News Topic - YouTube

Two wheels
I've been spat on, sworn at and forced off the road - and that's just by pedestrians. Cars, buses and taxis have driven at me, cut me up, swerved into my path and knocked me to the ground. During five years of daily cycling in Glasgow I have become accustomed to "almost dying" on a regular basis. My efforts at retaliation are puny in comparison. I might roll my eyes and shake my head in the offender's direction. Once or twice I've mouthed an ineffectual "wanker". On another occasion, when a jeep driver took a fancy to driving into me three times within a 100m stretch of road, I made an official complaint at the police station across the road. But no action, direct or otherwise, seemed to change the way some drivers (and walkers) in Glasgow treat cyclists. Until recently, that is. For the past few weeks I have been wielding a shiny new weapon of defence: a helmet-mounted digital video camera. And I am not the only one. According to Action Cameras, one of the UK's leading sellers of such cameras, there has been a threefold increase in sales during the past year to cycling commuters. (During the summer, almost half of the average £10,000-a-week sales of video cameras - average price £200 - are to urban cyclists.) Sab Jhooti, managing director, says: "When we launched the company in 2006, we mostly sold cameras to people taking part in extreme sports. They are great for filming clips of mountain biking and snowboarding, which people then post on the web. But in the past year, the biggest growth has come from cycle commuters. Rather than filming for pleasure, they tell us they want to film their routes to work as a form of evidence against dangerous driving." It was "too many near-miss incidents" that led fellow Glasgow commuter David Brennan to attach one of the cameras to his cycling helmet. Brennan, a clinical scientist, regularly posts his commuter film clips on YouTube under the pseudonym Magnatom. Among his footage is evidence of a catalogue of dangers that face the ordinary city cyclist, including "brush-with-death" motoring incidents, inconsiderate and illegal driving, pedestrian misconduct, poor road surfacing - and even careless cycling. Brennan, 35, says: "Although the camera has not changed my commute to any great extent, it does make me feel safer and calmer. Now, instead of screaming in annoyance at motorists, I simply point at my camera. It's amazing how quickly they back off when they clock it." A video camera has also proved its worth for Winchester cyclist Paul McNeil after he was hit by a car. The 39-year-old, who posts on YouTube as "Tuneaftertune", suffered cuts, bruises and shoulder damage in an accident on the way to work. "Although there were witnesses, the footage made the claim much easier," he says. "I'm a member of CTC, so I contacted their solicitors after the accident and when they saw the film they were only to happy to pursue the claim." But both cyclists make the point that footage is not meant to taunt motorists. In fact, Brennan believes that his YouTube films could "ignite a campaign to re-educate all road users". I must confess to being a little disappointed not to have captured any major motoring incidents since I started using my camera, apart from a few car dodges and a couple of taxi swerves. Once, on a cycle/walk path, I came close to being knocked off my bike by something jumpy and yappy. But Lakeland terriers aren't much concerned by video gadgets. Perhaps the most noticeable difference has been in what hasn't happened. A bus driver waved me past instead of doing the usual sudden pull-out manoeuvre, possibly because he noticed my filming potential. I'm also sure that a silver sports car gave me a wider berth after I tilted my helmet camera towards the driver. Have I been witnessing a minor breakthrough in motoring/cycling etiquette? Or just experienced a few weeks of happy summer driving?Related StoriesSurprise in the post for illegal music downloadersIllegal downloaders to get warning letter in clampdown by government, ISPs and music industryDownloading music: what does the government's announcement mean for you?ABCe: Guardian.co.uk breaks 20m user barrierHarvey Rishikof: New Fisa law increases accountability for government surveillance
The Guardian  –  Jul 23, 2008 11:07 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

Early leak exposes DNS flaw details
