in discussions of what’s web 1.0 vs. web 2.0 vs. web 3.0, we might look instead at another shift: how the web enables us to move from one era into another, from the Information Age to the Connected Age. You can see this shift both in the practices of individual workers and in the strategies of technology companies.“
Zelenka speculates that the old paradigm of the Information Age was one of the “knowledge worker,“ and the new paradigm of the Connected Age is ruled by the “web worker,“ yet another sort of Microsoft-Google comparison represented in this chart:
Zelenka acknowledges that most web workers will pursue a “hybrid” model, and that these categories are not meant to be descriptive but suggestive of new ways of thinking about trends.
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The Wall Street Journal reports today that “citizen journalists” in Myanmar have been using cell phones and blogs to get out news of the military crackdown in the country, following mass protests sparked by dissenting Buddhist monks. Many of the reports have been going to an exile publication about Myanmar, based in New Delhi, called Mizzima News.
The WSJ article, by Geoffrey A. Fowler, says, “In the age of YouTube, cellphone cameras and text messaging, technology is playing a critical role in helping news organizations and international groups follow Myanmar’s biggest protests in nearly two decades. Citizen witnesses are using cellphones and the Internet to beam out images of bloodied monks and street fires, subverting the Myanmar government’s effort to control media coverage and present a sanitized version of the uprising.“
But now there are reports that the military junta in Myanmar has cut off Internet access in the country, blocking the bloggers and others sending images and text over the Internet. Ko Hitke, a blogger who has been featuring reports and images from Myanmar, writes today that “I sadly announce that the Burmese military junta has cut off the internet connection throughout the country. I therefore would not be able to feed in pictures of the brutality by the brutal Burmese military junta.“
One of the images that made it out of Myanmar was of 50 year-old Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai, who worked for Agence France-Press (AFP), and who was killed in the violence.
]]>“In terms of producer takeback, they have the best policy of any global electronics company, period,“ Robin Schneider, of the Texas Campaign for the Environment, told CNN last March. “They went from being a laggard to being a leader.“
]]>Polls show that three-fifths of Americans don’t know anything about this transition, which will be the biggest change to television in the United States since the introduction of TV itself. Congress and executive branch officials are concerned that a large portion of Americans will not take the steps necessary to prepare for the end of analog, over-the-air broadcast of television. So there will be a massive public education campaign in the United States over the next year. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration held a public education kick-off event in Washington, D.C. on September 25.
]]>NYC TV is mostly a channel for promoting New York City, and features interviews, performances, short documentary clips and other features about New York City’s attractions, entertainment, food and cultural events.
]]>The City’s Office of Telecommunications & Regulatory Affairs (TARA) is also looking for reviewers for the GTOPs program, people to be part of the selection committee that awards the grants. There is an application for that volunteer position on the same Web site, under “Application.“
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The One Laptop Per Child foundation, the nonprofit organization managing the production and distribution of the computer formerly known as the “$100 laptop,“ has announced that it will be starting sales of the XO laptop, for $399, with one of the machines donated to a poor child for every sale. “For $399,“ says the Web announcement, “you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home.“
The program begins on November 12 and will last only “for a brief window of time.“
]]>The Department of Homeland Security denied that they are “interested” in the reading habits of Americans. “We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading,“ said a DHS spokesperson quoted in the article. But the spokesperson did say that federal officials are expected to document information of interest to national security.
The article mentions that this story was first reported in Wired News.
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