Ben Shoemate's Notebook

Shared by Ben Shoemate
library organization...very interesting

Home library organization doesn't necessarily mean alphabetizing. See more methods of home library organization, from color to chronology.

Erick Schonfeld via TechCrunch shared by 8 people

Aza Raskin at Mozilla Labs thinks there’s got to be an easier way to create Web mashups. Today, he is announcing the launch of Ubiquity, an experiment in using natural language to invoke Web services. Ubiquity is an extension to the Firefox browser that lets you type in what you want to do—insert a map, translate this page, Twitter this block of text, search on Google—and invokes one of 30 Web services. As Raskin describes the problem in his post:

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

With Ubiquity, all you do is type in map, and it calls up the Google Map and sticks it in your e-mail. Just as you type what you want into a search box and it figures out what you are looking for, Ubiquity tries to figure out which services you want to access. In a phone call, Raskin explains it to me this way:

Ubiquity is an experiment in connecting the Web with language. The problem with the Web is that services and locations and data are disconnected. You want to send a link to a map, translate a Web page, convert things to PDF, add a review for a restaurant—all of these things you want to do right now, but you have to trundle around the Web to do it. Ubiquity is instant access to services through language.

This is an ambitious project whose goal is to make natural language into a programming interface. It is open-source so anyone can contribute to make it work with more APIs and Web Services. The extension can be downloaded at the link above. More detailed information is available here and in the video below.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

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Mark Hendrickson via TechCrunch shared by 7 people

Last March, Google began inviting a select number of publishers within its AdSense network to test a new hosted advertisement management tool called Google Ad Manager. The search company has now announced that the tool is out of beta and available to all publishers with AdSense accounts.

Since its unveiling, Google Ad Manager has been seen as a direct threat to OpenX, an on-premise software solution (known previously as OpenAds and phpAdsNew) for managing the advertising campaigns on websites. Both solutions serve and track the performance of ad units sold either directly or introduced by third party networks like Federated Media or Google AdSense (which we use here at TechCrunch). But only Google can “use AdSense to fill unsold inventory or compete on price against other ad networks,” optimizing returns for publishers by serving up the most profitable ads from campaigns vying for the same space on a page.

As a hosted solution, Google Ad Manager also has the advantage of an easier setup and administration process since it doesn’t require any server-side installation or code maintenance. A hosted version of OpenX - which would necessarily depart from the company’s open source roots - has been anticipated for awhile now but has yet to be released.

Some will say the public release of Google Ad Manager spells serious trouble for OpenX. But seen in a different light, the release also enhances OpenX’s standing as acquisition bait for the likes of Microsoft, who wishes to compete more effectively against Google in the online advertising space.

Since its acquisition of DoubleClick, Google has also run the DoubleClick Revenue Center for publishers with large in-house ad sales teams.

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leelefever via Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English - shared by 5 people

The Google Reader team hired us to create this one minute introduction to Google Reader.

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My coworker Lori Grunin already covered Canon's announcement of its $1,400 mid-range EOS 50D SLR, but as somebody who's in the market for a new SLR, I thought I'd weigh in with some thoughts of my own. I'm glad Canon is investing where perhaps it counts most: the sensor, and if the reviews look good, this is the first time I've really been tempted to upgrade from my well-used Canon Rebel XT.

When it ships in October, the 50D will sport a 15.1 megapixel sensor, up from 10.1 megapixels in the current 40D. The increase in megapixels is nice for the poster-print and microstock-sales crowds, but what's most notable is the increase of the top ISO from 3,200 to 12,800.

That means Canon has done some serious work to cut down on the noise levels inside the sensor, which bodes well for image quality not just at the new extremes but also at more ordinary sensitivity settings. ISO 3,200, for example, is now part of the ordinary range, not the extended range that must be manually enabled before it's available. Canon hit some sweet spots in sensor design, for example with its earlier 20D and the full-frame 5D, and the 50D holds the potential of being another model that balances megapixels with low noise and accurate color.

Canon attributes the advance to "newly designed gapless microlenses over each pixel to reduce noise." Microlenses gather light for the light-sensitive part of the image sensor, compensating for surface area occupied by other electronics. Gapless microlenses presumably stretch across the entire pixel width. Perhaps this technology will also help out whatever model will succeed Canon's 5D, my other obvious upgrade path but one that likely would require spending twice the price for the camera body and that would require me to shell out another few hundred dollars for a new wide-angle lens to support the full-frame sensor size.

Fending off Nikon
Higher sensitivity is important for Canon. It's been losing market share to Nikon, which has pushed high sensitivity as an advantage, though with lower megapixel counts. The full-frame sensors on Nikon's D3 and D700 can reach ISO 25,600, though reaching that level was made easier through a sensor design that emphasizes a smaller number of larger pixels.

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"Hitchhiker"

"The colours of Rodopa."

via http://2photo.ru/2008/04/16/pobediteli_black_amp_white_spider_awards_2007_sredi_professionalov.html

"no description"

"no description"