Security researchers are rushing to patch a flaw in the domain name system (DNS) servers that direct internet traffic, after details of how it worked were revealed online where they could be exploited by hackers. The researchers had thought that their own agreement to allow a 29-day "blackout" period during which the software vulnerability - which may allow hackers to misdirect innocent surfers to fake sites, even though the address in their internet browser was correct - could be patched. The discoverer of the flaw, Dan Kaminsky of IOActive, found it several months ago and had asked other researchers to hold off on speculating about how it worked until he could distribute it to companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and the Internet Systems Consortium to let them develop patches. He said he would announce the details on August 6 at the Black Hat security conference. But Thomas Dullien, chief executive of Zynamics.com (who uses the online name Halvar Flake) seems to have reverse-engineered the details of the weakness without being told its specifics, and he then speculated on how it worked in a blog post. This prompted Matasano Security, another company which - unlike Dullien - had been briefed on the flaw to put up a blog post of its own confirming the details. That was quickly withdrawn on realising that Dullien's post was only speculation - but it was time enough for the post to be cached and copied widely. The attack uses a method called "DNS cache poisoning", which relies on the fact that DNS servers do not store the entire map of the internet (converting a domain name such as guardian.co.uk into a numerical "quad" such as 212.187.153.30). When a server does not have the quad conversion, it asks the next one along to do the lookup. By targeting a DNS server, hackers could poison its "store" of lookups and tell it to point users to fake sites. Such changes have been made accidentally in the past: in February, changes by Pakistan to DNS servers it operated made YouTube inaccessible worldwide. But an attack by hackers could be serious. Kaminsky has provided a "Check my DNS" button on his blog (doxpara.com) that will let people check whether the DNS they are using is vulnerable to the hack. In the latest post on his blog, Kaminsky accepts that the flaw has been revealed - giving it the headline "13>0", implying that having 13 days to fix the flaw is better than having none - and urges the people who will have to do the fixing to "patch. Today" and "stay late" as necessary. Quite how the bug is being fixed will probably remain secret - to defeat hackers.Related StoriesLocation technology finally finds its feetLetters and blogsAleks Krotoski, gamesblog: Capturing game data is the futureCold callers target O2 users with false Bluetooth security warningTouch takes hold, but it's no mouse-killer
The Guardian  –  Jul 23, 2008 11:04 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

Police: Teens Post Video of Crimes on Net
Teenagers apparently recorded themselves igniting a large firecracker attached to an aerosol can and breaking into a skateboard facility in Lawrence, then posting the footage on the YouTube, according to Shawnee police.
WIBW.com  –  Jul 23, 2008 10:52 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: Kansas: Topeka

Utah Man Who Left Toddler In Car During Movie Posted Wacky Internet Video
A man accused of leaving his 2-year-old son inside of a car during a late-night screening of the new Batman film posted a comical video on the Internet site YouTube,...
KUTV.com  –  Jul 23, 2008 9:20 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: Utah: Salt Lake City

Youtube Wife Hints: Ex-hubby Made Death Threats
The curtain has come down on her marriage, but YouTube yeller Tricia Walsh-Smith refuses to get off the stage. The daffy divorcee held a press conference yesterday, where her lawyer insinuated that ex-hubby Philip Smith and his lackeys at the...
New York Post  –  Jul 23, 2008 8:32 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: New York: New York

YouTube Divorcee 'Will Not Be Bullied' Despite Threats
The woman who trashed her Broadway mogul husband in a widely viewed YouTube video said Wednesday she "will not be bullied" despite threats on her life.
Fox News  –  Jul 23, 2008 8:07 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Top Stories

Trendspotting: Summer Grace Light Tour Spotlights Los Angeles, Heats Up on YouTube
Read full story for latest details.
PR Newswire  –  Jul 23, 2008 6:37 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Top Stories: Press Releases

The Coffee Fix: Can the $11,000 Clover Machine Save Starbucks?
