Webware

Google's Street View now is augmented by photos supplied by contributors to the company's Panoramio service. This shot of the St. Louis courthouse is more scenic than the official Street View version. Note also the advertisement below the photo. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google Maps' Street View feature uses imagery collected by cameras mounted to Google cars, but now the company is blending in photos taken by the public as well.

Panoramio, which Google acquired in 2007, lets people share photos that have been geotagged with location data so they can be shown on a map. Those Panoramio photos already were available in Google Earth and Google Maps, but now they can show on the more personal Street View as well, Google programmer Frederik Schaffalitzky said in a blog post Wednesday.

Potential advantages of checking the photos on Street View include views at a higher resolution view or during a different time of day, which could be handy for the occasions when Google's Street View camera was shooting into the sun and didn't produce much of an image.

And of course a disadvantage is that the Street View intrusiveness to which some people object is amplified.

When a view can be shown with Panoramio images, a "user photos" icon shows in the upper-right corner of Street View. Clicking it shows an array of local photo thumbnails, and clicking one of those thumbnails loads that image. Above it is a link to the Panoramio page of the person who added the photo.

Not every Panoramio image is included. Once you've contributed geotagged photos to Panoramio, "Google's image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location," Schaffalitzky said.

Social network Hi5 has launched a site translation project, a week after the announcement that the company had created a "crowdsourced translation" app for use on the OpenSocial developer platform and several months after it initially announced plans for translation.

The site is now available not only in American English and the two dozen languages that Hi5 had previously translated it into (not through community efforts), but now also in Catalan, Danish, British English, Finnish, Hindi, Macedonian, Slovakian, Mexican Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Swedish. These translations were generated by community participation and verified by translation service Lionbridge. Later in October, Hi5 plans to launch translated versions of the site in Albanian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, French, Maltese, Norwegian, Serbian, and several other Spanish dialects.

"The power of this program to deliver localized versions of our product has exceeded our own high expectations," founder and CEO Ramu Yalamanchi said in a release. "It is amazing to see the energy and enthusiasm of our global user community in action, taking our site into new languages and geographies that we otherwise wouldn't have the resources to address."

Hi5 is headquartered in San Francisco, but a plurality of its 56 million users come from Latin American countries.

This post was updated at 1:19 p.m. PT to note the number of languages into which Hi5 is already translated.

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly in his 2004 Halloween costume.

(Credit: Blog Southwest)

A few years ago, it was trendy and "transparent" for CEOs to have their own blogs. But typically it didn't go this far--then again, Southwest Airlines chief Gary Kelly isn't your average CEO.

Kelly posted an entry on the Southwest blog on Tuesday asking readers to contribute to an annual poll he hosts: What should he dress up as for Halloween? Kelly has been known to go all-out, and provided photo evidence of past costumes that included Hairspray drag queen Edna Turnblad, Pirates of the Caribbean's Captain Jack Sparrow, and painted-up Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.

"It would be really nice if your suggestion doesn't involve short-term (and especially long-term!) body modifications like shaving my legs," Kelly wrote in the post, "although I will sacrifice for art--within reason."

It's certainly a quirky and humanizing move for the airline, which is one of only a few U.S. carriers that's not mired in economic woes.

So what have readers suggested so far? They seem to be looking toward the silver screen. There have been a couple of requests for the Joker from The Dark Knight, a few for Indiana Jones, and one for Harry Potter. Then there's one reader's bright idea that Kelly don a Speedo and go as Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. I wouldn't put my money on that one.

Google on Monday unveiled a new Web-based tool, Map Maker, that lets people add roads, lakes, businesses, and other features to unmapped regions of Google Maps.

Google Map Maker lets people add details to maps in some countries.

(Credit: Google)

With the tool, people can using tracing tools to build maps in Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, and Vietnam, according to the Google LatLong blog. Also open for cartographic contributions are several Caribbean nations: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's great that this kind of activity can be crowd-sourced (please excuse the jargon) so the community (please excuse the jargon again) can contribute to a project that reduces the amount of digitally uncharted terrain. Google has given us a way to help make a difference that, while small, could collectively become quite large.

But on the other hand, I can think of worthy causes in greater need of charity or free labor than Google. If we're all going to be augmenting Google Maps with user-generated content, wouldn't it be nice if we could do it through a more neutral mechanism that lets others benefit from the work, too? Geotagged entries in Wikipedia show on Google Maps, but not Google Maps alone, at least theoretically.

Overall, I think my first reaction will carry the day for me.

That's because, fundamentally, Google Maps is a service not just consumed by many but also repackaged by many through the availability of the Google Maps API (application programming interface). So until the day Google flips its Don't Be Evil switch to the "off" position, Google Maps is in effect a public utility, and many can benefit from contributions to the service.

Google Map Maker looks slick, but it would be slicker with better satellite imagery. Parts of Iceland, one of my favorite places on Earth, are too coarse for any tracing.

In a quintessentially Web 2.0 case of "If it got funding, it must be worth a look," user-generated news site NowPublic hauled in $10.6 million in series A venture capital funding earlier this week, and now the blog community has pounced on it with accolades and criticism alike. NowPublic, in case you haven't checked it out yet, is a "citizen journalism" site devoted to bringing you news of the user-generated variety--all stories and accompanying photos, videos, and other multimedia are contributed by fellow NowPublic readers. Then, much like Digg, which remains the top name in "social news," the user base is invited to rank and comment on stories.

