Around the World in 80 Days goes QR

Ha... love this so much. It's just so damn quirky, clunky, mixed up and obvious that it gives some real 'ye olde world' charm to digital. Even down to the awesome 'snuggiee-esque' infomercial. I'm ordering one right now. Thanks Mr McCrudden

KEEP THE NET FREE!!!!!

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

New York Times links up with LinkedIn

Thanks Wendy for sharing this post from the guardian. A big move into site convergence based on open-id concepts. Great stuff and a pointer for how publishers should be embracing the social web. I'm sure keeping it as a 'must-activate' function has allayed any data security fears.

• Jemima Kiss
• guardian.co.uk,

The New York Times will be able to serve targeted web stories to business and technology users following a deal with social networking site LinkedIn.

Aiming to strengthen its audience among the business community, NYTimes.com will show five relevant headlines in a right-hand box, with stories selected based on the industry, location, role, company and gender of the user's LinkedIn profile.

A LinkedIn button next to stories will invite users to share and discuss news with contacts on their LinkedIn network.

Users need to activate their LinkedIn account within NYTimes.com to launch the service.

NYTimes.com's objective is to increase the volume of traffic from business executives and the entrepreneurial community, which is a valuable audience for advertisers.

"This relationship expands NYTimes.com's targeting capability and creates a powerful incentive for advertisers to leverage LinkedIn's and NYTimes.com's combined reach of the business community," said Denise Warren, the senior vice-president and chief advertising officer for the New York Times Media Group.

"Advertisers are constantly looking for context, content and quality brands and this approach delivers just that."

LinkedIn claims that 25 million professional people have registered with the site since it launched in May 2003, while measurement firm Nielsen Online estimated that NYTimes.com scored 17.7 million unique users during June.

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

ReCaptcha: Reusing your 'wasted' time online

Cheers Mark @ Little Lucifer for sharing this>

July 16, 2008 4:00 AM PDT || Posted by Stefanie Olsen 6 comments

ZURICH, Switzerland--Chances are that if you've solved one of those distorted-word tests to secure an account with Facebook, Craigslist, or Ticketmaster, you've helped The New York Times inch a little closer to digitizing its entire print newspaper archive from 1851 to 1980.

How have you unwittingly helped the Gray Lady by wasting 10 seconds on a computer-generated word challenge? It's thanks to a year-old initiative called ReCaptcha, a play on the antispam tests known as Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), a test that people can pass, but machines cannot.

People typically fill out Captchas so Web sites can verify that a human, rather than a spam bot, is behind the request for a new e-mail address, log-in, or membership. But with ReCaptchas, which are double-word tests, humans are also helping machines better recognize faded-ink or blurry words that have been digitally scanned from old newspapers or books--text that's difficult for a computer to recognize optically. That way, people will eventually be able to sift through print archives with a more intelligent search engine.

Luis von Ahn, assistant professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, created ReCaptcha.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)

In the last year, as many as 600 million people have completed at least one ReCaptcha on sites such as Twitter, LastFM, and Ticketmaster, which use the technology for free, according to ReCaptcha creator and Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor Luis von Ahn.

With all those helping hands, von Ahn expects that The New York Times digitization project will be finished by the end of 2009, at the latest. (About five months ago, The New York Times paid an undisclosed sum to von Ahn's CMU team to complete its project.)

"We're reusing wasted human cycles," von Ahn, 28, said while speaking at a robotics conference here recently.

The venture involves putting millions of eyes on words printed in roughly 47,000 newspapers, with various counts of pages. For example, before the turn of the century, The New York Times was about one-fourth the breadth it is today. It's doubled in size about every 50 years or so since its beginning in the 1850s, when it was published every day except Sunday. (The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.)

Von Ahn's team is also helping the Internet Archive with the digitization of books through ReCaptcha, but it's doing that project gratis.

In fact, von Ahn, a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (or "genius award") in 2006 for his work as a computer scientist, only wants to aid projects that work for the good of humanity. His main work-related guilt, it seems, is that he helped invent Captchas in the first place (in 2000, so that Yahoo could fend off spammers). And that's only because he's factored how much time people have wasted on the four- to six-character tests. He's estimated that people type 200 million Captchas every day around the world, or a collective estimate of 500,000 man hours (at 10 seconds per puzzle).

