unmediated

Interesting times we live in now. When I was growing up, there were 3 broadcast networks, PBS, and a handful of UHF stations. Now there are so many choices -- both on television and online. But what are people watching?

To get a sense of what kind of numbers, I turned to MediaWorks to look at a sampling of choices.

In terms of total viewers, cable TV networks range from a high (USA Network) of 2.6 million to a low (Fuse) of 24,000. Ouch!!! I think that a family gathering in my clan might approach that number.

A network that falls squarely into the midrange of total viewers (ranking 32 out of 64), VH1, is drawing 670,000.

The top 10 most-viewed channels on YouTube this week drew between 247,000 views for Lonelygirl15 to 712,000 for a user from Japan called blacksoulafroman.



YouTube says that their most popular video of all time is "The Evolution of Dance" which has 33,501,050 views in the last 6-months. I included it above just for you.

The Big Four broadcast networks' total viewers ranged from 7.21 million (Fox) to 9.41 million (ABC) during the week of Sept. 11-17.

I know, these are not apples-to-apples comparisons, but I thought interesting none-the-less.

Nokia has dismissed the need for a single spectrum band across Europe for mobile TV, and particularly doesn't like the proposed solution of a temporary L-band allocation until permanent spectrum can be released. "We're going to lose quite a lot of economies of scale if we are going to add new radios to the devices. Also, the network operators are not keen on that band as it is two-to-three times more expensive to build the network for this frequency," said Jouni Kamarainen, director of industry collaboration at Nokia's multimedia unit.
Meanwhile, Juan Carlos Jil, executive director of the GSM Association in Latin America has called on the Chilean government to set aside spectrum for mobile TV services, while the government is considering which digital TV system to implement.
And Australia is still debating media ownership laws as they apply to mobile TV, with lady-in-charge Senator Coonan being pressured to ensure that more than one company has access to the spectrum - one option is that whoever gets the spectrum be "forced to guarantee access arrangements to other players".

William Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood — “Nobody knows anything” — may be true of the social media space, too. So many arguments about whether the social networking space is another dot-com bubble turn on anecdotal evidence or emotions, so we should welcome an analysis of the question that promises to include some data other than “2006 sure feels like 1996, doesn’t it?” On the Knowledge@Wharton site, an unbylined author explores why it’s so hard to value social networking sites. Several Wharton professors look at the numbers, acknowledge that someone is bound to be a winner, but both the subjects and the author say — you guessed it — that it’s too early to tell. “If you have a little bit of money invested in this and you’re already invested in other things,” says Wharton adjunct finance professor John R. Percival. “Frankly the risk is not as big as you think.” In other words, the experts tell us, we don’t really know.
Should this be so difficult? We have been through this before and it wasn’t even all that difficult at the time to differentiate between the properties that has staying power (say, eBay) or those that were unlikely to differentiate themselves (think PointCast). In the early days of a new media type, there are always plenty of ventures that make noise (TheGlobe, Boo) but they’re just noise. YouTube, for example, is trying to follow the Napster model of transitioning from a copyright-infringement service to one supported by rights-holders. Academics like those at Wharton could look at Napster’s valuation as a starting point for figuring out whether YouTube is (a) worth half a billion dollars or (b) too much of a headache for any company to buy. Every new-media moment is full of players who claim that what they do is unprecedented and can’t be valued using earlier methods. But the commecial Net has been with us for more than a decade. There are plenty of examples out there worth extrapolating from to make best guesses about the future. Valuation is a moving target and it’s based on many fast-changing variables — and yet anyone who says it’s impossible to figure out isn’t thinking hard enough. Percival notes, “This is kind of like the oil and gas business … a high valuation might be justified.” OK, so what can we learn from the oil and gas business that will help us here?

This is pretty interesting: even games companies aren't immune from the attention-sucks that are MySpace and YouTube. This Sony VP sounds very much like some of our lot:

Denny told the audience he believes that online communities such as Myspace and YouTube have had a huge impact on the way people interact and will additionally impact the success or failure of tomorrow's games.

"Today's games are competing for time share even more than cash. Consumers today have more choice, they have more and better things, and they have louder voices. And the future consumer will have an infinite menu."

Infinite menu. I like that, I might borrow it.

JesusQuintana asks: "I'm working with a low-power television station to update their playback system. Currently they're using tape and I've been tasked to move them to computerized playback (MPEG-2, etc.) There are proprietary solutions (very expensive) and there are companies that bundle software with Windows and standard x86 hardware. Overall, they are generally unimpressive and won't sell the software without bundling it with their own hardware. (They won't let us buy our own storage.) We have the expertise to build our own infrastructure (NAS, redundancy, etc.), but really just need the equivalent of iTunes for high quality video. There are lots of other pieces needed to complete the work-flow (such as encoding the media), which could be accomplished on Mac or Windows or even Linux. But what about playback? We need something that will play back these files at their scheduled times (perhaps scheduling cron jobs to change playlists) to broadcast quality hardware (SDI or YUV video). Could we run a TV station on Linux?"

