unmediated

Dirac: BBC Open Source Video Codec

"Need To Know this week has a piece about Dirac, a BBC R&D project to produce a video codec, which has been released as an Open Source project. From BBCi: 'Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced... Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions.'"

MuSE

MuSE is a user friendly but powerful tool for network audio streaming, making life easier for independent free speech online radio stations.

MuSE is an application for the mixing, encoding, and network streaming of sound: it can mix up to 6 encoded audio bitstreams (from files or network, mp3 or ogg) plus a souncard input signal, the resulting stream can be played locally on the sound card and/or encoded at different bitrates, recorded to harddisk and/or streamed to the net. When sent to a server, the resulting audio can be listened thru the net by a vast number of players available on different operating systems.

vnc2swf - Saving screen captures to Flash

Vnc2swf captures the live motion of a screen with VNC protocol and generates a Macromedia Flash movie.

Talking to your TV

Motorola and AgileTV are working on a way that you can feel less embarrassed when you talk back to your television: set-top boxes with built-in voice recognition so you can change channels and schedule shows to be recorded just by talking into a little microphone built-into your remote control. Sounds like a headache if all you want to do is switch channels, but with digital video recorders being integrated into all of these boxes, being able to just say what show you want to watch or record will probably be a heck of a lot easier than trying to tap it out on a keypad.

Readers as Reporters at the BBC

If you are a news company, are a subscriber to all major wire services, and you have your own reporters in every corner of the world, will you ever feel under-informed? Obviously yes, or how else would you explain that BBC News yesterday asked its readers for help in covering a breaking news story? Yesterday, shots were being heard in Damascus. Obviously nobody knew exactly what was happening, news feeds from the agencies were only dripping, and the BBC's own reporter couldn't add much background very fast. The BBC published some basics and asked its readers to add more details: "Are you in the Damascus area? Did you witness the blasts? Send us your comments using the form below." Five reader comments and a much more detailed article are on the site right now. It is not disclosed how many people have sent in comments and how much editing and fact checking was done by BBC News before publishing. However, this looks like a clever way to dress up your coverage even from far-away places and to involve your readers beyond letting them criticize the results of your brainwork.

Norway's First Photo-Phone Reporter

When yvind Woie from the Norwegian newspaper Vrt Land packed for the CeBIT 2004 exhibition in Germany, it would have been a slight understatement to say that he packed lightly. He brought nothing but his Nokia 6600 photo phone, and sent in his reports every time he spotted something worth a mention. All in all, he submitted 32 small stories, consisting of a 400 x 300 pixel photo and no more than 160 characters of text. The end result was a small slide show with all the latest gear and trends.

According to Journalisten.no, Woie reported (...)

Entry continued...

FCC Requires Firewire on All Cable Boxes

As of April 1st, cable companies are required to provide a Firewire-enabled cable box to anyone that asks, as per an FCC interpretation of Section 304 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. What this means to you is that easy ripping and recording of HDTV streams is just a phone call to your cable company away--at least those streams that are unencrypted (broadcast stations are required to remain unencrypted, and while most premium channels are open now, too, they likely won't be for long). Not only can you record shows and watch them on your computer, but the Firewire port allows you to stream video back to your TV, making the cable box, if nothing else, an extremely easy way to get a high-quality signal back into your existing A/V setup.

Bandwidth Simulator for Streaming Media Testing

How do you effectively test the way streaming media sites will appear to people on modems, DSL, cable and other varied Internet connections? My piece, A Bandwidth Simulator for Testing Streaming Media addresses this.

VH-1 Gets Participatory Media

Fast Company has an interesting article on how VH-1 used comments posted on their blog to develop ideas for their new show.

In the months leading up to the debut of "Best Week Ever," a new show in VH-1's lineup that makes a nostalgic nod at our warp-speed culture, executive producer Fred Graver set up an internal blog. He hoped it would be a way for the show's writers to brainstorm commentary about the latest celebrity gaffes and quirky of-the-minute news.

But when the show launched in mid-January, he made the decision to open up the blog to the Internet. Just one week in, more than half the comments posted on the blog were coming from random stoppers-by, giving the writers ideas for show material.

d y n e : b o l i c

A GNU/Linux distribution shaped by the needs of media activists, artists and creatives.

dyne:bolic is a GNU/Linux distribution simply running from a CD, without the need to install anything, able to recognize most of your devices and periferals: sound, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb devices and more.

About About

Peter Caputa has some interesting ideas for About.com, suggesting that it become a repository of syndicated blog content, sending revenue to bloggers in return.

I do think there is room -- and a need -- for such a service but I doubt that About.com is the service to do it.

A few months ago, I had lunch with Tom Rogers, the former head of Primedia who bought About.com, and said in the middle of my usual blog evangelism that if About.com started today, it would be decentralized, not centralized. He agreed. Rogers understood the power of niche content and targeting online. When Scott Kurnit started About and Rogers bought it, the decentralized blog world had not yet exploded. But now it has. Yet About remains a centralized content service, not even a portal to decentralized content.

Do we need such a portal to decentralized blog content? That depends on whether you think people will ever specifically wonder what "blogs" have verus what online "content" has. I don't think blogs should segregate themselves from the rest of the content world.

But I do think there is opportunity for sophisticated and decentralized ad and content networks and Caputa's thoughts about grafting such opportunities onto About is an interesting way to frame the discussion. [via PaidContent]

Books Get Napsterized

Toronto Globe and Mail has an story on how the rise of print-on-demand technology and Web sites devoted to self publishing are making it ever easier for writers to bypass conventional publishers.

Try before you buy a Content Management System

opensourceCMS:This site was created to give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best open source and free php/mysql based software systems in the world. You can log in as the administrator to any site here, thus allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

Open-Source Mesh Group Releases Software, Discusses Social Goals

The CUWiN project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.

Read the rest of this post at Wi-Fi Networking News

free video streaming technologies

Highlights affordable and reliable compression technologies, transport protocols, software and hardware setups for video streaming.

Given the vast panorama of video technologies available nowadays, this research could fill up way too much paper in the attempt of covering every aspect of this field, instead i'll just try to narrow the focus to certain advanced aspects of streaming video, also trying to give a quick reference guide to the usage of selected free software.

FreeJ

FreeJ is a digital instrument for video livesets, featuring realtime rendering of multilayered video and chained effect filtering directly on the screen. FreeJ deals with every video source as a layer, making then possible to dynamically apply on each a chain of filters, loadable as effect plugins and easily customizable.

Everyone is an editor

Sam Williams in Salon: Everyone is an editor. In the wacky wiki world, a Web browser is all you need to start contributing. But when the goal is to create an encyclopedia, such democracy has some pitfalls....

software motion detector

Motion monitors the video signal from one or more cameras (video4linux interface) and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed.

Here's a few of motion's features:
-Taking snapshots of movement
-Watch multiple video devices at the same time
-Watch multiple inputs on one capture card at the same time
-Live streaming webcam (using multipart/x-mixed-replace)
-Real time creation of mpeg movies using libavcodec from ffmpeg
-Create mpeg movies from snapshots after events using mpeg_encode
-Take automated snapshots on regular intervals
-Take automated snapshots at irregular intervals using cron
-Sending an e-mail when detecting movement
-Sending a SMS message when detecting movement
-Control via xml-rpc

via cms2u

Videoblogging Frustration

I wish I could say it was easy to do this kind of videoblogging, but it's just not true. What I hoped would be a quick, spontaneous thing turned into a chore. It's frustrating, really -- we're so close, yet so far, when it comes to being able to sling video clips as easily as we sling text, still images, and even audio.

Tiny Stealth PC Adds Integrated WiFi

Stealth Computing's newest small footprint PC, the LPC-401XW, has built-in WiFi, but sadly only of the 802.11b variety. With up to a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 inside, you could hide this substantial little box anywhere there is a power outlet (think Home Theater PC). The 802.11b is really too bad, though:...

Laser vision

You'll have to feel totally comfortable with beaming lasers into your eyes to want to try this out, but a company called Microvision has come out with the Nomad Expert Technician System, which uses a wireless computer and a sort of monocle to project a virtual image by beaming lasers directly into the retina.

Microvision says they're perfectly safe (they better hope so!), and the US Army is already using them in Iraq to give soldiers a heads-up display with a view of the entire battlefield. Next up, they're being tested by surgeons, who would actually be able to see inside of their patients or keep taps on vital data like heart rate and blood pressure during surgery, and Honda is trying it out with its auto mechanics, who would be able to view car diagnostic and repair information while working. Right now the quality of the images is pretty low, but you know that they'll eventually get it right and it'll be full-color, fully immersive virtual reality for everyone. Or at least everyone who can afford it right now the Nomad Expert Technician System costs four grand.

