Roundtuit

Tagging is what it’s all about. I sincerely believe it will become the deep enabling technology for the semantic web.

And, it makes it really easy to find pictures of the Koreshan Premise on Flickr.

One cool development in the world of tagging is geotagging: labeling content with latitude and longitude in a standard format. Think about it, if enough things are geotagged on Flickr, we can view every freaking square inch of Earth on the web. There will never be a reason to look up from your laptop!

Geotagging on Flickr is wonderfully enabled by Greasemonkey and GoogleMaps via this addin.

But why doesn’t my camera do this for me! What I envision is a camera with GPS, that puts a geotag directly on the photo, so when I upload it to Flickr, it goes with it. And why stop there!

Why not put in a time code, altitude and three more degrees of freedom that specify the tilt of the camera!

Then you could use the combinations of data to merge everybody’s photos on the web into one continuous movie of anything everywhere, all the freakin time!!!

Mwa-ha-ha-ha.

Contributed by Rob Smith

Given the great mass of recent movies striving to exploit the carnal instincts of Comic Book Guy (see Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, Sin City, etc.), someone desperately needs to knock out a She Hulk script. There must be droves of green muscle goddess fetishists waiting breathlessly for this product.

But who to play the violent verde vixen? I suggest Meryl Streep.

Written up by Rob Smith, blatantly stolen from a suggestion by Mike Swaim

Went to the Apple Store on Oxford in London yesterday

(btw, someday all stores will be like this one: basically hands-on showrooms).

In the “music” area, a friend of mine and I noted that the vaunted iPod shuffle is really just a USB flashdrive with a play/pause/forward/backward/up/down control on it. Duh.

So why not just make the controller, so that you can plug any USB drive in? Simple device: battery, headphone amp, software to recognize a flashdrive, read MP3s, play them. It’d sell like hotcakes.

When I first saw the Philips Ambilight TVs, I thought they were the lamest gadget since the pet rock.

But then I saw one in person. And damned if it doesn’t work. Filling up the vague space of your peripheral vision with the right color really does make TV seem more real.

BTW, since women have better peripheral vision, I wonder how it is for them?

But why can’t anyone who has a home theater PC (or even just a regular TV) add on a couple of lamps (wired through a USB port in the HTPC case) that back light in the right color? Would this cause a patent problem with Philips, I wonder? If not, someone should make it, as I can imagine lots of people buying them, if they were at a modest price point.

So, you’re sitting in Starbucks, working on your iBook, admiring the girl in the Starbucks across the road (who is working on her iBook), and you turn off your iPod for just a minute, perhaps to answer your cell phone.

And, surprise of surprises, you find yourself toe-tapping to the public music swanking its way out of the coffee shop sound machine. Of course, Starbucks has the specialty CD on sale at the counter, but those shiny platters aren’t your scene.

Why can’t you just hit a button on your (wireless enabled) iPod, or your iBook, and just buy the currently playing tune (or the current CD, or playlist)?

This sort of on-the-spot buying may be the only way to get people to buy music anymore: tapping into that lovely moment when a certain song plays, and you realize the girl at the other Starbucks just smiled at you.