Tuesday, December 14, 2004

 

A Suggestive Google

Why can't google just slow down? This is my second google posting today. They have introduced Google Suggest in their Google Labs area.

As you type in your search terms, it shows you variations on the terms and how many websites match the search terms. Very cool!

Folio Views Infobases searching software had this feature as well. I think the company has gone out of business, though.

 

SwarmStreaming

Justin Chapweske's blog introduced yesterday swarmstreaming. My earlier post described how BitTorrent doesn't swap files, it swarms them to your local drive. Swarmstreaming is the same concept only that the files are not downloaded to your local drive, but streamed (in a swarming way) to your 'player.' The content does not coherantly exist until your player plays it.

This really pushes the notion of what exactly is copyrighted? The bits? The string of bits? The metadata that orders the bits in the string? How many properly ordered bits in a row constitute copywrighted content? What if I only possess the content one double-byte at a time (each for 1/50th of a second) as it streams through my player?


 

Oh, to Google the Library!

Yahoo News has an AP story that Google is going to scan (and OCR) and index books from the Oxford University Library published before 1901. Harvard and Stanford libraries are also going to put some books into the hopper as well.

Now if we could just get Congress to shorten the period of copyright, not lengthen it.

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