It's 10 am on a Thursday, and the line at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco snakes out the door. Inside, an espresso machine hisses like an angry tomcat as customers order their cappuccinos. But the real action is taking place a few steps away, where a scruffy barista stands at a stainless steel contraption, introducing the coffee he's about to serve to his rapt audience. "The Honduran is sweet," he says, "with a refined acidity and an excellent finish." He lets one perfectly measured scoop of fresh grounds shimmy deep into the machine, then goes to work, twiddling knobs, pushing buttons, and whirling a whisk in a chamber at the top of the silver box.Forty-five seconds later, he sets down a single cup of custom-made coffee that's Jessica Alba hot, Bill Gates rich, and as unique as a snowflake. No foam. No caramel. No whip. Just beans and water — pushed through a cool little machine called the Clover — for a pricey $4 a pop.The Clover coffeemaker debuted in a handful of cafés in 2006 and was promptly hailed as the best thing to happen to coffee lovers since the car cup holder. With an $11,000 asking price, the Clover has become a fetish object among the coffee-obsessed. Long queues signal its arrival in new cities, and self-described "Cloveristas" post videos on YouTube demonstrating the machine's flashy brewing process. There are more photos on Flickr paying homage to this shiny gadget (700 and counting) than actual Clovers in existence (roughly 250 worldwide).Writer Mathew Honan tries out the Clover machine at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco.For more, visit video.wired.com.The Clover also wowed Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks. Last year, Schultz stumbled upon the machine in New York City when he had spotted a line of people standing outside a tiny joint called Café Grumpy. He tried a sample and declared it "the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted." In March 2008, Starbucks announced the acquisition of the Coffee Equipment Company — the Seattle-based startup that manufactures Clovers in a converted trolley shed. His hope is that the Clover will bolster Starbucks' bottom line.Chalk up some of the excitement — and the equipment's hefty price tag — to artisanal tech. A robotic hybrid of a French press and a Dirt Devil, the Clover is the first coffeemaker that lets the user program three key variables: dose, water temperature, and brew time. (Example: 37.5 grams of Brazilian Fazenda São João at 204 degrees for 43 seconds.) After the coffee steeps, a piston mechanism extracts the liquid from spent beans, resulting in a fresh cuppa in less than a minute. A filter platform pops a hockey puck of grounds out of the top, where it's easily wiped away. An Ethernet port connected to an online database is designed to let users save favorite recipes for specific beans. Made of stainless steel and copper, a single Clover typically takes several hours to assemble by hand. Fast, fancy, and idiot-proof? No surprise that Starbucks is all over the Clover — the company has been rolling them out since last summer. Half-caf nonfat toffee-nut latte lovers, get ready for a real cup of coffee.I'm a coffee achiever, as that old ad campaign goes. I own two French presses, a stainless steel Cuisinart grinder/drip, a retro De'Longhi espresso machine, an Italian Vev Vigano moka pot, and a Vietnamese drip that I purchased in old Hanoi for making ca phe sua nong. My San Francisco neighborhood has five coffee shops within a five-block radius: four mom-and-pop operations and a Peet's. But compared with David Latourell, CEC's 42-year-old resident coffee expert, I'm a Sanka-slurping rube.Latourell and I are standing in the middle of CEC's cupping room, a tasting area next to the company's small Seattle factory. The Clover is specifically designed to bring out the nuances of high-end coffees like Los Delirios, which comes from a Portland, Oregon, company called Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua. Actually, it's on a micro lot located at 13° 22'45.99"N x 86° 28'50.45"W, between 1,050 and 1,450 meters above sea level, according to a manila "origin" card that comes with each bag of beans. Underneath the farm's GPS coordinates are flavor descriptions that read in part, "violets and black cherry, baking chocolate, and chocolate covered raisins."Latourell hands me a cup of Los Delirios coffee made in the Clover. We both take slow, even sips. "I'm picking up a little chocolate," he says with a toss of his shoulder-length hair. I sip again, summoning every taste bud. I just taste — well, coffee. Delicious, sure, but coffee.Like wine and, more recently, chocolate, a quality coffee bean must reflect a certain terroir — the climate, soil composition, and elevation of its place of origin. At least in theory, this gives a bean its unique and desirable flavor. Whether or not your average caffeine fiend can tell a Guatemalan Maragogype bean from a Honduran Catuai is debatable, but terroir explains how Stumptown can sell bags of beans for $40 a pound (about 10 times the price of commercial-grade coffee) and cafés can charge from $3 to $7 for a single cup of joe. "For $7, you can get a bad glass of wine," says CEC cofounder Randy Hulett. "Or you can get one of the best cups of coffee in the world." Illustration: Jameson SimpsonClover, From the Grounds UpClover looks like just another countertop coffee machine. But peek under the hood and you'll find an innovative brewing system. Here's how it works: 1. A barista selects dose, water temperature, and steep time. 2. A piston pulls down the filter platform while freshly ground coffee is poured into the chamber. 