inter:digital strategies

Surveillance of the border between Texas and Mexico seems to be heading towards a new "Web 2.0" like user interactivity. According to articles in BBC News and numerous other papers.

It’s not really quite that sophisticated, of course. Texas will be creating a 24-hour telephone hotline to report possible activies, rather than providing a neat AJAX interface - but it does seem like the government is becoming more and more aware of the possibilities offered by modern web technologies. Along with the recent requests for web firms to preserve collected data for two years, they’ve been using commercial records to track information for a number of years.

The plan to monitor the Texas border is not particularly well thought out - intending to help control illegal border crossings, the practice may actually make it easier.

Also worth noting that computer access isn’t limited to the good guys. It surely won’t take long before other clandestine crossers, such as armed smugglers, find that they can use the cameras’ images to determine the best places, and the best times, to cross. Worse, they could put property owners at risk if somebody decides it’s better to find a camera and take it out, rather than look for a new crossing point.

The Brownsville Herald

What makes the idea interesting to me is the very thought of a governmentally established "vigilante" warning system. It isn’t at all new to request citizens assistance in discovering illegal activities, but using the internet to enable citizen reporting seems a new step.

Courtesy of Wendy Boswell at Search Engine Journal, cNet networks are disrupting the way business is done online with the launch of All You Can Upload. The new image hosting service has removed practically all of the normal barriers to using a new service by not requiring registration. Yes, you read that right.

This isn’t to say that they don’t have a "luxury" set of features available to registered members, of course; but the basic hosting of images (for use at places like MySpace, blogs, or Ebay) has as close to no strings attached as you can imagine.

Account levels include the basic membership - a free package which provides personalized online photo albums, member homepages, camera phone compatibility (mobile net comes alive!) and a few other perks. The premium membership, at $2.49 a month provides unlimited photo downloads, no ads, and photo storage for up to 5,000 personal photos.

This, of course, raises a question for me: what is the storage limit for those with no membership? Paying members can only store 5,000 images - can non-members upload an unlimited number of images, then? It rather seems that it would be impossible for non-members to be subject to those kinds of limits.

At any rate, it’s an interesting way of utilizing the common tiered-membership profile for a website. I’ll be curious to see how successful this no-registration file hosting works out.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on the question "Does Accoona Suck". My criticisms were two-fold: first, whether Accoona provided a unique value as a search engine, and second, whether they utilized underhanded marketing techniques to build their reputation.

On the basis of those two points, I was very unimpressed. Recently, Accoona released an interesting new toolbar, as pointed out by Loren Baker. As Loren says, the toolbar, functionally speaking, is fantastic. It’s not perfect; but I was quite impressed with the way it managed to handle numbers.

I tested it with a year incorporated into text, and it successfully expressed that year correctly. It even distinguished between the speaking pattern for a year like 1985 (nineteen-eighty-five) and 2005 (two thousand five). I checked a zip code - also correct. I tried a phone number expressed with dot separators - no problem. It didn’t manage a PO Box number quite right, and had a little trouble with the fraction 1/2 - pronouncing it "one-second". However, fractions which do not deviate from the normal number speaking system were handled more successfully.

On the whole, the voice is pleasant and clear. I would be perfectly willing, if necessary, to listen to a longer text with the tool.

But the marketing strategies that Accoona has demonstrated with this project still leave me frustrated. They have not disclosed everything that I felt necessary in order to install the toolbar - namely, that I would need to install additional software after the toolbar and that I would need to register for a 60 day free trial in order to use the product. It’s a minor issue; but I would have appreciated this information in advance.

For your information, the toolbar costs Euro 21.49 - since that information is also obscured from the Accoona marketing information.