But that lost time is nothing compared with the amount spent on games--another key focus for von Ahn. By the time the average American has turned 21, researchers estimate that he or she has spent about 10,000 hours playing video games--that's the equivalent of holding down a full-time job for five years. In 2003, players collectively spent 9 billion human hours on the game Solitaire. In contrast, building the Empire State Building took only 7 million human hours, or the equivalent of a collective 6.8 Solitaire hours.

A slide from von Ahn compares the time people spend on games vs. the time spent constructing major physical structures.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)

Such thoughts spurred von Ahn to create Games with a Purpose, or Gwap.com, a project designed to harness people's time having fun to solve bigger computational problems. (The field is known as human computation.) He developed the first of those games, the ESP Game, several years ago to tackle image labeling to improve Web search. The game asks two randomly paired people (on different computers) to describe the same image without any way to communicate. Within a time limit, the players must predict the same word for an image before moving onto another image.

It's infectious. As many as 200,000 players have provided 50 million labels for images since the game was created, according to von Ahn. Some people play as much as 20 hours a week.

Normally, companies like Google or Yahoo would need to hire people to label the millions of images in their archives. But with only 5,000 people playing the ESP Game simultaneously, they could label all of Google's image archive within two months, he said. That must be why Google licensed the ESP Game from von Ahn and Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 to label its images.

Even though it would seem Google has completed its image labeling, it's really a never-ending project because of a constant influx of photos and people's changing perceptions.

For example, people's perceptions of celebrities like Britney Spears or political figures like George Bush morph over time. Just two years ago, labels for Britney Spears were as simple as "Britney" and "hot." But recently, they turned into "crazy," "shaved head," and "rehab." President Bush's tags have gone from "George" and "President," to "dumb" and "yuck."

Thanks in part to the success of the ESP Game, von Ahn and a team of 10 computer scientists at CMU have launched four new games to solve different artificial-intelligence problems. Gwap.com, introduced in May, is the umbrella site for all five games, which include the new Verbosity, Tag a Tune, Squigl, and Matchin. Since May, the site has attracted about 85,000 registered users.

Tag a Tune, for example, is much like the ESP Game, but for audio recordings. A player must figure out if he or she is listening to the same song as an opposing player by watching their descriptive guesses and making guesses of their own.

There's a 50 percent chance players are listening to the same song. That game would help describe the contents of audio recordings in a way that someone could eventually ask a search engine for a "happy song about rainy days," rather than using the exact song title. Squigl asks players to outline an object they see in a photo--a task meant to eventually further the field of computer vision.

Next up: von Ahn plans within the next three months to introduce a game that deals with labeling video clips. That way, the system would improve search over video archives. It currently doesn't have any other licensors for its games, although it's easy to see a host of interested parties for audio, music, and video labels.

In a bit of procrastination of his own, von Ahn had been thinking about how not to waste time with games, and then Captchas, at least two years before he acted on a project to recoup energy spent on word tests. He's certainly seen some weird things since he helped get them started on Yahoo in 2000.

A slide from von Ahn illustrates the estimated time an average person spends on various activities. If you calculate the time an average American has spent solving Captchas, it might work out to be 1.9 seconds per day, according to von Ahn.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)

HotorNot.com, for example, has shown prospective account holders images of nine women and they must pick from the selection which three are "hot." Von Ahn said that through this exercise, a man met his wife on the site.

Spammers have also created so-called Captcha sweatshops to get around the tests. He said that they will hire people for an hourly wage of $2.50 and the average worker will solve about six word puzzles per minute. Even though Captcha sweatshops generate new jobs, von Ahn said he would rather put people's time to better use.

"I started thinking about how you could direct people's efforts in a way that's good for humanity," he said.

Last year, von Ahn introduced the ReCaptcha free antispam system with a double-word test (six to eight characters each), which, it turns out, doesn't take people any longer than solving many single-word tests that mix characters, he said. With two words, the system can develop a confidence rating for the human by serving up one word the computer doesn't know, with another it does know.

Digitizing books or old newsprint is a worthy chore for von Ahn. Typically, if you print something, then scan it, the computer's optical character recognition would be able to "see" the text with 100 percent accuracy. But for older works, with faded ink or warped letters, OCR will not detect the words with accuracy. Recaptcha, which literally shows words scanned from old New York Times newsprint or books in the queue for the Internet Archive, uses people's intelligence in this process.

From blogs like Wordpress and sites like Craigslist, Recaptcha is digitizing between 15 million and 16 million words a day. Sometimes, however, the automated system generates offbeat combinations of words, such as "bad" and "Christians," or "damn" and "liberal."

As for clients other than The New York Times? Von Ahn said he's been approached by at least one bank that wanted to digitize checks, but he turned that offer down.

