RK's Rambling

GAudi is short for Google Audio Indexin g, and it’s the latest experiment to be added to the Google Labs . This service lets you do a text search for spoken words in videos of YouTube’s US politicians channels. The functionality was previously already available as part of an iGoogle gadget . Will Google ever manage to apply this technology to all YouTube videos – and perhaps even videos not contained on YouTube, but available from other video upload platforms? Google in their FAQ write that the aim of GAudi “on Google Labs is broader and the US election is just a first step. We see it as an experiment platform where we can learn what features make the best user experience for people looking for spoken content on the Web.”

As “the father of the Internet”, Vint Cerf is a man who needs to be listened to, especially when he is talking about the Internet itself. So when he warns that the Internet is almost full, meaning the available IP addresses are rapidly running out, I think we all need to start taking action. Cerf, now aged 65 and an Internet evangelist, was one of the men who worked on ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet, and so is rightly regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Internet. According to The Guardian, he has recently warned that the Internet is rapidly running out of IP addresses, with late 2009, early 2010 a possible time-scale for when all the IP addresses in the world will have been used. The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that it’s not only computers that are now able to connect to the Internet, with mobile phones, PDAs, game consoles, televisions, and even fridges all being sold with some kind of Internet access built in. This means that the Internet Protocol ve