It's pretty easy to use, especially if you're familiar with Digg. The top handful of stories are displayed on the front page, and a click will get you to a longer list. An Ajax-powered widget shows you the latest in comments and submissions. You can also divide the news up into verticals (politics, culture, entertainment, what-have-you). The interface is a little clunky, but pretty well-designed. The really important factor for a site like this, however, is the content.

News aggregation, either through "crowdsourcing" the reader base or automating the story selection (a la Google News), has grown more all the more appealing in recent months as headlines of Paris Hilton's jail sentence have made the jump between Us Weekly and USA Today. It makes the "shark attack story," once the poster child for media sensationalism, look downright newsworthy--and it also means that there are plenty of disgruntled news junkies out there who are fully convinced that they'd do a better job of picking which stories are the important ones.

Crowdsourcing is trendy. The problem is that you don't know what the crowd is going to be. There are a handful of "real" stories at the top of NowPublic's ranking (a bridge collapse in California, for example), but the top photo-video hit remains "Sexy Girls Playing Beach Volleyball." Additionally, there are already stories popping up on NowPublic--and getting some high ratings--that are clearly satirical. Cute, yes, but what happens when somebody plants a fake story on a user-generated news site? We've already seen this happen with Digg; remember that story about Apple Stores charging admission? 1500 Diggs later, readers caught onto the fact that it came from an Onion clone.

Right now, if you look at the top stories on NowPublic and compare them to those on the automated Google News, there is some overlap--but some disconnect, too. A bridge collapse in northern California, which doesn't make an appearance on Google News' front page, is the top story on NowPublic. No mention is made on the Vancouver-based NowPublic of Google News' current top story--that the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was hospitalized--but photographs from a nude anti-oil protest in the start-up's home city are plentiful. On the flip side, Google News' aggregator has glossed over reports of a threatening typhoon off Japan, but it's right there on NowPublic. Human filtering, it seems, has both its drawbacks and benefits. Just look at Digg: it's great for tech enthusiasts, but hasn't caught on much outside the geek community.

I'm a believer in the theory that a lot of the Internet's biggest successes owe a whole lot to luck, and that the early days of a new Web endeavor are the most crucial. It's tough to kill a site's early reputation when nothing "goes away" online, and when word gets around among the early-adopter crowd that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has trashed a hotly anticipated new start-up, that company will have a hard time cooking up a second chance. It's the same reasoning that has made a handful of New York restauranteurs rather annoyed with the city's very vocal community of food bloggers, claiming that the epicurean WordPressers rush in and test out their establishments before all the kinks have been ironed out (newspaper restaurant reviewers typically give a few weeks' grace period) and giving the eateries prematurely bad reputations that tend to last.

Consequently, these first few weeks in the wake of the funding announcement are going to be important for the evolution of NowPublic. If curious Web users, having read about the site's new funding, click their browsers over to NowPublic and see a refreshing new take on relevant news, the site could be a real phenomenon. But if NowPublic is clogged early on with fake or satirical news, political fringe or conspiracy-theory stories, celebrity gossip, or local news that's only relevant to a narrow demographic, then it could easily become crammed into a niche from which it will be hard to escape. Yes, reputations can change--just look at how the Huffington Post went from being a "liberal Drudge Report" to a reputable news destination--but when there's a lot of hard-to-control user-generated content involved, it's not going to be easy for a company to shape and reshape is own image.

Because no matter what your business model is, putting so much control into the hands of users is always a gamble. If it works, it works great. But if it doesn't work, well, you're in quite the bind.

The team from Satisfaction had a demo table at the Stirr event last night. Satisfaction reps were showing off their new system for "people-powered customer service."

I'm all over this one. Because most product support and service just stinks. On everything from washing machines to software, the experience you're going to get from a company is highly variable. You might get a dolt reading from a script. You might get the engineer who built the thing. And you might wait on hold for 45 minutes before you get anyone. That's why customers have been flocking to the Web for support from each other. But customer-to-customer support could be better, too. Web forums, the typical venue for user-to-user support, aren't as easy to use as they could be. Messages and topics get lost, know-it-alls dominate some discussions, and newbie users often have to be up on the concept of forums to take advantage of them to begin with.

Satisfaction is taking a swipe at this problem. Check out getsatisfaction.com/Pownce for an active example of the system applied to Pownce (or go here for more companies). You can see that search is front and center. Also, topics are broken out into questions, ideas, and problems.

Satisfaction: User forums 2.0

Users can rate replies, add their own, and subscribe to discussions (although for the a general audience there should be an easier way to sign up to receive updates on a topic). You also rate responses by "how it makes you feel," which is an interesting new take on ranking user-generated content. The "satisfactometer" will be used to surface the best comments and users, I gather, although there are also ways to more simply flag posts as "useful."

How does it make you feel?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

And this is very nice: users get their own "dashboard" that tracks their topics across companies. So, assuming Satisfaction takes off, we'll be able to keep up with our user-to-user conversations in one place, instead of trying to follow discussions on multiple services (with multiple log-ins and user interfaces). That's important, because Satisfaction is for more than just problem solving, and people might use the service more frequently than they do today's troubleshooting-based forums. Satisfaction has made a good place to discuss broader issues around a product, and, I can imagine, to talk with product managers and designers and engineers who could probably use a better way to connect with users.

While the service is still being built, it's already clear that Satisfaction does a better job of building a town square around a product or company than most other company-sponsored forums do. The design is approachable, and the social tools on the site make sense. It feels more like a site for users than for the companies who make the products, which, of course, is better for the customers and the companies.

Satisfaction reps told me they are "quietly testing the service" now, which means don't be surprised if the servers collapse while they are scaling up the business.

See also: Fixya (review).