TI says streaming will grow 87%

Texas Instruments says home streaming media is only going to get bigger. TI says streaming will grow at a rate of 87% annually between 2004 and 2008. Note: TI is in the streaming biz, and has an interest in its growth.

Alcatel delivers mobile video solution to Orange

The solution allows Orange France to provide its GPRS subscribers with access to video, the first mobile video service in France.

DVRs poised to change advertising culture

Forcasts of increased DVR usage could mean decreased TV advertising budgets. TV's loss may lead to an increase in Internet advertising revenues.

For years, TV advertisers have relied upon the "captive audience" for pushing their product pitches, but now TV viewership is on the wane with the rise of the Internet and other entertainment options. Add in the commercial skipping features of DVRs and TV advertisers are faced with a precipitous decline in the value of their advertising dollar. This new viewership reality has started to change advertiser attitudes and how they pitch their wares.

a proper marriage of tv and blogs.

a friend of mine who does technology development for a Big Media Network asked me a blue sky question over a couple of pints at NAB last week: if i could properly marry television and blogs, how would i do it?

I ended up giving two answers: a drunken rant that night (use RSS!), and a longer, more sober one which I recount here:

1. Start publishing your program schedule as an openly subscribable RSS feed based on the XMLTV format. It will allow folks to publish feedrolls of their favorite TV shows on their blogs. If people like your programming, they'll spread the word for you. You gain instant karma.

2. Fund Andrew Grumet's (and other folks') work to marry BitTorrent, RSS, and TiVos. Make sure it all works with your newly minted RSS feed.

3. Pay someone else to graft the TiVo interface onto a BitTorrent client. My mom can use a TiVo. My mom could care less for BitTorrent. The geek in me finds this funny since they're basically the same thing. They're both "downloaders" although one goes out in search of content while the other waits for the content to fly by in the stream. For my mother, the difference is in the UI. P2P apps make excellent software but horrible players, and ultimately, civilians don't need download managers. Throw all of the file management to the background and toss the whole thing in a set-top box.

4. Change your advertising model. People don't like 30-second ads. Move all advertising to product placement (Queer Eye is the best infomercial EVAR!), show sponsorship (Texaco Star Theater, anyone?) and less-obtrusive snipes. And if it isn't overdone, have your audience make your advertising for you. This should probably come first, but as I'm a geek, I want to emphasize steps 1-3 first.

5. Make it easy for folks to download your programming via BitTorrent. Don't worry: you've embedded your advertising in your programming, remember? To you, what matters are the eyeballs, not the interface. Set up a decent number of servers as file seeders on some fat bandwidth. The only major thing missing from the broadcatching concept is guaranteed sources. You have the bucks and the broadband to provide that.

6. Encourage bloggers to create feedrolls of their favorite TV programs, irregardless of the TV network. Let them aggregate their own virtual TV stations, if they want to. Sometimes you have to build culture to create audience. (Don't give up on me now. We're almost there.)

7. Create an Amazon Associates-style revenue sharing program for bloggers who's readers click through to download an entire episode. Extra commission for those who click on interactive ad links. Even more for those who's click throughs turn into actual transactions. If I had it my way, ABC.com would be a lot more like Amazon.com, complete with links for "People who watched Such-and-Such also watched So-And-So."

There are still a lot of holes, but it's a start.

mini GNU/Linux distro for the Via EPIA boards

freepia Yea! Now I will have something to do with my M-10000 once my thesis is done ;-)

From the site:

Freepia is a small GNU/Linux distribution designed to run on Via Epia-M Mainboards. It currently runs on the M-9000 and M-10000 (ezra and nehemiah cpu) but with some modifications like kernel and X11 modules it should run on others too. (if someone has get it running on other Epia¥s let me know). The main motivation behind this project is to build a full featured, low noise media box to play movies/mp3s/images etc. For this it uses freevo but in the future there maybe support for others like mythtv or vdr.

CHI tutorial on sociology and cybercollective action

In Vienna, Marc Smith and Susan Herring are teaching a CHI 2004 tutorial on recent sociological work on computer-mediated collective action. This includes a session on Analyzing Social Interaction in CMC Systems.

Blogging, equality and the future

With the mainstream media's interest in blogging at a fever pitch, Mindjack's Melanie McBride takes a critical look at the future of blogging and talks to some of the bloggers trying to shape it.

It's All About the Distribution - Free Speech, Telecomm and Copyright (Ernest Miller)

I've said it before. I'll say it again. When it comes to information, it is all about the distribution.

Last week, Ed Felten pointed out a great point about the important nexus between copyright law and communications regulation (Copyright and Cultural Policy). Felten was referencing James Grimmelmann's excellent LawMeme write-up on Seton Hall Law School's recent symposium, Peer to Peer at the Crossroads [PDF] (Conference Report: Peer-to-Peer at the Crossroads). Read the whole report, but the presentation that struck Felten's fancy (and mine) was UVa's Tim Wu: Copyright's Communication Policy [PDF]:

This article suggests that the main challenge for 21st century copyright are not challenges of authorship policy, but rather new and harder problems for copyright's communications policy: copyright's poorly understood role in regulating competition among rival disseminators. [emphasis in original]

Read the whole thing. It is a rich look at an extremely valuable way of considering copyright law.

Wu calls them disseminators, I call them distributors, but we both recognize their importance to copyright law. If, as I argue, copyright is about distribution, then it really makes sense to view copyright as communications policy (which is also about distribution) (It's All About the Distribution, Stupid).

I go even further, however, and claim that important elements of the First Amendment are also about distribution (It's Freedom of the Press, Stupid and Freedom of Speech as Distribution is a Good Thing).

Bonus: Check out the figure on page 11 of Wu's paper. Reminiscent of a layered protocol, don't you think?

Where to get first-hand news

Reporters in Iraq can't give us first-hand news... but bloggers can.

The head of CNN laments that the violence in Iraq means that reporters are not getting out to find out what is going on firsthand and that means we're not getting good reporting from Iraq:

I think news consumers are being shortchanged to a degree, not just on television but in print, because journalists are not able to do their jobs effectively, and certainly the depth and breadth of reporting that you saw even a month ago was far more vast than what news consumers get today.

We're being shortchanged to a degree? Well I suppose that we are. And I applaud him for making that clear and explaining the limitations on reporting clearly and explicitly so that we can evaluate what we're getting from Iraq knowing that.

: River also criticizes media coverage -- Western media coverage -- of Iraq.

MIT Media Lab Offers a Simple Recipe for Publishing Homegrown News.

MIT Media Lab Offers a Simple Recipe for Publishing Homegrown News.

Veteran journalist Jack Driscoll's research group has teamed up with senior centers and schools around the world to teach would-be journalists how to write and publish community news. The program gives participants simple online publishing tools -- and a few key lessons in how to be reporters and editors.

RIAA's noise-spoofs turned into noise-rock

Claire Chanel, the person behind the Jay-Z Construction Set, has decided to net.judo-ify the RIAA's spoof tracks, random noise disguised as top-40 singles which it promulgates on the P2P netowrks.

As a follow-up to our last project, the Jay-Z Construction Set, Scary Sherman and I decided to take a fair & balanced route by highlighting one of the positive moves made recently by music industry leaders.
The RIAA-Mix Vol.1 is a compilation of the hottest underground remixes of top40 hit tracks produced by the upcoming talent at Overpeer. These homages to 20th century noise artists and avant composers pull a frightening bait and switch on listeners veering wildly from recognizable pop hooks to jarring digital distortion.
Available at riaamix.com as downloadable mp3s, streaming flash audio, or on a compact disc, we're hoping our compilation can help support the arrival of challenging new music to mainstream exposure.

Link

Apple shows new H.264 codec at NAB

Apple demos new high-quality video codec at NAB. From the article: In addition to the five product announcements made on Sunday and the upgrades to the notebook product line-up on Monday, Apple Computer Inc. still had a surprise for people visiting their booth at this week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, NV. Apple demonstrated at its booth an advanced HD video codec, dubbed H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10 by the ISO governing body.

Content Management Systems for alternative media

I'm looking into systems to set up an alternative media website.

Here are a few that I found today:

The independent media center uses Mir as an Open-Source content managment system.

The Boston Indymedia Center runs on dadalMC.

dadaIMC also sports a new "license" section, allowing the author to specify a distribution license, selecting from public domain, standard copyright, or one of the Creative Commons licenses.

GeoStamp

GeoStamp overlays GPS latitude, longitude, heading, speed, altitude, date, time, and a user defined message onto a self-generated blue screen or any incoming video source.

