AOL Properties Sign Girafa For Thumbnail Search Images
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AOL Properties Sign Girafa For Thumbnail Search Images  Girafa.com Inc. announced today that the CompuServe, Netscape, AIM and ICQ properties of America Online, Inc., have signed an agreement with Girafa to use Girafa's thumbnail search images as an integrated part of their search results.  Using Girafa's thumbnail search service, search users can ...
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On the Zend Developer Zone, they point out a handy little image manipulation class they've come across - GenXDesign's PHP Thumbnail Class - as well as some details about it.    I've seen a lot of implementations of thumb nail functionality in PHP, I've even written a couple of my own. I like this class thought. In looking over the code the first thing you notice is that it's clean code. I don't mean they use the latest whiz-bang method to cshave a few keystrokes.    This code is simple, nicely formatted and easy to read through. My only real problem with the code itself is that it is not terribly well documented. That can be forgiven since easy to read.    Cal talks about some of the other features of the class, including that it works with gif/jpeg/png images, makes it easy to set the quality of the jpgs, and makes it easy to display the dynamic images directly to the browser. Check out the demo for more.
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Adobe Integrated Runtime paves the way for Web applications that perform like desktop-bound programs.Images: Building apps on AIR
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(InfoWorld) - Google is asking surfers with time on their hands to help it categorize and label the images indexed by its search engine, building a database of knowledge about the contents of the images. The company launched a new online game on Friday, Google Image Labeler, which it describes as "a fun way to help us organize all the images on the Web." In the game, two randomly selected players are each shown the same image, plucked at random from Google's search index, and given 90 seconds to suggest as many keywords or phrases as they can to describe it. They score points if any of their descriptions match. Google's image search engine currently returns results based on captions and other text adjacent to images on Web pages, without reference to the content of the images themselves. The game will allow it to improve the performance of the search engine by returning results based on the players' descriptions of the images. The game is not the first attempt to use volunteer labor to create a database of knowledge: The Wikipedia online encyclopedia and the DMoz search directory two of the better known examples. Google's game, based in part on technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University, is not even the first to use volunteer labor to categorize images: TheÂ ESP GameÂ developed by Luis von Ahn and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon first put players to work tagging its image database in October 2003. Building a database using information provided by volunteers has its risks: campaign groups or pranksters might influence or pollute the raw data by associating an insulting term with the image of a political candidate. The campaign to link the term "miserable failure" to theÂ online biography of U.S. President George W. BushÂ is one example of how this can happen. The ESP Game and Google Image Labeler limit the possibilities for such pranks, since they select players and images at random, and only associate a label with an image if both players independently suggest it. Von Ahn and his colleagues study "human computation," or finding novel ways to put human brains to work. Their work includes Peekaboom, a game which harnesses players' brains to locate objects in images, and Phetch, which goes further than the ESP game by inviting players to create longer descriptions of images. You can also blame them for Captchas, those puzzles featuring sequences of distorted letters that are intended to distinguish between humans and computer impostors. Google says its search engine indexes billions of images. That may make Google's goal of labelling all the images on the Web seem far-fetched, especially since players of Von Ahn's game have only attributed around 17.8 million labels to images since October 2003, according to the game's Web site. However, computer users around the world collectively wasted 9 billion hours playing Solitaire on their computers in 2003, Von Ahn estimated in a presentation to Google staff in July. If they had spent that time playing The ESP Game or Google Image Labeller instead, they could have labelled almost 200 billion images.
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:Auto-Gen CSS FormsadebugFox captchasecShieldImage ResizerPage Rating Classl10nFuerte Image ToolOsiris CoreOsiris CoreArZipStrOTP_TSArZipStrDBNavigatorWAP PushphpTubegCachePaging Class with AJAX or HREF
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Adding location data to images is a pain right now, but geotagging is worth it, and it'll get easier. Here are my warnings and a wish list.
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AOL adopts Open ID, allowing people to use their AOL or AIM username and password to sign into non-AOL sites.
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Tracking down online images is mostly hit or miss thanks to inaccurate text tags, but a new technology could help you find what you're looking for more precisely. By John Gartner.
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America Online will have a desktop search capability in a new browser the company is now beta-testing, an AOL spokesperson says. The spokeswoman declined to provide more details about the desktop searching
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America Online is teaming up with RSA Security in an effort to keep its users safe from online fraud and identity theft. RSA and AOL are announcing a new program called &quot;AOL PassCode&quot; that will encourage AOL
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Blog: Yahoo Photos members now can start moving their photo archives to some alternative sites.
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According to sources familiar with testing, America Online is developing its own desktop search technology that will initially be added to the AOL Browser beta as early as the end of this week. AOL's entry into the space pits it directly against rival Microsoft, which has designs for a desktop search engine of its own.
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ImageWell, the lightweight image editing software for bloggers, now supports Flickr, SmugMug and ImageShack.
