Techno Babble

snippet …

Back to the real subject of this article

Online video is no longer just fun and games: You might actually learn something.

The University of California at Berkeley said on Tuesday that it is using Google Video to deliver college courses, including lectures and symposia, free of charge, the first university to have its own featured page on Google Video.

The site is at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.

As an initial offering, the university has put up a library of more than 250 hours of video for public viewing. Most of it previously was not available online, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

“Coursecasting” is a growing trend in educational technology, enabling students and the general public to download audio and video recordings of class lectures to their computers and portable media devices. Berkeley has been offering a limited set of material since 2001.

In August Google was sued by an organization called Copiepresse, which represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It argued that the Google search engine and news site breached these publications’ copyright.

Recently, a court ruled in favor of Copiepresse and ordered Google to remove these publishers’ content from both Google.be and Google News. The court also required Google to post its ruling to the home pages of Google.be and Google News Belgium.

The decision of the court is due to be reconsidered in November.

Interesting questions are raised by this case … does this mean you should never reference text from another website explicitly?

Typically a Google web search will reveal a snippet of the item and a link to the originating source requiring a user to visit the original website to view the full article. There are techniques available (robots.txt) that prevent indexing of content.

I wonder if any of these newspapers have an RSS headline feed? Does content published in this way become public domain?

In a somewhat related case, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) have been fighting Google in court since March 2005 over indexing its news content. (This is possibly because the AFP have a deal in place with sites such as Yahoo! News to license and carry its articles).

eDrawings is now available for SketchUp…

The eDrawings Publisher for SketchUp is a free add-on to SketchUp that allows uses to export their models to eDrawings format

The eDrawing publisher for SketchUp is available for download from the SketchUp Website

http://www.sketchup.com/?section=downloads.

Here’s the Eiffel Tower as an eDrawing

eiffel.exe

Perhaps the Google 3D Warehouse will start using eDrawings rather than the static images they currently use.

A couple of interesting new items available from Google Labs

http://labs.google.com/

Google Notebook enables you to clip and gather information while browsing the web, in your own Notebook which can be accessed from any computer.

http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/overview.html

Google Trends allows you to compare the worlds intetrests in your search topics. Enter a number of topics and Google will report how often they’ve been searched for over time along with other associated information.

http://www.google.com/trends

For example,

This shows a comparison of the search terms “SolidWorks” (in blue) and “Autodesk Inventor” (in orange).

Hardly a month has passed since the purchase of SketchUp by Google and now a copy is available FREE for personal use.

Google SketchUp (free)

Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program whose few simple tools enable you to create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects – even space ships. You can add details, textures and glass to your models, design with dimensional accuracy, and place your finished models in Google Earth, share them with others by posting them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies. Google SketchUp (free) is a great way to discover if 3D modeling is right for you.

Google SketchUp is free for personal use. No registration is required.

Details at

http://sketchup.google.com/product_suf.html

@Last are producers of the SketchUp software, popular among the architectural community and thus used primarily by Architects, for modelling buildings and other architectural features.

Lots of news reports on this one … starting with the Official Google Blog

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-home-for-last-software.html.

…or read the offical announcement from @Last Software.

http://www.sketchup.com/index.php?id=1439

…or a collection of News stories

http://news.google.com/…q=google%20sketchup&sa=N&tab=wn

So what will Google Do with it?

Perhaps incorporate the product to allow modelling of buildings from images in Google Earth ? Time will tell …

The Google Legacy (ebook) by Stephen E Arnold has a sample chapter available which discusses the Google Technology.

http://www.infonortics.com/publications/google/google-legacy.html

And a couple of other recent stories …

Google is being sued by book publishers over their plans to index and scan millions of books as part of their Print Library project …

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4358768.stm

Google will change the name of its e-mail service in the UK following a trademark dispute @gmail.com will become @googlemail.com …

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4354954.stm

Models created in SketchUp can be located at their exact position in the world and shared via Google Earth.

Try out some samples here

http://www.sketchup.com/index.php?id=408.