Hi, I’m Mike DiBenedetto

Google Voice Allows Voicemail Embedding

Here’s an interesting little feature of Google Voice: it allows you to embed voicemails you receive onto other sites.  I’m surprised that this hasn’t raised any privacy concerns yet.

Making private messages easily shareable will inevitably lead to some pretty sticky situations.  Think about email.  We can share emails with the click of a button.  And worse yet, people can forward the emails we send them.  Before email, we would never worry that people would photocopy our letters and share them with the world because that would have been a hassle.  But every business in the world instructs their employees to watch what they write via email because they know that those words could easily get forwarded around (remember this story?) or end up on Consumerist.com.

Before Google Voice, one could certainly make a sound file of a voicemail and put it on the internet, but the process wasn’t simple.  It wasn’t as easy as clicking a few links.  (Let’s all thank God that this woman went through the trouble of posting this voicemail.)  However, now it is.  This newfound ability got me thinking.  Who should own the intellectual property of a voicemail?  Probably the receiver of the voicemail.  But is that the correct legal answer?  I don’t know.  Perhaps leaving someone a voicemail is akin to granting them a temporary license.  Should it be?  When you call a company’s call center, they tell you that the call may be recorded.  Do they do that because they have to or do they do it out of the goodness of their hearts?  I wonder.  If they have a legal obligation to do it, should all Google Voice users tell their contacts that their messages may be posted to the internet?

On a somewhat related note, Google Voice is hilariously terrible at transcribing voicemails.  They are so off the mark that the transcribing service is more of a joke than a service.  Check out GV’s transcription of the voicemail embedded above.  It turns a simple request into a borderline scandalous proposition.  “I know we would just wanted to touch and you wouldn’t mind.”

Hey Mike, It’s knowing how you doing. I am the looking for like an old pair of shoes or sandals for tomorrow and I thought maybe I’d be able to like 5 there, but I can’t find any because I was just order close to go to shopping at 3 o’clock on. That’s it for me and but I’m going to go to rethinking and I thought cross my mind that perhaps you would have an older see that you wouldn’t care about. I know we would just wanted to touch and you wouldn’t mind. Let me give me for a day and I know that’s a lot of the way and that you would actually be at home on Friday night and that I could find a way to stop by my pick it up so I’m making like a lot of group for the about the possibility here, but I’m just trying to think if there’s any way that I can find after 2 for this river to bring thing then I’m going on tomorrow, I’m, and so it’s at at all of these things happen to be true, all at once and you would like to this message. I guess it’s another thing that has to be true if calls. I happen. Let me know and if anything else, so I’ll come tried had take about an event at any of the are not true. I will not be surprised and and or send it at all, so i’m yet so give me a call. Let me know and enjoy your party tomorrow. And sorry I can’t make it alright. Bye.

Helpful? Didn’t think so.

On July 14th, my girlfriend and I boarded a plane to Dublin, Ireland. One of her best friends, a lovely Irish girl named Emma, was getting married in Wexford, in the south of Ireland, on the 18th to a great guy named Garret. We planned to spend a few days in Dublin and then head down south for the ceremony and party.

I decided to use the trip as a little experiment in travel documentation. While my girlfriend would document our travels (okay, okay, our visits to Irish pubs) with her very nice digital camera, I would only bring along a Flip Video camera. She would take nice, well composed, well lit photos of people, places and things. I would capture short videos of action or moving panoramas of vistas that were too difficult to capture in one frame.  I did my best to keep the videos short (under 20 seconds when possible).  I also took certain videos for certain people based on jokes or stories we’ve shared.

Now that we’ve returned home, I’m uploading all of the videos to YouTube and she’s putting her photos up on Picassa. I plan on sending the respective links to our family and friends to see how people react and which medium they like better for vicariously experiencing our travels. Once I get feedback, I will post again here with the results along with sample photos and videos.

My suspicion is that as long as a particular person’s broadband connection and computer are fast enough they will get a kick out of the video and will really enjoy seeing us in action traveling.  I think that this type of recording and sharing will become more common as the tools get better and people learn that videos that don’t tell stories but merely show something need to be very very very short.  I know this is happening now.  But perhaps one day, a majority of travelers will leave their still cameras at home.

If you want to drive something as powerful as a car, you need a license.  You need to prove to society that you know how to operate it in such a way that innocent civilians will not be endangered.  If you want to drive something as big and dangerous as a bus, you need yet another license on top of that.

In the world of image editing, Photoshop is roughly the equivalent of a 747 with side mounted nuclear missile launchers.  And yet, we let any old designer get his or her hands on it for less than 200 bucks.  This is dangerous.  As if Photoshop Disasters wasn’t proof enough, I present the following evidence:

A few weeks ago, I was walking through the Union Square Subway station in NYC and I saw this anti-smoking ad.

Ok. Smoking is pretty dangerous. This is a good cause. Weird language but whatever…I can deal with that. But check out this detail.

Apparently cigarettes let you keep your right hand.

Photoshop is obviously too powerful a tool to let mere mortals near it. Erasing someone out of a picture should be so hard that there are only a few people on earth who can do it and those people would never let something like this happen.

It is interesting that when something like photo-editing becomes this simple, we will have to recalibrate our expectations. Making complicated tasks simple will always have a downside. I just hope that we don’t make passenger planes as easy to drive as Photoshop is easy to use.

By not customizing your default image size settings in wordpress, you risk having badly sized images.

After I wrote the previous post on this blog, I was very unhappy with the tiny size that I choose for the Reddit screenshots.  Actually, I didn’t choose them at all.  It was the default settings for medium sized images in Wordpress 2.7.  I tried using the large image setting but it was too big for my column width.  Sure, I could have manually resized the image but I didn’t.

That’s because default settings are powerful things.  They determine way more of your life than you’d probably like to admit.  I will be posting a short brainstorm in the coming days about the ways that changing common default settings could drastically alter our lives.

For now, I’d like to make a few suggestions about changing your image size default settings in Wordpress 2.7.

Step 1: Click on “Media” in the Settings Menu

Step 2: Set the Medium Size width to half of the width of your main column and the Large Size width to a few pixels less than the full width of your main column.

Changing default image sizes saves time and makes your blog look better.

By having the large size correspond to your maximum width, you can easily make images take up the entire column.  And by setting medium size to half the width, you can easily insert images that can float to the left or right and have text wrap around them.