sheltonlibrary.com

In the nine weeks or so since the debut of Spacewalk, we’ve been blown away by the level of interest, the contributions, and the excitement generated by the project…

commentary

Back in early 2007 Red Hat let slip that it was planning to release its Red Hat Network code as an open-source project. In June of 2008, Red Hat officially announced that Red Hat Network Satellite would be open sourced.

To achieve this more effectively, however, Red Hat needs to reach out to the commercial open-source ecosystem and evangelize the benefits of building on Project Spacewalk, rather than creating silo’d “Red Hat Network-esque” offerings. To date, Red Hat seems to have taken an “If we build it, they might come” approach to Spacewalk. It needs to be a bit more proactive.

I’ve suggested before that the company that owns the heart of open-source monetization would be sitting on a massive opportunity. Yes, there are alternative ways to monetize open source (e.g., Google’s advertising model), but for many years to come vendors will make money by distributing software, not merely advertising around that software.

As such, a community effort around a network service, such as Red Hat’s Project Spacewalk, is hugely important. It’s important because it provides Red Hat a way to corral the growing commercial open-source ecosystem.

spacewalk-list@redhat.com : currently has over 250 members…
spacewalk-devel-list@redhat.com: currently has about 120 members…
The first patch from inside Red Hat came within three days of the opening of the mailing list.
The first patch from the community came within eight days.

Last week, Red Hat posted an update on the project, now called Project Spacewalk.

If a friend sends you a clip from the service it will start and end at the exact timeline they select. When you’re prepping a clip yourself, you can also scrub to the spot you want and e-mail it to them without leaving the page.

(Credit:
VideoSurf)

Ideally this technology could be licensed elsewhere. Considering it can figure out who people are in both moving videos and still frames, having this on something like Facebook would mean your photos and videos would automatically be tagged. This would be especially cool for recognizing both your friends and others on the service that you might not necessarily know.

The service is currently in private beta but accepting sign-ups Wednesday.

VideoSurf's homepage.

To make all of that happen, entire episodes–in this case illegally hosted ones on YouTube–get crunched through VideoSurf’s servers. It’s an entirely automated process that scans videos faster than real-time, and does not require people to do the heavy lifting.

VideoSurf breaks down TV episodes, or any video for that matter, into character scenes.

At Wednesday morning’s TechCrunch50 demo of video search engine VideoSurf, CEO Lior Delgo showed off how the technology would be useful for finding a single moment from your favorite TV series. Delgo used HBO’s Entourage as an example, picking out a few lines of dialogue from a 30-minute episode.

What makes the technology special is that it picks out characters from these series and lets you see individual moments where they appear. The same thing happens when you’re viewing any episode through the service–it’ll pick out who it recognizes and put up a character list next to the clip.

(Credit:
Videosurf/CBS Interactive)

Update at 5 a.m. PDT Wed., May 14: Andreessen’s analysis of Google Friend Connect has been added.

Marc Andreessen sees a number of companies suffering from the same disease.

We will support Friend Connect in two ways:

Instead of using Ning or an alternative service to create a companion social network for a Web site, savvy users could roll their own with Friend Connect. It might not be as full featured as what Ning delivers today, but if Friend Connect gains traction, it will gain features and thousands of applications.

Friend Connect glues together some emerging Web standards to make it easy for any Web site to add social features. Andreessen is co-founder and chairman of Ning, which allows people to easily and freely create their own social networks. Ning’s platform currently hosts more than 260,000 social networks of varying sizes.

Ning announced support for Google’s OpenSocial APIs, and could support Friend Connect, which would allow users of Ning sites to connect with friends on other social networks.

Ning was founded in 2004 and has raised $104 million so far, including $60 million last month, giving the start-up a market value of about $500 million. Andreessen said he raised the large amount of money to support the accelerating growth of the company and to have the funding to survive what he called the “oncoming nuclear winter.” In addition to a skittish economy that could go nuclear, Andreessen now has to worry about Friend Connect slowing his growth.

