unmediated

Wow! Japan copyright laws worse than ours..

Japanese website closed after screenshot-related arrest - Ferrago From the story:

Reports this morning inform us of the rather troubling news from Japan that the owner and Editor of popular online gaming site Gamesonline, one of Japan's most popular news sites, has been arrested for alleged breach of copyright concerning screenshots used on his website.

View on e-journal evolution

Jeanne Galvin, The Next Step in Scholarly Communication: Is the Traditional Journal Dead?, Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, v.5 no.1 (Spring 2004). Galvin reviews the development of electronic journals and the open access movement and considers the acceptance of both by scholarly communities. She points out disadvantages of traditional journals and how these are countered by e-publication, OA and institutional repositories. Furthermore, Galvin discusses new concepts in scholarly publishing: "David Rodgers has suggested that the structure of publication will change from one marked by discrete milestones, such as peer review and acceptance, to a continuum more closely resembling the scholarly process. He proposes that the unit of transaction should be the idea, rather than the article. Smith recommends a 'deconstructed journal' which does not need a publisher and is based on subject focal points." However, combatting academic inertia is viewed as the biggest obstacle to changes in publishing. (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog)

Tom Mangan Talks About News Instablogs, His Blog "Retirement" and PR

As noted earlier, Prints the Chaff blogger Tom Mangan of the San Jose Mercury News has announced he is retiring from frequent blogging.

"I haven't given up on blogging altogether... just a certain variant of it which obliges a take-over-one's-life timesink. My homepage at tommangan.net will still have occasional postings," Tom explained to me today in an email.

"I thought I wanted to be the Romenesko of newspaper editors but my heart wasn't in it for the long haul. But it was fun till it wasn't, which is always the best time to bail. Plus there are tons of editors blogs out there now so I don't feel like there's this big unmet need."

I conducted an email interview with Tom earlier this month and was waiting for the right moment to post it. In homage to Tom, I can't think of a better time than today to do so. Tom, we will miss your regular rants. Every time I fix a spelling error or cut a comma I will always think of your postings and how they made me laugh and think. Keep in touch.

(Read the rest of this post at Micro Persuasion)

Anti-piracy built into new films

Couldn't help but notice while watching The Day After Tomorrow, Memorial Day's cheesy $100 million hit, that an anti-piracy code is built into the movie. You can see the brown stripe whiz by on-screen just before the Soviet ship enters flooded Manhattan. This way, studios can track where a bootleg print came from.

BBS in China

I know c.c. function of email can be counted as "social software." What about BBS? It certainly can function as many-to-many. Anyway, the reason I say this here is because BBS is the most politically active place in Chinese cyberspace. The number of Chinese Internet users is quickly reaching 90 million. (Already surpassing the number of members of the Chinese Communist Party. ) About one-fifth of Chinese netizens regularly make use of BBS (Bulletin Board Systems). These BBSs can be run by individuals, commercial companies such as sina.com, or government agencies. At any given time, there are literally tens of thousands of users active in these BBS and forums, reading news, searching for information, and debating current affairs. Even on official Web sites such as People's Daily, its popular BBS, Strong Nation Forum, has more than 280,000 registered members and more than 12,000 posts per day. Together with e-mail listservs, chat rooms, instant message services, wireless short text messaging, and an emerging Weblogging community, the BBSs have provided unprecedented opportunities for Chinese netizens to engage in public affairs. I chaired a round table discussion on this subject in Berkeley last month. Here is the webcast link.

The Way the Music Died

The Frontline special on the music industry covered a lot of ground, perhaps too much for just an hour. The main theme of the show was that music hasn't fared too well as an industry. Media companies, including the big five record labels and the radio station chains, have lost touch with their customers, marketing what will sell instead of providing a good product. Big media blames the industry downturn on free music availability on the Internet, but as Michael "Blue" Williams, Outkast's manager, puts it, the labels have gotten lazy and are pushing out crap; he says if the labels "started putting out good records, quality records, the public will buy".

How To Convert Any Web Site Into An RSS Feed

Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips: How To Convert Any Web Site Into An RSS Feed. "Creating a Generic Site-To-RSS Tool. While this is certainly not breaking news, it maybe something that you have not had the opportunity to learn more about until now. Authored by Roy Osherove this in-depth article provides you with all of the technical information, examples and references you need to taste the flavour of true site scraping. (Not for the tech-shy or RSS novice.) By Robin.Good@masternewmedia.org (Robin Good). "

File-sharing undented, Kazaa traffic plummets

Looking at two ends of the same elephant.

First from JD's NewMedia Musings: The threat of legal action and hefty fines has done little to stop internet users around the world trading music and video files, according to a new study of network traffic.

"There's been no decline in the number of people file-sharing," says Chris Colman, European managing director for Sandvine.

Next from p2pnet: Kazaa file sharing traffic has dropped from 90% of the total to just 20% in North America, and from 70% to 20% in Europe, says a study.

Creative Commons: Metadata Tuneup

Upgrading to one of our version 2.0 licenses or selecting one for the first time? Consider providing optional metadata about your work via the choose license process.

Make Every PC a Server

"JXTA provides us speed and flexibility because the physical network will no longer be a bottleneck in our design and applications. It will also allow us to do things that the designers of the network don''t want us to do or can''t do. By bypassing these constraints, we might actually do something cool along the way. The power of JXTA is at the network level, not the application level...." More

Video Playlists

Lucas Gonze has an interesting post on broadcatching with video playlists (On the topic of broadcatching). He points to the Webjay video playlists of Brett Singer: Playlists by webjaybs. According to Lucas:

Since I don't have a television in Montreal, I watched the news last night via his [Brett's] compilation of BBC and NY1 clips. It was embryonic and crude, but also mind blowing.

TV viewers don't just watch TV

Duh. A new study found 59 percent of TV viewers regularly or occasionally spend time online while watching primetime TV. The researchers say that's just one more reason for advertisers to question why TV is still demanding premium ad rates.

Auto-focusing camera for phones

Atsana Semiconductor and the briefly-named 1 have formed a partnership to deliver auto-focus-capable cameras to mobile phone manufacturers.

The new camera technology, dubbed "Helimorph", is able to function within the confined space of a mobile phone because it differs from traditional focus technology. Most auto-focus cameras use electromagnetic transducers, which are bulky and power-hungry. The Helimorph, by contrast, is an actuator made out of a new piezoelectric ceramic material called PZT that changes shape when voltage is applied. That material is shaped into a helical structure, so that a small change in shape gets magnified into a large movement. That movement realigns the camera lens for optimal focus.

Illegal film downloads on increase

Following a number of months where the average number of film download files had been on the decline, the number files and their average size increased in April, according to digital tracking firm BayTSP.

The firm suggests that this means that although people are still happily downloading video content over peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa, a smaller number of them are sharing those files.

BayTSP said that 2.9m people a day made use of such services in April, and that the most popular download for the month was Mel Gibsonís The Passion of the Christ.

Iranian Blog Meetup

Hoder sends word of a Weblog Festival in Tehran, Iran on June 8-10 (damn, don't you wish you could be there?). Here's a photo from the last big gathering of bloggers there at Hoder's photoblog. Iit was Hoder's photos from that session -- just folks, just eating lunch -- that first impressed upon me how blogs and the Internet can connect folks across any boundaries; this, too, is why I'm so glad to see photos showing up on Iraqi blogs. Here's Hoder's blog post on the event. And the official Weblog Festival site: "Our goal is to improve the quality of such Persian media and to improve their quantity as well." (That sounds just like the mission of the Citizens' Media Center I've been hoping to put together here.)

It's being put together by Persian Blog and the National Youth Organization of Iran -- which, mind you, is a government organization. Think about that: This is a nation that has arrested bloggers and still cuts off Internet access and yet a government organization is sponsoring a blog event and bloggers -- who write at some risk -- will come. A land of ironies.

BBC to use Creative Commons licenses

Digital Lifestyles is reporting that Larry Lessig has been named to a BBC advisory board and that the BBC's Creative Archive project (which aims to put the BBC's archives online for non-commercial re-use) will use Creative Commons licenses:

Professor Lawrence Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project was clearly excited: "The announcement by the BBC of its intent to develop a Creative Archive has been the single most important event in getting people to understand the potential for digital creativity, and to see how such potential actually supports artists and artistic creativity." He went to enthuse "If the vision proves a reality, Britain will become a centre for digital creativity, and will drive the many markets in broadband deployment and technology that digital creativity will support."

US & the 3G plans

The Wall Street Journal reports that Cingular Wireless will be testing a third-generation mobile network based on the UMTS standard, beginning in Atlanta this summer, although a rollout is not expected until 2006 or 2007. AT&T Wireless Services will offer a UMTS services in four US cities by the end of 2004. Seems like Verizon's decision to go with EV-DO and its plans to roll out the service in major metros in coming months is proving to be a catalyst for the wireless data market. Nextel, as you all know is flirting with Flarion, while Sprint is still thinking.

A few months ago I asked the question: what happens when say about 2 million subscribers opt for this Verizon service? And I got some really good answers on what are the problems with EV-DO service.

Martin said: It goes totally titsup. Because the reverse link isn't really CDMA. And it was slow to start off with. And the channel grab and release is slow. And it takes a lot of spectrum. And it scales REALLY BADLY. But it looks great in a demo to the telco execs, and the bits per hertz figures for the downlink look good, so who cares, right?

Charlie added: That is to say, the way QCOM boosted the speed on DO, is to limit the complete channel to only ONE user at a time. One step forward, 47 steps back. So as the load increases the latency dies and throughput can really drop.

How Bloggers Force Changes in Big Media

OJR's Mark Glaser has a story on how bloggers are forcing changes in big media outlets.

Communities Tied to One Technology (Seb Paquet)

For the most part, members of online communities usually rely on one dominant communication channel - be it a mailing list, a forum, weblogs, a wiki, or IRC - even when alternate channels would be helpful for certain purposes. Communities like open source development networks and the international, never-sleeping Joi Ito posse, who use multiple modes, are the exception rather than the norm.

I've been wondering about the factors that somehow work to inhibit or facilitate the use of multiple communication channels, and the interplay between those channels. Now there's a discussion underway on that topic over at the lively Community Wiki, on the page Community Tied to One Technology. Among the potential explanations that are brought up for sticking to one channel: inertia, lack of technical acumen, the fragmentation/critical mass problem, and the lack of integration between modes.

My hunch is that as the “software that does less, well - pattern and the concomitant "mix and match tools" user philosophy that we've seen develop in social software become dominant, we'll see multiple modes become relatively widespread relatively quickly.

(I should point out that the incredibly prolific Dave Pollard touched upon this topic a while ago.)

When consumers are creators

Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (and a friend), had this last month, which I had missed: Convergent Audiences: When Consumers are Creators.

[Convergence] puts the focus not on the consumer, our audiences, but on the supplier, the news organizations. It becomes an exercise in Us vs. Them.

I think we are focusing on the wrong "C" word. Rather than focus on convergence, we should be focusing on connections and how new digital tools can help us build all kinds of innovative, new connections with our audiences. The potential of new media is not simply more noise but more meaningful interaction and hopefully more meaningful learning.

