Information Week has reported that in June of 07 Google filed a patent application, which has just become available, outlining a “method of optical character recognition in digital images.” The application seems to cover both static images as well as video. The ability to do this could radically change a number of existing Google services as well as again change the way the Internet marketing world interacts with images and video.
Digg Adds Images Category
It seems like Digg users have been asking for–and Kevin Rose promising–a category for images and photos forever. Well the long wait is now over and you can finally uploaded your favorite lolcats image.
At the Digg blog, Kevin Rose announces the launch of image support and also better organization of existing categories. Here’s what Digg users are waking up to today:
Careful How You Use Flickr Images
When I started my music podcast, I needed an apporpriate image for the podcast blog. I found an ideal image on Flickr accompanied by a Creative Commons attribution share-alike license. The image of an electric guitar neck now graces the JamJourney blog.
Optimize for Yahoo Images Search with Flickr
Google Blogoscoped reports that Yahoo’s Image Search now particularly likes Flickr content, so this may be incentive for webmasters to use Flickr “as a kind of Yahoo search engine optimization”.
NASA To Digitize Space Images
NASA and the Internet Archive are partnering to scan, archive and mange the agency’s large collection of photographs, film and video. The imagery will be available online and free to the public.
Semantic Images & SEO
Very rarely do I come across software that makes me go “WOW”
Keep in mind that I read almost everything covering new social software.
Microsoft has a project team working on a piece of software called SeaDragon.
What is SeaDragon?
Google Earth Gains More Detailed Images
Google Earth recently incorporated some images of the seabed around Britain, and the few people who heard about this tended to shrug in response. The introduction of Street View, on the other hand, may have generated a little too much excitement. The latest Google Earth release – detailed images of western America – may hit a happy medium.
Google Software Engineer on Google Images
I’ve asked Google some questions in regards to their image search engine. Here are the answers by Radhika Malpani, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google.
Google Maps Reverts To Pre-Katrina Images for NO
Google is coming under criticism for rolling back satellite imagery of New Orleans, replacing the images of post-Katrina New Orleans with older, pre-hurricane photos that show the city in a much cleaner condition than is the reality. In this article by The Age, Google says it is only offering the best images it has, and that there are many factors that went into the change:
Google Images China Censors – Friend and Foe?
“For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages.”
– The Google Team, 2004