3. Hot water flows into the chamber. 4. The barista briskly stirs the grounds with a whisk, and the water and beans steep for several seconds. 5.The piston rises, creating a vacuum that separates the brew from the grounds, then lowers, forcing the joe out of a nozzle below. 6. The piston rises to the surface again, pushing up a disc of grounds, which are squeegeed away.Then there's the top-shelf stuff. Stumptown sells beans from Nicaragua called Las Golondrinas for $80 a pound. On the international market, Esmeralda Special, a rare kind of Panamanian bean, can go for $130 a pound wholesale. And consider Kopi Luwak, also known as catshit coffee: It's an Indonesian bean that's eaten by a civet cat, then "harvested" from the animal's dung. (The bean's bitter flavor is apparently greatly improved by passing through a cat's digestive tract.) A single cup of Kopi Luwak at the Peter Jones espresso bar in London goes for $100, and a pound of the beans can cost as much as $600.If you're going to pay that much for beans, of course, you want to have the right machine. Back in the cupping room, Latourell fires up the Clover and goes to work on a second cup of Los Delirios: He measures out 46 grams of beans, grinds them, and then slides them into the recessed chamber on top. Next, he programs a new brew time and temperature, raising the heat from 205 degrees to 207 and increasing the brewing time from 45 seconds to 50. As the hot water rushes into the chamber from a topside nozzle, Latourell stirs the blend with a metal whisk, being careful not to break the stream, which would cool the water. "The temperature has a massive effect on the extraction of chemicals that affect flavor," he explains.I take a swig. Bang, there it is: chocolate. Scharffen Berger, eat your heart out! A few tweaks and I have a new beverage. And it's not just the chocolate flavor; the mouthfeel and acidity are completely different from the first cup. All Latourell did was adjust the brew time and temperature and add 6 grams of beans. Taste-testing it against the earlier brew, I wouldn't have guessed they were the same bean. I'm starting to become a Clover convert. Photo: RJ Shaughnessy Brewed coffee is awful.That's what Zander Nosler thought back in 2001, when he was developing a commercial coffeemaker for — of all places — Starbucks. The bespectacled, rail-thin product designer had previously spent 18 months at Ideo developing everything from sunglasses to medical supplies. As he tinkered with a revolutionary single-serve, push-button brewing machine targeted for the workplace, he realized that most makers were as stale as the coffee. "I got to see firsthand how coffee was better by the cup," Nosler says. "The coffee coming out of those glass office pots is wretched." (Starbucks later called the prototype the Interactive Cup.) When the project was finished, Nosler kept thinking about the single-brew concept. He soon decided he could do better, making a superior brewer that wasn't one-size-fits-all.By 2004, Nosler had cooked up a business plan. He recruited other Stanford alums, including Hulett, 34. Within a year, the team raised half a million dollars from friends and family and set up shop inside an old trolley shed a few minutes north of downtown Seattle. The Coffee Equipment Company was born.For months, the group reworked the design. They abandoned the office market in favor of cafés, ditched the grinder, and shrunk the countertop footprint. By spring 2005 they had the first Clover prototype. Code name: Chalupa. Made of particleboard, with its guts bolted crudely on the outside, it looked like Mr. Coffee designed by Dr. Frankenstein. But to roasters wanting a high-end single-serve option, it was gorgeous. CEC demo'd a final prototype that October at a local party and sold three units before they were even built. When Clover debuted at the Specialty Coffee Association of America event in 2006, Nosler was mobbed. "People saw us walking in and began chanting, 'Clo-ver, Clo-ver!'" he says, his eyes wide at the memory. To the little indie guys, Nosler was a god.While interest in CEC was percolating, Starbucks was crashing. Its share price had dipped from nearly $40 in 2006 to around $19 in January 2008. The company that brought macchiato to the masses had lost its way — and a chunk of its profit margin. Was Starbucks in the market of selling coffee drinks or fancy milk shakes? Cappuccinos or compact discs? Was it competing with Peet's or Mickey D's? After just three years, CEO Jim Donald was on his way out, and Schultz, Starbucks' founder, retook the helm. On Valentine's Day 2007, Schultz wrote an internal memo (later leaked to the press) lamenting the state of the company. "I'm not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee," the