Haier's wireless UltraWideband digital camcorder

Haier has been showing off a prototye of a digital camcorder which uses Ultra Wideband (you'll be hearing a ton about UWB soon - it's basically a way to connect things together wirelessly like Bluetooth, except that it's much, much faster) to wirelessly beam a live 20Mbps video stream back to a plasma TV.

[Via The Unofficial Bluetooth Weblog]

Homer on citizens media

Just watched Sunday's season finale of The Simpsons on our TiVo. Homer has this to say about all the residents of Springfield starting their own newspapers: "Instead of one big-shot controlling all the media, now there's a thousand freaks Xeroxing their worthless opinions." Ah, citizens media.

;) -kc.

SMaL Camera Technologies Introduces Ultra-Pocket 5 RDK

"SMaL Camera Technologies, a developer of digital imaging solutions and enabler of award-winning super-thin digital still cameras, announced today its new Ultra-PocketÆ 5 rapid development kit for 3-megapixel credit card cameras with color TFT display. The Ultra-Pocket 5 kit enables manufacturers and brands to rapidly enter the heart of the mass consumer market ñ 3-megapixel ñ with unparalleled thinness, style, wide dynamic range, and worry-free battery life, in the sub-$129 retail price range."

Japanese Broadcast Flag -- welcome to the crappy future of TV

The Japanese Broadcast Flag has gone into effect. Like its American cousin, this is a technology mandate that restricts how you can use the shows that show up on your own television, on the grounds that you might be some kinda eyepatch-wearing-pirate. 'Course, the broadcast flag doesn't really stop you from capturing analog signals and putting their programming online; no, this is a measure that is 100% ineffective at stopping "piracy" and 100% effective at stopping new tech like VCRs from being invented without the permission of the movie studios.

Because programs that have been copied once cannot be duplicated or edited digitally, editing the programs via a personal computer has become impossible.

In addition, the broadcasters' move has made it necessary for viewers to insert a special user identification card, known as a B-CAS card, into their digital TV sets to watch programs.

These duplication controls are being applied to digital TV programs aired by both digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasters.

In the week after the measure was implemented, NHK and the grouping of private broadcasters received more than 15,000 inquiries and complaints about the scheme.

AD:TECH - Broadband Advertising Moves From Theory to Practical Application

Monday's first Media Matters Session, Leveraging Interactive and Broadcast and Aggregating TV Audiences Online was led by moderator Matt Wasserlauf, President and CEO of Broadband Enterprises. The panel included ESPN Motion Director and General Manager Ed Davis, CNET Networks VP Business Development Chas Edwards and AtomShockwave CEO Mika Salmi.

The theme of the panel rested with broadband's ability to deliver television quality video over the web. CNET's Edwards said research has shown that television-style ads viewed online are far less annoying than the same ads viewed on television. He cited Yankelovich research stating 64 percent of consumers are "pummeled" by ads and 77 percent of TiVo users skip commercials yielding an "opt-out culture." which calls for the more opt-nature of the web. Edwards reviewed CNET's Instream ads and how the site has plans to replace most of its images with video.

AtomShockwave's Salmi jumped in and explained his AtomFilms and Shockwave offerings which he described as "pre-roll" and claims use of these technologies has delivered click throughs from nine to eleven percent.

ESPN Motion's Davis said his company (as did Salmi's) decided to design ESPN Motion as a downloadable, rather than streaming, application to insure the quality of video delivery and so that the company can better manage resources by controlling the download process. Davis hinted at a soon to be released "send to a friend" feature which will allow ESPN Motion users to forward videos to those that do not yet have ESPN Motion installed.

None of the three speakers did a great job at tying their technologies back to advertiser's needs. Sure there were some examples but other than the knowledge that television commercials can now be placed on the web, not much else was offered.

StreamSage's Campaign Search

StreamSage has rolled out CampaignSearch- an audio/video search engine for content from political sources like C-Span, PBS, WhiteHouse, Washington Post, BBC, NPR, AP, Bush and Kerry's respective campaign websites, etc... The search functionality is excellent. And it's easy to link within the stream because StreamSage provides both a link to a relevant excerpt as well as the whole file. For example, I searched for "mccain vice president." Here's the relevant audio (link: Real Media Audio File). Here's what StreamSage says about their system- from CampaignSearch.com:

How does it work?

StreamSage's Audio/Video Search Engine listens to and watches the audio/video content to determine what topics are discussed and where they are discussed within the media file. By automatically understanding the information presented in the audio/video content, StreamSage's Audio/Video Search Engine is able to automatically generate "Relevance Intervals" that encapsulate all of the contextually relevant information about a given topic in the audio/video content. Additionally, by employing contextual understanding, StreamSage's Audio/Video Search Engine ranks search results according to the degree of relevance to the search term. This contextual relevance ranking allows users faster access to relevant information.

Tuesday: Sony Cell development bears watching

One of the things I took away from almost 30 years in TV news was a deep respect for Sony. If you want TV stuff that works, you'll rarely go wrong with this company. That said, this news item from Reuters caught my attention.

In an interview with the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Sony Chief Executive Nobuyuki Idei said it would use Cell to power its next-generation game console as well as a network television that will offer functions similar to a personal computer.

The Cell processor will be up to 10 times more powerful than conventional chips and able to shepherd large chunks of information through a high-speed Internet network.

Sony has said Cell ó due to start test production in early 2005 ó will power the next-generation PlayStation game console, which will probably double as a home server, as well as other digital home electronics.

Convergence isn't just a word anymore; it's an increasing reality. Sony's Cell will enable broadband TV, and its next-generation game console will double as a home server. What will it "serve?" Probably anything video.

A TV client wondered out loud the other day, "I'm just trying to figure out where all of this is going." Think digital video on demand. Think your signal as a part of the Internet. Think media center. Think your network doesn't need you anymore to distribute its programs.

And that leads to local programming for survival, regardless of how it's delivered.

Fujitsu Announces Cheap, Flexible Touchscreens

Fujitsu has announced the availability of thin and lightweight plastic touch panel technologies that will make it easier and cheaper for gadget companies to offer touchscreen capabilities to even the lowest-end devices. Instead of the more expensive and fragile film-glass technologies, the new Film-Film and Film-Film-Plastic (Go Go Happy Punk Rock!) use a plastic backer that is more durable and flexible and should add only about $5 and $11, respectively, to the cost of gadgets that take advantage of the technology.

CNN developing broadband channel

CNN's NewsStream Live is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year, reports CableNewser. "It will not suck as much as ABC News Live," joked a source. CNN is just beginning full-scale development on the 24/7 broadband news channel. "Your ISP will pay for your subscription just like your cable operator pays to carry CNN," the source says. Thoughts?

The wireless pill camera

From Given Imaging, a new wireless version of their M2A swallowable pill camera with a low-power transmitter built-in that can beam photos of your insides to a special receiver you wear on your belt. Normally with these sorts of pill cameras you have to, um, evacuate them in order to get the photos, so having a wireless trasmitter built-in means no more waiting!

(More interesting than practical tool, but hey -- you never know. -kc.)

TelefÛnica MÛviles launches commercial 3G

Spanish mobile operator TelefÛnica MÛviles EspaÒa has launched its consumer 3G services.

Currently video conferencing over the network and mobile gaming is available in the two largest cities of Madrid and Barcelona. Two handsets currently available can access the service, the Sony Ericsson Z1010 and Motorolaís A835, and another three are to be added to the range in the coming weeks.

DMusic supports Creative Commons and embeds MP3 files

DMusic, the oldest independent digital online music community now supports Creative Commons in their upload process. More importantly though, DMusic is providing the first web-based application to embed Creative Commons license information into ID3 tags of MP3 files. Now, when you upload your MP3 file to DMusic and choose a Creative Commons license, DMusic will put the license into the MP3 file for you. When people download your file, or share it on a file-sharing network, there will always be a way to detect the Creative Commons license.

Citizen Lab

Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based in Toronto, Canada, looking at the intersection of digital media and civic activism. Functioning something as a DARPA for digital freedom, Citizen Lab serves as a seed-bed for a variety of very cool and interesting projects focusing on identifying, analyzing, and resisting efforts to censor and lock down information networks. Citizen Lab is the umbrella for a couple of other ongoing projects, Infowar Monitor and the OpenNet Initiative. Infowar Monitor, run in cooperation with the Cambridge Programme for Security in International Society, is a good resource if you're interested in ongoing developments in information and network-centric warfare; OpenNet Initiative, run with CPSIS and with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, looks more closely at censorship and surveillance.

The main site is a blog-like listing of updates about net surveillance, censorship, and the like, pulled from both mainstream and niche sources, along with links to its various projects. Aside from Infowar Monitor and OpenNet Initiative, Citizen Lab is also working on a project called "Rhizome," which will "remotely interrogate the networks of censoring countries and securely transfer the results to a database node network for analysis and storage" (responding to the fact that most filter systems, both commercial and governmental, keep the lists of what they censor secret), and a project called "Psiphon," a distributed proxy project to allow computer users in controlled regions to surf the web freely. If this latter one sounds familiar, it's because another project, Peek-a-Booty, took a similar approach. Peek-a-booty, unfortunately, appears to be dead; its site hasn't been updated since December, 2003.

For an infowar and sousveillance geek like me, the Citizen Lab site provides hours of fascinating reading. But one of the most powerful Citizen Lab-supported efforts linked from the site has little to do with computer networks, and will be compelling stuff for many WorldChanging readers. The Kandahar Chronicles tell the story of the day-to-day life of a MÈdicins Sans FrontiËres worker in Kandahar, Afghanistan, from August 2003 through February 2004. Good stuff.

The Worldwide Conversation

I've been working on my final Shorenstein Center paper for a few weeks now. I wrote a draft, showed it to a few people, got their comments, decided to add and change a bunch of stuff, rewrote it, and now have a new draft. I think it's finally ready to share more broadly for more feedback and comments. It's called "The Worldwide Conversation." Please let me know what you think, and if it makes any sense. It is meant for a broad audience that includes people unfamiliar with the workings of weblogs, so for those of you who are already steeped in the blogosphere, feel free to skim through the explanations of blogging tools and processes.

Mobile customers want streaming video

A growing minority of wireless users want to watch video, finds a new study....

"A recent In-Stat/MDR survey of wireless consumers found that 13.2 percent of them are extremely interested or very interested in buying video services for their cell phones. Additionally, the company found that Sprint PCS customers are likely to be early adopters and are the most likely, among those surveyed, to be interested in mobile video services."

A lockbox for digital radio

Mindjack has just published a piece I pulled together, culled from research for my upcoming book Darknet. Will digital radio be Napsterized? looks at a new proposal by the Recording Industry Association of America for the FCC to impose new regulations mandating the adoption of a broadcast flag standard for audio.

What does this mean for you?

Where today you can tape anything you want over the free analog radio airwaves, that may not be true tomorrow. Want to record the digital broadcast of Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, or Terry Gross on your PC and listen to it in your car? Or tape a cool new digital radio station you discovered and play it for friends at a party?