GeoStamp updates the screen after each valid GPRMC and optional GPGGA (for altitude) sentences are received from the GPS receiver. The fields displayed are: Latitude (North/South), Longitude (East/West), Heading (course over ground in degrees), Speed (mph or knots), Date and Time (UTC universal time), and optional altitude (meters or feet.)

Does Television have a future..

The Future of Television

Of course it does... Dave Lennie has an interesting blog: "television will be very different in just 5 years"...

What is participatory journalism?

CyberJournalist.net asks: "What is participatory journalism?" and provides links to answers as well.

Newsday published photos this weekend of Billy Joel's Long Island automobile wreck shot by the person who helped the rock star from his car. Some might consider this participatory journalism. Of course, readers have been selling photos to newspapers for generations, so participatory journalism, in this sense at least, is nothing new. What's new is how the Internet has expanded the outlets for participatory journalism and thus helped it spread in so many new ways.

Here's a definition of participatory journalism from J.D. Lasica:

(1) Audience participation at mainstream news outlets.

(2) Independent news and information Web sites.

(3) Full-fledged participatory news sites.

(4) Collaborative and contributory media sites.

(5) Other kinds of "thin media."

(6) Personal broadcasting sites.

For more on this topic, also check out WeMedia and draft chapters from Dan Gillmor's new book, We the Media.

Nokia, Tecnomen to push video message mail boxes

Similar to voice-mail, Tecnomen's solution allows unanswered calls to be forwarded to a video mail service. Callers then see subscribers' video greetings and can leave video messages.

The Law and Politics of Open Source

- software use is regulated by a contract (EULA);
- control over the desktop by ANY monopolist in e2e network implies control the network, or at least the intention to do so;
- Open Source model prevents any single entity to take over the the operating system and desktop;

- closed SW systems correspond to broadcast only models and closed news and media systems, one we have now;
- both (proprietary) software and (corporate) media ecosystems experience the the lack of trust of their end users: software system in security realm while media system is widely perceived as not credible and relevant;
- broad participation and transition from "consumers" to "producers" is the way to regain confidence and improve the quality of both ecosystems (unmediated.org);

- Open Source Streaming, Net-TV hybrid systems (laika); 
- P2P and RSS media distribution (BitTorrent and blogs);
- dv.open4all.info;

Disrupting the News Industry

On Friday April 30th the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism will be presenting a panel discussion on "Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism." Panelists include Neil Chase, managing editor of CBS MarketWatch, Vin Crosbie of the media consulting firm Digital Deliverance LLC, Dan Gillmor, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the forthcoming book "Making the News," and Ken Sands, managing editor of online and new media at The Spokane Spokesman-Review. The event is free and open to the public and will be webcast live at 10:30AM PDT.

The panel is being held in conjunction with a two-day conference on the impact of information and communications technologies on Chinese society which also promises to be very interesting.

Business 2.0 article on Creative Commons

Giving It Away (for Fun and Profit) - By Andy Raskin, May 2004 Issue, Business 2.0

Good article about Creative Commons and the business case.

Techpopuli notes on BloggerCon: Personal TV networks

Just read Jack Hodgson's notes from the Bloggercon session on Personal TV Networks where they discussed both "metafilter for video" schemes and videoblogging. Interesting stuff.

People want help sorting through all the video choices, and the consensus is that web-based video will inevitably increase the number of choices.

There was a difference of opinion as to whether "regular people" wanted to create video for the web, but agreement that the tools to simplify the workflow to posting were lacking.

Steve Garfield Explains How To VideoBlog.

At the end of Steve Garfield's recent video post, he explains his process for creating and publishing his video blogs.

When I got back to my editing suite later that night, I was anxious to post the video.

I hooked up the camera to my Macintosh via a USB cable and copied the video file to my local disk.

At this point I had two options:
1. I could FTP the video up to my web host or
2. I could load the video into Final Cut Pro for some editing first

The file you get from the Canon S400 is a .avi file.

DScaler - Analog Video De-Interlacer

DScaler is a piece of software that grabs analog, interlaced video, and deinterlaces it to make it a progressive scan feed then allows scaling to any resolution for use on your computer monitor or projector.

Listen to Internet Radio over Wifi

wildumut writes "There's an article on the Register about new WIFI radio tuners, worth a look. 'Wi-Fi is not only freeing up notebook and PDA users to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the home, it's also making Internet radio work (almost) like the real thing.'" The company website has some more information, but these aren't available for sale yet.

Creating a self-organizing weblog directory

As everyone has noticed by now, the blogosphere is rather tricky to get around in, especially for newcomers, and the efforts at mapping it have remained pretty much scattered and fragmentary. Even if you restrict your view to the small space of academic weblogs, things aren't really better. Alex Halavais has launched into an effort of his own in that space, and upon reading this I've started a Wiki page to help find a promising strategy for enabling a self-organizing directory of research weblogs. You're welcome to contribute....

Continued at clippings

Cellulo - Applescriptable Mac OS X Movie Player

Cellulo is a movie player for Mac OS X that allows you to create a playlist (a la iTunes) of video files (multiple file types) and display it full-screen on your computer (including subtitles.) Since it's scriptable, you can do things like write in triggers for automatic playback.

(This is a useful app. I once paired Cellulo up with FileMaker to create a cablecast video server out of an old iMac. -kc.)

Steal this remix

BoingBoing reader fluffy says:

Forget about underground remixes of mainstream music - this site (inspired by the wonderful songfight.org) is an ongoing collaborative remix project where independent musicians remix each other. It's great!

JpegRDF

The JpegRDF command reads and manipulates RDF metadata stored in the comment section of JPEG images. It can extract, query, and augment the data. Manipulating JPEG images with JpegRDF does not modify the actual image data or any other sections of the file.

Production truck in a briefcase

From lostremote: I remember the old days when we packed a bunch of gear in a camping trailer to switch live three-camera productions. Now Sony is coming out with Anycast, a switcher, audio mixer, camera controller and character generator in a single briefcase. It also has an on-board Real video encoder to send out a live stream. Costs $20,000, weighs 15 lbs, available in August.

(i checked this out yesterday at NAB. it was impressive looking.... a pint to the first one to minituraize this and get it under $2500. -kc.)

Rumor says, Wi-Fi Camcorder

According to Tech Digest UK, a Wi-Fi Camcorder's on the way:

Sadly we donít have any photographic evidence as cameras are banned from the Hong Kong Electrical Fair, but OEM maker Shuoying International is promising a camcorder that could really shake the market up when it is launched later this year.

The model is a traditional camcorder storing moving images on miniDV cassettes, however it has two killer features. Firstly it has a whopping five-mega pixel CCD for capturing still images. Secondly it has built in Wi-Fi to enable it to stream video direct from the camcorder to a PC.

Weíll believe it when we see it, but it sounds like a really cool product.

Note: Although I see nothing about the camcorder on Shuoying's site, there's no reason to believe a consumer wifi camcorder won't be out in the next 6-12 months. Now we just need compelling reasons to use one.

The emerging mediascape

Here's a recently posted video presentation from MIT: "The Emerging Mediascape," a discussion featuring Mark Jurkowitz, Boston Globe media writer, and Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's ombudsman. Hear from two experts about changes in the news business where an abundance of information and information sources does not translate into an abundance of knowledge.

VideoScript

The premier language/tool for digital video and image processing.

VideoScript makes digital image and video processing easy. With VideoScript, you can automatically:

* Analyze video data in real-time: Has movement occurred? Is it still dark? Does the green level exceed the blue level by 23 percent?
* Respond to the analysis: Send email; add a picture to a movie file; move a robot arm.
* Track objects as they move.
* Create special effects: Dynamically correct color balance and exposure.

Processing 1.0 _ALPHA_

Processing is a tool for teaching basic concepts that will lead to the creation of future media and tools. The strength of Processing as a tool for learning and sketching lies in its simplicity, generality, and extensibility. Its simplicity makes it easy to use -- making it possible to create basic interaction within a short time period.

The Citizens' Media Association: a proposal

Out of the Bloggercon session on blogs as business, the clear and resounding wish of the assembled bloggers was to start a trade association that will enable business and sell the wonders of our new medium.

So here is a proposal for the Citizens' Media Association (working title), a first step for discussion.

Continue reading "The Citizens' Media Association: a proposal" at buzzmachine.

Introducing disruptive technologies for learning symposium

Don't know why I didn't get the good news out earlier. The symposium proposal that seven co-conspirators (across three continents no less) andI prepared was accepted for the ED-MEDIA conference.

One interesting meta-note about the development of the proposal: it was built in a collaborative manner over a few pages in my personal wiki. The proposal document went through dozens of updates. (See the revision history.) The process went quite smoothly, undoubtedly more easily than it would have gone if we had been passing revisions around by email.

