Innovation in Software

We sometimes take for granted the knowledge we have of how the Internet works. We know that an image in a search result might be linked to a site that has nothing to do with the image. We know that just because a reader of a blog comments on a post and links to a picture, it doesn’t mean the blog owner has endorsed or in any way taken ‘control’ of that picture.

We know this.

Some people though, aren’t quite as smart as us. They think that you have more control over how Google sees you than you do. They think that if you link to a picture you are ‘trying to take it over’. They don’t understand hypertext, they don’t understand indexing algorithms and they certainly don’t understand how this all applies in terms of copyright. Don’t believe me?

TechCrunch is currently dealing with perhaps the most technically inept man on Earth representing a photographer in an argument over online copyright and image distribution.

The problem is that he has a little knowledge – pictures can drive traffic, and that drives revenue – but not enough knowledge to understand what TechCrunch’s role is in this instance.

Even worse, he’s decided to act in a way I would consider unethical by phoning advertisers and threatening to name them in a lawsuit explaining he “just wanted to let [them] know”, in that I’m-doing-you-a-favour-don’t-look-at-me-like-I’m-a-leech kind of way.

This makes me come to the following conclusions:

1. If I ever need to hire a photographer, I’m never going to hire Beth Boldt as she clearly hires idiots to represent her legally (although he doesn’t appear to be a lawyer), and I really don’t want to deal with idiots working on her behalf
2. If you’re ever going to threaten to sue somebody, maybe you shouldn’t threaten Mike Arrington who is, you know, a lawyer, and knows what he’s doing… (top tip Mike learned at law school: use spell check before hitting ‘send’).
3. All of us have a responsibility to make sure the people acting on our behalf – personally, or within our companies – understand the issues as they really are.

If you’re working in a corporate environment in the UK, you should make sure at least some of your directors or somebody over at legal checks out Out-Law.com once in a while, and if you’re freelancing or a SME, its RSS feed should be part of your morning coffee ritual.

A few years from now, people new to the Internet will find it impossible to imagine an era before video online. What use is that content though, if your user is visually impaired? How do we go about indexing and searching it?

A few weeks ago IBM announced an “Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia” over at alphaWorks. It addresses the short-comings of JAWS or voice-enabled browsers, and is built on top to of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform as a stand-alone application. It means the play/pause buttons (normally unavailable to visually impaired users) are stripped out and made accessible, and that playback doesn’t ‘clash’ with voice-synthesised browser operation.

Developers can add metadata to reorganise or simplify the content, provide additional information, add special navigation or even provide audio descriptions for movies using XML metadata.

It’s this last point that I think is going to be interesting. If this tool – or one like it – becomes standard, and video producers are encouraged to mark-up their content properly, existing search and relationship algorithms can be applied to video content. Right now searching video content is pretty limited – maybe by making it accessible, we all benefit.