In the following excerpt, Andreessen explains how Ning will support Google Friend Connect:

For Ning, Friend Connect is simply a new and better way to do the same thing with Open Social gadgets — in both directions: out and in.

Every network on Ning will of course be able to contain Open Social gadgets published out from other social networks on the Internet via Friend Connect. So, for example, a group of friends on MySpace who all enjoy cooking will be able to travel from MySpace to a cooking-specific social network on Ning, via any Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget published from MySpace into that Ning network. In short, people will be able to flow more easily from other social networks and walled gardens into Ning social networks without losing the social context from those other networks.

Every network on Ning will be able to be an Open Social origin social network — pushing out Open Social gadgets to anywhere else on the web that carry with them the social context and friends data from their origin Ning network. So, for example, the members of a backpacking social network on Ning can still interact as friends on any third-party backpacking web site, by publishing an Open Social gadget out from their Ning network onto that third-party web site. In short, people will be able to flow more easily from Ning to many other web sites without losing the social context of their Ning networks.

Andreessen is accurate in his categorization of Ning and Friend Connect. Ning is a finished product for end users, and Friend Connect is code that Web masters can apply to add a social dimension to their sites. It’s also a way for Google to extend its reach into the social Web without having a leading social network.

Andreessen is referring to the launch of Google’s Friend Connect, as reported by Betsy Schiffman of Wired.

“…I think a lot of companies have what I call ’strategitis.’ Instead of launching a product, which would apparently make too much sense, they come up with a ’strategy,’” he says. “There’s a strong temptation for companies that don’t have strong social networking franchises to roll out social networking ‘features’ instead of products, and in reality, consumers like to have products.”

Update: In a blog post published on May 14, titled “Friend Connect, Open Social, Ning, and the Web,” Andreessen offered his opinion of Friend Connect. He doesn’t address his strategy-vs.-product remarks quoted in the Wired story.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

They are complementary approaches, but Google’s strategy appears to rankle Andreessen, even though he said that he would “support anything that creates interactivity or feeds” in the social space.

Marc Andreessen

Campbell used her cell phone to send pictures and text messages to her sister in Florida, her brother-in-law in New Jersey, and her brother in Virginia.

Andrea Williams takes a picture of herself in Washington on Tuesday to send to her family.

Countless others also used their handheld devices to share the historical moment with loved ones.

WASHINGTON–Barack Obama was sworn in as president Tuesday in what many spectators viewed as the nation’s most interactive inauguration ceremony so far.

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

The inaugural balls this year have a new emphasis on interactivity as well.

New media received top billing at the pre-inaugural ball held Monday night by the news aggregation and commentary site Huffington Post. Even as stars like Ben Affleck, Dustin Hoffman, and Michael J. Fox milled around the lowly lit, sleekly designed Newseum in downtown Washington, they were overshadowed by a giant computer displaying text messages sent in from lesser-known guests at the party.

Regular citizens will also be able to contribute to the Official Barack Obama Inaugural Book by uploading their pictures to Photobucket.

“CNN airs,” says one post from a deli in Washington. “A small sitting room is packed with diners eating out of Styrofoam containers. Three limo drivers beside a salad bar talk rapidly in an eastern language.”

The Huffington Post pre-inaugural ball Monday night featured text messages from guests displayed on a giant computer.

As millions of people in Washington and around the globe watched a weekend of festivities, culminating with Tuesday’s ceremony, they gave their instant feedback online and through text messages and other means to family, friends, and anyone else listening. At the same time, event organizers were able to give spectators live updates about the state of affairs in the nation’s chilly, crowded capital.

Dawn Chandler from New York said she was sending text messages to her relatives throughout the ceremonies describing “how cold it was, how long we were waiting–it was worth the wait–and the speech.”

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

The Presidential Inaugural Committee’s Web site will host a live blog of the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball Tuesday night, which is open to Washington residents. The committee is encouraging people to host their own inaugural balls across the country and text in photos or video of their events, some of which will be aired on ABC’s broadcast coverage of the Washington inaugural balls.

