No, I’m not going to start making overly impassioned political posts, I’m talking about Democracy. Democracy is a video player, but it’s also much more than that. It’s mixes RSS feeds from various video sites and a Bittorrent client to make finding and saving videos to your personal collection a nicely integrated experience. Being free and open source doesn’t hurt either.

Democracy’s interface is reminiscent of iTunes, which I guess makes it easier for Apple’s users to switch back and forth when they get tired of overpaying for shows and movies on iTunes Store. The sidebar on the left has a pre-built list of RSS feeds for video sites, but you can add as many others as you want. The default feeds aren’t bad for a start, though. Video Bomb, for example, is sort of a Digg for internet videos. They link and embed popular videos from the other big sites like YouTube and Google Video and allow you to vote on themYou’re likely going to find a lot of videos that you’ve already seen elsewhere, but there’s also a lot of original content that you might not have come across before. When you find a feed you like, Democracy will automatically download the new videos for you as they are posted.

Democracy showing a custom RSS feed.
(Click to enlage.)

The player itself is nothing extraordinary, but it works. I did have some issues with a few videos, like flickering, but considering how many different formats this thing plays, that’s not that surprising. The volume slider has an annoying habit of getting stuck to the pointer if you slide it too far in either direction without letting go of the button, but these issues are small and I imagine they’ll be fixed in time for Democracy 1.0.

The Google Earth Blog is reporting that there have been some worldwide updates to the aerial and satellite photography for many areas in both Google Earth and Google Maps.

A nice update for those of you that like to explore via these tools. I do wish my area would get a little more high resolution love in some parts, though. It’s pretty damn cool, and somewhat creepy, to see your own car in your driveway.

In case you haven’t tried it yet, Google has come up with a new way to improve search results for their image search. Google Image Labeler turns the otherwise tedious task of labeling images into a multiplayer game.

You can try it out at first by just playing as a guest, but if you want your score to be saved, you need to be logged into your Google/Gmail account. Also, you can change your nick to anything you want, even someone else’s nick, but your score will be tied in to your account, so you won’t get a huge score by masquerading as the current points leader.

The game is rather simple. You and your partner start off with 90 seconds on the timer and are shown a thumbnail for an image in Google’s index. You both then begin entering labels you feel describe the image’s content, and if you both happen to enter the same one, another thumbnail appears. If you are both stumped on an image, you are able to pass. After your time runs out, points are tallied and if you wish to continue playing, another random player will be found. During the first day or two that Image Labeler was open, you could check the thumbnail’s URL to find out details about an image, but Google has since fixed this small “exploit.”

While playing I noticed that people don’t seem too concerned withmaking quality matches. Far too many times when a book cover appeared, players wouldn’t try to enter words from the title or author, they’d just stop at book. Or whenever a person with facial hair appeared they’d stick with beard even if the subject was easily recognizable. Once, I spent nearly all 90 seconds refusing to enter monkey when the picture was obviously of a chimp. Eventually, we matched on hairy. When the match was over and I was able to see what labels my partner had chosen, monkey and hairy were the only two he had attempted.

Google did plan for this, at least partially. There is an off-limits list of labels for each image. Once an image has been matched on one label, it becomes off-limits and you can no longer match on that particular term. This will, hopefully, force players to be somewhat more imaginative on future matching opportunities.

And in case you were wondering, at least at this time, the points you win serve no purpose beyond recognizing that you spend way too much time doing this. Which is a good thing, because if there was something useful you could do with them, the matches would be even more imprecise.

I play as 8seek, by the way. Just remember, if we happen to get matched up, I refuse to call an ape a monkey!

Guess I have while to go before I can make that leaderboard.

This enterprising fellow has created just what I have been wanting for a while. Google Maps vs. Yahoo! Maps places synchronized map results for both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps side-by-side so you can compare the two.

I’ve been playing with it for a while and am seeing that Yahoo! Maps really lacks in the aerial photography department. I imagine both sites serve up decent, useful maps, but that’s been true for map sites dating way back to when MapQuest was pretty much the only game in town. My comparisons weren’t that extensive, though, so your areas may fare better on either one.

Here is the first example I always use when testing out a new map site. It’s the Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas. It’s just the most ridiculous man-made landmark I can think of that’s clearly visible from above.

Lifehacker has a useful article about finding media with reusable licenses such as Creative Commons or GNU Free Documentation License. They list several search engines tailored specifically for this and also some tips you can use to find such media with your usual search engine of choice.

Now, I was going to post about this story and then add a nice little edited Creative Commons licensed image to show my support for sharing your work and allowing others to creative derivative works, but as I got into reading about the different licenses and discussions regarding their usage, I realized it was all very vague on some points and more than a little confusing. Their FAQ answered some of my questions, but left enough unanswered, especially in regards to attribution, to persuade me into not using a CC licensed image.

It would take the patience of Gandhi to figure all that out. Well, not really, but I wanted to use this public domain picture of him that I masked out and made a “derivative work” from.