missive read. "You certainly can't get the message from being in our stores ... At a minimum [we] should support the foundation of our coffee heritage."Schultz announced that Starbucks would return to its roots. No more vacuum-sealed bags of beans or breakfast sandwiches (the smell of bacon and eggs overwhelmed the coffee aroma). Starbucks would once again grind beans in the store. It would introduce new blends and better espresso machines. But most important: It was going to road-test a little machine that Schultz had discovered a few months before on a walk through New York's Chelsea district. "In my 25 years at Starbucks, the Clover machine unquestionably delivers the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted," Schultz later gushed to his stockholders. "And we want to share this experience with our customers."Starting in summer 2007, Starbucks discreetly purchased and installed a few Clovers at stores in Seattle and Boston. It sold a cup of Clover-made coffee for as much as $3.05, about a dollar more than Starbucks' regular brew. The early reviews were glowing. As one Yelper put it, "If you're a coffee snob who normally scorns Sbucks and its burnt offerings, you might try the Clover pressed coffee at this location and be pleasantly surprised."After roughly six months of successful trials, Schultz proposed buying Clover's maker, the Coffee Equipment Company. "We thought Starbucks wanted to take us out on a few dates," Nosler says of the deal. "But they wanted to go steady." Michelle Gass, a senior VP of global strategy for Starbucks, is slightly less romantic: "Frankly, we just don't want anyone else to have it."Starbucks is willing to share custody, however, of the 250 machines already out there, plus maintain and repair them, but it won't sell any more Clovers to independent cafés. The company has already pulled the plug on CloverNet, the online database that tracks sales, maintenance, and brewing preferences for Clover owners.Clover's early adopters are outraged to see their coffee machine become part of the Coffee Machine. "We made the decision to purchase the Clover to support this small independent manufacturer," says Stumptown owner Duane Sorenson, who bought the first Clover in the US. "When we found out that CEC was sold to Starbucks, we made the decision to sell our Clovers."Nosler shrugs off the criticism: "Everyone has their favorite little band that they've watched change as it signs with bigger labels," he says. "But I can defend to anyone that selling to Starbucks was absolutely the right thing for us to do. Starbucks has a larger market than all the independent roasters and specialty shops combined. I'm a product designer first, a coffee guy second. I love coffee; I'm passionate about it, but I want to make products, plural. Having a gigantically hungry customer is appealing on a lot of levels. It was the best of all possible paths for us — and the coffee industry as well."By the end of 2008, there will 80 machines installed in upscale urban markets across the country. Next year, Starbucks plans to remodel those stores with the Clover as their centerpiece. "Other than espresso, there's been no innovation in brewed coffee to speak of," Schultz says. "Now we're driving new traffic because of the Clover." Then there's that other counter where the Clover is destined to end up — the one in your kitchen. "The Clover is a commercial machine," he says, "but there's potential to create more consumer-based opportunities, specifically at home." Today, you buy a $10 bag of Starbucks French Roast to take home. Soon, you might buy a $40 bag and use your very own Clover to brew it. Photo: RJ Shaughnessy Coffee snobs are skeptical. "Clover will differentiate them from the Dunkin' Donuts, the McDonald's," says Tony Konecny, an industry consultant who runs the coffee blog Tonx.org and was one of the first to see a Clover prototype. "But it comes down to the coffee." The machine is only as good as the beans you put in it. Which is a problem for Starbucks, a chain that purchases coffee in mass quantities and can't deliver fresh bags of beans as quickly as the indie cafés. Then there's quality control: "By the time the customer experiences it, the beans have been blended and have been sitting in a bag for six weeks. Anything special about the coffee is lost."A few days after my cupping room challenge, I'm standing in line at a hilltop Starbucks in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood — one of Clover's beta sites. I do a taste test: a cup of Clover coffee versus brewed coffee. A young barista tells me they're out of the first two specialty coffees I request and suggests instead Starbucks' everyday blend, called Pike Place. During brewing, the barista stirs the grounds into the Clover with a clunky rubber spatula — not a metal whisk — and pours the concoction into a crummy paper cup. I smell, I sip, I inhale. I can't tell which cup of coffee is which — and neither is anything special. Is it the beans? My palate? After a few minutes, I finally pick it out: This coffee tastes a little bit like hype.Mathew Honan (mhonan@gmail.com) offers tips on Twittering in our How To: Self Promote package.
