More cool Web 2.0

I love Flickr, it's a great site for storing all of my photos and I love the ability to have them all online at full resolution, sharing the ones I want to share and so on. Brilliant. However, today I noticed Riya, which looks very interesting too. It holds your photos (although at 800x600), but the idea isn't really to store them on the site, rather to index them. The best feature is the face recognition that is built in. Riya will check photos you upload for faces it recognises and tag the photo automatically. How cool is that!? And slightly scary of course. Great stuff.

More Skype Coolness

Skype is cool. Not only is it the best IM client (God knows why people still use Messenger), but it opens-up the world of free voice calls to other users, and generally cheap calls to people who are technophobes without Skype clients. Still, up until recently it has involved sitting in front of a computer, making it still less than 100% convenient. Not any more though - check out the Netgear Skype phone, a wifi device that sits on a wireless network and runs Skype for you. It's just like a mobile phone really, except much, much cheaper. The downside is that you need to be on a wireless network, but like a lot of people I'm not often away from one these days. When this phone is launched it's goodbye to my mobile (I'll get a cheap PAYG phone for when I'm away from wifi) and hello to cheap Skype calls. Progress!

Another interesting (and currently available) product is the Olympia 9211. This is just like a cordless DECT phone in that it plugs into your normal phone line. However, it also plugs into your PC and from the handset you can choose to make a Skype call or a normal phone call (a display on the handset shows if your contacts are online). It's a great device, but fundamentally flawed in that there are no Mac or Linux drivers, so it's no good to me. Foolish manufacturers! If they opened-up their specs someone would have drivers coded for it in no time - I can't understand why so many companies are so stupid. Ho hum, Netgear phone it is!

Google Base

So Google are pretty cool, there's no doubting that. Today (or pretty recently at any rate) they have opened-up Google Base for general use. This is pretty nifty - a database that anyone can add items to. There are some pre-defined types such as recipes, jobs and so on, or you can add your own. There are already nearly 1,000 recipes on there, and I expect that this will grow massively.

Aside from providing a good place to dump data that you don't mind being public, Google have provided what is effectively a massive Wiki version of the Web as a whole. There are links for each item to mark it as bad, so if someone posts porn as a recipe, for example, it can be taken down. The possibilities for finding information are great. Let's say you want to find a review of a DVD player you are considering buying. If you type any model of DVD player and 'review' into Google at the moment you'll get hundreds of hits for price comparison sites and very few useful reviews. However, with Google Base you should (in theory) be able to search for that DVD player model in the 'reviews' category and get straight to useful content.

If it all works then it will be really cool. I suppose the concern is one company owning all of that data, but to be fair to Google they haven't gone for Microsoft-style evilness so far so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. If having some unobtrusive Google ads at the side of the page is the cost for getting straight to the information I want, I'm all for it.

If you usually read my blog via my Web site then you'll notice that you've been redirected to my LiveJournal. There were some storms last week and one casualty of a lightening strike on the power line was the PSU of my Web server. This is a pain but at least it's under warranty. Not only that, but it's an external PSU (being a Mac Mini) so it could all have been a lot more painful! Anyway, I put my photos on Flickr as a temporary measure but I've decided to make that permanent. Go take a look - it's a neat site.

Good idea

Luckily I've never had a mobile phone stolen, but all too many people do. The MEND UK Web site allows you to register your phones unique IMEI number on the national mobile equipment database. Should the police recover it, you've then got a good chance of getting it back.

You never know - your phone might get stolen. I think that registering it is a good thing to do. You'll certainly regret not taking two minutes to do so if the worst does indeed happen!

eBay

I've got to hand it to her, this girl is enterprising. She's put up an invite to a wedding she doesn't want to go to for sale on eBay. Read the description - it's most amusing.

Internet 'tax'

So, the music industry is thinking about giving up on chasing people who illegally download music and putting a 'tax' on Internet charges instead? Great. Why should I pay because some crackhead teenager after his Britney fix can't be arsed to buy a CD? I don't see the government saying "OK guys, we'll get rid of speed cameras and just charge all motorists equally to get the fines".

Downloading illegally shared music is illegal, and the people who do it are criminals (as the law stands). Whether they think this should be the case or not, people who download this stuff know it is illegal and should therefore be prepared to face the consequences. I don't see why they should be let off just because they are hard to catch and everyone else made to pay for them.

The way to change the music industry is not to download stuff illegally shared on P2P networks. The way to do it is to embrace the emerging legal downloads on sites like Magnatune. If all record companies adopted this approach then illegal downloading would cease to be a problem. Of course they don't like this idea as it would eat into their profit margins, but in the end we would all be better off (especially less popular artists).

Some countries (Canada?) have a tax on every blank CD sold. Some of the money goes to the big record labels on the assumption that people will be copying music. The presumption of guilt has seemingly gone unquestioned. Most blank CDs are not used for copying music, as most people who work in IT will tell you. Who are the record labels to think that they can make the law? If this new Internet tax proposal gets anywhere it will show just how much in the pockets of big business our government really is.