Drivel-Pushing Bloggers
Is it a slow news day today? The Daypop Top 40 puts this Google advertisement at the 21st most popular article in the past day. And, it’s just an ad for Froogle. I quote:
“Want one [insert object here] of your own? Just go to Froogle.”
And that’s the substance of it: unmitigated greed mixed with “word of mouth” viral blog marketing.
If you wonder why the news media doesn’t take blogging seriously, look no further. When blogs turn into marketing tools, who cares to read ‘em? Not me– I wish I had a regex .kill file for blogs talking about this URL.
Stonehenge found in Russia
Scientists say that they’ve found a 4,000 year old Stonehenge in Russia. The structure overlooks two well-travelled rivers, and was composed of wooden poles placed in a large (22.97 feet in diameter) circle. From the center, “sunset can be seen through the gates: One more pole outside the circle points at the sunrise.”
Ahmedov explained that solar and lunar cults were related to a fertility cult and to the mythological link between life and death. The circular shape was thought to hold magical properties because it has no beginning or end and was regarded as a symbol of eternity.
“(A) parallel can be drawn to Stonehenge, which is close to our monument in terms of the erection date and initially also was made of wood,” Ahmedov told Pravda. “However, no blood relationship could have existed between the peoples who erected Stonehenge and the Ryazan observatory. The latter evidently indicates the influence of (an) alien population (the Iranian forest dwellers) from the South-East of the Eurasian steppe.”
Read more at dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041115/stonehenge.html
Google is Deaf
Matt points out this article, “Google is deaf.” Its point, while more subtle, can be reduced to:
Podcasting, that is radio web shows, is the new craze. And we’re never going to transcribe them. However, Google is, for all intents, a deaf user. A billionaire deaf user with tens of millions of friends, all of whom hang on his every word.
Wordpress already lets you generate an RSS enclosure for your podcast with no additional effort–just include the mp3 in your post. This has led to increased podcasting popularity, because it’s so easy to do one. The next step for podcasting tools will be to generate a “best match” transcript by using voice recognition technology. Pipe the podcast into your voice recognition software, and output a transcript in a “read more” cut directly in the post. It doesn’t matter if you only match 70% of the words, because you’re playing for Google. Getting a few of your keywords out there in the right order is all that is important.
It shouldn’t be hard to technically do, but I don’t have any voice recognition software myself–does anyone know of any open source packages?
Update: cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php from Carnegie Mellon University has potential. It’s written in java, so it could be easily added as a binary to a webserver, and has modes for reading .wav files. Get an application that can decode mp3->wav->Sphinx, and you’d be all set.