filter

Peter Gabriel a fan of Radiohead-esque Internet efforts

Peter Gabriel, the Grammy award-winning performer, this week applauded attempts by some artists to experiment with new ways to sell music.

Since October, the bands Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have generated plenty of notoriety after distributing their own albums--without the backing of any music label--through heavy use of the Internet.

"I think it's fantastic that these new models are appearing," said Gabriel, one of the founders of the band Genesis, told me on Monday. "You don't need very many people to make a project economically viable if you're distributing yourself."

When it … Read more

YouTube's filtering issues still not 'moot'

LAS VEGAS--A year ago Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt delighted an audience of TV and radio broadcasters when he promised to roll out a system that would mean the end of piracy at YouTube.

"We are in the process of developing tools which are called 'Claim Your Content,'" Schmidt said at the National Association of Broadcasters 2007 conference. "If people tell us this is a licensed copy, our computers will automatically detect that an illegal copy has been uploaded and then automatically delete it."

Schmidt went on to say YouTube was "close to turning this (system) on&… Read more

Rocker Peter Gabriel offers Filter to cut through online clutter

Internet users are awash in information every time they search for new videos, music, or books online, says rocker Peter Gabriel.

One of the founders of the rock group Genesis and the creator of the iconic solo album So, is an investor in The Filter, a recommendation engine that now offers to help users cut through clutter on the Web and find the kind of content that will appeal to them.

Until now, The Filter has operated mostly in Europe as a music discovery service. A redesigned site is now offering to find a much wider array of content, Gabriel … Read more

Duplicate content: Separating the penalty from the filter

Several weeks ago at SMX West I had the pleasure of meeting and having lunch with Brian White from Google. White works on Matt Cutts' Web spam team, tirelessly working to make Google's search results the best they can be, ensuring the best user experience. Quite a hefty task indeed.

You'd think that someone who spends his days fighting the never-ending battle that is Web spam might be a bit negative or jaded. If that is the case, he does an amazing job hiding it. Instead, he was upbeat and you could feel the excitement in his voice as he spoke. Here's a guy who loves what he's doing and truly wants to not only improve the searchers' experience on Google, but wants to make the Web a better place. You can't help but like a guy who's fighting the good fight.… Read more

Peter Gabriel to help launch music discovery service in U.S.

Correction: Representatives of the The Filter say the April 9 launch date in their correspondence to CNET News.com was inaccurate. The site is due to launch later in the April.

UPDATE 1:45 P.M.: Peter Gabriel, the Grammy-winning recording artist and technology innovator, is scheduled to help launch The Filter, a music-discovery service in April.

The Filter, Gabriel and the company's CEO, David Roberts, will meet with members of the press in San Francisco on April 9th as part of the run up to the launch later that month. The company says that the site will launch … Read more

Using open source to fight porn

Our daughter was rummaging through a box of memorabilia and found an evelope of photos taken in early 2001, about the time I'd purchased a cool new macro lens. One minute she was flipping through a series of cute puppy pictures and the next minute she's face to face with a set of full-frontal nude photographs depicting...a wolf spider. In fact, the spider was so exposed, the close-up so extreme, that Amy could not bring herself to even handle the photos so as to put them back into the envelope from which they came.

So when I … Read more

"Sort" your Gmail messages with filters and labels

There are lots of things to like about Google's Gmail service: It's free (unless you count the text ads at the top of each window; it is available on any device with Internet access, and it's easy to use as a central repository for multiple e-mail accounts.

Unfortunately, there are also many useful features of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and other standalone e-mail programs that Gmail lacks. One of the features I miss most is the ability to sort messages by sender. I used to have to page through old mail 50 messages at a time to … Read more

China keeps information in, not just out, with Internet filtering

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic and a blogging resident of Beijing's Chaoyang District, has written a good outline of how China's online filtering apparatus works: "The Connection Has Been Reset."

Aside from the fact that The Atlantic has made the lovely choice of freeing its content, the news to me was that China's filtering system is working in reverse:

Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese media at the University of California at Berkeley journalism school, told me that the authorities have recently begun applying this kind of filtering in reverse. As Chinese-speaking people … Read more

China browsing restrictions may drop off during Olympics

Something was going to give.

As Beijing prepares for the Olympics and the attending flood of foreigners, many of them reporters, expected to arrive this summer, the government's controls over the Internet have become increasingly sophisticated. But would the Olympic organizers really be OK with dozens of stories about reporters and athletes unable to reach Wikipedia and BBC?

Apparently, decision makers are indeed worried about press regarding censorship. AFP quotes an Olympic organizing committee representative as saying, "I believe you will be able to (access banned sites such as the BBC), but I can't give you a … Read more