When I saw Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow speak at a publishing conference in January, he made an offhand remark about how the "directory of wonderful things," one of the most popular blogs on the Web, occasionally came under fire for not being a "true blog" because it didn't allow readers to comment on entries. Comments on Boing Boing, which started as a zine and then went online in 1995, had been turned off several years ago in the wake of trolling problems.
Well, Boing Boing critics can consider themselves moot on that point--the blog has reinstated comments along with a redesign that went into effect on Tuesday morning. Additionally, there's a new Boing Boing Gadgets vertical helmed by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson.
In a post on Tuesday, Boing Boing co-editor Mark Frauenfelder hinted that more new developments are coming in the near future, too. Could more verticals be on the way, eventually leading to a full-out blog network? Boing Boing has made a name for itself by chronicling all things bizarre--common topics include steampunk culture, cryptozoology, Disney (a favorite topic of Doctorow's), Creative Commons, and news of the odd--and there's plenty of room out there for even more weirdness.
"We'd like to thank the happy mutants who helped make this major relaunch possible," Frauenfelder wrote. "These folks went under the hood and untangled the mess that Boing Boing's code had snarled into, and created an elegant, powerful system that positively shines."
If you've been playing with Google's new Street View feature--that $25 billion time suck--you may well have wondered how the heck they took those 360-degree images while driving down the street.
The camera used by Immersive Media for Google's Street View images.
(Credit: Immersive Media)Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know that many of the images, at least those shot outside the San Francisco Bay Area--were shot using this fairly disco-ball-esque device by the outside contractor, Immersive Media.
What's not clear just yet is if Google used the same kind of camera in the Bay Area, where the company shot its own, higher-resolution images. But it must have been something similar, though we know from this image that Google used a van, while Immersive Media seems to have used a Volkswagen New Beetle.
Enjoy. Oh, and did I say $25 billion time suck? By now, it's up to $26 billion. And counting.
When I heard about the new Street View feature Google Maps unveiled Tuesday, the first thing I thought--after I discovered that anyone in the world could see my car parked in my driveway--was that the next great craze would be people posting images from the service showing personal details from their own homes, jobs or what have you.
CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman's car as seen in his driveway using the Google Maps Street View feature
(Credit: Google)Sure enough, I pop over to Boing Boing today and lo and behold, there's a posting about someone whose cat is visible through the window in such detail that you can even see that it's a tabby.
And I thought, I want to do a story, or at least a photo gallery, illustrating some of the more interesting examples of this thing that some might call spying.
So, if you have found a particularly interesting image using Street View that helps make this point, please send me the link and a brief description. You can send it to daniel.terdiman@cnet.com. Please put "Street View" in the subject line.
And within a couple days, I'll post something with the best submissions.
Thanks, and happy hunting.
- prev
- 1
- next