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AOL&#160;plans to unveil a number of new mobile services Tuesday, including the customizable MyAOL for mobile phones as well as a redesigned AOL.com portal page for mobile phones.The beta version of the mobile portal has been available since September but is now being formally introduced, said Scott Falconer, executive vice president of AOL Mobile. The portal includes the type of news, entertainment, and sports content that is available on the desktop version of the portal.In addition, it features AOL&#39;s mobile search technology that returns tailored results for mobile users. For example, if a mobile user searches for a music artist, the first results may be ringtones. In addition, AOL&#39;s search crawls an index of sites designed for mobile use, so it will return those sites near the top of the list.The search results will now include paid listings. That addition started last week, said Falconer.AOL is also announcing that MyAOL, the customizable home page, will be available to mobile users. People will get access to the same MyAOL they build in their regular PC browsers.Other new mobile services from AOL will include a shopping service that lets users enter a barcode number or product name and receive comparative prices for the product at various retailers, as well as contact and location information for the retailer.AOL is also launching a downloadable client called MyMobile. Initially available only on Windows Mobile devices, MyMobile is designed to offer an easy way for users to download and use AOL services of their choice, such as mail, MapQuest, and CityGuide, within a single application on the phone.AOL isn&#39;t alone among Internet services and content companies pursuing mobile users. So far, none seems to have a clear advantage. &quot;I would say it&#39;s still an open market,&quot; said Falconer. &quot;Google of course is the leader in online search but mobile search is fundamentally different.&quot; In addition to the online giants, a number of startups are targeting the mobile search and content market.AOL has two reasons for offering mobile services, including as a way to maintain loyalty among its existing user base and as a way to grow its advertising business, Falconer said. Analysts are predicting large growth in mobile advertising and AOL hopes to establish a foothold in the market, he said.
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I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
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Mikko Koppanen has posted another quick example of using the ImageMagick functionality in PHP - overlaying a string of text over a currently existing image.   Ever had the situation where you have a piece of string which you need to overlay on an image? Maybe a situation where the area reserved for the string is known in pixels but you need to know the font size to fill most of the area? Think no more!   In his example (ready to cut and paste), he defines the text in a variable and, with the help of the newPseudoImage method, adds the text over the top of his sample image. Example input and output is provided.
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Just two days before it was to&#160;end support for Netscape Navigator,&#160;on Wednesday AOL gave the browser a last-minute reprieve, saying it would extend support until March 1.At the end of December, Tom Drapeau, the director of AOL&#39;s Netscape brand, surprised users when he stopped development of the browser and set Feb. 1 as the date when his team would stop issuing security updates.Yesterday, Drapeau pushed out the support end date a full month, saying that Netscape and its partners needed more time to wrap up work on tools designed to help users migrate to the Mozilla Firefox or Flock browsers.&quot;Mozilla, Flock, and AOL are working together to provide tools to ease the migration of existing Netscape browser users to our recommended Flock and Firefox alternatives,&quot; said Drapeau in an explanatory post to the Netscape blog. &quot;AOL support for Netscape browsers has been extended one month, to March 1.&quot;In addition, an upgrade will be issued to Netscape 9 users through the browser&#39;s integrated update feature to &quot;streamline the process of choosing from these two great browser alternatives,&quot; Drapeau said.Flock was a new recommendation from Drapeau, who last month cited only Firefox -- the code successor to Navigator -- as an alternative, but Flock had been touted by others on the Netscape team earlier this month. Flock, a free browser that stresses social networking features, is built on the Firefox code base.Drapeau didn&#39;t specify what tools were in the works, but presumably they will include some kind of Netscape-to-Firefox migration assistant. Currently, the only way to move a user profile from the former to the latter is to manually copy the Netscape &quot;profiles.ini&quot; file and its folder to Firefox&#39;s directory. Flock, on the other hand, recently unveiled version 1.06, which includes Netscape migration features.Nor did Drapeau elaborate on the reasons for Netscape&#39;s demise. In December, he named &quot;AOL&#39;s current business focus&quot; and an inability to revive Navigator&#39;s moribund market share as motivators for the move. At the time, however, sources close to Netscape called out AOL upper management&#39;s lack of interest and funding as the real reason why Drapeau pulled the plug.According to one source, the lack of resources meant &quot;we would not have been able to offer releases in a timely manner, which would have been a disservice to the brand as well as the end user.&quot;Coincidentally, Mozilla celebrated its 10th anniversary just last Tuesday, Jan. 22. Several months before it was acquired by AOL, Netscape Communications Corp. in early 1998 announced it would release the browser&#39;s source code, a move that led several weeks later to the formation of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and eventually the creation of Firefox.Last month, Asa Dotzler, currently Mozilla&#39;s company&#39;s director of community development, and one of the first paid employees of the Mozilla Foundation, said good riddance to Netscape on hearing Drapeau&#39;s news. &quot;I&#39;m glad that sad beast has finally been put down,&quot; Dotzler said in a post to his blog. He also didn&#39;t buy Drapeau&#39;s explanation for putting Netscape to rest.&quot;The real truth is probably closer to &#39;we weren&#39;t building a compelling enough product to be able use it to bring users to our ad-supported world and it doesn&#39;t make sense spending more on browser development than we recoup in increased ad revenue as a result of that browser work&#39;,&quot; said Dotzler.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.