Your device may well tell you: I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

(Read the rest of this post over at JD's New Media Musings)

Peerflix - Legal P2P DVD sharing

Here's a great example of piggybacking on what works to create something useful. Peerflix is a decentralized version of Netflix. It's all about 'movies I have,' and 'movies I want.' Watch a movie and send it on to the next peer. Read an overview of the service here.

TDK claims to bring P2P into Bluetooth phones

This device is not any different from a regular Bluetooth dongle. But TDK is marketing it with a different spin-probably targetting an audience that has never used BT on their phones and PC's. What TDK's Free Styla really is: a PC Bluetooth USB dongle with a bundled application to transfer mobile goodies downloaded from the Web across to your mobile.

This is another sign that P2P will definitely arrive to mobile devices and lots of companies already want to capitalize on the idea.

More evidence of video based networks turning to Flash

Streamingmedia.com: Flash Powers Comcast.net's Innovative Video Browser The interface is a bit funky but the review is glowing. Sounds a lot like what a dot bomb company I was working for a few years back was trying to develop. I would like to see Flash open up a bit more and see some better authoring tools but it does seem as though they got some things right with the video streaming. All in all, pretty interesting, too bad it is the same content that can be found on TV.

Survey Indicates Public Journalism Progress, But...

Fewer journalists today see the press as too cynical. And, compared with five years ago, fewer also see journalists as out of touch with their audiences.... Both of these are areas that reform movements such as public journalism--which was concerned with trying to reconnect journalists and the public--focused on.

That's a direct quote from commentary addressing the Journalist Survey conducted for the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media 2004 report. More than 500 national and local reporters, editors and executives were surveyed.

(Read the rest of this post over at PJNet Today)

Rise of TelcoTV

With more telcos expected to add digital TV to their services, and equipment suppliers reporting increased activity, In-Stat/MDR expects over 100% growth in telco TV subscribers in 2004. The delivery of digital TV service over high speed networks is now a reality, especially in Asia and Europe where a number of new players have started offering these services. Yahoo Broadband in Japan is one such example. The popularity of TelcoTV is increased because of improvements in the data rates and reach of DSL, and advances in video compression.

"Competitive threats and fixed line revenue pressures are encouraging telcos to become active in offering digital TV to their subscribers. The possibility of gaining an additional $60 per month in revenue, while becoming less likely to lose $30 a month to your competition, is an important factor in the business case," says Michelle Abraham, a Senior Analyst with In-Stat/MDR.

In 2005, advanced video compression will allow telcos to reach more homes in their territory or expand the number of video streams delivered. The delivery of high definition streams over DSL will be much easier, as each stream will only need about 8 Mbps rather than 15.

2014: TV without schedules

"TGIF" and "Must See Thursday" won't mean a thing in 10 years. We'll be watching HDTV on demand, and storing the shows we want on home terabyte servers. And not far behind: holographic TV that doesn't require a screen.

Roll your own reruns

Last week's season finale of The West Wing was on smack dab in the middle of game 6 of the Timberwolves/Kings series. I opted to watch the game instead of the Wing. Of course, since NBC wants to make their media artificially scarce, the episode wasn't replayed later in the evening nor will it until later in the summer (if you haven't seen it, it's new to you!). This weekend, I found a torrent for the finale...without commercials and in letterbox no less. A couple hours of downloading later and voila, my own personal rerun.

Sony portable broadband TV to ship this autumn

The LocationFree TV will offer wireless broadband television, without interference from microwaves or cordless phones.

The LocationFree TVs can deliver your personal video contents from the Base Station via secured device authentication and encryption technology to the wireless monitor in wi-fi hot-spots and Ethernet ports found in hotels, airports and other locations. This means the TV monitor is no longer confined to a living room.

Review of Sony Ericsson's Z1010 3G video phone

Geekzone checks out a phone that we definitely won't be seeing over here ( -- This part just totally broke my heart. -kc.), the Z1010, Sony Ericsson's new 3G video phone which comes with not one, but two built-in digital cameras, an external one for taking still shots and recording video clips, and then another internal one for making video calls.

Weblogs and authority

This week I'll be presenting a paper at the International Communication Association Conference in New Orleans titled Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community. The paper is an analysis of two different metrics for measuring authority within weblogs; the first uses blogroll links, a proxy to popularity, and the second uses permalinks, a proxy to influence.

(Visit overstated for the rest of this post.) Link to full paper: Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community (pdf 228k)

(thx: buzzmachine)

GPS meets Audioblog.com

Looks like Eric's playing and experimenting with GPS Audioblogging today. Coolio!!

Eric Rice: My GPS Location 10:50 AM. 37d 58.586' N 122d 02.043' W

The Media Revolt Manifesto

Just came across this from David Neiwert, a pretty sharp freelance journalist up in Seattle: Media Revolt: A Manifesto. Excerpt:

Blogs can and should play the role of central clearing-house for information in the Media Revolt. As the general public realizes that blogs can provide them with vital information they're not getting anywhere else, the audience will build. This includes the whole gamut of information: the factual news about the world, as well as reports on who's misbehaving or committing political atrocities or simply being incompetent; analysis of this information that would be suppressed in mainstream reports; information about planned actions to protest misbehavior; and action and funds needed to enact the needed legislative and structural reforms.

Blogs, in other words, can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.

BBC launches WAP news content for kids

Headlines from the UK state broadcaster's long-running news and current affairs show for kids, Newsround, are to made available via WAP.

"Our research reflects that children are becoming increasingly technologically aware, with the rise in internet use and mobile, and we are simply reacting to the demands of that audience, offering approved, relevant content across easily accessible platforms," said Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology.

The service will allow children to access the latest news headlines from the Newsround programme via the mobile internet.

Techie: Next step, Audio/Graphic Rich Media Blog Posting Object

What is an Audio/Graphic Rich Media Blog Posting Object you say? And why would one want one? It'll be easier to see what it is and where I'm going with this idea once I post the first basic Flash rendering of the foundation here in the next week.

After thinking about some new Audio/Rich Media object ideas during the week I finally decided yesterday I needed to learn some basic Flash to build a simple Rich Media MP3 Audio/Graphic posting blog player/viewer to move beyond just thinking about it. The reason for using Flash in the first place was mainly for it's clean browser integration and the reach it enables. Coupling that fact with using MP3 as the audio format in my opinion gives the object the most flexible audio building blocks that a Internet available child audio media object needs for integration and inheritance into other Internet based parent Rich Media objects. Without a doubt I will be looking at my past thoughts and ideas around SAM to supply the content DNA of the object.

Stay tuned as I take my first steps in learning how to build something like this or anything at all in Flash.

Rip-Mix-Burning DVD players

Copyfight has an interesting post on the discrepancy in congress over ClearPlay DVD players. The players automatically remove scenes that would be offensive to sensitive viewers, but do so in the comfort of one's own home while playing standard movies on DVD. Some politicians oppose it because individuals are creating derivative works and they also see it as opening the door to "recipe hacking", which would be like producing the Grey Album by purchasing two legal records (the original Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album) and combining them at home to produce a derivative work (if DJ Dangermouse produced software that could create his mixes).

On top of all that, since the motivation behind ClearPlay technology is largely religious, it turns the argument on its ear to many participants and observers. It's not hard to find folks that loved the Grey Album but see ClearPlay technology as something to be frowned upon, but the underlying technology and law is largely the same. It's an interesting case and hopefully does open the doors to all sorts of creative uses of derivative works.

Toshiba's new Digital Media Servers

Toshiba announced new products today, including two TiVo based DVD recorders, in 120Gb ($599) and 160Gb ($699) sizes. They're set for an August release and will be the only competitor to Pioneer's line of DVD recording TiVo boxes, which have gotten rave reviews. The Toshiba units also include a DV plug on the front, to make it easy to convert digital camcorder video directly to DVD.

Make a Film; Get Free Worldwide Distribution

This from the BBC: One-Minute Movies is your chance to make a short film that we'll publish on the web for the world to see. You have up to 60 seconds in which to make a film, and we'll do our best to give you tips and advice.

It reminds me of the recent IBM white paper in which it listed new audience types by 2010, which apparently are here now, including:

Authors ñ (who) will utilize Web tools to tailor content to business or personal interests, seeking self-expression or control. Media companies will provide affordable advanced tools to this growing slice of active users, such as special blog (Web log) sites, multiplayer online games, user-group ìtheatersî or conference centers and downloadable production components ñ music, cinema and TV samples, streaming video or digital photo illustrations. Users who contribute or interact as producers of their own programming or authors of content will not cease to enjoy passive consumption; they will add new skills and redefine the amount of time they spend enjoying media passively.

Watch some of the one-minute movies and see the possibilities.

BBC Reaches Kids via Phone Headlines

Dot Journalism reports: The BBC has launched a new mobile phone service for children that will deliver headlines from Newsround, the current affairs programme for children.

"Our research reflects that children are becoming increasingly technologically aware, and we are simply reacting to the demands of that audience, offering approved, relevant content across easily accessible platforms," said Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology.

Other interesting fact:
new research by mobileYouth that shows that under 25 year-olds spend around five times as much on mobile phone services than on music.

Thanks to editorsweblog.org for the pointer.

Pssst...wanna download a TV show?

File sharing of prime time TV shows is exploding. Spot check: on Wednesday, 20,000 episodes of The Simpsons, Alias, Frasier, Friends and other series were available via Web sites like TV Torrents, eDonkey, and BuckTV.

Radio.blog Club

Radio.blog Club: "Radio.blog is the first stand-alone player to let you stream sound on your website."

Multimedia From the Road

I heard Naka Nathaniel of NYTimes.com speak at an online journalism conference a few weeks ago, and it was apparent that's he's a fast-rising star in the field of multimedia journalism. Check out his latest work, "Six Questions for Iran," which is a multimedia feature accompanying the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof's latest column, "Nuts With Nukes." Nathaniel frequently travels with Kristof, taking photos, recording audio, and producing the online features. The duo is redefining state of the art practice for column-writing. In the case of Nathaniel, he's a new breed of multimedia foreign correspondent.

Buzzmachine: Two posts on net audio

Can you hear me?
: I'm starting to see/hear more good audio work from audio amateurs on the web.

Jay Rosen's independent study student, Linda Blake, has an audio blog with stories about and from people affected by AIDS. I listened to some of it (downloaded on my iPod) and it's very good.

It's very much in the style of Ira Glass on NPR's This American Life: Let people narrate their own stories but make sure it is told as a story (not a ramble).

Transom.org -- which features Glass right now -- does a good job of telling you and me how we can create such online radio ourselves. And it has some of the radio that has resulted; I listened to a report about a German rider lawnmower race, also good.

Now that I have my iPod, I was hoping to hear more Chris Lydon interviews but, unfortunately, his work is now streamed instead of downloadable. Which leads me to a minor rant....

Read the rest of this post at BuzzMachine.

