The Telegraph writes:
<<One of the cars that are currently filming every road in Britain stopped by police – for driving in a bus lane.
The distinctive vehicle – complete with roof-mounted camera pole and Google logo on the door – was stopped in the centre of Bradford at 12.40pm yesterday.
Eyewitnesses described how the Google car was followed through the city centre by a panda car with sirens blazing.>>
If there’s ever going to be a movie made about Google, please, put in something from that last paragraph.
In other news, the British Information Commissioner’s Office just gave Google’s Street View filming the thumbs up, Guardian reports. This organization, called a privacy watchdog by the Guardian, stated they are “satisfied that Google is putting in place adequate safeguards to avoid any risk to the privacy or safety of individuals, including the blurring of vehicle registration marks and the faces of anyone included in Street View images”.
[Thanks Manoj Nahar and Dave Shaw!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Street View Car Pulled Over by Police | Comments]
[Advertisement] PingPongPie - the art of linkbaiting and social media marketing 
Comments Off
Aaron Wall of SEOBook reports that Google is experimenting with related search queries shown below snippets on result pages. I can’t reproduce this as it’s probably one of Google’s experiments, but Aaron searched for link building and below a result from searchenginewatch.com, the suggestion “Related: link building software” was showing. Below a result from seobook.com, the queries “get more links”, “link building 101”, and “link building strategy” were showing.
Clicking on any of these extra links “generates an entirely new query, without direct reference to the old query,” Aaron tells me, adding that “many times the document it was near appears toward the top of the search results for the new query (which sorta makes sense given that google said that query was related to that document)”.
[Thanks Ionut! Image based on a Creative Commons-licensed screenshot by Aaron.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Related Queries Below Google Result Snippets | Comments]
[Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.com
Comments Off
Raw Story covers how a 22-year old cop was filmed while slamming someone off his bike at a New York rally some days ago. The YouTube upload of this assembled over 1 million views so far according to YouTube’s statistics, and may have played a big role in opposing the cop’s statements. The cop had claimed, among other things, that the bicyclist was deliberately heading for him. The police officer “has been placed behind a desk" for now, Raw Story says.
In another recent report, Daily News covers how a New York police officer struck a citizen with his baton during arrest, and is currently placed on desk during investigation of the incident. A video of the incident had been uploaded to YouTube as well. The police claims that the person shown on the ground in the video had attacked the cops with an umbrella, whereas the citizen claims he would never strike an officer.
Videos like these often don’t tell the whole story; important seconds before or after the shown incident, or different perspectives not caught on tape, could shed a different light on what happened. On the other hand, a cop’s statement too may not tell the whole story.
[Via Reddit.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Cop Attacking Cyclist, as Shown on YouTube, P ... | Comments]
[Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.
Comments Off
Using the Google translator and the Babelfish translator, here’s Garfield automatically translated from English to Chinese and back to English.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Garfield Lost in Translation | Comments]
[Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.
Comments Off
Google has bought video annotation site Omnisio to have their team join the YouTube team. Omnisio, as covered before, allows users to mix together YouTube videos. Also, Omnisio visitors can add comments over the videos in specific time frames – a feature that made some early Omnisio videos completely unwatchable, but you’re now able to select whose comments you’d like to see overlaid.
The acquisition statement on the Omnisio homepage says, “We’ve been continually surprised by the creative and interesting stuff our users have built on the Omnisio platform – from hilarious video compilations, to witty (and yes sometimes over the top) in-video comments, to informative presentations with slides synced with video.” (Ionut Alex. Chitu’s comment: “I don’t know if YouTube’s community can write witty comments.”)
An online video editor is a good idea but it’s something the YouTube team didn’t manage to pull off so far, despite tries – their YouTube Remixer was slow and somewhat feature-weak when it was released, and it was later removed. Omnisio’s editor was a working start but I’m sure there’s still much more to improve in this space... perhaps that’s something the Omnisio founders Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar and Simon Ratner will be thinking about in the future.
Formerly hosted at youtube.com/ytremixer, the YouTube Remixer is now used or kidnapped as a normal channel (screenshot by Ars Technica)
[Thanks Ionut!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Acquires Video Site Omnisio | Comments]
[Advertisement] PingPongPie - the art of linkbaiting and social media marketing
Comments Off
