Here’s an updated graph of Creative Commons photo growth on Flickr.

Download tab delimited data

Previous related blog posts: one, two, three

I photographed a magazine (about 50 pages). Then ran them through Snapter. The interface and workflow are still a little rough, but the more fundamental problem is the page detection. The program is suppose to detect the edges of the page. Using this information, it can than warp the image to deal with things like page curl, or crooked photos. On most pages, it wasn’t even close, comically so. The page detection algorithm appears to just look for high contrast and forgets that a the edge of a page is almost always a straight line, or close to a straight line. To add insult to injury, the interface gives you the opportunity to correct the page detection by dragging the handles to the true edge, however, when dragging the handles, it would refuse to move where I dragged the cursor.

The above photo is an example of Snapter doing a decent job of page detection thanks to the very simple layout of the pages, with high contrast between the page and the background. It has correctly found the center of the magazine (yellow vertical line). The red line has a minor blip on the lower left, and also didn’t quite find the left side. I imagine, it would do a decent job on a book with no color and no photos or illustrations.

On this set of pages, Snapter fails miserably. These pages are trickier than above, but there are still distinct page edges. Snapter has made comical wavy lines desperately trying to find the edge. Attempts to drag the handles to the true page edges is mostly ignored and just ends in frustration.

On top of these issues, Snapter is overpriced (for a consumer application) at $50 and only available for Windows. Here’s hoping for Snapter 3 soon.

I first emailed their tech support address. I asked if I could just use PPP on a Mac. This is the response I got:

“Regarding your concern, we suggest you to reload PeoplePal Toolbar.”

I wrote back saying I just wanted to know about PPP and Mac support. I got this back:

Regarding your concern, we would suggest you to first connect to PeoplePC Online service using the PeoplePC dialer and then try accessing Internet explorer and Outlook Express.

That route was clearly a dead-end. I decided to just try it. First, I tracked down a local access number. You get a list here. (I had erroneously been looking for them in the support documentation.)

The rest turns out to be remarkably simple. Your username is simply your PeoplePC email address (username@peoplepc.com) and your account password.

With these three items in hand, PPP dial-up works flawlessly.

YouTube video. Photo Gallery.

The total number today is over 32 million which is just incredible. A few days ago, I compiled all the data and graphed the growth. Click the graph for a larger version.

Once I had cleaned the data up, I uploaded the data to Swivel.com to see if it could produce nicer graphs than Excel. Turns out it didn’t. In fact, I found the interface confusing… it automatically created graphs for each individual column (license) and then created a combined graph based on percentage which made no sense. I ended up ditching Swivel, not really realizing uploaded swivel data can be remixed easily by other users.

Then things sort of took off on their own… which is both amazing and frustrating at the same time. Brian Mulloy, the CEO and Co-founder of Swivel, created a useful graph of the data on Swivel (much like the one I made above). That got a bunch of views on Swivel… and the graph ended up on the front page of the Creative Commons website. It goes to show you just how incredible collaboration among people on the Internet is. Even when you don’t intend to participate in collaboration it still happens. Next time, I’ll get my act together and actually blog about what I’m up to before my data starts to spread.

Here’s the data in tab delimited form. And here it is on Google Spreadsheet. Spread it freely.

Update: I just noticed that the collaborative path this data took was blogged on the Swivel blog as well.

Fresh Air with Terry Gross is now podcasting full episodes. Actually happened in late January. One less show to record manually.

Fair Game is a new show that has found its way onto my podcast subscription list. Distributed by PRI and aiming at the Daily Show demographic. I find myself fast forwarding a fair amount, but that’s the beauty of podcasts.

This American Life has posted a trailer for the upcoming TV series. The show will premiere on Showtime on March 22. Ira and his posse are also going on tour. Corin and I are going to see them do a live show on Feb. 27 in Boston.

That red line on the right of this photo is a single strand of fiber optic cable…

It has the same bandwidth capacity as all these bundles of copper:

PRI announcement page. 

Yesterday I found out that The Be Good Tanyas newest album, “Hello Love”, was going to be reviewed on NPR’s, “All Things Considered” (link to review).  A few minutes before the review aired (4:47 pm to be precise), I headed over to Amazon.com to see the Amazon Sales Rank for the album.  It was #244.

This morning, I checked at 8:33 and the sales rank is now #23.

You can now use libremap.org to search geonames (towns, mountains, etc.) and it will return the appropriate DRG. Or you can just get a listing of the every DRG map for each state.

It is nice to finally make these maps available. Thanks again to the 100+ contributors that helped liberate these Public Domain maps. Happy downloading!

The main Internet Archive maps page is here.

I’ve gone ahead and registered libremap.org which is where the Libre Map Project will now live.  I’ll be updating it soon to point to the maps hosted on the Internet Archive.  This will allow you to search for geonames (points of interest) to find the appropriate USGS DRG map file.

• Marketplace
• Marketplace Money
• Word for Word
• American RadioWorks documentaries
• The Splendid Table (available in Podcast form in November)

You can get the feeds to the above and there other podcasts on the American Public Media Podcast page.

Starting Monday, October 16, each show will be available to podcast subscribers on the Monday following its national broadcast. After seven days, the shows migrate to the program’s online archives.

Bravo.

Update: Here’s the RSS Podcast Feed.