Can computer crime be beneficial? That’s the question asked by a provocative note, “Immunizing the Internet, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Worm,” by an anonymous author in June’s Harvard Law Review. The note argues that some network attacks, though illegal, can be beneficial in the long run by bringing attention to network vulnerabilities and motivating organizations to address problems.

I don’t buy the note’s argument, but there is a grain of truth behind it. Vendors and independent analysts often disagree about whether a vulnerability is real or could ever be exploited in practice. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the best (and often the only) way to resolve that debate is to demonstrate an exploit. If you can do something, people will accept that it is possible.

Our recent e-voting study is a good example. Diebold can’t seriously argue that malicious code can’t sway an election, because we have a working demo that we have shown on national TV and in front of congress.

Even when the vendor is willing to acknowledge reality and work constructively to fix a problem, a working demonstration is useful in helping the vendor cope with the problem — and in helping the good guys within the vendor organization neutralize any internal minority that wants to deny the problem. Showing the vendor a working demo can be the first step in a constructive problem-solving relationship.

(To be clear: You can build a working demo and show it to people without revealing to the public every detail of how to build the exploit. How much information to publish about a demonstration exploit is a separate issue from whether to build it in the first place.)

But some sorts of problems can’t be demonstrated without breaking the law. For example, Diebold apparently claims that there is no way to tamper with the upcoming November election in (say) Maryland. I’m convinced that claim is false, but the most direct, obvious way to prove it false would involve actually tampering with the election, which of course is unthinkable.

The note’s reasoning would imply that the penalty for tampering with the election might be reduced, especially in cases where the tampering is engineered to be obvious and to cause minimal damage, for example if it added 10,000 write-in votes for Homer Simpson to a statewide race where a candidate was running unopposed. Though such an attack would be instructive, it would still be wrong and would deserve serious punishment. If the legal lines are drawn in the right places, and if the punishment otherwise fits the crime, then we shouldn’t let attackers off easy just because their attacks were instructive.

• catwav: concatenating two .wav files under Unix
  (tags: shellscript wav cat sox opensource shell *nix audio)

Mark Tapscott, who is sitting in for Mark Glaser at MediaShift, explains how the Washington Examiner Community Action Network (WeCAN) functions. He writes:

This project is barely in its infancy but is worth watching because it combines elements of citizen media and open-source journalism, with a semi-traditional daily newspaper.

After describing how the Examiner is putting government databases online, he writes that WECAN is a:

powerful force for greater transparency and accountability in local affairs, something Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds might view as a platoon in An Army of Davids. The same principle could be applied at the state and federal levels, too.

Additionally, WECAN illustrates the truth of the maxim grassroots journalism guru Dan Gillmor first promulgated - our readers know more than we journalists do about the beats and topics we cover. A smart newspaper will see the value of harnessing multiple "stringers" for the news-gathering process.

One other thought here: Finding a way to make a newspaper a partner with civic groups throughout the community can't help but be a good marketing tool. Of course, I'm just a reporter, so what do I know about marketing, right?

India ENews.com lists online resources for journalists in developing nations. For example, there is the Gender for Journalists toolkit, developed by the Commonwealth Press Union. Several other useful sites are also listed. Technorati : journalism, onlinetraining Del.icio.us : journalism,...

I never really thought much about same language subtitling (I saw a lot of it in Thailand, but for karaoke), but it turns out it’s a great way to teach literacy.

Back in June, Dr. Brij Kothari, the president of PlanetRead, was given a grant from the Google Foundation to use ‘Same-Language Subtitling’ of movies to increase literacy in India. It’s a very cheap, effective and creative method of teaching people to read, and can be broadcast over the Internet at almost no cost. They hosted SLS movies on Google Video and on Youtube.

Source: Smart Mobs: Google’s Literacy Project

As we've noted before, there's a growing movement to create new networking solutions for poverty- or disaster-stricken areas. (See, for instance, Jer's interview with Inveneo.)

Green Wifi is the latest effort to join this movement. Their brief is to use available technologies to create a rugged, low-cost, solar-powered wifi system for the developing world:

A number of non profit entities focus on addressing the digital divide by providing internet access to developing areas. Green WiFi addresses one of the biggest barriers to success: the lack of reliable electricity in developing areas required to power the network. Green WiFi has developed a low cost, solar-powered, standardized WiFi access solution that runs out-of-the-box with no systems integration or power requirements. All that is required is a single source of broadband access. Green WiFi nodes can then be deployed on rooftops to form a self-healing network that hops the source signal over a virtual 802.11b/g grid. Because these nodes require no fixed installation or power tie-ins, these nodes can form an unplanned, mobile grid that can grow or be relocated as needed. ...last mile internet access with nothing more than a single broadband internet connection, rooftops and the sun.

Such an approach, of course, has the potential to fit nicely into the suite of emerging leapfrogging tools aimed at serving people who not only don't have access to the Net, but don't have any of the infrastructure upon which connectivity usually depends. From the One Laptop Per Child project to broader leapfrogging tools like Freeplay's Weza and Ubuntu, a really compelling toolchest is starting to emerge.

