unmediated

Vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write).

Today at comp.compression, Brendan G Bohannon announced a vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write). The format will assume no fragmentation of smaller files, rather a file is to be moved if it expands beyond the space available to it.

Current default file extension will be “zpk” and will use deflate with a 64kB window. The CRC algo will be the same algo used in ZIP and PNG for example.

You can checkout the code and format specs.

From the press release."Creative Commons and Vogele & Associates today unveiled the Podcasting Legal Guide,which was prepared by both organizations together with the invaluable assistance of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw.The Guide was prepared as part of the Stanford Center for Internet & Society’s Non-Residential Fellowship".

Podcasting Legal Guide Released To Assist Podcasters Navigate Potentially Troubled Legal Waters

We've been working hard on ccPublisher 2 lately, and I'm pleased to announce that the third beta is available for download. You can find release notes and downloads for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux here. This release is stable enough for regular use. If you've tried ccPublisher in the past and want to upload a work to the Internet Archive, I encourage you to try this release. We're still working on ironing out the last few wrinkles, but overall this release is more stable and flexible than previous ones.

ccPublisher 2 doesn't add lots of new features to the original ccPublisher feature set, instead opting to focus on the infrastructure of the application. I think it's a strategy that's paying off, and will make the addition of new features far easier in the future. We're already seeing results, as bugs and major improvements to the code base are far easier than they were with ccPublisher 1.

If you have any suggestions, ideas, or bug reports, we'd love to hear them. You can file bugs in the ccPublisher tracker, or join the cc-devel mailing list to communicate with the developers.

Whitney Independent Study Program is setting up Image War, an exhibition of artistic works that remix, transform, or mimic images from the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans, hijackings, popular uprisings, recent American military interventions, and other violent political events.

Among the works featured in the show:

In his Afghan Dialogs series, Rainer Ganahl took taglines from the bottom of cable news channels during the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan. He embroidered them into silk banners, and sent then to Afghanistan, where residents were given the opportunity to stitch their own responses to these taglines.

Joy Garnett’s painting Kill Box (part of the Night Vision series) appropriates a night-vision image of a tank from the First Gulf War as made iconic by TV news coverage.

In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1995-7), Johan Grimonprez mines archives of televised
airplane hijackings, remixing the material into a disco-driven video narrative that rethinks depictions of air terror and that, some say, eerily foreshadowed 9-11 (video excerpt and trailer).

Beyond Manzanar: An American Internment Camp: Between Fears and Realities, by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand, uses navigable 3-D game technology to immerse viewers in an historical and cultural space and engage them as participants in history.

"The piece explores media scapegoating of immigrant groups in times of crisis," said Thiel, who compared the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar, Calif., during World War II to the threatened internment of Iranian-Americans during the 1979-80 hostage crisis. "The installation also finds echoes in post-9/11 discrimination against people of Middle Eastern extraction today," Thiel added. (via)

Other participating artists: Willie Doherty, Claire Fontaine, Coco Fusco, Jon Haddock, Amar Kanwar, An-My Le, Din Q. Lê, Radical Software Group (RSG).

Image War, at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, May 19 - June 25, 2006.

Press release (PDF)
Via Rhizome < Newsgrist.

="http://feeds.we-make-money-not-art.com/~a/wmmna?a=YBADXx">

T-Mobile in the UK has launched an HSDPA-enabled data card in the UK, but at the same time has banned the use of VoIP across the service. The fine print on the new Web'n'Walk Professional service explicitly prohibits both...

Continue.

(Phone service is not an app! Don't look behind that curtain! -kc.)

"The global distribution of Internet users has sharply shifted away from the largely American base of years past, giving the "world" in World Wide Web new legitimacy,"this IHT article says."Figures from March show that fewer than one-quarter of global Internet users were in the United States,comScore Networks said in a report last week. A decade ago,the rate was about two-thirds.ComScore,a market researcher based in Chicago,says it believes that its latest research is the first worldwide survey that uses consistent measurements in all major markets,including China and India.Of the 694 million unique visitors over the age of 14 who used the Internet in March,the most were in seven countries:the United States (152.1 million),China (74.7 million),Japan (52.1 million),Germany (31.8 million),Britain (30.2 million),South Korea (24.7 million) and France (23.9 million),it says.Together,China,Japan,India and South Korea represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population,168.1 million users,a figure that in the aggregate is 11 percent larger than the U.S. online surfership.That is true even though the research excludes traffic from public computers like those at Internet cafés,a primary means of access in Asia,and access from cellphones or PDAs".

The End User:More world on the web

On Monday, May 15, the Online News Association will begin accepting entries for the 2006 Online Journalism Awards.

Deadline for entries is June 15. In yesterday's ONA newsletter, outgoing ONA executive director Tom Regan emphasized that there will be no extensions this year. So if you want to enter, make sure you get your entry form in on time!

Note that the entry form is not yet online, but will be available shortly on the ONA site.

I'm stunned by a statistic in a RTNDA/Ball State University survey of local TV and radio websites. Get this, 50% of TV news directors surveyed say they don't know if their station's site is profitable. Since the level of profitability of a station's website has a direct correlation with how well a news director can defend his/her level of spending (let alone make intelligent resource reallocation decisions), don't you think EVERY news director should know this little detail? And if the station isn't breaking out these numbers, they should. Anyway, the survey is here ("TV Websites Helping the Bottom Line"), but it's for RTNDA members only. So I posted a couple more stats below...Survey of news directors regarding TV and radio websites.

What do users want from your site?

1. Local weather
2. Local news
3. Money news
4. Other information
5. Entertainment news
6. Headlines
7. Local sports
8. Weather elsewhere
9. Live cameras
10. Traffic

What's your web content staffing (TV)?

