Matthew Belinkie at Overthinkingit.com just posted a great mash-up he did of “The Dark Knight” and Bush’s Sept. 24 speech on the economy.

The video’s description:

Our society’s institutions are collapsing, and we have lost confidence in our leaders to save us. Wait, didn’t someone make a summer blockbuster about this?

Where do we turn in this time of crisis? Here’s what the Joker thinks about President Bush’s economic bailout.

A new service for the iPhone allows you to see data on real-world objects that appear on your screen.

A Tokyo-based company called Sekai Camera just demo’d a service for your iPhone that overlays tags and information onto real world objects that appear on your iPhone’s screen.

Hold your iPhone up to Mt. Rushmore, you’ll see a wikipedia article on the monument pop up on screen next to the monument.

Hold your iPhone up to supermarket shelf, you’ll see product info pop up on screen next to each item.

When I first saw the demo, I thought the iPhone was using image-recognition software to identify objects — like, ‘Hey, that looks like a box of Captain Crunch … Let me check my database … Yep, It’s a box of Captain Crunch! And it’s on sale!”

But it turns out the service relies on geo-tags to “recognize” the objects. (Geo-tagging works by assigning GPS coordinates to real-world objects.)

Regardless, this Sekai Camera is Brave New World territory, folks: Instead of wearing rose-tinted glasses to see the world in a layer of pink, we’re now wearing iPhone-tinted glasses to see the world in a layer of Cyberspace … “Hey, cool alley! Wonder what’s around the corner? … Let me check it out through my iPhone … Oh — a crack house. Maybe I’ll go the other way …”

Here’s a video of Sekai’s demo of the service, made at TechCrunch50, a popular industry event.

Of course, there’s a huge potential problem with this service…

Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s got a new service that uses speech-recognition technology to make YouTube videos searchable by keywords or phrases in the clip.

So, for example, you could search for every time that Barack Obama mentions “George Bush” or “healthcare” or any other discernible word or term in a YouTube clip.

Check out the service here

For now, Google is only indexing the transcripts of political videos. And politicians — by virtue of being public figures in the post-Macaca age — know that they can’t expect to control every video of themselves on the ‘Net.

But sooner or later Google is going to start indexing regular (non-political) videos — which means that if I, say, attend an event somewhere and someone mentions my name on camera, I’m now forever linked to that footage.

What if that footage proves embarrassing to me? What if I don’t want to be indexed? Facebook allows me to “un-tag” a photo that I appear in. Will Google do the same? Should it?

I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. Just like Google’s plan to index medical records, I’ve got mixed feelings about this venture.

I obviously can’t “un-tag” my name from the documents that Google’s regular search engines indexes, so should I have the right to un-index myself from a video?

You tell me…

While up at Burning Man this year, I passed by Current TV’s “TV Free Burning Man” booth.

The booth’s tagline: “Participant Powered Media.”

So I got a friend to stand in front of the “Powered” part. Presto! “Participant Media.”

(click on image for a larger size)

Today in Wikincubate, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of ways to get engaged with socially conscious issues:

Police brutality

Racism

Racism multimedia, including this Dave Chappelle classic:

Pollution

Organic food

Today in Wikincubate, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of ways to get engaged with socially conscious issues:

Online piracy, including this trailer of “Live Free or Die Hard”

Polygamy

Self-injury multimedia

School prayer

Puppy mills

Mr. Senate in "Boston Public"

In what appears to be a first in the country, a Texas school district has OK’d teachers to carry guns into school this fall.

Said the Harrold Independent School District superintendent, David Thweatt:

“We have a lock-down situation, we have cameras, but the question we had to answer is, ‘What if somebody gets in? What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s just common sense.”

This reminds me of that great episode from Boston Public in which Mr. Senate (pictured above, right) shoots a blank gun in class to get the students’ attention. But something tells me this isn’t what the Texas teachers have in mind…

In “Boston Public,” Mr. Senate shot a gun in class — but not for the same reason that teachers in Texas presumably want/need to do so…

Today in Wikincubate, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of ways to get engaged with socially conscious issues:

Social business

Social business multimedia, including this video of social business guru Muhammad Yunus:

Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship multimedia

LGBT Rights

Breakthrough.TV just posted this great Star Trek-themed satire on America’s illegal immigration policies.

From Breakthrough:

See what happens when a permanent member of a popular space crew finds his status is in question. In any galaxy, when we deny due process and human rights to some, we put all of our freedoms at risk.

The video:

Today in Wikincubate, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of ways to get engaged with socially conscious causes:

Rebuilding New Orleans

Rebuilding New Orleans multimedia, including this video:

Separation of church and state

Separation of church and state multimedia

Recycling