Wired News  –  Jul 23, 2008 6:00 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

Google Debuts Rival for Wikipedia, Written by Experts
Udi Manber loves cartoons. Not animations, but the single-panel graphics that appear in magazines like The New Yorker. He studies the history of the field, has covered the walls of his house with framed originals, and has edited a book of cartoons about Google, where he works as the head of search engineering. "Udi's not just a fan, he's a connoisseur," says Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker. When not thinking about cartoons, Manber spends endless time thinking about how search can be improved. One big reason many searches don't succeed, he believes, is that despite the 20 billion or so Web pages in Google's indexes -- including the 2 million items in Wikipedia -- the information simply isn't there.For instance, what if you wanted to learn all about Peter Arno, a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist who died in 1968? You wouldn't get lucky. The items appearing in the first page of results give only the barest information on Arno's life and work. Of course, it's not just information about cartoonists that's missing -- according to Manber there are thousands of black holes when it comes to things searchers want to know. What people need, Manber concluded about a year-and-a-half ago, is the information that would come "when an expert who knows this topic would tell you, if they had 15 minutes to explain." So Manber began what he refers to as his pet project -- an effort to generate exactly those kind of answers in the top search results. The product, announced Wednesday, is called Knol. "It's a nice, very simple word to remember, and it's part of knowledge," says Manber.Google hopes that Manber's project will give experts who know their stuff a platform to share it with everyone else. Google is especially keen on seeding this information internationally, in languages where the online corpus is sparse. From the Knol team's loft at Google headquarters, software engineer Mohsin Ahmed works out bugs in front of a panel of monitors at Googleplex. With $20 Ahmed created a simple red, yellow and green light bug detector that glows green above his head.Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com Here's how Knol works. Experts in a given subject log into a Google account and use the Knol software to post an item, also known as a knol. In some senses, the process is like producing a blog post -- but in this case it's not something written off the cuff but carefully crafted to coherently explain a single subject. One key attribute: Knols are meant to be signed with the author's actual name. With permission, Google will actually verify the writer's identity, either by credit card or phone. "The process will take 20 seconds with credit cards," says Knol product manager Cedric Dupont. Phone checks will take a minute or so. This vetting, Manber hopes, will give knols accountability and, in the case of high-status authors, the benefit of a solid reputation. The format and tone are up to the author: Google won't intervene if your knol on F. Scott Fitzgerald opines that The Great Gatsby was really a dud. And it will certainly help if the knol delivers the goods in a pithy, captivating style. (Google won't, however, tolerate knols that violate copyright or include porn.) Google is attempting to establish a model for a standard item, and has seeded the "Knolosphere" with a few hundred entries appearing on launch, largely in the field of health and medicine. Working with Google on this is Robert M. Wachter, a professor of medicine at the University of California, who also sits on Google's health advisory council.Just like blogs, knols can include images, video and links. As a special bonus, The New Yorker will allow knol authors to include, free of charge, a single cartoon from the publication's 20,000-image archive to illuminate the subject. (Guess which Googler was behind that deal.) Knols are treated pretty much like any web page -- found by following links, but readers will encounter most through search results from Google or other search engines. Google says that knols will get no special favors when its algorithms choose results, but clearly expects the best efforts to rocket towards the top of search results. Maybe even ahead of the ubiquitous Wikipedia items."A high-quality knol will rise up not just on Google but all the search engines," says Michael McNally, the project's technical lead. Knol software engineer Ben McMahan concentrates on "firefighting last-minute bugs."Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com There's no limit on how many people can write knols on the same subjects, but presumably the inferior ones will be stalled in the back results pages while searchers encounter the best ones immediately. Why would an expert on a subject take the time to write a knol? One reason would be an altruistic impulse to share wisdom with the world. There's also the ego juice that might come with being the first authority one encounters in a search for absinthe or Daryl Lamonica. By default, knols use a Creative Commons copyright license, which allows copying and remixing. If they wish, authors can change the settings to register traditional copyright protection.In addition, there's money involved. If authors OK it, Google will compensate them with revenue from advertisements served by the company's AdSense program. If someone writes a top-ranked knol on a subject that's matched