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Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Memorial Day Google Logo Contest


One of the suggestions (by ZombieTime.com/ Byron S.)

Google is missing out to celebrate US patriotic holidays with their special logo doodles, some think, and created a Google Memorial Day Logo Design Contest earlier this year. You can find the collected creations that will now be suggested to Google. The latest “controversy”: Google put Sputnik into their logo... a (gasp) communist satellite*! “Google consistently has ignored patriotic American holidays such as Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day,” WorldNetDaily writes, continuing that now “it acknowledged an accomplishment of the communist Soviet Union, which launched the Sputnik space satellite 50 years ago. ... Besides overlooking Veterans Day and Memorial Day since the company’s inception in 1999, it also has ignored Christmas.”

*On a side-note, Sputnik is indirectly responsible for launching ARPA, which is indirectly responsible for launching the internet, without which there would be no Google. Then again everything is related to everything.

[Via Spiegel.]

Google Street View Adds Chicago, Phoenix, Tucson...

There are a couple of new panorama views in Google Maps (click on the “Street View” button and zoom in to see them). Google says the new cities are – bold indicates hi-res – Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson. Also, in some of the new cities, like Chicago, you can now pan high up.


Some advertisement...

[Thanks Callum!]

Yahoo Music Exec: Life’s Too Short For DRM

Cory Doctorow points to a presentation by Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music who’s saying “no” to Digital “Rights” Management software, which puts barriers between paying customers and their rights to fair use of the product they bought. The headline for this post is just a paraphrase, but I think it’s in the spirit of what Ian is saying:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

If, on the other hand, you’ve seen the light too, there’s a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

And no one should be scared by copies roaming the web: “convenience will beat free,” as Ian puts it. Maybe one day we’ll look back and laugh about all this... the dark period of the late 1990s and early 2000s, right between after cassette tapes (allowing easy remixing, sharing, recording from radio etc.) were lost and real digital music (allowing easy remixing, sharing, recording from web radio etc.) arrived.

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