The symposium with the title "Introducing disruptive technologies for learning: Personal Webpublishing and Weblogs" will include the following contributions:

Paper 1: Personal Webpublishing practices and conversational learning
Paper 2: COLLABOR: Cooperative Learning and publishing
Paper 3: Integrating Webpublishing tools in higher education
Paper 4: Observational Learning in Personal Webpublishing Networks
Paper 5: What can be learnt by reading weblogs?
Paper 6: Weblogs and learning culture
Paper 7: Blogging and reflective learning

C-Summit Bringing Together Cam Phone Community

From blueherenow: Next Week, C-Summit will bring together camera phone enthusiasts from around the world. Luminaries such as Alan Reiter will be making presentations but the biggest reason to go is to see who else is participating in the space. BlueHereNow will be posting reports on each days events. Tune in beginning April 27. To learn more about the conference or register visit www.c-summit.com

This looks like more of an industry event than anything else (there's a million dollar golf tournament!), although i trust blueherenow and some of the panel discussions look interesting. -kc.

The free culture movement

From Siva: Swarthmore students (among my many heroes) have started freeculture.org, which will be the central node in a global movement to save culture and information from the grasp of oligarchs. From the freeculture.org home page:

FreeCulture.org is the home of an international student movement for free culture. Although many activist organizations have arisen to protect and promote free culture (including the EFF, FSF, and Creative Commons), for true change in the system, we must look to the future -- the youth of the world. If we can win the hearts and minds of the next generation, the vested interests will slowly and inexorably become irrelevant. And who is more qualified to build a student movement than the students themselves?

Be a Freeporter!

Tom Nicolai has posted slides and notes from his presentation on Enabling a Mobile News Publishing Community. It describes a system in which amateurs would use cameraphones to enable collaborative journalism:

A web of trust is the basis for the news selection and filter mechanism of the network of Freeporters. This web can be implemented as a peer-to-peer network. Every node in this network is connected to other trusted nodes and fetches and recommends news items from those nodes. The interestingness of messages decays until a threshold where messages are dropped. This mechanism creates reputation and trust between the participants which makes it possible to automatically exchange messages.

(via Smart Mobs)

NYU-ITP Spring Show - May 11th and 12th, 5-9pm

"A one-day explosion of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP." Don't forget to ask the students about their work.

Small Electronic Logic Blocks - eBlocks

eBlocks writes "eBlocks are small low-cost electronic devices that can be easily interconnected for a wide variety of applications such as: detecting motion, light, water, sound or magnetic fields; triggering a buzzer, a light, an electronic relay or a lock. Devices can communicate wirelessly or can be controlled remotely via the internet or a telephone. The eBlocks technology has been developed by a professor at U.C. Riverside who is looking for inspiration on its best uses. Try out the simulator. Suggestions and comments welcome!"

New Plastic Turns Entire Mobile Phone Into Antenna

An inexpensive but "highly conductive resin" called Electriplast -- also called Plastenna -- enables mobile phone makers to get rid of the antenna and use the entire phone to send and receive signals. It could also improve call quality and improve battery life, according to the inventor, Thomas Aisenbrey, who is chief technology officer at Integral Technologies Inc. The handset makers are drooling at the prospect, as it will make handsets both better and cheaper. Integral is already working with DuPont to productize the invention.

(If I had a nickel for every day I spend figuring out The Signal Problem.... -kc.)

Design for Hackability

Our panel on Design for Hackability has been accepted for DIS 2004 - hope to see you there!

Design for hackability draws on hacker, punk DIY and remix cultural practices and values. It encourages designers and non-designers to critically and creatively explore technology and media, to reclaim authorship and ownership of new and existing technologies, and of the social and cultural worlds in which we live. Hackability implies more than customisation or adaptation - it calls for redefinition. Design for hackability involves creating spaces for play where people are never forced to adapt to technology. It involves recognising and working with tensions between people and artefacts. It also subverts the traditional function and use of networks. In a world where technologies are increasingly mobile and invisible, design for hackability means allowing and encouraging people to work with resources at hand and to make technologies be what they want them to be. It cultivates reciprocity between users and designers and supports transparency and graceful responses to unanticipated uses.

We invite people to further explore with us what it means to design interactive systems that are creative as well as socially and culturally responsible - to explore what design for hackability might involve and how it may inspire our design objectives and processes.

I will be moderating, and panelists include Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Lalya Gaye and Elizabeth Goodman.

British Library audio archive coming

The British Library is releasing a ton of audio from its archive on the Web -- though the article implies that it will only be available to higher education institutions.

Examples held on the British Library site include a live recording of Paul Robeson in Othello, Florence Nightingale speaking in one of the earliest sound recordings, as well as the genesis of Sherlock Holmes.

These historic recordings will be made freely available to further and higher education institutions in the UK and will include a wide range of materials, including classical and popular music, broadcast radio, oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.

Link

(Thanks, Patricio!)

Know your TV tuner cards

Home Theater PC News has a guide with way more information than you could possibly need about buying a TV tuner card for a PC and whether or not it'll be compatible with your choice of digital video recording software. Especially helpful is the illustrated guide to identifying the diffe

[Via LockerGnome]

Halavais series on weblogs and education

Alex Halavais has been pushing out a series of texts that make up a chapter in the forthcoming International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. I'm definitely going to read all of it.

* Part 1: Collaborative Web Publishing as a Technology and a Practice
* Part 2: Weblogs as "Replacement" Educational Technology
* Part 3: The Open Classroom
* Part 4: Trips without the field
* Part 5: New apprenticeship
* Part 6: Timeless education

Source: [Seb's Open Research]

Digital Imprimatur in a Nutshell

From 4/7/2004. I missed this last week b/c of db issues (mysql seems to have gone on strike), but it seems important enough to reblog now. -kc.

Via Howard Rheingold comes David Weinberger's NPR talk on emerging technologies that could significantly limit our ability to use and create with digital content -- the "triple threat" of content lockdown: Digital Rights Management (DRM), digital identity and trusted computing.

Rheingold observes that "This talk should recall [John] Walker's Digital Imprimatur paper." Indeed. That paper, which spawned a much-discussed Steven Levy piece, builds on the same insight (and pessimism) made famous by EFF board member Larry Lessig in his Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace -- "Hey, you Internet pioneers, your Internet isn't intrinsically free -- it's already proven quite regulable and we're headed toward more regulation. Wake up!" Lessig went on to divide the "levers" of regulation into four categories -- code; law; markets; norms.

What Digital Imprimatur does is add granularity to the "code" category -- a specific laundry list of technologies that have the potential to transform the Internet from open to closed. EFF's Fred von Lohmann read the paper; below, he provides a digest -- Digital Imprimatur in a Nutshell -- as well as his own list of countervailing technologies.

read the rest at EFF Deep Links

Citizens Can Improve Your Media Company

Here is my first draft of a one pager of ideas for how participatory journalism can help change and improve news media companies. It is part of a follow-up request from the organizers of the MediaMorphosis conference, which I attended...

Mainstream journalists want to maintain their objectivity and above all their independence. In the past this meant being the gatekeepers. They see themselves as the professionals who demand firewalls not only internally, but also externally. Indeed, when it comes to the letting the public in, they have almost a fortress mentality. The public journalism reform movement illustrated how deeply entrenched that mindset was and is....Today through self-publishing tools like weblogs, the public is battering away at that fortress and forming its own information portals.

Garage Cinema Research Open House

For those of you in the Bay Area, this Saturday April 17th Garage Cinema Research will hold its annual Open House. Come by and see demos and videos of select Garage Cinema projects, talk to the team members, and hear a presentation by Professor Marc Davis on "The Future of Digital Media." The open house is open to all members of the public.

For more details, see the schedule of events. The open house will take place at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems. There are directions available on the school's website.

Cell phones supporting interactive FM radio

Nokia, HP 'Visualize' Mobile Radio - Nokia is apparently making a couple of handsets that are capable of receiving FM broadcasts and synchronizing visuals and other media elements. Very interesting...
From the article:
"The FM radio capabilities are based on standard tuners embedded in the handset. The Visual Radio service picks up a user's location over GPRS and is able to pinpoint which radio stations are in the area," Reidar Wasenius, Nokia senior project manager told internetnews.com.

Creative Commons-licensed phonecam blogging service

Alfie Dennen of the phonecam blogging service Moblog UK says:

We operate the site code on a copyright commons basis, and with users like Warren Ellis (who want to retain control of their images/video/audio), we urge people using the site to do the same. The fact that Textamerica and mblog etc own your content once it hits their servers got us so angry we felt we had to make an alternative.