"We want to do stuff with the preservation of important material," he said.

Penguin's ARG

Thanks Melissa!

Penguin publishing dips their toe in Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). Every week a story is published with clues leading to the seventh story location
http://wetellstories.co.uk/

Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular

TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.

Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.

“My mother didn’t even know that I was writing a novel,” said Rin, who, like many cellphone novelists, goes by only one name. “So at first when I told her, well, I’m coming out with a novel, she was like, what? She didn’t believe it until it came out and appeared in bookstores.”

The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

“Their cellphone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called ‘packet death,’ and you wouldn’t hear from them for a while,” said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing, a leader in republishing cellphone novels.

The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.

The writers are not paid for their work online, no many how many millions of times it is viewed. The payoff, if any, comes when the novels are reproduced and sold as traditional books. Readers have free access to the Web sites that carry the novels, or pay at most $1 to $2 a month, but the sites make most of their money from advertising.

Critics say the novels owe a lot to a genre devoured by the young: comic books. In cellphone novels, characters tend to be undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist of dialogue.

“Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,’ ” Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country.”

“In cellphone novels, you don’t need that,” said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cellphone novels at the urging of her publisher. “If you limit it to a certain place, readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.”

Written in the first person, many cellphone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart, spiritual descendants, perhaps, of Shikibu Murasaki, the 11th-century royal lady-in-waiting who wrote “The Tale of Genji.”

“Love Sky,” a debut novel by a young woman named Mika, was read by 20 million people on cellphones or on computers, according to Maho no i-rando, where it was first uploaded. A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease — the genre’s sine qua non — the novel nevertheless captured the young generation’s attitude, its verbal tics and the cellphone’s omnipresence. Republished in book form, it became the No. 1 selling novel last year and was made into a movie.

Given the cellphone novels’ domination of the mainstream, critics no longer dismiss them, though some say they should be classified with comic books or popular music.

Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

As the genre’s popularity leads more people to write cellphone novels, though, an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand?

“When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone,” said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. “Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.”

Still, others say the genre is not defined by the writing tool.

Ms. Naito, the novelist, says she writes on a computer and sends the text to her phone, with which she rearranges her work. Unlike the first-time cellphone novelists in their teens or early 20s, she says she is more comfortable writing on a computer.

But at least one member of the cellphone generation has made the switch to computers. A year ago, one of Starts Publishing’s young stars, Chaco, gave up her phone even though she could compose much faster with it by tapping with her thumb.

“Because of writing on the cellphone, her nail had cut into the flesh and became bloodied,” said Mr. Matsushima of Starts.

“Since she’s switched to a computer,” he added, “her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.”

Related links:

Book Uploading Site of Starts Publishing

Orion, a Cell Phone Novel Site for Goma Books

The Novel, "If You"

Mika’s blog

NYTimes.Com Aggregates Third-Party Content, Marks Transformation of Media

Posted: 01 Nov 2007 09:11 PM CDT

NYTimes.com wasn’t the first traditional media brand to aggregate third-party content — and it certainly won’t be the last. But the New York Times, once considered the national newspaper of record, represented one of the last bastions of the traditional media approach to content, i.e. we produce it ALL ourselves.

And if anyone makes a credible run at doing it all by themselves, it’s the Times, which generates a prodigious volume of the highest quality content every day.

But in a networked media world, where news consumers have access to EVERY piece of content produced by EVERY news outlet large and small (and with high quality news outlets proliferating on the web), media is undergoing a seismic shift — it’s no longer strictly about producing and distributing your OWN content.

Media is now about distributing the BEST content — and Times has embraced this new reality with the launch of its new technology section, which incorporates third-party headlines surfaced by Blogrunner (which the Times acquired very quietly last year — and which uses a TechMeme-like algorithm based on link patterns) and then selected with input from Times editors.

Microsoft’s Green News Site Launches

Microsoft has launched MSN Green, an environmental news site aimed at consumers.

MSNBC, The Daily Green, Conservation International, Environmental Defense, Grist, TreeHugger and StopGlobalWarming are supporting partners, writes Environmental Leader.

MSN says that the success of Live Earth was part of the impetus for the site. Liveearth.msn.com generated more than 15 million streams the day of the concerts and surpassing the number of people who watched the event on TV.

Today’s news includes a story on the disappearing bees, one covering whether climate change is affecting the color of foliage, and another on how many trees are used to make baseball bats.

Yahoo launched a green site in May.