Most people who watched the inauguration did it through traditional television broadcasts, a medium that hasn’t changed significantly in half a century. But it was also possible to tune in online; our sister site CBSNews.com, for instance, streamed the inauguration live over the Internet. And people learned about the inaugural action from pictures uploaded by friends, comments on Twitter and other social media, and direct text messages from event organizers.

The committee made use of more practical interactive features as well, offering text alerts for event scheduling updates, public transportation news, weather reports, and more.

“It allows us to share the experience with everybody live, as opposed to getting home and saying, ‘Guys, you should’ve been there, you should’ve seen it,’” she said.

“I think we’re more connected with the experience, the overall process from the primaries to today,” because of technology, said Ghajiibah Campbell, who came from Baltimore with her family to watch the inauguration. “It made you not only more connected, but willing to be connected–it wasn’t an inconvenience.”

The desire to share the experience led to more organized communications as well. Inauguration-watchers from Oregon to Massachusetts sent anonymous comments to Januarythe20th.com, describing the scene around them as the swearing-in took place. Participants of the “mass observation” sent comments to Januarythe20th either via e-mail or Twitter.

That’s why I’ve compiled this list of five television shows that I’d like to see added to Hulu.

The Sopranos

I’m certainly one of them. But after catching up on Battlestar Galactica and watching the same five episodes of The Office over and over again to memorize Dwight Schrute’s lines, I’m left wanting more.

Another huge HBO hit, The Sopranos is one of my favorite series and probably the show I’d most like to see on Hulu.

Hulu has quickly become one of the leaders in online video. Providing professional content from major networks and movie studios, the site has welcomed millions across the U.S. who want to watch streams of their favorite shows or movies online.

Putting Sportscenter on Hulu seems like the logical next step for the video streaming service. Except, of course, that Sportscenter is broadcast on ESPN, which is owned by ABC–a company that has yet to partner with Hulu. But that shouldn’t stop us from wanting the premier sports news show on television to make its way to Hulu.

Curb Your Enthusiasm creator and star, Larry David, co-created Seinfeld with Jerry Seinfeld. And although this show doesn’t quite live up to the popularity Jerry’s show did, it’s easily one of the funniest shows on television and one that I would watch every day if it was available on Hulu.

The Wonders Years is easily one of my favorite shows of all time. Following the formative years of Kevin Arnold, the show’s viewers were able to relive teenage years that were rife with uncertainty, misunderstanding, puppy love, and a strong desire for whatever the future might hold. Its writing was superb, its acting even better. The Wonder Years was, to both children and adults alike, a tale of life. I’d like nothing more than to be able to immerse myself in that world just one more time on Hulu. And I’m willing to bet its cult following is right there with me.

Am I alone in thinking that The Wonder Years was one of the best television shows of the past 15 years? I thought it was poignant, funny, and most importantly, real. Yet I can’t find it anywhere on DVD and as far as I know, it might never be released due to contract disputes. But that shouldn’t stop it from coming to Hulu.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Sportscenter

What can be said about Seinfeld that hasn’t already been discussed by its millions of fans and countless pundits? Seinfeld is, in my opinion, the funniest sitcom ever created and its cast of characters was second to none.

Seinfeld

Sportscenter is the single source for daily sports highlights and with so many rebroadcasts each day, it’s conceivable that you’ll see the same show three or four times in just a few hours and never tire of it. That’s the kind of viewer Hulu needs and I don’t know of any other show besides Sportscenter that could provide it.

Curb takes you through the trials and tribulations of being Larry David. He’s a rude, abrasive person who has little respect for anyone or anything. But it doesn’t matter–his total disregard for people’s feelings and his penchant for arguments makes the show a winner. Adding it to Hulu makes perfect sense. It’s an HBO show–a network that Hulu currently doesn’t partner with (but should)–and its cult following could help the site capture an even larger audience. I don’t see any downside.