100% Open Source Helix Player 'Alpha' Available

"Helix Player 1.0 and RealPlayer 10 Alpha are now available. The Helix Player is 100% open source, and includes support for Ogg Vorbis and Theora, as well as SMIL 2.0 so that you can combine Theora videos with JPEG, GIF, or PNG images and RealText. The RealPlayer 10 alpha is a superset of the Helix Player alpha, and adds support for RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, and Flash. See the release notes to find out about the rest of the enhancements and give the players a whirl. We love your feedback and comments as always, so use any avenue you are comfortable with (forums, email, bugzilla) and let us know what you think! The team has tried hard to get all the bad bugs out, but remember that it's alpha and constantly improving with your feedback and help. Enjoy the player!"

Film-streaming website exploits copyright loophole

To circumvent copyright legally, Rotterdam-based website Dvdstream.nl asks subscribers to ëbuy' the streamed film from Dvdstream.nl for a fictitious price, and then to ësell' it back for the same price - in effect, using Dutch copyright law to gain access to unlimited film downloads for the price of a monthly subscription.

OLEDs Finally Get Big

They used to max out at about 7-inch but today Samsung announced they'll offer a 17-inch OLED monitor next year. The monitor will be about 1/3 as thick as an LCD monitor and consumes less power too. We wish it were a widescreen, but instead Samsung is sticking with a high resolution standard format 1600 x 1200 resolution.
Not to be outdone, ">Seiko Epson showed off a 40-inch OLED screen at a press conference today. Just when we finally had our hearts set on Philips' 40-inch LCOS HD TV, isn't it a gadget junky's curse to learn something even more trick is coming along? It all depends on how long you can wait. Philips' LCOS model should be in stores this year (the 60-inch model is already on sale), but should Seiko Epson deign to grace us with this display, it probably won't be available until 2007.

Digital Technologies for Deliberative Democracy

A project at Columbia's Center on Organizational Innovation is looking at how technology has or hasn't been used to enable participatory democracy in the rebuilding of the WTC:

"New digital technologies have figured critically in the process of deciding the future of Lower Manhattan after September 11th, not only supplying the infrastructure for soliciting public input but also opening new channels of communication between citizens, designers, advocacy groups, and decision-makers..."

"By compiling an archive of all the websites devoted to Lower Manhattan redevelopment issues and tracking changes in the form and structure of the websites over time, the project will examine how old and new advocacy groups are adapting to a political landscape in which new deliberative technologies may be challenging traditional mechanisms of citizen participation"...."Analysis of the website database will chart whether and how architects and urban planners are capitalizing on new digital technologies to involve residents more directly in design." (project outline in .pdf)

Full speed ahead with iDTV - Belgacom

Belgian incumbent telco Belgacom announced yesterday that its number one priority for the future is the development of Belgian interactive digital television and the provision of iDTV and video-on-demand.

AlwaysOn starts video blogs; First blog post on outsourcing.

Tony Perkins launches video blog over at AlwaysOn. I've been thinking about video blogs since Jeremy started playing with them months ago. is there a need for them? Is there a business in video blogs?

In AO's first video Tony talks about outsourcing ("a good thing"), Google's IPO and video blogs.

The total video time: 4:38.

Total value I got from it? Zero.

I'm not sold on video blogs. Writers and people who are interesting to watch on TV are two very different things 90% of the time.

Community Site for VJs by VJs - VJCentral.com

"Welcome to VJCentral.com, a community site for VJs by VJs intended for newbies who want to learn how to create live visuals as well as for experienced VJs looking for inspiration, advanced tips and or other fellow VJs."

T.V for the mobile by 2005

In Japan, terrestrial digital TV broadcasting for the mobile phone, is scheduled to launch in 2005 after an agreement with MPEG LA, a US organization managing MPEG-related patent licensing, over the licensing fee payments for H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC)-video coding, NE Asia online reports.

Terrestrial Digital Broadcasting for Cell Phones to Debut from Autumn 2005

While

KDDI Develops Prototype of Cell Phone Capable of Receiving Terrestrial Digital TV Broadcasting

Congress wants to restrict P2P software distribution to minors

Last week's P2P child pornography crackdown is helping Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) to search support for his bill that restricts P2P software distribution. The bill, called Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography (P4) Act would require the Federal Trade Commission to regulate peer-to-peer networks and take steps to ensure that children aren't accidentally coming across porn. Pitt praised the action but he thinks the Feds are just being reactive:

Friday's announcement is a disturbing confirmation that Peer-to-Peer programs are being manipulated. They are becoming an ever more dangerous platform used by child predators -- some convicted child molesters to attack kids.

Why Google Will Merge Orkut and Blogger

Veronis and Suhler Stevenson (VSS) sees a day fast approaching when we will be over-saturated in media, according to this TelevisionWeek report. I believe it. If there's one thing problematic with the Information Age it is that there's just too much to take in!

Currently I subscribe to about 350 "real" news and blog feeds using FeedDemon and Bloglines. Many of these, particularly the blogs, are filled with thousands of pearls of wisdom. Despite these powerful aggregation tools, I find it impossible to read all these feeds and end up scanning probably about half (at most) on a daily basis. The problem is going to only escalate as online publishing becomes cheaper and easier. I find new blogs to read almost every day.

Thankfully, despite the gloomy VSS predictions, Google will again free us from information clutter, just as they have done time and again. They will eventually merge their Orkut social networking site and Blogger Web publishing system to establish communities of "trusted bloggers." A unified Blogger/Orkut platform will make it easier for us to identify the most credible/valuable bloggers who write about the subjects that matter to us. The system will be even better than the tools we use now to measure influence, such as Technorati. Some are already experimenting with such a model, but Google will prevail.

You can already see the early beginnings of this in Blogger's recent relaunch. Google is grouping bloggers into discrete communities. Orkut has an eerily similar community system. I can easily envision a day when Google will realize the tremendous power of merging these platforms into a single entity that facilitates information publishing/sharing and retrieval -- if they haven't already.

IMHO, this will all make our job - reaching online influencers - just a little bit easier.

DIY ringtone software panics record labels

make your own ringtones from MP3s with Xingtone, user/pass

Xingtone's desktop software is easy-to-use, legal, and allows you to create mobile phone ringtones using digital audio files on your computer - music clips, sound effects, your child's laugh, your dogís bark, or any sound you like!

Pixagogo supports Creative Commons

Pixagogo, an online photo site, now offers Creative Commons licenses to its contributing photographers. Pixagogo allows you to upload and share photos via its web site. They also let you purchase prints. Check out their toolbar, that includes an option to choose Creative Commons.

I, T-shirt: wearable movie trailers at NextFest

In The Hollywood Reporter today, an item about t-shirts that display movie trailers -- as seen at both E3 and NextFest last week.

Coming soon to a T-shirt near you: trailers for "I, Robot," starring Will Smith. In the never-ending search to capture the attention of consumers bombarded by commercials, billboards and a massive array of other advertisements, 20th Century Fox debuted an innovative new guerilla marketing tactic at E3 last week -- T-shirts embedded with video screens that played "I, Robot" trailers.

The two women who wore the video T-shirts as they walked around E3 drew crowds and TV news crews on hand to cover the gaming conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. 20th Century Fox is the first studio -- or business of any kind -- to use the video T-shirt marketing tactic developed by San Francisco-based Brand Marketers.

Fallows: End of the Info Middlemen?

In the yesterday's New York Times, James Fallows explores how the rise of the Internet is transforming the business of content by making it possible to eliminate "info middlemen." In particular, he discusses journals that publish professional, scientific, and medical papers -- which complain of being undermined by free online clearinghouses such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central site. He also ponders the fate of services that historically have repackaged and delivered data and content produced with taxpayer funds, such as AccuWeather.

This conundrum also challenges the news media. Says Fallows, "Publishers can theorize about (...)

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Japanese Trend: Millions Get News Via Their Phones

I had dinner last week with Shayne Bowman as we planned for the Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism Conference on Aug. 3 in Toronto. We were talking about the potential of wireless, and he said pay attention to Smart Mobs because its founder Howard Reinghold says look to what is happening around the world. Eventually it will happen here in the USA.

So here is what is happening in Japan, according to a comprehensive Japan Media Review article:

In a July 2003 survey, Tokyo-based mobile ad agency D2 Communications, a joint venture between mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo and advertising giant Dentsu, found that about 84 percent of i-mode users subscribed to some form of mobile news service. As of late March there were just over 41 million i-mode users in Japan (out of a total population of more than 127 million), implying that a staggering 34.7 million i-moders are now receiving news via mobile technology. And that's just among NTT DoCoMo customers; competitors KDDI and Vodafone have millions more mobile Internet users.

Mobile media users are also generating strong profits for at least some media houses, primarily those that have opted to create subscription news channels. The Asahi Shimbun is making well over $1 million per month on wireless content and others are trying hard to catch up.

Blog reader survey

Over at Blogads, Henry Copeland has posted a 22-question online survey to help improve the service. By getting a snapshot of blog readers, he says, the aggregate data could be good PR for blog advertising.

Henry, who is writing about the survey on the Blogads blog, also points out that of 6,000 responses so far, 80% have come from men. "This shocks me, but the percentage has been true since the first 10 responses came in, and fluctuates nary an 0.1% as different blogs dump their readers into the pot. If anyone blogs this fact, will we see a higher proportion of women respond?"

Blogbuzz

In today's New York Times James Fallows has an article titled "The Twilight of the Information Middlemen": As he introduces blogs to a readership not necessarily familiar with him, he writes: "the Internet's most fascinating impact has been on those who have decided not to charge for their work."

Fallows grasps a key point about weblogs, one worth emphasizing as this medium grows more mainstream: blogging was born out of the desire for free expression and the desire to share one's self-expression freely and easily with others... not out of the desire for profit.

Bill Moyers is also a blog fan. At the very end of his recent Fresh Air Interview he says: "I think the internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why they called them inkstained wretches. Because they operated their own hand presses. For a little bit of money, like Tom Payne and others, you could have your own press........ After the revolution independent journalists, printers they called themselves, sprung up all over the country ... they were partisan by the way, vociferously. They attacked the others politics. but it was a healthy period of bombast in america in which people could sort out the information. I think the bloggers, then the websites, come closest to the spirit of cacophany, to that democratic expression, that we had in the early part of this country's history."

TV over IM

My dream of distributing couch potato behavior has been realized by Simon Thornton: Sending Live Television Via iChat. Simon says:

However, if you just so happen to be someone that has purchased an analogue video -> DV (firewire) converter box in the past, such as the Formac Studio, you might be suprised to learn that when it's plugged in it is presented to the Mac (and specifically the iChat application) as a perfectly valid firewire input device. In other, shorter, easier, words: you can use your converter box to stream live video from something - oooh, let's just say your Sky Digibox for example - to someone else using iChat anywhere else in the world. If you happened to have one of the outputs of your Sky box (it has two) connected up to the inputs of your converter box, you might see how this could work.

Opera Sings RSS' Praises

Opera (last week) introduced a new browser that integrates RSS reading capabilities. Users can subscribe to feeds and have new items arrive regularly as individual messages in Opera's mail client, which is packaged with the browser.

AP says "The decision by a major browser maker to include RSS is a sign of the technology's rapid adoption."