Markets 1-25 -- 2.24 full-time, .47 part-time
Markets 26-50 -- 1.34 full-time, 2.55 part-time
Markets 51-100 -- 1.64 full-time, 2.07 part-time
Markets 100-150 -- 1.37 full-time, 3.04 part-time
Markets 151+ -- 1.32 full-time, 2.08 part-time

(Source: RTNDA/Ball State University)

E-Commerce Times interviews Amazon VP Paul Misener about net-neutrality. "[Incumbents] say they will not block or degrade service otherwise, but that is not possible if they are prioritizing some content," argues Misener. He goes on to lament the state of competition in the broadband sector, suggesting that "if [consumers] had more choices of providers, this wouldn't be such a dangerous situation." Amazon spent $460,000 in the first half of '05 on all technology lobbying issues. Google spent $220,000 in all of 2005. Expect those expenditures to sharply rise thanks to the net-neutrality issue.

I just wanted to write a quick post about the ITP Spring Show. A friend of mine talked me into going on Tuesday and it turned out to be a very interesting experience. The ITP Sring Show is where graduate computer science students at NYU showcase projects they’ve been working on all semester (thesis projects or some kind of academic thing). Most of the exhibitions fell into one of three categories: very artsy, educational toys or a mobile based web 2.0 app. Obviously I was very interested in the mobile apps (at least from a browserless perspective), although there was some interesting projects like the live action super mario brothers or the drawing produces from conversations on blogs. I think that MoBeeLine is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Out of the mobile/web 2.0 apps (hence forth refered to as “mobile 2.0″), I saw a lot of innovative projects and some emerging trends. Here are some of my favorites:

Snagu.com, the mobile scavenger hunt. Very interactive and potentially addictive. Everyday they send you a word and you have to find a picture that matches it. Then your photo is compared with others with the same word and the commuity votes on which photos are the best. An interesting use of mobile technology and bringing a web based game into “real life”.

PlacesToDo is a mobile 2.0 app that allows you to set up a “to do list” of places by sending the location via SMS to a server. It logs the location and what you wanted to do there (examples are the store, an art gallery you walk by or a hot girl’s apt). Then you can share the list in a social fashion. Useful app if they have a good breadth of locations in their system.

free4md (pronounced “free formed”) which is a clever perl hack that allows people to upload video from their phone and put it into a community structure. The asthetics could use some work, but the idea is solid and will provide a great tool for capturing live, unfiltered events. Though I have questions about the quality of video captured from most mobile phones, all it takes it one major event uploaded before the site becomes very popular.

You Are Hear’s GeoTag lets you associate a sound file with any location a map. It doesn’t have GPS capability (yet), but you can put in an address and link a sound to that. If they could just come up with a “tour of the city” feature that will let me walk around and quickly for an audio guide at any point in the city. Also very useful for identifying good bars, exhibits and loose women.

The mobile 2.0 concept is new and very interesting. It combines the attributes of most web 2.0 sites (social, tagging, gibberish name) with the real life experience of walking around. You still have to use the website to register, etc in most cases, but much of the interaction can be done only using the phone. One of my favorite tricks that I saw was encoding an audio file from a phone conversation and associating it with a location (you walk by a bar, call a number then leave a review. Then users from the web can hear your review as opposed to reading it). I think this a great combination of web and non-web interfaces and a great example of mostly browserless technology at work. I wish all of these students well and I’m sure they learned a lot in putting together these interesting apps.

Paid Content is again updating its list of media conferences. Panels for all!

Still cameras that record HDTV may require solid state memory to keep them compact. That means MPEG-4 AVC encoding will be required to lower bandwidth.

Panasonic and Sony took a step in that direction today when they jointly announced a new MPEG-4 digital-video-camera/recorder format.

The new "AVCHD" format, which will allow recording and playback of high-definition 1080i and 720p video onto 8-cm DVD media, far smaller than today's conventional 120-cm DVD discs, or even the 12-cm miniature DVDs currently used for recording.

Separately, Panasonic said it would use the AVCHD standard to allow consumers to record HD video to standard SD memory cards.

Neither Panasonic nor Sony said when products using the technology would be sold. At the high end, the AVHCD format will allow recording at 1080i at 60 frames per second (1080/60i), 1080/50i, and 1080/24p; while midrange 720/60p, 720/50p, and 720/24p formats will be complemented by a 480/60i format at the low end. In HD, a bit rate around 18Mbps is used.

The AVHCD format will use the AC-3 audio codec to acheive between 64 to 640 Kbits/s of audio data over 5.1 channels, or 1.5-Mbits/s of PCM audio over two speakers.

Panasonic believes the SD Memory Card is the recording media best suited for video cameras, and has already released a professional-use HD video camera that uses SD memory card technology. SANYO's $799 Xacti HD1 can record both 720p high-definition video and 5.1 megapixel digital still images to a standard SD flash memory card. It can record over 21 minutes of 720p HD video on a 1-Gigabyte SD card and 42 minutes on a 2-Gigabyte card.

A cost/effective MPEG-4 AVC encoder might be the tricky bit. Maybe Panasonic will add an audio input jack on their still cameras, too. One can hope.

Social networking sites have gone from being the next big thing to the thing itself. But, asks Sean Dodson, can they continue to hold the fickle attention of today's teens?

"In December 2005 I was interviewed for Printed and Disposable Electronics News about the Touch project, the future of RFID and on the social implications of NFC. Here is the plain interview, since an online version of the magazine is not available."

A Swarm of Angels is a new way to create cult media. The project is a giant new media experiment to gather 50,000 people paying £25 each to create a new type of movie.

The new book, ""How Would a Patriot Act: Defending America from a President Run Amok," has risen to become the number one seller on Amazon.com -- before the book has been published. How? Bloggers.