Google getting into Image Recognition

Hitwise had released figures indicating almost 10% of google search traffic is for image searches. There are no ad's with Google image search, simply because image search doesn't provide a good way to put contextual advertising on images. Google's purchase of Neven Vision can change all that. The official google blog talks about providing a better way to organize personal photos.

We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos—to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.

In the long term, I hope google would be working on ways to put contextual ad's next to photos. Photos are the single biggest source of user generated content, far ahead of text and video.

It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects

If the image recognition software were to mature, enough to identify objects and places in photos, it gives google an opportunity develop something of an "Adsense for Images". With the richness of Ajax, these images could be overlayed on images. In the short term, the technology would be put to test with Picassa , helping users to manage their photos better. Gigaom has more on this.

Riya's Munjal weigh's in .

What does this mean for us at Riya? It means we now have tangential competition but not yet direct since with Riya 2.0 we are focusing not on personal search but on webwide similarity search

I wouldn't be so sure, since Google is basically a search company and not a personal photo organizer. Webwide search would be a part of long term goal , which would bring it head on with Riya.

More about the company Google acquired from Google's cache. The company website has been replaced with a message, its has been acquired by Google.

First youtube election

I liked the way Rollingstone put it, "The First YouTube Election". Republican Senator George Allen's racist comments found its way upto youtube. Then it got picked up by major news networks like CNN. Public figures have to get used to this new media, a world where they are constantly under observation and any small mistake or off hand comment can get magnified into something potentially career damning.

There'’s a paradigm shift under way and politicians like Allen, and to a lesser extent Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer, are learning it the hard way. The barriers to video broadcast are now gone. So an opposing campaign no longer has to rely on a local news station or CNN or CSPAN to run video of a gaffe. Any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide.

If it generates enough buzz in the blogosphere, the cable networks will even pick it up, as happened almost immediately with Allen'’s monkeyboy dig.

CNN, BBC and others have realised the potential of so called "citizen's media" with the introduction of features like "iReport" by CNN. CNN encourages its viewers/readers to send across photos/video's to put across their stories. A lot of these videos are then shown in primetime shows like Paula Zahn now and others. The flow of news now in lot of these instances is reversed, from people to the blogsphere and then to news networks.

Blogger gets an update : Finally

Today, google has released a long due update to blogger adding few missing features like categories and permissions. It is still in beta and existing blogger accounts would be migrated to "beta blogger" in a phased manner. There is a WYSIWYG style editor for editing blog template which is something a lot of users will appreciate. This has been long due and this is the first useful posting i have come across in "Blogger Buzz" after an year of utter junk.

Today we're launching a new version of Blogger in beta! You've been asking for ways to do more with your blog, and you can with this new release. With the beta you can:

* Categorize your posts with labels
* Control who can read your blog
* Change the appearance and content of your blog with your mouse instead of HTML