RSS has clearly passed the tipping point. Everyone I show it to leaves with their mouths open wide. However, it still needs to get a lot easier to use before it becomes a technology a grandma can love. How much longer will it be before Microsoft buys and dumbs down Newsgator or Feeddemon and integrates the technology into XPSP3 or Longhorn? Or before AOL, Google or Yahoo! buys Bloglines and throws ads into the mix? Not long.

XVID 1.0 Released

"The 1.0 version of XVID codec is available. XviD is an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec like DIVX codec. It's an open source project which is developed and maintained by lots of people from all over the world. On the 31st December, Doom9 has made a codec comparison and XVID was at this time, one of the best codecs."

"Koreans will Kill TV"...

...with broadband. That's what George Guilder recently said in Seoul.

jMax, Max for Java

freesoftware@ircam A new version of jMax was recently released. For those of you who don't know, jMax is a version of the Max family of sofware (Max/MSP, PD and so on) that uses a Java front end. From the site:

jMax is a visual programming environment for building interactive real-time music and multimedia applications. jMax is a new implementation of the MAX software written originally by Miller Puckette at Ircam. The name MAX is an homage to Max Matthews, one of the fathers of computer music.

'First free VOD channel' launches

RipeTV is debuting with 11 shows (with commercials) via video-on-demand.

American Idol voting 'seriously flawed'

Only a relative few votes get recorded, reports a Broadcasting & Cable investigation. Tens of millions haven't gotten through because no phone system can handle the volume of calls. Exception: AT&T's text messages, which are transmitted digitally and cost callers 10¢ a piece.

Eye-contact-sensing goggles

Connor Dickie, a student at Queen's University's Human Media Lab, has developed these video-shooting glasses with an eye-contact sensor, and a companion app called eyeBlog that allows the wearer to videoblog her/his PoV.

NTT's home IP videophone

Fusty old Japanese telecoms monopoly NTT is straining to go all cool and IP as its conventional phone and dialup businesses wane, and it's come up with its vision for the home phone of the future: a touch-panel VoIP videophone that hooks up to a DSL or fibre connection. The only shortcoming, apart from an unfashionable lack of portability, is the price; about US$600. Too expensive for PC-less grannies and PC'd-up young bloods alike, we don't see this one taking off (we'll settle for a webcam, thanks). NTT deserves some kudos for developing it with what seems like remarkable speed, though this vision of the future goes on the market to NTT broadband subscribers in June.

O'Reilly Open Books Project

"Over the years, O'Reilly Media has published a number of "Open Books"--books with various forms of "open" copyright".... In addition to the books (with their various open licenses) listed here, O'Reilly has adopted the Creative Commons Founders' Copyright, which we'll apply to hundreds of out-of-print and current titles, pending author approval.

Samsung's satellite TV phone

Samsung is coming out with a cellphone that can receive satellite TV broadcasts, which means better coverage and more channels than you could get with a regular broadcast TV tuner. The first Digital Multimedia Broadcasting phone should be out sometime during the third quarter of this year, but the bad news is that it's only coming out in South Korea. They're also planning a satellite TV phone with RIM's BlackBerry email technology built-in.

Short message writers proliferate in China

via Smart Mobs: The huge popularity of cell phones and their and multi functions have made for the creation of new professions, think of ringtone composers and now, China is experiencing a proliferation of text message writers, according to an article in China View.

[...] Like Hallmark Cards, some telecom and Internet firms in China have hired professional writers to churn out more polished messages that fit a variety of moods and occasions.

It is estimated that Beijing has over 100 short message writers, the highest number of wordsmiths for this particular purpose, and Shanghai has about half of that.

Some of them are full-time employees, but most are "special contributors" who are paid by how much they can write and how popular their messages turn out to be.

Some companies have designed very complicated pay scales, with the writer's take varying according to different brackets of user popularity for each message. Overall, media experts put the monthly income of a full-time short message writer at 4,000-5,000 yuan (US$483-604). Some star writers earn much more because their compositions tend to attract the highest number of customers.

Internet Video Links

Internet Video Magazine.

Flash AV Player.

Video-Link.tv

MeshForum - A conference on networks

If you are interested in networks -- of any sort -- you may want to attend the MeshForum conference in Chicago this October. One important prerequisite for attendance is that you be well-networked: one can only attend if one is invited by another attendee, and find someone else to pay your way.

Organizer Shannon Clark tells us:

Our goal is very much to engage the widest range of thinkers on Networks we can, and connect those people to each other across fields of study and industry/political lines. We are looking for a mix of academics, business leaders, and public sector leaders to cross-pollinate ideas and build up new connections. It is my view that while there is a lot of exciting research and work being done on networks at the moment, it is still only scraping the surface of the possibilities - Networks as a lens from which to study different industries, structures, and types of problems will, I think, open up many exciting new developments and opportunities - from innovate organization structures to solutions to complex biological research challenges.

We are also very eager to bring thinkers from a wide range of areas - and to expose thinkers who have been working deeply in one area to people from a diverse range of other fields (i.e. introduce people from the programming group of a major airline to academic network researchers but also to say innovative thinkers studying networks in perhaps biological systems - with the thesis being that there are common approaches and common "rules" about networks that each party can learn from the other.

At NextFest: OLEDs and the future of flat-panels

Among the many gadgets and concept devices being shown off at the NextFest this weekend are a bunch of different Organic Light-Emitting Diode technologies from Universal Display Corporation, including a transparent OLED screen and a PDA with a flexible display which rolls up into a pen.

AFP Looks at Participatory Journalism

Agence France-Presse has a story today on how cheap digital technology is revolutionizing the way news is gathered, disseminated and perceived. The article provides some historical perspective, while also touching on video blogs or vblogging.

RPXP/web

A web clipping service for RealPlayer, Windows Media and Quicktime audio/video streams.

Autometa RPXP is an open-source (LGPL v2.1) Perl 5.005 script for template-driven content generation. It is a subset of the functionality provided by Autometa cSpacer, which provides multispace policy projection for identity-driven applications.

RPXP v0.74 generates SMIL 1.0 and RealText streaming media presentations. These can be hyperlinked via standard HTTP URLs. Web publishers can subset and annotate video streams as URLs that can be distributed via email or weblog. The original media stream is not changed.

WiFi antennae made from cheap Chinese cookware

These Kiwi WiFi hackers are building cheap, incredibly powerful WiFi antennae out of Chinese cookware (like this $2 parabolic "dumpling scoop") and USB WiFi dongles. They've got extensive build and testing notes: I wonder where I can get a dumpling scoop of my own? Link (Thanks, Stan. Swan!)

Read this and understand the P2P wars

Timothy Wu is a law prof at the University of Virginia, and a very clever copyright reformer to boot. When Timothy and I last met, he was called Timmy, and we were both students at ALP, the hippie alternative school in Toronto that we both attended until grade eight. One of the weirdest coincidences in my life to date is that two alumni of a tiny school in Toronto would both end up moving to the US to pursue something as obscure as copyright reform.

Back to Tim(my)! His latest paper, "Copyright's Communications Policy," has me absolutely floored. Tim traces the history of copyright law, the way that we've spent a century undergoing a once-a-decade copyfight, in which representatives of inventors faced down representatives of artists and duked it out in the courts and Congress.

The parallels to today's fights are downright spooky. For example, the first music pirates (the recording industry, who ripped off sheet music) got this proper dressing-down from John Phillip Sousa, who told Congress:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

CNN's 'Crossfire' gets interactive

In a first for CNN, viewers can log on to CNN.com and participate in live polling and trivia synched to Crossfire's broadcast. "We're excited that Crossfire is again blazing a new trail, becoming the first truly interactive political program in history," said Sam Feist, senior EP of CNN's political programming. The application is powered by GoldPocket and sponsored by Xerox.

Video comes to Game Boy Advance

Long talked about, video has finally come to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. Majesco has started shipping $20 Game Boy Advance Video cartridges each with 45 minutes of cartoons from Nickeodeon, Cartoon Network and others. Controls are DVD-like, sound is good and cartoon quality great. And it can't skip. Hasbro's black-and-white VideoNow should beware.

Photography Resource: Web Photo School (webphotoschool.com)

Web Photo School has the largest compilation of photography and digital imaging educational resources. Our mission is to visually communicate the ease of use of digital cameras and photography equipments to all levels of photographers.

Our lessons have been written by leading professional photographers. The lessons are written for all levels of experience and are easy to learn and follow in the next photograph you shoot. The lessons range from Basic Photography to Fashion to Indoor and Outdoor Portraiture. Virtually any subject you can think of, we can help you take a better picture today.

This site has some excellent tutorials on different aspects in photography. Some of them are free, so try those out. If you like them, you can enroll in this photo school and you get a further 15 lessons free, as far as I can tell.

Talking About an Evolution (Donna Wentworth)

Jason Schultz @ LawGeek, responding to Yochai Benkler's suggestion that while music will undoubtedly survive peer-to-peer, the record labels might not:

What we need is not for the record industry to 'die' but rather to have the industry evolve. We still need methods of marketing and distributing music. P2P does a nice job of distribution but it has yet to demonstrate that it can market an unknown band on its own to the same scale that the RIAA can. P2P does a nice job of distribution but it has yet to demonstrate that it can market an unknown band on its own to the same scale that the RIAA can. [DJ Dangermouse is a notable exception, although one could argue that the coverage in the NYTimes, the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and LA Times didn't hurt].

The bottom line is that as much as we hate the evil aspects of the recording industry, we mustn't discount the actual good it produces, both socially and economically. If P2P is really going to succeed in moving music forward to the next era, it's going to have to find substitutes for these benefits that the RIAA currently provides. If we are unable to bridge this gap, I fear losing the record labels will, in fact, hurt artists and music lovers.

Micron Technology debuts 1.3 megapixel CMOS sensor for camera phones

Micron Technology has introduced its MT9M111 DigitalClarity System-on-a-Chip (SOC) 1.3-megapixel CMOS image sensor that is developed specifically for camera phones and PDAs, the company reports.

The chipset's capabilities include, "color recovery and correction, auto exposure, white balance, lens shading correction, sharpening, programmable gamma correction, black level offset correction, flicker avoidance, filtered resize with continuous, smooth digital zoom, fast auto-exposure modes, ultra-low power view-finding and on-the-fly defect correction," the company says.

EFF invites people to ask Congress for a solution on P2P war

EFF has launched a campaign inviting Americans to write to Congress requesting the rejection of the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act.

You may not agree with the recording industry's war on file sharing, but under the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act (PDEA, HR 4077), you'd still have to pay for it. The PDEA would create the first criminal copyright penalties for people who aren't engaged in willful criminal conduct. Under the law's murky "negligence" standard, a person with 1,000 legally obtained songs could be sent to jail for three years if she fails to lock them up tight enough - and that's only for the first offense. In addition, the PDEA would force the government to push a lopsided "education" campaign that demonizes P2P while failing to mention your rights to use copyrighted material. To top it off, all of this would be funded with your tax dollars. Tell Congress to reject the PDEA and explore solutions that pay artists rather than punish people.

