Tag: google

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Links for 11 August 2008 through 12 August 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 11 August 2008 through 12 August 2008, polished with a smooth cloth:

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Crikey: Oh no, Google took a photo of my house!

Crikey logo

[This article was first published in Crikey yesterday.]

This morning Australians woke to the news that Google’s Street View has taken photos of their street, their office, their school — their home! — and published them for all to see. Doubtless we’ll now see a flood of stories screeching “Invasion of privacy!” Hardly.

A picture taken on a public street isn’t “private”. A house is a visible, physical object that anyone can walk past and photograph. Its address is a known fact. Anyone can post pictures online with a description. Real estate agents do it all the time. All Google has done is photographed “everywhere” all at once, and given us the results.

Worried that knowledge of who lives in your house will become public? That data is already available — in the phone book, in most cases, or the electoral roll. If you’ve done any renovations recently, there’s probably even a floor plan of your house on your local council’s website.

Besides, when you use Street View, chances are the very first thing you’ll look up is your own home. Knowing this, Google can simply cross-match that with everything they already know about you: every Google search you’ve done, every link you’ve followed, every YouTube video you’ve watched — and, if a website uses the “free” Google Analytics or runs Google AdSense advertising, Google also knows about every such website you’ve ever visited. Congratulations, you just let them write your address across the top of their dossier!

And isn’t Google owned by the CIA anyway? Beware The Googling… ! [Insert maniacal laugh here.]

Continue reading “Crikey: Oh no, Google took a photo of my house!”

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Aussie mobile providers “like deer in the iPhone headlights”

Dropping into Day 2 of the Mobile Content World conference last week was a step back in time. And not in a healthy Kyliesque mirror ball way. The hyper-connected Twitter rumour mill had told me something was wrong: they didn’t seem to understand what was happening. The rumours were right.

When user experience expert Oliver Weidlich of Ideal Interfaces showed them screenshots of the iPhone on the big screen, around 80% of the 150-odd audience sat up, alert, seeing it for the first time.

Huh?

Sure, Apple’s groundbreaking product isn’t officially available here until the (rumoured) 19 June opening of slick new Apple stores in Sydney and Melbourne. You don’t have to have bought into the whole Steve Jobs personality cult, bought one overseas and hacked it for Aussie networks. But if you claim to be professional and haven’t at least read about the iPhone a year after its release you should be shot.

Continue reading “Aussie mobile providers “like deer in the iPhone headlights””

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In Finland, they go buses good!

Finland makes our buses look crap, as well as our phones. “Every bus and tram in Helsinki and the surrounding cities of Vaanta and Espoo are being fitted with Linux servers and GPS units. Every bus and tram in the conurbation will not only become a wireless hotspot serving broadband internet throughout the vehicle — for free — but every bus and tram is visible on a Google map (the beta version is at tinyurl.com/2gftso) that uses the same real-time passenger information as the controllers in their command centre.” Hat-tip to Guy Beres.

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Lessons from tacky Heath Ledger jokes, final edition

It’s nearly a month since I posted my tacky Heath Ledger joke page. What have we learned? Truth be told, not a lot more than I wrote in the Day 1 lessons and the items tagged “heath ledger”.

But let’s look at the total traffic anyway, this time using a graph from Google Analytics which shows visits only visitors to the jokes page.

Graph of one month of Heath Ledger-related traffic

As of just now, there’s been 11,717 page views in total, representing 8,798 unique visitors who stayed on average for 3 mins 44 secs per visit — quite respectable!

Traffic took a couple of days to peak — the first day being fuelled by Google Adwords — with a secondary peak the following week when Ledger’s funeral arrangements hit the news. Google rates the peaks as about 1000 visits a day and even now, a month later, we’re still seeing 60 to 80 visits a day.

As for the jokes themselves, well… to be honest I really don’t want to read them again. Most of them were crap. If you’ve got any astounding sociological observations, feel free to post a comment.