We carry no advertising, and are donation supported. In terms of the code itself, we support multiple image posts, multiple audio and image posts, in pretty much every format that phones can produce. The site is very malleable, if you can make a css style sheet, you can make the site entirely your own look, still hosting it with us. We are a community that consists partly of a lot of artists who want to make sure they keep some ownership of their work.

They Want to Learn to Blog

Leonard Witt writes over at PJNet: "I am sitting in a classroom at Kennesaw State University, getting ready for a weblog workshop I will running it along with members of our Information Technology Services department. We sent out one email notice to faculty and staff and some 35 people signed up almost immediately for the two separate workshops we will be giving."

"Sometimes when I get talking about the weblogs, some people's eyes seem to glaze over and I am never quite sure what level of interest there is in blogs. But when 35 faculty and staff members sign up on a campus at the end of a semester, that's a good sign. The word is out and people want to get involved."

Java based open source streaming server for Ogg

JRoar casts live Ogg streams to Ogg Vorbis players as IceCast2 does and shouts live Ogg streams to IceCast2 and JRoar(, but JRoar does not support encoding/re-encoding). JRoar also accepts live Ogg streams from IceS. The uniqueness of JRoar is that JRoar works as a proxy for live Ogg streams and enables you to share single stream with others. Of course, its characteristic property is that it is in pure Java. JRoar can be easily deployed and in fact, it can run on the built-in JVM of IE

Citizen Journalism's Big Test Is In South Korea

All eyes should be focused on the National Assembly elections Thursday in South Korea (today is tomorrow over there).

AFP has some of the background here but fails to mention the role of OhmyNews! in the rise of the liberal Uri Party. This will be a huge test of the political power of citizen journalism, and if the Uri Party makes the gains predicted, it will further turn all of journalism on its head.

ReadMe on politics, blogging, punditry and more

The newest edition of NYU's student-run zine ReadMe looks at the political impact of blogging on the 2004 presidential race and much more.

Political Bloggers Push Their Way into Journalism Ecosystem.

ï Political Bloggers Push Their Way into Journalism Ecosystem. Political bloggers are carving out a niche for themselves in the opinion elite and they're doing it with style.

ï If You've Got it, Blog it! Do professional credentials certify a punditís wisdom? Not online, says blogger Chris Geidner. In blogdom, amateurs and professionals can share the spotlight in the opinion elite.

ï Rethinking Ethics Through Political Weblogs. ìOpinion [journalism] is inherently unfair,î declares Daniel Okrent of The New York Times. Josh Marshall, a respected liberal blogger, couldnít disagree more. "Opinion journalism can be fair,î argues Marshall, as long as the writer maintains ìa fundamental honesty with the reader.î Is there such a thing as honest bias in the age of Fox ("We Report, You Decide") News?

(continued...)

IBM predicts age of open media

IBM hits the nail on the head in this report, but will big media listen? They urge broadcasters to "move to a truly open environment" and allow consumers "around-the-clock access to protected media content." (Via IWantMedia)...

ìThere will be clear winners and losers,î he added. ìThe winners will be more open, will deliver protected information through variable packaging and pricing, will know their consumers and business partners intimately, and will deliver media to them how, when, and where they want it.î

Citizens' media in Iraq

U.S. Marines in Iraq are raising money to equip seven TV stations in Iraq to be owned and operated by Iraqis. From the Spirit of America site:

News broadcasts in Iraq can be biased, inaccurate and incomplete - to put it mildly. Your contribution will create a television alternative owned and operated by Iraqis. This will provide better information, counter efforts to provoke and help reduce tensions....

It is essential to success of the Marine Corps' mission in Iraq that the Iraqi people understand our sincerest desires to help them rebuild their country and lay the foundation for a viable and free democratic society.

Cheap Tools and Rosy Futures

Paul Hughes envisions a rosy future made possible through "cheap tools of creativity, music & video production, blogging, smart mobs, and even more empowering and creative tools on their way":

Counter-culture will happen, because it will be just that - counter to so-called "culture" that is propagated in a highly controlled, locked-down way by the media oligarchs. Since they are denying their memes... the same freedoms that other memes enjoy, they won't spread as fast, far, or wide as counter-cultural memes without such restrictions. Additionally, their memes can't mutate, since DRM prohibits fair use [and] deriviative work. Counter-cultural creations will have no such restrictions.

In the marketplace that is as much a part of the natural world [as] plants and animals, Darwinian counter-cultural meme propagation will out-compete expensive, crippled memes, leaving corporate-controlled media eating the dust of an out-of-control Cambrian meme explosion. As this meme propagation accelerates towards the singularity, corporate dinosaurs will die off, wasting away in the pollution of their own making. The irony of it is, in the age of infinite duplication, there is no scarcity, so their desperate gasping is their own refusal to breath readily available air of a new culture.

I hope he's right, but I don't think we can lay back and expect that new tools will make this happen all by themselves. As Patricia Zimmermann tells us, when reel film cameras first became cheap enough for amateurs to use, pundits thought that it would usher in a new era of democratic media production, as people made documentaries about the ills of their communities and the like. Instead people filmed their kids' birthday parties. Cheap tools alone won't do it...

Building and Using Collaborative Tools

At WorldChanging, Jamais Cascio reflects on the recently published Manifesto for Collaborative Tools:

Replace "tools" with "movements" (and "tool builders" with "activists") and Kim's argument clearly applies to not just to those who are making the technology, but also to those who are using the technology to build a better world.

Collaborative tools and strategies for using them are a key issue for participatory media. Blogging was initially viewed as a solitary activity ("a web diary"), but with the advent of group blogs new genres are developing which focus on developing community conversations. As participation in media production expands to encompass audiovisual media, the issue of collaboration becomes even more critical, as AV productions are typically created by teams.

Although current tools may support multiple authors, do they address the differences between producing alone and producing together? I would argue that they do not. Even if they did, do we have patterns to follow for successful collaborations among distributed groups (without a corporation or other authoritative entity to bind people together)?

Toolmakers and activists alike have a tough job ahead...

Unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter

re-work, re-tell and release... I feel like this is something like bringing the oral storytelling tradition to modern media. It allows for change, critique and so forth.

From the site:

Wizard People, Dear Reader is an unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Ston, by Brad Neely. To experience it, viewers need to get a copy of the first Harry Potter movie and watch it with the sound off, replacing Neely's narration with the original soundtrack.

Live Webcast of Online Journalism Symposium

The fifth International Symposium on Online Journalism will be held April 16-17, 2004, at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Information about the two days of live webcasting is available here. Saturday's session "The State of Blog Journalism" and "Reconsidering Journalism and Its Effects on a Wired World" might be particularly interesting to participatory and public journalism folks.

Step-By-Step: Turn Your PC Into a PVR

PC World's got a great article on turning your PC into a PVR.

It's a great way to dip your toe into the world of PVRs, since most modern PCs have plenty of horsepower to record TV. All you need is a TV tuner (and a lot of newer PCs come with them) and a little software. Unless you have a special setup, you'll likely run into the classic problem of how to comfortably watch TV on your PC, but it's a good cheap way to try out the technology before committing to a TiVo or ReplayTV unit.

Server-based Mediation of Dreams

Location One announces a new weekly event: Server-based Mediation of Dreams, Wednesdays from 7 - 9 PM

Beginning April 7, Location One initiated a new series of Wednesday evening of talks and artist presentations on various topics. We are proud to include renowned curators and specialists from many disciplines, questioning and reflecting upon different aspects of our highly mediated contemporary society.

In this first month of April 2004, we will focus on art and technology. The events will address such themes as peer-to-peer biofeedback mechanisms; server-based mediation of dreams; robotcats; and implied morality of network incisions.

Notices about the upcoming speakers will follow, but here is the line-up for April:

April 7th
dorkbot-nyc
kicked off the series with presentations by people doing strange things with electricity.

April 14th
Drazen Pantic
co-director of Location One will talk about political and pragmatic implications of the open source movement as it affects artists today.

April 21st
Chris Csikszentmihalyi
a lecture by new media artist and MIT professor, Director of the Computing Culture Program at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

April 28th
Brian Whitman
from the Music, Mind and Machine Group, MIT Media Lab.

FFMPEG: video manipulation, at the command-line

FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developped under Linux, but it can compiled under most OSes, including Windows.

Time-shifted TV

New Media Committee of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, New York Chapter organizes a series of interesting lectures, first of which is:

April 28, 2004 Time-shifted Television

Blogs on campus

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Post and publish. Weblogs are creating a whole new campus culture. The article points out, for example, that 140 of the 1,340 students at Oregon's Reed College keep weblogs at reediejournals.com.