Sony: VAIO Video Pocket to arrive soon

Sony makes the first move and has decided to create a video iPod killer before Apple can get the jump on them. The VAIO Pocket Video is planned to be launched in the "very near future" (i.e. earlier than 2005) according to the chief of the VAIO division, Keiji Kimura. The portable player will include a hard drive, MPEG-4/MPEG-2 video
decoding, and (here's the good part), 802.11g-based Wi-Fi for wirelessly streaming video to a TV.

It's obvious they're trying come up with a competitor to those new personal video players running on Microsoft's Portable Media Center software, the first of which are due out later this year and are expected to cost around $400. We saw a product manager from Microsoft's TV division deliver a speech earlier this week where he confirmed that you'll be able to buy movies for the PMC from video download services CinemaNow and MovieLink.

Looking for a Sound

During a recent trip, several Poynter employees engaged in an in-depth discussion of how to index, sort, organize, and search the out-of-control fire hose that is rich media. Interesting options are quickly approaching for the desktop, but few options exist for finding recent and relevant video or sound clips you want via a web-wide search engine. For example, searching "Fallujah" in any of the three video search systems I just linked to bring up absolutely nothing.

A recent article about optimizing non-HTML content for search engines at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo gives little (...)

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DoCoMo's OnQ concept phone

NTT DoCoMo is showing off a concept phone called the OnQ with a high-resolution, 2.4-inch LCD screen that rotates 90 degrees so you use it in widescreen mode for watching videos. It even has a cradel that doubles as a digital video recorder for transferring TV shows onto the phone (at least that's what we're guessing from the mangled automatic translation).

[Via TRFJ]

Progressive versus Interlaced: 720p versus 1080i

This depicts how progressive (P) scanning works - see top row - versus how interlaced (I) scanning works - bottom row. People (such as Congressmen) read "our" 720P proposal and "their" 1080I proposal and assume that 1080I is superior because the number is larger. The diagram above shows that this is a fallacy. In the progressive system, 720 lines are presented to the human eye every 1/60th of a second while the so-called 1080I system presents only 540 lines. Therefore a more accurate name for the interlaced system is 540I. It also more accurately represents the fact that the interlaced system is lower in quality than our 720P system. Not only is 720P superior to 540I in quality (note the well-known artifact: interlace flickers), but it is cheaper! And it is naturally compatible with computers (which all use progressive scanning). Now you can understand the title of this page: It is 720P that is greater than 540I - formerly known in old-speak as 1080I.

MythTV to TV

There's an interesting thread on the MythTV developer list about how to bring archive.org content to the television set. Imagine, a TV with no umbilical cords, just the full power of the Internet. Now that would be exciting.

"The days of push-pin maps are over"

Okay, so everybody and their mother has heard about Pacmanhattan by now. And things going on at the Psy.Geo.Conflux are pretty great too. One thing projects like this point towards, aside from the pure exhilaration that comes alongside any real-time intertwining of a networked space with a physical one, is that lots of wonderful things can happen when you map your code to geography. Brett Stalbaum's work at C5 is just one other example that comes to my mind (work) (text).

Perhaps a bit more on the pragmatic side are how local (NYC) civic organizations are experimenting with GIS to tie the structure of their web applications to maps of the areas they serve. Projects doing this now in New York City include: NYPIRG CMAP's team up with Queens Community Board 3 (article), another with Municipal Art Society called the CITI project, and Gotham Gazette's Community Gazettes - not only an interesting example of coding geography, but also a participatory media project in it's own right.

Toronto Open Source Conference Report

Today's Ottawa Citizen is running a report in the TechWeekly section on the recent open source conference in Toronto organized by U of T's interdisciplinary Knowledge Media Design Institute and last month's Real World Linux trade show. It highlights the extremely poor Extremadura region of Spain's success story using open source to bootstrap themselves technologically. Quotes from FOSS luminaries include: 'Who controls the software, controls life. Well, it had better us. That's the real political meaning of the free software movement,' said Eben Moglen. Open source 'was the default way you built Internet Infrastructure. You wrote code and released it without trying to commercialize and monetize it,' said Brian Behldendorf." Newsforge (also part of OSDN) has a series of reports on the conference: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

(Drazen just returned from the conference full of energy and ideas. Can't wait to hear what he has to say about the conference. Also check out the Loomware blog for roundups of the sessions. -kc)

Reality TV goes mobile

While Reality TV shows have been taking over broadcast TV, Sprint is planning to bring it to mobile phones. "The Spot", billed as a "reality drama", will be streaming to handsets on Sprint's PCS Vision network.

Sprint's new version of "The Spot" will be the first time original content of this sort has been made available for wireless phones in the United States. Naturally the show will be modified from its original design, both to fit the screen and fit the different nature of the medium. It will include interactive content, although exactly what sort of interaction is not clear.

Jimmy Breslin on the End of News Gatekeepers

The reformists, like public journalists and webloggers, first warned of the death of journalism as we know it. Now even hardened journalists like Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin are beginning to agree.

He writes in part:

We are at the end of an old way of telling the public the news of the day.

Speaking of the Iraq prison attrocities and the beheading of Nicholas Berg, he continued his column saying,

Here is the new news reporting. If something is too gruesome, too ominous for the newspaper editor's taste, it matters not. The Internet will decide what you print, and if you don't care, if you want to stay in the past, then stay there with your dead newspaper.

Right to preserve digital information

Alicia Ryan, Contract, Copyright and the Future of Digital Preservation, Journal of Science and Technology Law 10(1),(Winter 2004). Ryan views the access question in terms of preservation and argues that libraries and archives should be granted the right to copy digital works, copy web sites, and have the right to lend digital materials, especially in cases where the works are at risk or no longer commercially available. (Source: LawLibrary Blog)

Video Blog Assignment: Democratic Convention

Jeff Jarvis posts this from the Bloggers' convention assignment desk:

1. Do not cover anything we can see on TV: not a single speech.

2. Do give us your perspective as a citizen: be opinionated and, when deserved, cynical.

3. Do report on the reporters: Expose the tricks of their trade.

4. Do take assignments from your readers: ask the questions the people who can't be there would ask (that, after all, is the real job of reporters, isn't it?).

5. Do not take it too seriously. This is a nonevent, a media event, a carnival. Treat it as the amusement it is.

Good Blog News Roundup

Bill Hobbs has posted a solid roundup of news about blogs and the impact they're having in public relations, journalism, politics and academia. The roundup includes a Reuters report that explores the impact of digital technology on war-related public relations and journalism, an interview PR Newswire's Media Insider conducted with me on blogs, PR and participatory journalism, and much more.

The people's news judgment

The great, vaunted talent/skill/art/gift from God that editors supposedly have is news judgment. I had to work my way up in the business until one day a light shone from heaven and it was decreed that I had news judgment. Editors have it. Mortals don't.

Or not.

Glenn Reynolds puts together a bunch of opinions from many quarters that say the news business has no news judgment regarding the murder of Nick Berg.

He's right. And now we have the means to prove he's right. We can look at what people are talking about on weblogs. We can look at what people are searching for online (see this Google search for "Nick Berg"). We can see what people are linking to on Technorati (this takes you to the latest links on "Nick Berg"). We can look at the traffic on stories about an evil enemy killing one of our innocents versus stories about -- to go to Page One of the NY Times today: stories about our "abuse" and even a story blaming us for the murder of our innocent.

The people have news judgment. And it beats the judgment of many an editor.

The people have their own newspaper now. And you're looking at it.

Qualcomm Offers Chips to Allow 6-Megapixel Cameras

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mobile phone technology provider Qualcomm Inc. on Wednesday unveiled a new line of chips with ultra-high resolution camera features and said it was making inroads in advanced new markets.

The FeedRoom's RSS feeds

Earlier this week, Reuters began offering RSS feeds of its video clips, thanks to The FeedRoom. Turns out, The FeedRoom offers a ton of video RSS feeds.

Grouping

Ev announces that Google is beta-testing the ability for users to create their own groups (fighting Yahoo on another front).

I just went in and created a group for the nascent Citizens Media Association hatched at Bloggercon. Nothing there so go say things...

There's WiFi in my TV

Despite objections from broadcasters, it looks like the FCC will propose a plan allowing WiFi to use unused frequencies between TV channels 2 and 51 in each market, as long as they don't disrupt existing stations.

Jay Rosen on the Free Press and Webloggers

Here is Jay Rosen's special take home message from today's earlier interview on Minnesota Public Radio. It is a declaration for all webloggers to post and for all traditional journalists to ponder:

"The notion of a free press, from, let's say, World War II to the 1980s, in journalists' minds came more and more to represent their institution, they were the press. What the weblog is saying to them is the press belongs to America as a whole and every citizen is potentially the press. There is a very important principle there thatís actually a Constitutional principle that could use underlining in journalism. Freedom of the press does not refer to the same press that has the National Press Club in Washington. It refers to anybody's rights to publish their thoughts. That more expansive meaning of the press is one thing weblogs are bringing into reality."

YouSendIt, send files up to 1GB

Yousendit is a more powerful Dropload, but can't possibly stay free for long [via]

Choose who you want to send a file to. It can be anyone with an email address. You can specify multiple email addresses separated by commas. Select a file to send. You can send photos, audio, documents or anything else. Your file will be stored by YouSendIt without ever filling up your recipient's mailbox. Click on Send. YouSendIt will automatically email your recipient a link to your file stored on our server. Your file will be deleted after seven days.

Is Congress Ready for DMCA Reform? (Donna Wentworth)

The burning question of the day: How did the hearings on the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) go? More specifically, to what degree does Congress appear willing to consider the public's side of the copyright equation?

The first report from the hearing seems to tell a variation of the same old story: advocates for the public interest cried "harm," the content industry responded with "theft," and progress got reacquainted with impasse. Closer inspection, however, reveals a tiny crack in the wall: Washington lobbyist and former congressman Allan Swift openly admitted to recording songs as gifts for friends -- "mixed tape" copying of the sort we can all still do using audio cassettes, only (gulp) using digital media. "I never made a straight duplicate of a record for anyone," said Swift. "I have never charged a person a penny. I am, like other American consumers, a profit center for these businesses. It's about time they treated us with a little respect."

Now, a second crack has splintered off from the first: Fred von Lohmann reports that the DMCRA has the critical support of Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. During the lunch reccess, Congressman Barton privately announced that he "intends to see the bill marked up (a prerequisite to approval), passed by the subcommittee, passed by the full committee, passed by the full House of Representatives, and ultimately signed into law by the President. This year."

The future of wearable displays

An article over at Forbes.com about wearable displays that amazingly does NOT mention the Eyetop, and instead talks about a few hadn't heard much about, like Interactive Imaging Systems Second Sight and MicroOptical's heads-up display for eyeglasses (pictured at right). It seems like the big obstacle these are gonna run into sooner or later is that fewer and fewer people want to walk around wearing glasses of any kind.