The Wonder Years

The Sopranos follows the life of mobster, Tony Soprano, but it doesn’t inundate the viewer with scenes of mob violence, though there is quite a bit of that. Instead, The Sopranos uses Tony’s family and psychology as the backbone of the story and employs the Mafia angle to provide color and drama as needed. Suffice it to say that The Sopranos is more about sociology and human interaction than the Mob. But one aspect of the show that probably keeps Hulu away is the profanity and sexual content–it’s everywhere. Look for age verification if it ever gets to Hulu.

A show about nothing, it took some time for Seinfeld to captivate audiences. But when it did, they were taken by off-the-wall stunts, strange characters (George Costanza was based on Larry David), and hilarious story lines. Perhaps that’s why I simply don’t understand why NBC, one of the main companies backing Hulu, doesn’t feature one of its most popular sitcoms of all time on its own online video service. Maybe it’s contractual or maybe NBC suits don’t want to offer it for free if they think they can incur more revenue on DVD sales, but bringing Seinfeld to Hulu would, in my mind, make the video site a more compelling service.

The combination presents Google’s view of a particular property from the road and lets users virtually pivot around to see the surrounding area. It works in the 40 cities where Google has supplied imagery for its Street View service.

Trulia builds a Google Street View into its real estate search results in areas where it's available, letting people check the neighborhood of a property for sale.

It’s nothing that couldn’t have been done manually before by typing an address into a separate window with the Google view, or likely even with an on-page mashup, but having the curbside vantage readily available is certainly handy, and Google worked with Trulia to integrate the feature, the search giant said.

(Credit:
Trulia)

Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has incorporated Google Maps Street View into its Web pages, the company said Wednesday.

He also expects more people to jump onboard as the platform expands to include
Mac users, which should be happening in the next few weeks–right around the time the long-awaited auto-archiving feature makes its way into users hands. “We’re close to having it ready,” Grillo said “and RSS is going to make it far more useful than we originally intended.” Once in place users, will be able to schedule when they want the service to take snapshots of their favorite pages. It will continue to do so as long as the computer where the extension is installed is running.

Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.

“What’s surprising is how many of our users were asking for RSS feeds,” Iterasi CEO Pete Grillo told me. Grillo acknowledged that the current Iterasi user base is a bit on the early-adopter side, and he thinks the widgets will help open the service up to a wider audience.

I’ve embedded an example of the new widget after the break. It’ll continue to update as more pages are saved.

Also being introduced is a new widget that can be tacked onto your blog or favorite start page like iGoogle or My Yahoo. It will display a reverse chronological stream of the latest pages you’ve tucked away. Each item is just a thumbnail, but when users click on it they’ll be taken to the fully archived version of the page, complete with working links. It’s the same basic experience seen when the service launched its sharing feature.

When a message from an unknown number arrives, you can save it with the caller’s name through the Google Voice interface, and it will show up in your Gmail contacts, too. A “contacts” tab at Google Voice borrows heavily on the Gmail contacts tab.

Also, reading the text lets you quickly home in on the caller’s phone number without having to wait through the whole message. On clever phones such as the
Apple iPhone or T-Mobile G1, the phone number is highlighted in the e-mail so you can click it to call back, too.

“The point was to allow your existing services to work better together,” Walker said. “You have to come with your own underlying phones and services for it to work.”

Walker said it takes roughly 30 seconds to translate a 30-second voice mail, which is pretty good turnaround. My timing test of a rambling, 1:45 voice mail took just almost exactly twice that time to show up translated in my inbox, though the voice version was available over the Google Voice Web site almost immediately.

Existing GrandCentral users should get the option to upgrade Thursday, and Google plans to offer it to the public after “a number of weeks,” said Craig Walker, product manager of real-time communications and head of Google Voice.

Tussling with carriers?
Another interesting possibility, given Google’s Internet expertise and Google Voice’s Web-based interface, would be to offer direct calling using VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). Google Voice already has the potential to shift some of the customer relationship and valuable services from phone service companies to Google, and offering VOIP service would increase that potential.