The Public Radio Exchange

"The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is an online service for peer-review and digital distribution of public radio programming, creating a web-based bridge between producers and stations. It is a decentralized partnership that will provide good homes to good works, more broadcast opportunities for the people who create them, and new sparks of freedom, imagination, initiative, and creative vision for a mature public radio field."

Time Mag Article on video blogging.

Garfield belongs to a small but growing legion of video bloggers, or vloggers, who are turning the Web into a medium in which someday anyone could conceivably mount original programming, bypassing the usual broadcast networks and cable outlets.

Terry Heaton illustrates the new journalism model

The second illustration represents a Postmodern media outlet. It sits at one of the millions (billions?) of intersections of a giant web, wherein each person also represents an intersection. There is no top or bottom, and, as such, the term "bottom-up" is really a misnomer. The flow of information runs through the same channels for the big boys' Websites that it does for the end users' emails. It is not just two-way; it's multi-directional. This clearly shows the problem for Modernist media institutions, whose business models are built on the top-down paradigm above.

The LPFM Bicycle

Folks up in Vancouver have paired up a bicycle with an LPFM radio transmitter to create a mobile LPFM radio station with programming all about local bike culture. I've emailed them to find out if they can provide documentation. I wonder if they use pedal power to generate electricity for the radio gear.

(thanks Yury!)

Wireless wearable MPEG-4 videoconferencing system

The product is based around a MPEG-4 hardware encoder, embedded web server and a 802.11b wireless interface. The system is built into a aluminium housing featuring shock protection, IP 65 protection (splash proof) and impact resistance.

It's designed for the commercial-industrial market, but interesting nonetheless. The system costs $9K. We spent about $5K getting wifitv to work. I can't wait til the codecs are better, the network is robust enough, and the hardware is commidified to the point where folks can do this with a $300 cellphone-like device. -kc.

Creating Community Blogospheres

Hossein Derakhshan has posted a guide to creating an active local blogging community, based on his experiences with Iranian bloggers:

The success of Iranians in creating a hyper-active blogosphere in their own language could be implemented by other developing countries. Weblogs have had social, political, and journalistic functions in Iran, a country run by an authoritarian, Islamic regime. Studying the process of forming such online community can help many in developing countries to shape their own version of blogosphere.

(Via BuzzMachine)

The Art and Science of Location and Media

I came across two interesting experiments involving location metadata and media today.
First, scientists Roberto Cipolla and Duncan Robertson at the University of Cambridge are building a system for inferring location from image content:

Roberto Cipolla and Duncan Robertson have developed a program that can match a photograph of a building to a database of images. The database contains a three-dimensional representation of the real-life street, so the software can work out where the user is standing to within one metre.

Their project is the inverse of the Mobile Media Metadata project, which aims to infer image content from contextual metadata (including location). It is interesting to consider how the technologies might work together: taking a picture of a building tells the system where you are (South Hall). Knowing where you are tells the system what you are doing there (attending class), from which it can infer who the people in the picture are (your classmates)…
Second, artists Pall Thayer, Sara Kolster, and Pete Gomes are playing with the concept of geocinema, using open-source tools to superimpose GPS coordinates on video on real-time. Cool, but how much more interesting would it be if they could:

1. convert those coordinates to higher-level semantic location metadata ("the place I passed out last night"), and


2. use that metadata not just for superimposing on the video but as input for determining the structure of the video narrative?

FirstMonday - The state of copyright activism

"Since 1998 questions about whether the United States has constructed an equitable or effective copyright system frequently appear on the pages of daily newspapers. Activist movements for both stronger and looser copyright systems have grown in volume and furor. And the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in early 2003 that the foundations of American copyright, as expressed in the Constitution, are barely relevant in an age in which both media companies and clever consumers enjoy unprecedented power over the use of works"

Center for Citizens' Media

Jeff Jarvis wants to create a Center for Citizens's Media, which would bring together citizen journalists, journalism students, big media, and news sources in government and business. Take a look at his brief writeup which also includes some choice quotes on participatory journalism from a Howard Rheingold interview in Businessweek.

Wired bots. Bot Making Tutorial

"This guide explains how to create an AIM/MSN bot of your very own. You should have some technical knowledge on DOS/Perl/general programming before continuing. Be sure before you begin that you have installed perl on your computer"

BBC NEWS | Technology | File-sharing to bypass censorship

Ross Anderson wants to swap news clippings with you...

"By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind."

konspire2b: a revolution in mass-scale content distribution

Distribute high-quality content to a massive audience without expending large amounts of time, money, or other resources.

Speechbot

SpeechBot (from HP/Compaq) is a search engine for audio & video content that is hosted and played from other websites. It uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe and index documents that do not have transcripts or other content information.

The Internet isn't broadcasting

From Terry Heaton's Pomo Blog..."Time and again, I run into the mistaken proposition that the Internet is just another form of broadcasting. Sadly, this view is pretty common amongst broadcasters, and it's what keeps them from entering into a profitable relationship with the Web ó something I believe is essential in our digital world.

When I left TV News in 1998 and bought into an Internet startup, I believed as most broadcasters do. Consequently, it was easy to create a business model wherein advertising was the principal revenue stream. It didn't work. In fact, I believe ó in hindsight ó that this misunderstanding of the nature of the Web was a key factor in the building of and later collapse of the Internet bubble.

It didn't work (and doesn't work), because the Internet serves a master more powerful than the mass market. The laws of reach and frequency don't work here, because the end user calls all the shots. The individual user is god, and broadcasters are inherently unable to get ahold of that, because their nature is to speak to and influence a captive audience. You cannot "serve ads" to people who don't want them online, but if you give them some say in those ads, they'll gladly take part. I don't know how to say it more clearly than Doc Searls has: There is no market for unsolicited messages. There never has been, and the Internet makes that abundantly clear...."

MyMarathonDVD

MyMarathonDVD sets up video cameras along race routes and creates custom-made DVDs for participants by combining footage of the race with shots of that specific participant at key points in the race.

The service debuted last October and was offered at the Honolulu Marathon for the first time in December. The personalized DVD of the Dec. 14, 2003 race netted Sports Media nearly $200,000 in sales. DVDs were sold for $49.95.

According to Pacific Business News, "MyMarathonDVD, whose corporate name is Sports Media Productions Worldwide, (sets) up high resolution digital cameras on 12-foot tripods at various angles (at the) starting line... the 10-kilometer, 15-kilometer, half-marathon, 30-kilometer, and 40-kilometer marks... and the finish line... MyMarathonDVD works by synchronizing timing data from the microchip laced in each runner's shoe with the digital cameras. Data is fed into a copyrighted software program which produces the DVDs with full menu of options."

participatory art

Here's an interesting participatory public art project:
As of April 22, 2004, anyone who logs onto the website www.dublinelevation.net will be able to design enormous light sculptures in the sky of Dublin. The website will have a 3D virtual model of the city where participants can make a light design using 22 robotic searchlights placed around OíConnell Street. As submissions arrive from the Internet, every fifteen seconds a new pattern will be displayed in the sky. With 154,000 watts of power, the beams of light will be visible from a distance of 15 kilometres. Participantsí names and dedications will be shown on a large screen in the street and on personal web pages that will be made automatically for each design. The website will also present a live broadcast from four video cameras placed around the city centre so that remote viewers can see the current state of the installation.

A Participatory Panopticon?

What happens when you combine mobile communications, always-on cameras, and commonplace wireless networks? We're going to find out very soon.

Mobile phones and PDAs with cameras are increasingly common; one in six phones sold in 2003 had a camera in it, and last year cameraphones actually out-sold other digital cameras. But, as this photo (which I took with my Sony-Ericsson T610 cameraphone and cleaned up a bit) shows, image quality from cameraphones is often quite poor. That's a temporary problem, however; Nokia just introduced a one megapixel camera phone, and other phone manufacturers are sure to follow suit. Within a decade, your phone will likely be able to take pictures at least as good as your present-day digital camera....

The bigger change will come from an entirely-new class of hardware -- what I call the "personal memory assistant." Both Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have built test versions of wearable cameras designed to record the world around you as you go about your day (the HP wearable always-on camera is the illustration at the top of this post). Nokia and HP are working on the software required to make such cameras usable. If you've seen or used a TiVo, imagine a TiVo for your day-to-day life. If you don't think that's revolutionary, consider that human memory is notoriously faulty; what happens when a person can have perfect recall?

There is no reason why wearable personal memory assistants wouldn't be linked to wireless networks. There are good reasons why they would be, in fact: to let others see what you're seeing (so that they can help you); to access greater computing power for image-recognition (including, eventually, facial-recognition routines so that you never forget a face); and for off-site storage of what you're recording, giving you far greater capacity than what you could have on-camera (and keeping the images safe if the unit was lost or damaged). I suspect that nearly all of these systems, once they come to market, will have wireless communication built-in.