Online Course on Social Software

Blog, Wikis, Social Networks - what can social software do for you? is an online course that runs May 17 through May 21. It costs $149. I'm posting this because I know and endorse a number of the people who will be teaching: Tom Mandel, Lisa Kimball, Ross Mayfield, Tom Erickson all know what they are talking about, and know how to teach in an online environment.

Interview with Sloncek of Suprnova

Smart answers from the Solvenian Bittorrent mogul.

--Slyck: It would be naive to say that BitTorrentís success was not based on copyright infringement. However, Bram Cohen, the developer of the BT protocol, clearly states that BT is not suitable for copyright infringement.

--SuprNova: Yes Bram Cohen did say in an article for New York Times that he doesnít like the idea of BT being used by sites like SuprNova, but letís face it.... Would he really get anything if there werenít sites like SuprNova? How many companies have really started using BT for downloads? Although, I wish more did.

Blogs Don't Challenge the Media Establishment, They Enhance It

ClickZ today features a provocative column by Vin Crosbie on how mainstream media outlets don't realize how technology has eroded many of the barriers that prevent new competition.

He highlights PaidContent.org, DPReview.com and others as upstart competitors to the big media conglomerates. Crosbie writes:

Traditional publishers and broadcasters should worry about these efforts. Entry barriers will continue to fall as new media technology evolves. New competition will further decrease the market price consumers will pay for content.

NTT DoCoMo to trial TV over 3G

SKY Perfect Communications and NTT DoCoMo has announced that the two companies have agreed to jointly field test mobile video-clip streaming services and program-related information services by integrating the 3G FOMA and SKY PerfecTV! networks. The test is scheduled from June 15, 2004 to November 30, 2004 in Japan, and the two companies will begin accepting monitors for the trial from today.

Videoblog with sound bites

Check out this new tool that my friend Peter made.
I haven't used it yet, but it's supposed to let you link to just a part of a video.
So listen to Rumsfeld's latest nightmare on CSPAN and then link to a specific soundbite in your blog.
Check it.

Freecache: bandwidth for the commons

A more reliable alternative to Bittorrent

FireWire Gets Ready to Go Wireless

mindless4210 writes "The 1394 Trade Association has approved a specification for the development of wireless FireWire applications, which will let 1394-enabled devices, both wired and unwired, to connect with each other. The new spec will enable communication between a variety of devices, such as set-top boxes, HDTVs, tuners, and DVD players, all of which will be able to interoperate in home networks. Officials speculated that in the future there could be plug-in cards for set-top boxes enabling wireless connection to DVD players and hard-disk drives. The trade association also said it will work with the WiMedia Alliance to jointly develop collaborative products."

The longer you moblog, the fewer photos you send.

"We can hypothesize that this may be related to design of the moblogging services, or to issues with the actual device. For the service providers such results should be indicate the need for better incentives for the posting of content.

"While bad resolution and image quality may diminish the desire to share an image, another major issue is the large number of key presses from the time a picture is taken to the posting. Users may be unwilling to deal with the hassle of the interface beyond the first few pictures."

The blog tool you really want

Dave Pollard, at How To Save The World, posted a list of functions he wants his blog to have, such as "robust commenting" and "access to rest of personal 'filing cabinet'". He then scored its success at each:

This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster and simpler, at next to no cost.

My benchmark for this scorecard is my father. If I could explain to him how to use a blog feature over the phone, it gets a 'green' score. If my brother, who lives a few blocks away from him and is an engineer, could set it up for him so he could use it, it gets a 'yellow' score. If it's not available at all, or unfathomable to novice users even with help, it gets a 'red' score.

The Perfect Storm

News sites are having a great year, with soaring revenues and profits. But media companies more broadly face "the perfect storm of the Internet," said Chris Schroeder, VP of strategy for the Washington Post Company and former publisher of Washingtonpost.com, in his keynote address this morning at the E&P/Mediaweek Interactive Media conference in Atlanta.

Traditional media are aggregators at heart, and now face an array of new aggregator-competitors on the Internet. Disaggregators are building new businesses that chip away at content as well as advertising; even sports teams are running their own web destinations. And new forces are aggregating services that previously were scattered -- LendingTree, TicketMaster, and others.

To survive this storm, Schroeder said, it's essential for sites to focus on delivering quality audiences through registration and behavioral targeting, and to focus on content that delivers nuance and not just commodity data.

Moblogging from the front and the new Reformation (Clay Shirky)

James Hong of HotorNot fame launched YAFRO as a Friendster clone (the acronym is for Yet Another Friendster Rip-off.) Since then, they've turned it into a moblog, and Hong has recently posted a list of US soldiers posting pictures to YAFRO from Iraq. Images straight from the front, with Dan Rather nowhere in sight.

Jaques Barzun, author of the marvelous history of modernity From Dawn to Decadence (1500 - present), makes the point that the Catholic Church as a pan-European political force was done in by the Protestant Reformation, itself fueled by the printing press. Once the Church lost the ability to control the direct perception of scripture, thanks to the printing of (relatively) cheap bibles in languages other than Latin, their loss of political hegemony followed.

This is what we are seeing now relative to the military's control of information. A year or so ago, someone in the DoD told me that the thing that would most affect the prosecution of the war in Iraq would be images of DAB; Dead American Bodies. The unplanned spread of photos of coffins, and now of torture victims, means that control of this part of the war is outside the military's hands.

The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what's on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can't predict.

(continue reading this article at Many-to-Many)

More on Flickr: Notes from Ross Mayfield

Flickr released two things that proves they are going meta on us. Flickr Notes allows annotation of photos for telling stories:

Studio for Interactive and Responsive Architectures

One of Parsons` stellar physical computing instructors, James Rouvelle, will be teaching a summer studio called Interactive and Response Architectures at Technische Universitat, Berlin. The team-based studio/laboratory for shared
collective research will be directed towards the conception, design,
programming, development and construction of one or more interactive installations or systems. Workshops will be held on the materials of ubiquitous/physical computing, from the local (microcontroller) to the global (web). Topics will include programming, basic electronics, simple circuit building, data mapping, working with microcontrollers, sensors, effectors and networks. Now accepting applications for enrollment.

So excited about Reuters TV RSS!

I must break from my research paper-writing to gush with excitement over Reuters' video RSS feed. As Dave Winer points out, it could be better by using bitorrent, etc. Still, I love it. I use Sharpreader as my main aggregator these days because I like the way it notifies me with a little newsflash pop-up when feeds are updated. Now I get my Reuters video that way.

It's already having an impact on how I follow news events. Take the Rumsfeld testimony. I've banned myself from TV in order to get some work done, which means I didn't watch Rumsfeld testify live. But I got to watch a long video clip of his testimony later on the Reuters video site, at my own convenience during a writing break, without having to listen to annoying anchors and pundits yammering on before and after showing the video clip. Plus the clip was much longer than I would ever have gotten in a network or cable TV news replay.

I got even more excited just now when my Sharpreader notified me of the Reuters TV headline: "Congolese Soldiers, Hutus Clash". Clicking on the link, I got to watch a raw Reuters feed of video and soundbites from the aftermath of the latest violent mess in Congo without some reporter's narration, accompanied by a text story that explains what I am seeing. Somehow I doubt this story is going to be on the network or cable TV news shows this evening, or if it is, it will be a brief 30-second anchor-read. Being a very visually-oriented person, I found that the video compelled me to read and learn more than I might otherwise have done about how the Interahamwe - a militia group that orchestrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide - continues to operate and terrorize people in Congo.

I also find it valuable to be able to watch the latest raw video from Iraq, as opposed to the highly packaged and narrated version we get on TV. All this from a person who has worked in TV news for over a decade.

Video over DSL is coming

News.Com: Nortel Networks CTO Greg Mumford predicts 20 megabits DSL will happen sooner than we think because phone companies will have to stream videos in order to compete with cable cos. Wire-line providers will look to protect themselves from cable companies who offer video services, which will mean DSL speeds will rise to 20 megabits per second.

Microsoft Unveils Xbox Live Videophone

Just a quick "in case you've been under a rock update" to say that today is the first day of E3, which means we might be a little more game hardware-heavy than usual. That's a good thing, though! It's like Christmas!

Anyway, it looks like Microsoft's adding a videophone/videochat service to Xbox Live, not unlike the recently announced Sony EyeToy: Chat. Unlike Sony's implementation, though, Microsoft is claiming that you will be able to videochat with more than one person at a time.

Flickr adds image annotation

Flickr -- the fantastic social image-sharing Web app from Ludicorp -- has added image annotation; you can draw boxes around bits of the photos you post and mark up the contents of each box. When a viewer mouses over the box, a tooltip pops up with the annotation. Super cool.

Link

(via Kottke)

Will the broadcast flag shut down GNU Radio?

Linux Journal: Does the FCC's new Broadcast Flag regulation shut down GNU Radio? A Q&A with GNU Radio creator Eric Blossom.

EB: We think we can cover a lot of interesting things, including HDTV. The limitation with the USB approach is the bandwidth we can sustain across the USB. We can sustain 32MB/sec, which should be enough to get the raw or slightly processed HDTV signal across. We expect to be able to access about a 6MHz chuck of the RF spectrum, so a TV channel just fits.

Adam Curry and Personal TV

I've been researching VideoBlogging recently, trying to figure out how to host BitTorrent files on a blog. In my research, I kept running across the name, Adam Curry, who I figured was just some programmer. Turns out its the same Adam Curry who was a host on MTV in the 80s! Wow, there is an afterlife for VJs!
Adam is now a big time blogger working on a Personal TV initiative that aims to marry Blogs, RSS, and BitTorrent to broadcast audio/video through web-based subscriptions.

Psychogeography in New York City This Weekend

Here comes Psy.Geo.Conflux! Presented by Glowlab, the Brooklyn-based arts lab dedicated to the production, documentation and presentation of multi-media work in psychogeography and public-space arts, Psy.Geo.Conflux 2004 is the second in an annual series dedicated to current artistic and social investigations in psychogeography [the study of the effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals]. Part festival and part conference, it brings together visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public to explore the physical and psychological landscape of the city. Events are scattered throughout NYC this weekend. All events will be free and open to the public. More info here at the Psy.Geo.Conflux website.

Here is a brief description of a few events, as quoted from their website:

WiFiKu :: Julian Bleecker: A drift through New York City neighborhoods to discover the names people give to their WiFi nodes and to construct haiku using these found SSID names.

Footprint Mapping :: Noriyuki Fujimura: An attempt to create a digital map of streets and public spaces by gathering "footprints" of participants in the project; a DIY-style digital mapping system consisting of a cheap pedometer, digital compass, microprocessor, webcam and laptop computer, set on a custom-made backpack for participants to wear.

Funerals for a Moment :: Kanarinka: Brings together collaborators across space and time to commemorate the passing of inconsequential moments at particular locations in New York City. The event will culminate in a collaborative performance of simultaneous funerals across New York City.

Nomadic Talk Show :: J. Gabriel Lloyd and Jason Kambitsis: Crushed velvet, scotch in one hand, blue and black tuxedos, big ties, and good timeslike a 1970s Dean Martin Roast on the city streets. The guests of the show are people who live or work in the neighborhood.