Why does this matter? Because, as we've noted before, connectivity (through both mobiles and the Net, though obviously the two are blurring together) can empower rural people in the market by making prices in distant places transparent; it is enabling new forms of economic activity; and it is even beginning to drive political change. More widespread connectivity is also brings voices to our public debates that we here in the developed world are unused to hearing. And leapfrogging that last mile may prove the most powerful move of all.

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Leapfrog Nations - Emerging Technology in the New Developing World at 08:02 AM)

a personalized "recommendation visualization" interface for music playlists. playlist songs are in orange, recommendations are in green. node size indicates a level of "global popularity" for the song. node color indicates relative age (bright green songs are new, greenish-brown to black songs are older). the connections between the songs are the number of times the pair of songs occur on a playlist. users can browse the artist, album, genre & track information as well as view album art and listen to samples

see also music plasma & amaznode & music underground map & music similarity map & artist similarity visualization &

[link: labs.mystrands.com|thnkx Justin]

Last night I went for the first time in a long while to the monthly IGDA meeting of the San Francisco chapter. The lecture was about the latest CSI Game, which doesn't sound that exciting until you see the demo data: the CSI games' biggest group of consumers is women beween 35-50. The audience that no one else can get to play games is the one that is crazy about this particular game.

Robin and I noticed that a lot of the talk was about "casual gamers", as in, "Casual gamers want an authetic experience," "casual gamers want accessibility." It struck us both, I think, that the core audience for the game exhibits anything but "casual" behavior. They are crazy for the game. Over 80 percent finish the games, and 76 percent (I think - I don't remember the exact number) are repeat customers. They probably don't play any other game but this. Isn't that sort of focused attention the definition of "hardcore"?

There's a big semantic problem here. The tendency these days is to almost ghettoize the games that don't appeal to the standard male 18-34 demo as "casual games." Hence, everything from mobile games to kid's DS games to free flash games to CSI The Game are lumped into "casual." Robin suggests on her post about this that perhaps there is a subset of adventure gamers who just aren't being serviced by the industry currently, or maybe that there is a burgeoning audience for these types of games.

I think it's important to understand that "game", in this context, stretches far, and includes a wide variety of experiences. Some game reviewers slam adventure games precisely because the play element is so trimmed that it is virtually nonexistent - even some of the puzzles are obscure and illogical. But we call them games because they are interactive and still feel like a game experience.

I happen to be a fan of adventure games. But I also will admit that I play them often with a walkthrough or a guide handy, because it's not as rewarding to me to solve the puzzle than it is to see where the story goes next. So I can understand wanting to lose oneself in the narrative and get swept away by something like The Longest Journey, which I truly loved. And that's also why I have a high tolerance for games like Final Fantasy VIII, that really rely on story to overcome broken game mechanics.

Even though I think I'd be classified as a hadcore gamer, I am very open to the kinds of experiences described by the panelists on behalf of their customers: cinematic pleasure, immersion in a beloved IP, the continuation, in essence, of a franchise and a show.

But to call it "casual" seems odd. We need a new definition of "casual" games, and a new way to define games that are, like adventure games, driven more by story and character than by agency of the player.

It turns out that CitizenSpeak is really making the rounds right now. The latest news is that it's included in a new book: Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age by Allison Fine.

The book includes a description of how a Philadelphia organization used CitizenSpeak and other online organizing tools to rally their community around their cause. You can read more on CitizenSpeak's blog or by using Amazon's Online Reader.

Tags: citizenspeak

Navini Networks, a leading WiMAX vendor with "beamforming" technology, announced at Globalcomm 2006 in Brazil this week, that their Ripwave MX solution will now be available in the 3.6 GHz (3600-3700 MHz) band (pdf).

Navini’s MX base station, in commercial shipment since April 2006, is now be available in the 2.3 GHz, 2.5/2.6 GHz, and 3.4/3.5/3.6 GHz bands.

“We are excited to bring our Smart WiMAX solution to the 3.6 GHz band,” said Sai Subramanian, VP, Product Management and Strategic Marketing, Navini Networks.

MX mobile WiMAX platform provides non-line-of-sight (indoor) coverage and easy plug-and-play activation, with a proven seamless software upgrade 802.16e (as demonstrated at the Mobile WiMAX Plugfest last week).

 

Engadget notes that the much-buzzed-about Eye-Fi SD WiFi card is set to go into beta testing later this month.

It perports to combine storage and 802.11g Wi-Fi connectivity into a single card that can transform an ordinary digital camera into a wireless one.

The card doesn't require specialized drivers and will supposedly work with any camera that's been "qualified by Eye-Fi," letting you wirelessly transfer photos directly from your camera to your PC or to select websites.

Exactly which cameras have "qualified" we're not sure, with the company only saying that they've tested "numerous camera brands and models" and that they're aiming for "broad camera interoperability."

The card will also come with a Compact Flash (Type-II) adapter. Let's just hope the beta testing doesn't take too long, cause we're guessing the available slots are gonna fill up pretty quickly.

We'll believe it when we see it.