Of course, along with these new devices come a host of new dilemmas. Just as with cameraphones today, there will be people using them for various unethical purposes. The situation will be made worse by the potential invisibility of these systems: it may be difficult to tell whether a given pair of glasses is web-camera-enabled just by glancing at it. There will undoubtedly be attempts to embed software in the cameras to prevent the recording of copyrighted material, or to make an obvious noise if the image appears too much like a naked body. Perhaps there will be a mandate of a "remote shutoff" switch iin the devices, so that theaters and locker rooms and the like can automatically prevent wearable camera functions. Some of these fixes will work, some won't.

Now tie this technology to what Alex posted yesterday about Way New Urbanism. Mobile systems combined with GPS and GIS and social software and RFIDs and "smart dust"... These are tools to reshape your relationship with your environment, other people, and even your sense of self.

I offer up this scenario in order to ask: if we know these devices are on their way, are really already here in crude form, how can we use them as tools for good? Are these systems the harbingers of a Transparent Society, or are they the makings of a Panopticon Singularity? Does the sousveillance concept make sense, a world where we are all have the ability -- and responsibility -- to "watch the watchmen?" Would these be the perfect tools for corporate whistleblowers and anti-corruption activists?

This could be big.

We Media - How audiences are shaping the future of news and information

"We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of journalism ó but it is not journalism as we have known it. Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, "citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer." However, mainstream news media have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms."

"This report details the important considerations when exploring a collaborative effort between audience and traditional media organizations."

A DVD player that edits movies

SFGate: DVD player to edit movies. Technology allows viewer to bypass offensive content. The SF Chron looks at ClearPlay, a DVD movie filtering program that is making the leap to the living room in a few weeks with the release of a new line of DVD players. I've got a chapter on the subject in my upcoming book.

'We Don't Need No Stinkin' Reporters!'

DenverPost.com is gearing up for next Monday's home baseball opener for the Colorado Rockies, reports Gil Asakawa, executive producer of the site. A live camera will be set up just outside Coors Field before the game for interviews with fans. The innovation: "It's simply a live camera, aimed at the crowd," says Asakawa. "No reporter. No editing. It'll be fun. Other news sites have had live cams but I think this is the first time anyone's used wireless technology." They're using the Internet connection of a business across the street from the stadium.

Uhhh... someone should tell them about wifitv ;) -yatta

Your Portable Solar Panel

Here's one of those ideas that you hear and you want to slap yourself upside the head: "Why didn't I think of that?!" As noted on SmartMobs, coming soon are laptop cases, bags, and mobile-phone covers with photovoltaic cells (a.k.a., small solar panels) to provide recharging power for our growing array of portable electronic devices. D'oh! Why didn't we think of this before? (ABC Australia says the technology has been used by the Israeli military, but it hasn't yet filtered out to the consumer market.) Brilliant. And so obvious a solution for the my-battery-is-dying problem. This should be a considerable aid to portable news reading devices/applications.
Entry continued...

Citizen-Financed Media Revolution

This is truly a technology of cooperation, by people whose work I've trusted and respected for years. Help grow the Youth Media Exchange, a free, open media publishing platform for youth media organizations worldwide. I'm committing myself for $100. I recommend it. Components of the project:

• An online "commons" - FREE storage and bandwidth for any video we want to share online, provided by the Internet Archive. This alone has tremendous collective financial value.
• Interfaces and tools - To level the playing field for access to that commons, no matter where you are or what language you speak, and to highlight the work most worthy of attention.
• Mainstream exposure - YME will be working to finance development of television pilots for the best of the material, to be aired through Link TV, one of the partners that reaches 20M American homes, and other outlets.

• Long-term sustainability - There is significant financial value in such a community of creators and viewers, and YME will also be working with the various partners to realize that as a nutrient for the whole ecosystem.

The Process of BlueHereNow Citizen News

From the site: "Based on the collective interests of its users, BlueHereNow aggregates citizen reports on the most topical issues of the day. Citizen reports can be text entries posted on blogs or personal websites but BlueHereNow's primary focus is on citizen accounts through other media like camera phones and digital cameras because of their rapid adoption."

Real, no longer evil..?

Russell Beattie Notebook Russell makes some good points about how Real is starting to change it's game. Here is an interesting snippet: But check it out! Funnily enough, in addition to 3GP support, Real has added TiVo-like cacheing to the new player as well! I was listening to KQED at work today, and I paused the station while I did something else, and when I came back and hit play, I expected Real to re-buffer as normal and grab the latest from the stream. But nope, it had been cacheing the stream the entire time and I was able to go back and forth through the recorded audio and didn't miss a thing. VERY COOL.

Script your video compositing and other processing

iMagine Video From the site: A powerful image processing tool for AppleScript that uses Apple's Quicktime, Quickdraw and Quartz technologies. iMagine Video is a compositing tool for images, movie frames, shapes and text for AppleScript. iMagine Video provides comprehensive exif and IPTC support for image files and comes with example scripts and AppleScript droplets for the typical image file processing of scaling, cropping and rotating.

Iranian blogs

Here's a site of Iranian blogs, all in english.

Ive been obessed this past year with reading about life in countries that we get no news about. Iran is one of them. So here we have people in an essentially closed community using blogs to tell us what's going on. Strangely, much of the content is more poetic than journalistic.

Larry Bouthillier's eMedia Blog

Worth checking once in a while: Larry Bouthillier's eMedia Blog.

Thoughts on:
Streaming Media Technology
eLearning and Instructional Technology
Media Content Creation and Delivery Strategies

TV News in a Postmodern World

Most recent entry in Terry L. Heaton's series "TV News in a Postmodern World" is his article The New Public Relations.

There would be no professional news without professional public relations, and there would be no professional public relations without professional news. They are two sides of the same coin. In fact, when most television news people consider careers beyond TV, the most common first choice is PR. Why does that make so much sense? Because the industries are so intertwined as to be one and the same. PR serves a valuable function in the news gathering and disseminating process, providing important insight in the quest for truth.

Mobile Media Metadata

Marc Davis spoke last week at Stanford about the Mobile Media Metadata project, which aims to lay the groundwork necessary for enabling personal media production using mobile imaging devices like cameraphones. A video (Windows Media stream) of the talk is available online. It's a good introduction to the effort to "turn billions of daily media consumers into daily media producers." You can read the abstract if your computer doesn't like proprietary video streams.

Webcams go mobile

EarthCam Mobile - Webcam Service for Mobile Phones - MyCam The clearinghouse for webcams has a mobile service. I am still waiting for the mobile to mobile service and software but this is a start. From the site: EarthCam, the leading network of live webcams, is now available on any web-enabled mobile device.

[donatacom] Getting the TV industry's attention!

I know that my friends in the TV business are tired of the doom and gloom prophecies, but the handwriting is so clearly on the wall that it demands repeating. One of the clearest warnings yet comes today from Tim Hanlon, the New Media guy at ad giant, Starcom MediaVest Group. It's a 'must read' from somebody who really knows what he's talking about. He says television is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and that part of the blame is the way we try to account for viewing.... (Continued...)

what happens when everyone makes media?

What happens, let's say, in high schools, when the tv and film production departments are as popular as theater and music departments currently are, and everyone is filming all the time. When a school with 2000 students has five student-produced reality tv programs, three documentaries, five fictional films, and six news reporters all in production at the same time? Where does reality go?

We can see what will happen by looking to politics. From a brief LA Times article (reg. required), by Eric Slater, on the ubiquity of media technology on the campaign trail.

The omnipresence of video and voice-recording devices, and the ability to ship the information from almost anywhere at almost any time, has had another unforeseen effect on the campaigns, many journalists and others say ó the increased unwillingness of candidates to talk casually with reporters, and thereby the public...

"I genuinely believe that there's no such thing as an honest moment in these primaries," (Alexandra "Journeys With George") Pelosi lamented. "Now it's a reality television show. There's never an off-the-record moment, [so] all the candidates became caricatures of their made-for-TV-persona. Everything is being shot and everything that's shot is being talked about."

Hyperlocal: The project

I spent a couple of days in Evanston this week to work with Rich Gordon's graduate class on a joint project that explores the potential of hyperlocal citizens' content.

That link goes to the class' blog and I encourage you to go read and add any helpful information -- for example, to good examples of local citizens' media. (Just please remember that this is the class' blog, not mine, so there's no need to go into Howard Stern rants there!)

The class picked one town -- Skokie -- and will investigate all the possible kinds of news they can find. I encouraged them to broaden the definition of news as much as they can. If it's useful information to people in Skokie, it's news.

