Brad’s Sketchpad

Sites like YouTube and MySpace can run themselves ragged manually pulling copyrighted content from their services. But in the future, for legal and practical reasons, the process will have to be automated. In this week’s Plain Text, I write about acoustic fingerprinting, and companies like SnoCap and Audible Magic. The firms administer databases of copyrighted songs and then scan the online services for matches - a sprawling high tech version of the familiar card game Go Fish.

On Friday the Sci-Fi Channel’s superb series, Battlestar Galactica, begins its third season. My enthusiasm for this show knows no limits. In my latest Plain text column, I have written an in-depth, nerd-credential-cementing appreciation. The new episodes subversively draw themes and images from the War against Terror and Col. Tigh, in particular, is at his Rumsfeldian best.

In this week’s Plain Text, I write about the marriage of photos and maps- the new Internet tool that’s called, awkwardly enough, geotagging.  Geotagging is the practice of attaching any of your online photos to a publicly viewable map. Millions of Flickr users have done this in the last month, and the result is richly multidimensional maps, like the one in the image above. The dots represent various users’ photos of Lighthouses on the Great Lakes.

Forget the great sushi. Here’s a lament for my TV-playing, manga-downloading, coffee-buying mobile phone, in this week’s Plain Text.

The podcast JapanesePod101 helped us linguistically limp our way through Japan over the last two months. In my latest column on Newsweek.com, I write about the show and the growing world of language lessons for your iPod. 

A tour through the world of Japanese humanoid robots, in my Newsweek online column this week. A version of the story will also appear in next week’s Newsweek International.

In my first Plain Text from Tokyo, I take a tour through the  crowded, enticing video arcades of the Shibuya district. No quarters needed to click on this link.

 Before I left for Japan, I filed a column on the developing scourge of Netflix guilt. More from the Land of the Rising Sun soon.

In this weeks Plain Text, I look at the excellent forthcoming documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” and preview the electric sports car from secretive Silicon Valley auto-startup Tesla Motors.

In this week’s Plain Text, I ask whether America’s mayors are unwisely and unrealistically promising cheap, broadband wireless networks in their cities.