GrandCentral has appeared largely dormant from the outside since the Google acquisition, leading some to spotlight it as an example of a promising technology that was squelched by an acquisition. But, Walker said, there was plenty of work going on behind the scenes.

(Credit:
Google)

Another possible hitch is offering phone numbers that match where people actually live or work. Here, Google hopes to have things under control, though there were no numbers in the 415 area code for my test of the service.

“Our goal is to offer numbers to virtually everyone who wants to sign up. There are a finite number of numbers in the U.S., but we haven’t reached anywhere near depletion,” Walker said. “We hope to have a pretty good footprint (for area code choices) so that people will have really good choices.”

Changing my existing group to “Family” in Gmail merely created two groups with that name, so to work around the issue I copied all the “family” members to “Family.” I deleted the original to avoid the messy annoyance of keeping the two identical groups synchronized.

Shallow Gmail integration
You don’t need a Gmail account to use Google Voice–any Google account will do–but if you have one, you can customize the system’s behavior for existing groups or individuals.

When I asked Walker whether Google Voice would be unified with Gmail more thoroughly, he wouldn’t say, but indicated it’s on Google’s to-do list.

Transcription brings some of these advantages to voice mail.

“There are a host of things we’re working on,” Walker said. “We want to get the core telephony from GrandCentral to Google Voice, to get that ironed out first.”

The first promise of Google Voice is to simplify your phone communications. You don’t have to worry about which number to hand out to people, and if you’re sitting with your cell phone next to you home or work phone, you can choose which to answer. If you have the “screen calls” option enabled, Google Voice will tell ask you if you want to accept the call or send the person to voice mail. (Google Voice asks first-time callers to identify themselves.)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Craig Walker,
head of
Google Voice

Google Voice, hands on
Overall, I found Google Voice to be potentially useful, with the most compelling option the imperfect but still very useful transcription.

Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people’s lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail.

In practice, virtualizing your profusion of real-world phone numbers with one that redirects is handy. You can set various preferences–for example, calls from your family members get a custom answering message; calls from your parents don’t ring your work number; and calls from your spouse are answered directly when you pick up the phone rather than run through the Google Voice options such as answering the call, sending it to voice mail, or listening in on the voice mail.

“In addition to innovation, there’s been a process of getting migrated and integrating with the Google infrastructure,” he said.

As interesting as the service itself, perhaps, is that Google plans to offer it at no cost. Google is in the midst of a profitability push, trying to wring more money from existing sites, adding advertisements to properties such as Google Maps, Finance, and News that previously lacked them, and canceling many projects such as Google Lively that didn’t pass financial muster.

However, the text-to-speech conversion is imperfect, to say the least–for example, it thought “Steve and Mary” was “Steven Mary.” And here’s an amusing sample of one transcribed voice mail I left myself: “hey i’m just testing the grand central transcription service to see if it really can do a good tax to speech recognition and that they believe in bed that’s little voicemail and a web page because what would not be exciting what time you get in bed a voicemail on the web page.”

Even where there is integration, for example with the Gmail contacts page, there are some shortcomings. For example, I have a Gmail mailing list for “family,” and I doubt I’m not the only one. My wife is a member of the list, but Google Voice by default opted to use the settings for its “friends” category. Apparently the reason for the issue is that Google Voice is case-sensitive: it created its own “Family” group, with an uppercase F, that has no members in it.

The old version could let people centralize telephone services, screen their calls, and listen to voice mail over the Web. But the new version offers several significant new features, though. Google now uses its speech-to-text technology to transcribe voice mail, making it possible to search for particular words. Gmail’s contacts now is used to instruct Google Voice how to treat various callers. And Google Voice now can send and receive SMS text messages and set up conference calls.

One big possible difficulty for people could be the issue of changing phone numbers. People’s phone numbers can form a piece of their identity, in particular with home phone numbers held for years and number portability making it possible for people to keep their mobile phone numbers even if they change carriers. Even leaving aside the issue of the hassle of changing phone numbers, sharing your Google Voice number means committing your telephony to Google’s services.

Google Voice's interface now fits in with other Google properties.