They will also slice the community in many ways: politics, government, schools, sports, congregations, immigrant groups (they've found many Eastern Europeans, Filipinos, Indians, and Koreans). They will look at the kinds of information that may be available, what form it's in, how it can be gathered, how valuable it is. And they'll look at how this could be presented.

I'm one of many who believe that the real frontier of blogs and citizens' media is local; it simply takes time before there is a critical mass of content and readers there. This project, we hope, will explore just how big this can grow, just how useful it can be.

I also believe this is critical to the future of the news business, for it provides new sources of news and information that news organizations just can't afford to gather on their own; it provides new sources of marketing and advertising revenue; it builds a new relationship between newspapers and their communities and their citizens.

The course will continue through May and I expect big things of this smart and dedicated cadre of students; they are inventing the next generation of news. I'll keep you informed as it moves along. Again, please do check into the class blog and help out if you have something interesting or useful to add to the comments (or leave it here and I'll share it there, as I already have).

Introduction to Photoblogging and Moblogging

JOEL JOHNSON -- If you already know the ins and outs of photoblogging and moblogging, this high-level overview of mobile web publishing won't have much for you. For the other 99% of you that think remotely publishing pictures and text to the web from anywhere the mood strikes you sounds like a great idea (because it is), this introduction is a great place to start, especially with its list of various photoblogging/moblogging services. Read

Web sites that contain collections that are copyright free

Good resource, from Google Answers.

streambox

From Streambox.com:

Streambox Portable DNG solutions consist of two primary applications for newsgathering, a real-time encoding and transport application for live video delivery and ACT-L3 QuickTime codec for off-line store and forward encoding (store and forward is a broadcast term worth remembering and using - Eli). The QuickTime component allows seamless integration with existing NLE packages and output devices.

The live video feeds are received as contribution videos in the broadcast studios on ACT-L3 Video Transport Mac G5 decoder or Intel/XP based decoder systems with SDI or base-band video output...

The key features of the Streambox ACT-L3 Portable Video Transport System are:

* Real-time compression of 1/2 D1 (352x480i) interlaced video 30 fps on a PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 Ghz CPU or higher. The system supports full D1 resolution at 15 fps and higher.
*The ACT-L3 Codec produces high quality video transmissions at data rates as low as 64 kbps and higher over IP, sat-phones, 802.11 and 3G wireless networks. Optimal full resolution broadcast quality is available with IP satellite systems or land-based DSL lines.
*Live DV Video capture from camera via Firewire input.
*Works seamlessly with existing NLE editing software such as Appleís Final Cut Pro.ô
*Advanced Forward Error Correction technology recovers and cancels packet loss and overcomes jitter and buffering.
*Bandwidth shaping technology controls and prevents video overflow at satellites, routers and network switches for smooth video delivery.

Unmediated PVR Data Collection Project

Let's use the comment thread of this post to aggregate all commercial and open source projects related to Personal Video Recorders (PVRs). Perhaps once we have a substantial list, I'll parse through it and write it up all pretty and nice and we can post it as the first Unmediated White Paper.

Decentralized musiclogging

Take a look at Seb's "quick blueprint for a grassroots music dissemination network which works on music files that are linkable and freely available on the Web."

Interactive TV Boom Predicted for 2004

"GSN will likely be one of many content providers offering one-screen ITV applications. Viewers play along or interact on the TV screen itself using the remote. With two-screen apps the viewer plays along on the computer or via cellphone."

Somewhere in-between this and a cameraphone

What decentralized media really needs falls somewhere in-between a professional portable 'news link' and a cameraphone. Here's a good article on portable news links, by Jonathan Higgins, from Broadcast Engineering:

Portable news links, which have emerged in the last few years, broadly fall into two types. There are compact versions of traditional Ku-band SNG uplinks and videophone units based on using the Inmarsat satphone system. The compact Ku-band links offer data rates of up to 2Mb/s to 6Mb/s, while Inmarsat units are used at 64kb/s to 28kb/s. Of course, the Inmarsat units produce a much lower-quality picture. However, for easy use, rapid deployment, dial-on-demand connectivity, and low capital and running cost, they hold a unique position in the news gathering armory.

Computers as Theatre

Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre is crucial reading for anyone interested in computer-human interfaces. That said, I definitely disagree with a lot of what she has to say.

Laurel often brings up the problem of “holes in the mimetic context,” those places where the metaphor or abstraction being employed in the interface breaks down. This is a serious problem with metaphorical interfaces or indeed any kind of computational abstraction. (See Joel Spolsky’s article on leaky abstractions for a discussion of the problem in a computer programming context.) Laurel tantalizingly mentions Ted Nelson’s views on alternatives to metaphorical UI design, but soon gets back to the world of metaphor. She seems to believe that the answer to the problem of leaky abstractions is to design abstractions that don’t leak. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. You will always reach a point where you’ve pushed an abstraction to its limit, and if you don’t have some understanding of what underlies it, you will be lost and confused.

Laurel’s ideas apply better to the world of games, although the idea that games have narrative structure like theatre is pretty controversial. Even limiting the scope of the discussion to massive multipleplayer online simulations like There and Second Life, which seem to be intended as venues for communication rather than as games, it is questionable whether these immersive experiences are really good interfaces (for enabling communication). As David Kushner writes in the MIT Technology Review:

There will always be people who prefer the ease of a quick e-mail or instant message to manipulating an avatar. Often you don’Äôt want to hang out; you just want to tell someone to meet you for lunch at noon.

I enjoy online games for

• the social gaming experience defined by the rules of play


• the fact that I can play with friends


• the aesthetic pleasure of the graphics

I don’t interact with MMPORGs like I would with a theatre production or a film. And I certainly wouldn’t want to interact with Emacs or Thunderbird the way I interact with MMPORGs.

Keychain camcorder

Philips has released a "keychain camcorder," which PC Magazine describes as a "thumb drive with a lens." It stores and plays MP3s and shoots stills and videos (admittedly, it doesn't do a stellar job at any of these tasks), and it's cheap(-ish) and you can keep it in the change-pocket of your jeans. Link

Adam Wilt's DV - FAQ and more

The DV, DVCAM, & DVCPRO Formats -- tech details, FAQ, and links.
He has created a nice online non-commercial resource for everything DV. Plenty of technical information.

I got tired of answering the same old questions over and over again. By putting 'em all on the web, I can say "just go read my FAQ"....

Alternatives to Real, QuickTime and much more

The K-Lite Mega Codec Pack includes the K-Lite Codec Pack Full, QuickTime Alternative, Real Alternative and BSplayer.

Features:
- K-Lite Codec Pack 2.25 Full
- QuickTime Alternative 1.32
- Real Alternative 1.22
- BSplayer 1.00.807

Streaming MPEG-4 w/Linux

Streaming MPEG-4 with Linux

Nice article full of tips for FFMPEG and MPEG4IP on Linux....

HP Experiments with 'Always On' Camera

"Hewlett-Packard researchers in the U.K. are working on a camera that's always on, recording everything you see and letting you go back later and decide what's actually photo-worthy. Raises some serious privacy questions. But as an HP researcher notes, "If your wearable camera is always on ... you're not going to miss any moments, but you're also going to get a load of junk.""

FM Broadcasting from your computer

All about FM radio - Schematics, KITs, FM transmitters, digital transmitters and RDS encoders from PCS Electronics From the site: PCI MAX 2004 is a computer card that will change the way you listen to your MP3's or other audio...

Microsoft goes VideoPhone

It clearly was one of the most amazing sights at the Spring VoN - Microsoft’s different video phones. Most of them had nice video screens, were elegantly designed and were fairly easy to use. I spent a considerable time on these devices, and so did others, for Microsoft’s booth was one of the most visited of all VoN Exhibits. I loved the phones which worked with the ease of regular phones.  While clearly VoIP based, Windows CE powered devices, most of them paid attention to the real world needs and incorporated an analog PSTN port. While most of them are not WiFi enabled and need a wired ethernet connection, I suspect it is only a matter of time before they become Wi-Fi enabled. While I could not confirm it, but apparently Broadcom is the chip provider for these products.

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop From the site: The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is a forum for the demonstration and discussion of innovative game designs. It provides a place for designers to showcase challenging, unproven work, and discuss it with peers. By...

DIY Steadycam

$14 Steadycam From the site: Why build a cheap steadycam? Steadycams (or camera stabilizers) are attachtments used to capture smooth looking video even when the camera and camera operator are in motion. The camera operator may walk (or even jog),...

By 2008, 280 Million Make Media

New report says, "by the end of 2008, In-Stat/MDR expects that over 280 million consumers will have equipment to make their own media, and over 247 million will be connected to Broadband connections."