with high-value clicks from Google ads (diseases, travel destinations, personal finance), the payout could be thousands of dollars. (Purists can keep the ads off.) But Manber is emphatic that his project is not about the bucks. "If Knol doesn't improve search but generates some revenues, that'll be a failure for me," he says. Many people, however, will find it puzzling that Google thinks it necessary to create a new platform for people to share information. Why bother, when Wikipedia will give you answers whether you're wondering about George M. Dallas (James Polk's vice-president) or the 13th Floor Elevators (an Austin psychedelic rock band formed in late 1965)?One person asking that question is Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who learned about Knol a few months ago, when Google posted a blog teaser about the project. "What is the added value?" Wales asks. "People already can put up web pages somewhere on the internet, put some ads on it if they want to get revenue or not put ads if they don't want the revenue." Wales clearly thinks that his brainchild will satisfy most searchers. "If I type in Thomas Jefferson, there's a pretty good chance that the Wikipedia entry is more or less exactly what I'm looking for," he says. Google says it isn't trying to compete with Wikipedia, but providing an alternative. "I'm not suggesting one is better than the other, but different," says Manber. And what would the difference be? "One article is written by one person, and it's one person's opinion," says Manber. "You know who that person is and where they're coming from." From the team's loft, Xiangtian Dai makes sure that Knol runs uniformly on different web browsers.Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com During one of my interviews with Manber I asked him to compare the first commissioned knol, about insomnia, with a Wikipedia item. The knol was written by Manber's wife, Rachel, who is an associate professor at Stanford University's Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Sleep Center. Though Rachel Manber's item is a more coherent and thorough treatment of the subject than Wikipedia's, in some respects it's similar to the crowdsourced entry: a general definition followed by a discussion of causes and treatments. But the top of the Wikipedia page on insomnia displays this caveat: "This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject." Touché.By the way, Google isn't rejecting the wisdom of the crowd. Once an author creates a knol, the general public can improve it. People can suggest corrections, edits and amendments to the content -- a technique Google calls "a moderated edit."Readers can also leave comments alongside the content. While the author is the arbiter of the item itself, and can reject suggestions, he or she can't delete the comments. Users can also rate knols on a five-star scale."I'm sure there will be knol spam," says Dupont, who says that Google will use its experience fighting spam in Blogger and other products to minimize it."If Google is able to pull it off, bring expert knowledge to the masses, that's absolutely wonderful," says Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, the company best known for providing trusted expert information in an encyclopedia format. It's not Google that worries him, but Wikipedia, and he sounds like he'd like some help fending off Britannica's crowdsourced rival. "It's not the presence of Wikipedia that's a problem, it's the omnipresence of Wikipedia," he says. In fact, he says, from what he hears about Knol, "it's very similar to things we're thinking and retooling Britannica to do." He hints that the company might be changing from its subscription model to a scheme where much of its content would be free to users -- and show up in search engines. "If you're charging for content, you're behind the firewall. And if you're behind the firewall people don't call on you first," he says. As part of this process Britannica now encourages anyone to link to its items. Those following the link can read the full article free. Britannica also posts a daily info-nugget on Twitter. But Cauz does imply that Google is stepping out of its sweet spot by generating content. "The issue here is that Google will become a publisher and will have moral liability and moral obligation for something that happens under its own brand -- and that is something that Google has never done," he says.Google sees it differently, viewing Knol as a common-carrier platform like Blogger or YouTube. Knol pages won't even carry a Google logo. "We are not publishers," says Manber. "We do not want to be editors. We do not want to have influence over what is written." He can't say it enough: It's about search. "There are millions of people with something in their head that they're not writing down," he says. "If I can get some of them to write it down, I'm helping everybody." If Google's plan works, future searchers will get higher-quality results from searches of subjects commonplace and obscure -- even Peter Arno. In fact, a knol has already been written about The New Yorker cartoonist. If its author posts it -- he hasn't pulled the trigger yet -- Google won't have to work hard to verify the expert who worked for weeks to pen that item. It's Udi Manber. Most of the Knol team takes a moment from working out last minute bugs to pose for a group shot at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com ---Disclosure: Wired.com is owned by Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker.