The Web site uses bolder type for words it’s more sure of, so you can make better guesses about what really was said.

Today, voice mail is a something of black hole for me. It’s a pain to check, and I just tell people to send me an e-mail if they get my voice mail. When I’m on the road or at home, I check my e-mail much more frequently than my voice mail. And e-mail means I have their contact information and a record that they contacted me, all in a handy form that shows up through search.

But I thought Google Voice’s most promising aspect is voice mail transcription.

However, Google left me wanting deeper integration. Where are Gmail’s filters and labels? Google Voice is a big step toward the long-promised utopia of unified communications, but instead it presents me with a new inbox to check.

With Google Voice, though, the company is showing more of its earlier, more patient approach.

Money isn’t completely absent from the picture. The company does charge for international calls, and it wouldn’t rule out advertising in the future.

“Our goal is to be able to offer it to people for free,” Walker said in an interview at Google’s offices here. Asked what the revenue model is for Google Voice, he offered only an indirect answer: “Let’s get a bunch of happy users engaged in Google properties and getting their voice mail through this. Google gets value out of having happy Google users.”

Walker wouldn’t comment that possibility, though he did point out that Google Voice can work with the Gizmo VoIP service. For the regular public switched telephone network, people still have to spend money with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and others.

Because Google Voice e-mails you the text as soon as it’s ready, you can quickly scan it to see if it’s important. That’s a lot less obtrusive than calling your voice mail system in the middle of a meeting.

SAN FRANCISCO–Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail.

Developed in 2004, the computer-based game gives players points for answering financial management questions correctly, while wrong answers cost a team yardage. Like a regular football game, the team with the highest point total after four quarters wins the game. The game comes with a classroom curriculum that Visa has freely provided to public schools in 16 states. Financial Football can also be downloaded for free to cell phones–players start a game by texting the word VISA to 24421.

Visa also held a Financial Football event at last week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver with former Denver Broncos wide receiver Rod Smith.

(Credit: Visa)

Cris Carter, the former NFL wide receiver who played for the Minnesota Vikings, was in town for the Republican convention to promote a video game called Financial Football that Visa designed with the NFL as part of a national initiative to educate young adults about money management. The Young Republican National Federation and the College Republican National Committee were also promoting the game.

“Young people need to know how to make smart money management decisions before heading off to college and entering the workforce,” Carter said in a press release.

College certainly gives young people an opportunity to learn about fiscal responsibility: credit card companies often make deals to pay colleges and alumni associations millions of dollars for access to students’ personal contact information in order to target their marketing efforts at young people. A U.S. Public Interest Research Groups survey conducted this year found that two-thirds of college students have at least one card, and the average student surveyed will graduate with more than $2,600 in credit card debt.

ST. PAUL, Minn.–Republicans like to call Democrats a party of “celebrities,” but the GOP sometimes finds value in star power as well.

Polls Boutique, which is a play on words from the 1989 Beastie Boys album, is a free polling service that’s great for creating simple polls with statistical depth and a great sense of community. Like Polldaddy, which we use extensively on Webware and used for Webware 100 voting this year, and more recently on CNET News.com for the iPod survey, Polls Boutique lets users build and deploy polls to blogs or social networking profiles quickly and easily.

What makes it notable is that you can add all sorts of media to your polls such as photos, audio, and video clips. It also has some really great statistical analysis that lets you see the make up of your voters, both gender and age. There are also options to drill down by specific age group, geographical location, and even astrological sign (we’re not counting votes from Sagittarius voters in the poll below–sorry). These numbers come alongside easy to read and simplistic charts that can be parsed quickly.

Today the service has launched a customizable widget that lets you change the colors, fonts, and background image. The design process itself is a cinch, although you can’t change things like the height, width, or the font on the answers–things that really let you match a widget to the look and feel of your site. However, you can set the background to be transparent, so it will blend in to your post as it does on the example widget I’ve embedded below. Be sure to check out the view full statistics option to dig deep through user votes.

create a free poll