Filed under: World wide web, Video, Web services, web 2.0

Citizen Journalism is nothing new. People have probably been sharing news with their peers since before verbal communication was invented. But over the last few years, the internet has given anyone with a computer a new venue for communication. And with the prices of digital cameras and audio/video gear continuing to fall, it doesn’t take much to shoot a video and share it with the world.

The question is, if you shoot footage on your cellphone and post it to your blog, or even to a relatively established site like NewsVine, will anyone notice? The odds are not in your favor. But for the last few years, CNN has been accepting footage from amateur videographers and broadcasting it on TV through its I-Report program.

Now CNN has launched a new site dedicated to citizen journalism. iReport.com differs from CNN’s previous initiative in that nobody will be filtering or editing most of the content submitted by users. CNN may choose to use some of the citizen reports on the air, but as a standalone site, iReport is sort of like YouTube for amateur journalists.

Videos run the gamut from interviews with voters in presidential primary says to firsthand footage of disasters. You can sort videos chronologically, by most views, highest rated, or search the site. Or you can check out the “newsiest” videos, which is determined by how recently a video was uploaded, and what kind of response it has gotten from the community.

One question is whether people who had been planning newsworthy videos on posting videos to YouTube will be willing to use iReport. Our guess is yes, since there’s a chance the cable news network might pick up their video and broadcast it nationally. But we’re also wondering how CNN plans to keep people from posting less newsworthy items. How long do you think it will take before the iReport web site is littered with videos of teenagers talking to the camera about their Facebook profiles?

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Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Web services, web 2.0

PDF files are great if you want to share a lot of information in an simple to read format. And in theory, visitors to your web site can easily download the files to their desktop or open them in a web browser. But the truth of the matter is that opening PDF files using the Adobe Acrobat plugin for Firefox or World wide web Explorer can be a bit of hassle. It often takes a long time to open the file, and their browsers are rendered pretty much useless while they wait.

Enter PdfMeNot. Like Scribd, DocStoc, and Issuu, PdfMeNot instantly converts PDF files into Flash media that can be swiftly loaded in any web browser. You can either embed the Flash image on your site or offer readers a download link to the original PDF file. And you can convert files that are already online by entering a URL or upload files from your desktop.

PdfMeNot, which was developed by the folks behind BugMeNot and RetailMeNot, has a few tricks up its sleeve that other services lack. For example, if you want to view any online PDF as a Flash image, just enter http://pdfmenot.com/view/ before the URL. For example, http://pdfmenot.com/view/http://test.com/document.pdf.

The coolest trick comes in the form of a browser bookmarklet. All you have to do is drag this boomarklet to your browser toolbar and any time you visit a site with links to PDF documents, click the bookmarklet. Every PDF link on the page will be converted to a Flash link, saving you the frustration of dealing with PDF documents on the internet.

PdfMenot is in private beta until Thursday. Until then, you can login to the site with the username “stateless” and the password “system.”

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Stanislav_J writes “It happens to the ideal of us: you drop off your laptop at the local branch of some Super Mega Electronics McStore, go to pick it up, and they can’t find it. Lost, gone, kaput — probably sucked into a black hole and now breeding with lost airline luggage. It would make any of us mad, but Raelyn Campbell of Washington, D.C. isn’t just mad — she’s $54 million mad. That’s how much she is asking from Ideal Purchase in a lawsuit that seeks ‘fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 personal and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.’ Ideal Purchase claims that Ms. Campbell was offered and collected $1,110.35 as well as a $500 gift card for her inconvenience. (I guess that extra 35 cents wasn’t enough to sway her.) Her blog claims that Geek Squad employees spent three months telling her different stories about where her laptop might be before finally acknowledging that it had been lost. For those who follow economic trends, this means that a laptop’s worth is roughly equivalent to that of a pair of pants.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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eldurbarn tips a CBC story reporting that the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance claims Canada has joined Russia and China among the biggest violators of US copyright law. Quoting: “The group’s report is the latest to urge the US government into pressuring Ottawa to reform copyright laws.” As we have previously discussed here, the current Conservative government had planned to introduce a new copyright law, but dissent from the privacy commissioner and a groundswell of public protest delayed that action. eldurbarn adds, “What makes this story so important now is that this pressure is being applied at a time and in a manner that might cause the Canadian government to fall, forcing an election.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the rapidly heating debate, Michael Geist blogs about the forces arrayed against a Canadian DMCA. The Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, which includes a who’s who of the telecom, Internet, retail, and broadcast communities, has outlined a list of its copyright reform demands.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An anonymous reader writes “TrustBearer Labs has announced a new service that lets you use various hardware based security tokens like smartcards and biometric devices with OpenID. A hardware based connection to OpenID grants higher levels of security and makes it easier for the end-user to control their credentials. OpenID is a decentralized cross-site authentication system that has been gaining momentum for quite a while now with major supporters like AOL, Google and Microsoft already announced.”

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An anonymous reader writes “TrustBearer Labs has announced a new service that lets you use various hardware based security tokens like smartcards and biometric devices with OpenID. A hardware based connection to OpenID grants higher levels of security and makes it easier for the end-user to control their credentials. OpenID is a decentralized cross-site authentication system that has been gaining momentum for quite a while now with major supporters like AOL, Google and Microsoft already announced.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Disney has announced that they are going to take another stab at showing us the “House of the Future”. The 5000-square-foot house will appear normal from the outside but will home gadgets like lights and thermostats that automatically adjust when someone enters the room and countertops that can identify food put on it and suggest recipes. “Millions of Disneyland visitors lined up a half-century ago to catch a glimpse of the future: a home teeming with mind-blowing gadgets such as handsfree phones, wall-sized televisions, plastic chairs, and electric razors and toothbrushes. […] The $15 million home is a collaboration of The Walt Disney Co., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., software maker LifeWare and homebuilder Taylor Morrison. Visitors will experience the look of tomorrow by watching Disney actors playing a family of four preparing for a trip to China.”

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Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, Google, Beta, Search, web 2.0

Yesterday we gave you a few pointers on pimping out your WordPress blog. So today we figured it was time to point out a couple of swift and simple ways to make your Blogspot site look a bit less like you ripped a page out of Blogging for Dummies.

As you might be aware, part of the reason Google’s Blogger service is so popular is that it’s incredibly simple to use. All files are hosted on Google’s server, and all you’ve to do is pick a template and start writing. You can also add widgets to your site by choosing from a list of options in the layout tab of Blogger. If you really know what you’re doing you can customize the HTML for your page layout or add custom widgets to your sidebar.

But even if you don’t know a lick about HTML, Blogger has a few hidden tricks up its sleeve. If you go to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com, you can access a bunch of experimental widgets that Google has decided aren’t ready for mainstream consumption just yet.

Continue reading Pimp your Blogspot blog

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neo writes “Chris Rapier has presented a paper describing how to dramatically increase the speed of SCP networks. It appears that because SCP relies on a single thread in SSH, the crypto can sometimes be the bottleneck instead of the wire speed. Their new implementation (HPN-SSH) takes advantage of multi-threaded capable systems dramatically increasing the speed of securely copying files. They’re currently looking for potential users with very high bandwidth to test the upper limits of the system.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An anonymous reader writes “Canon has filed for a patent for using iris watermarking (as in the iris of your eye) to take photographer’s copyright protection to the next level. You set up the camera to capture an image of your eye through the viewfinder. Once captured, this biological reference is embedded as metadata into each pic you take. Canon claims this will help with copyright infringement of pics on the internet.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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