Wired News  –  Jul 23, 2008 2:00 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
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Twitter searches for the next step
On his Blogger.com profile page, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams describes himself as "a farm boy from Nebraska, who's been very lucky in business and life". That luck seemed to be running out in recent months, when Twitter - the microblogging and messaging service created by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Williams himself - struggled to cope with massive growth. Instead of their Tweets, users were frequently seeing the "fail whale": a cute cartoon whale being lifted into the sky by a flock of birds. It was Twitter's way of saying: "Sorry, we're suffering a bit of downtime." But it became an emblem of the site's inability to cope. Things are better now. The outages are fewer and further between than they were. And the company has just acquired Summize, the third-party startup that created a better Twitter search. Whale of a time During the bad spell, when the fail whale popped up almost every other day and became an internet meme in its own right, the criticism thrown at Twitter the company, and at Williams the person, was very fierce indeed. What was it like to be working at Twitter through all that? Looking back at those months - most of the first half of 2008 - Williams and Dorsey are thoughtful, considerate of the users, and don't sound at all bitter. "It didn't feel great, to be honest," sighs Dorsey. "We have extremely patient and forgiving users, which has been a big help. But we are all users of the service ourselves, so are all our friends and families. We are all feeling the pain and the frustration. It creates a lot of pressure on everyone here. It's not the healthiest way to exist, to be in crisis mode all the time." Williams, too, is always thinking of the users. Even the most critical ones. He likes to see things from their point of view. "The level of criticism has been very intense at times," he says. "You try to remember the reasons for that. It's a cliché, I know, but people wouldn't be so critical if they didn't care. And that's reassuring, in a way. "Twitter is a tool for one-to-many messaging. Some of the people it affects are people who like to make a lot of friends online. So it might amplify those users' frustrations more than other tools." In the past two or three weeks, though, the outages have faded away. They still happen, yes, but less frequently and for much shorter periods of time. The Twitter developers, a small team of 12 prior to the Summize purchase, have been at work messing with Twitter's insides. Dorsey admits it's not over yet. Cumulative effects "We haven't solved all the problems, we still have a lot of work to do," he says. "But we did put some technology in place to track the causes of the outages, and some of that is paying off right now. We have a much better sense of how we need to fix things. Much of it consists of small changes that have a larger, cumulative effect on the system." The Summize acquisition (neither party will say how much money changed hands) means Twitter gets more than a search tool. It also gets a team of developers much admired by Williams and Dorsey - an injection of new blood and fresh ideas. Summize co-founder (and former System Architect for AOL) Greg Pass becomes Twitter's new director of engineering and operations. The rest of the Summize development team will be moving to San Francisco to work in the Twitter office. "We are sure that the guys behind Summize are world-class engineers," says Dorsey. "We went to meet them and got along really well. They built a good search tool, and we could see that they were great curators of that technology." Search matters, he adds. The Twitter plan always included it. But the Summize team built a better search first. "Search is a big part of the product. There's a lot of value for people in sharing stuff with their friends. Search lets people go deeper into what other people are doing; it means you can recognise the pulse." Those critics - fewer of them, now, but they're still around - were quick to say buying Summize was foolish. Why not invest in getting the core service stable, before going on a corporate shopping spree? Williams sounds slightly exasperated. "We have already seen criticisms like that, but they are too simplistic. These are two completely different things - service stability and investment in growth. And we had already implemented systems to reduce the outages, weeks ago, which have had a positive effect. "The Summize guys are great engineers and I'm sure they will help us improve stability, yes." But that wasn't the reason for the purchase. And Williams is looking much further ahead. "This is our first acquisition. We are going to let things settle down for a bit. We want to be discerning, to pace ourselves." He's confident that the fail whale is going to fade from view. Perhaps not immediately, but given time. Unlike many of the critical bloggers, Williams likes to think far beyond the next 24 hours. "We can scale further. It will be an ongoing process of optimising and iterating. Lots of little steps. Some big ones." Capital ideas Of course, that far future is dependent on another important factor: money. Twitter does not yet earn any (the company is "pre-revenue", as Williams puts it), and while it has plenty of venture capital investment in the bank (to pay for what Williams calls "the usual startup stuff: salaries, servers, rent"), there will need to be an income eventually. Again, unlike his critics, Williams sees no need to rush things. He's toying with many ideas for making money and is keen to adopt something that stems directly from the functionality Twitter provides, rather than simply slapping banner adverts on top of its web pages. Might Twitter start acting as a bank for small payments between users, for example? "We don't have any specific plans for a payment system, though that's interesting. But we definitely are striving for (and believe we can achieve) a built-in revenue model that is compatible with the open nature of Twitter and its ecosystem, rather than something tacked-on." Meanwhile Twitter is struggling with spammers, who, Stone notes on the blog, "follow" thousands, hoping for reciprocation. But Twitter's asymmetry (you choose who to follow) defeats spam. Elsewhere online, there's a fail whale fan club (failwhale.com). You can buy fail whale T-shirts. Now might be a good time to grab one, before the fail whale swims out of sight for good.Related StoriesSolar power from Saharan sun could provide Europe's electricity, says EUUS media: Wife's rant on YouTube falls foul of judgeJohn Sutherland on how Google's library project could transform researchCharlotte Higgins takes on the challenge of becoming a full-time bloggerVideo: British Motor Show goes green
The Guardian  –  Jul 23, 2008 12:06 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
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