The New York Snap Exchange :: Andrea Moed: A round-robin, massively multiplayer street photography derby; a game in which everyone commissions art, everyone's an artist, and together we create an emergent visual index of the city.

Human Scale Chess Game :: Sharilyn Neidhardt: A cellphone-directed chess game played in real time, with humans acting as the pieces and the street grid of southside Williamsburg as the chess board.

Sony's 1TB digital video recorder with seven TV tuners

And almost as if to taunt us, one more from Sony today: a massive digital video recorder called the Type X with more than 1 terabyte of storage and not one, not two, and not even three TV tuners, but SEVEN TV tuners for recording up to seven different shows at the same time (we defy you to even find seven simulataneous TV shows worth recording). This one looks like it might not hit stores for a while. And yes, it'll probably only be for Japan.

Vodafone Japan debuts "facial motion" sw for cameraphone

(note: I snipped the MP cam stuff for what I thought was the relevant part of the post. Check out the rest of it here. -kc.)

Vodafone K.K. today announced it was introducing a two megapixel camera phone with an optical zoom....

Vodafone's release says it also has introduced "facial motion capture technology" for the V602SH and another new handset, the V601T. The software is from Santa Monica, Calif. software company Neven Vision.

Here's what a PR spokesperson for Vodafone says about the software, "Neven Vision's software -- embedded in camera phones from handset manufacturers Sharp and Toshiba -- will be the foundation for a wireless video messaging service that allows dynamic graphics to be placed over the sender's face and move with their changing expressions.

"Vodafone KK's subscribers can give themselves a moustache, glasses, a halo, a crown, stars and birds can circle their heads, etc. Neven Vision's software maps and tracks the sender's face in real time and communicates that information to a graphics package.

"Later in the year, this will evolve into a full avatar service -- Mickey Mouse will appear to be speaking your words. These services will represent an important means for carriers to recoup their investments in 3G networks."

Neven Vision specializes in "machine vision technology" that includes modules (see below) for "face detection, face recognition and facial feature tracking," the company says.

Announcing KnetLit ...

Jeremy Yuille and I have moved the manifesto for creative computing to a new blog come website. The object of this is to extend our ideas and thinking about what we mean by each of the terms, and to, let's be frank, set an agenda. It is open for comments, but please keep in mind that it is very early days yet - we're writing, adding, and designing. This will also form the basis of a research paper we are writing about creative computing, and an action research project we intend to undertake in the second half of this year. The site is located at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~knetlit and comments, additions, revisions, criticisms, are welcome.

Korea election commission posts video about camera phones in election abuse

As I wrote in late February, the South Korea National Election Commission (NEC) has been asking Korean citizens to use cellular phones to document cases of possible election irregularities. The Commission has posted a video on its Web site that illustrates how a camera phone user could capture an election abuse.

According to an article from Northwestern University's Medill News Service published on Yahoo, "One video depicts two men in a car exchanging money when suddenly their facial expressions change from joy to panic.

"The scene widens and it becomes clear that you are watching the exchange through a camera phone. Someone with a mobile phone has just snapped a photo of the bribe and is dialing the electoral regulatory office to report it."

I am assuming the video is on the Korean version of the NEC site, although I couldn't find it. (Anyone read Korean who could find the URL to the video?)

Raul Ramirez to Lead Workshop in Netherlands

Raul Ramirez, director of News and Public Affaris at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, will be leading a public journalism workshop in the Netherlands from June 28-30, 2004.

Some of the topics that will be covered include: The state of civic reporting, fundamental principles and assumptions behind public journalism, applicability of public journalism approaches in different European national settings, encouraging passive readers, viewers and listeners to become active sources and civic players, a European approach to civic reporting, and finding the untold stories in your community and the voices to tell them.

Sounds like a good workshop which could be adapted and taken on the road worldwide including the USA.

There are scholarships for journalists from Central and Eastern European countries and Turkey.

Blogs Colliding with Traditional Media

The Boston Globe has an in-depth look at the Democratic National Committee's efforts to credential bloggers for the upcoming convention.

It's a matter of definitions, said gallery supervisor Jerry Gallegos, who says that, these days, it's not always easy to distinguish real journalism from widely broadcast rants.

"Anyone with a computer and home publishing can call themselves whatever they want," he said. "If it's a retired couple that just decides they've got an opinion, that doesn't make them a news organization. It just makes them a retired couple with an opinion and a website."

DMCA Reform Gets a Hearing

In cyber-literate circles, it's common knowledge that the DMCA has been a dismal legislative failure. For years now, every new DMCA lawsuit trumps the last for absurdity. And it sure hasn't made any perceptible dent on "digital piracy." As detailed in our "Unintended Consequences" report, it's been consumers, researchers and competitors who have had the most to fear from the DMCA.

But Congress hasn't heard the message. Until now. This Wednesday, May 12th, at 10:00 a.m., the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee on Trade, Commerce and Consumer Protection is holding a hearing on H.R. 107, also known as the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA).

Introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), the DMCRA aims to reform the DMCA. If it becomes law, there will be no more Sklyarov prosecutions, no more threats against professors like Ed Felten, no more injunctions against 2600 magazine or 321 Studios' DVD X Copy. It will also ensure that copy-protected CDs are adequately labeled.

This hearing is a testament to the efforts of the more than 33,000 citizens who have used EFFís Action Center to write to Congress to support the DMCRA, as well as the efforts of 321 Studios, which has hired top-drawer lobbyist talent to explain the importance of fair use in the digital age.

Soldiers moblogging from the frontlines

James Hong of Hot or Not and Yarfo has a page of links to moblogging from soldiers on the front line in Iraq on Yarfo.

"We are happy that Yafro enables them to give us all a glimpse into their lives that we rarely get from the Media. Straight from the source, it doesn't get any cooler than that!"

Digital cameras as participatory journalism

Watching Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's testimony today, I was struck by his answer when he said that the military was helpless against anyone with a digital camera who can take photographs of atrocities in the Abu Ghraib prison and share them with the world.

It appears this is an underappreciated aspect of the scandal. I don't have any information about the circumstances under which these photos were taken, but it's quite possible that a GI might not have taken such photos with a film camera (where someone would see them in the processing lab).

In other words, this scandal could not have occurred four or five years ago, before citizens (including US troops) achieved the power to be visual reporters. There's no question that, but for the publication and airing of these photos, the reports of the prisoner abuse would have wound up buried on page A19.

David Brooks asked on tonight's NewsHour: "Can we fight a war in the media age?"

Yes, although atrocities will be much harder to cover up.

Weblog Promotion 101

informIT has a good overview on how to promote a Weblog.

"Got a weblog? If so, you're joining thousands of people who blog daily. Whether yours contains humor, passages from your life, or political discussions (and even if you use your blog for updating news on a professional site), making sure that the blog gets promoted is key. After your weblog is up and running, promoting and aggregating content is the step that will help move you from anonymity to worldwide fame. Molly Holzschlag lets you know how to promote your weblog content effectively."

Digital Cameras & Photo Phones Indeed Might Revolutionize Photojournalism

Throughout last autumn, I disagreed with postings by my compatriot here, Steve Outing, that consumer use of camera phones and digital cameras could revolutionize photojournalism. Yet, I now think he may be right and I was wrong. An Associated Press story today reports that the most shocking or memorable photographs of the American-Iraqi war were taken not by professional photographers but by individual soldiers or government contractors and were distributed worldwide with an ease that never existed in the days of just film cameras and professional photo satellite networks.

Keith Jenkins, photo editor of the Washington Post Magazine, told the AP, "With the technology now, the amateur photographer is as capable as a professional journalist and is operating with the same tools: digital camera, laptop, and an Internet connection."

Entry continued...

Union for the Public Domain

The Union for the Public Domain (UPD) is a non-profit citizens group. Our mission is to protect and enhance the public domain in matters concerning intellectual property. We are a membership organization, acting as an independent voice on intellectual property issues.

Copyfighters @ ILAW: May 13-15, Cambridge, MA

It turns out that I'll be attending and reporting on portions of the Berkman Center's always fascinating Internet Law Program in Cambridge next week (May 13-15) -- as will two other weblog writers likely to be familiar to Copyfight readers: Frank Field and Clancy Ratliff.

Frank, Clancy and I will also be leading dinner discussions on Friday night, so if you're a Copyfight reader planning to attend, you'll have your choice of Copyfight-related themes. Check them out below -- we hope to see you there!

My dinner: What's the Next Step? Mapping Out Battle Strategy in the Fight for Semiotic Democracy

(Continue reading this post at Copyfight.)

stock.xchng: free stock photo resource

Stock.XCHNG was launched in February 2001, as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. In about two years the site evolved into this massive community you see now - there are more than 80.000 registered users and more than 60.000 photos online!

via Seth Godin

Microbroadcasting Summer Camp

ScottGant writes "Wired has this story about Steven Dunifer and his four-day Radio Summer Camps sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley that offers how-tos for building transmitters and antennas, along with advice on handling any FCC agents that might come knocking. Imagine this: A thousand little stations send radio programming across cities and towns from senior centers, dorm rooms and attics. The understaffed FCC would be powerless to shut them down. Audiences would have substantive content choices. No one would tune into Top-40 radio. And the media moguls would slink back into their caves. The FCC and Big Radio are obviously paying attention to the microbroadcasters -- it was pressure from independent broadcasters that forced the FCC to grant a limited number of low-power, or LPFM, radio licenses to community organizations, a decision that the NAB resisted. Are these Pirates or Patriots?"

Micro-famous: Defining and redefining success in the blogosphere

Why do people blog? Is it for fame or fortune? I think it must be principally for fame since most people realize they will never realistically ever make any significant amount of money off of their blog (not unless they were famous).

Fame is a very powerful motivator. Our culture worships fame and there is probably a strong evolutionary biological component to the desire- and need- for fame in social groups.  Fame = social capital = social influence/power = security and control over resources like people's attention. Fame, in many ways, defines leaders and provides a sense of social order which is necessary for social animals like us. Heady stuff.

(Continue reading this article at The Nanopublishing Weblog)

Photos from Iraq: Watching the News Dynamic Change

Tim Porter at First Draft has some interesting thoughts about how the Iraq torture photos are part of a changing dynamic of news coverage. He writes in part:

The deflation of high technology into everyday tools usable by anyone redefines journalism's core function (reporting what happened) from the practice of an elite few to a possibility for many.

The linear nature of news - flowing from source to journalist to public - is disrupted. Journalists must adapt. Explanation and context and depth become more important as the basic "what happened" becomes more commoditized. Official sources - government and corporate authorities - become devalued as they grow warier of and less honest toward the news media; unofficial sources (prison guards, cargo loaders) increase in value. Assertion loses out to proof and the standard of fact is raised.

Ironically, what much of this means is that in a digital world, the human source, the one man or the one woman who was there, who saw, who heard, who documented, trumps all else.

Wired Looks at How Word Gets Around

Wired News has a story called How the Word Gets Around.

"The blogosphere has a strange ability to push a seemingly obscure idea into the forefront of people's minds in a heartbeat. How this happens is a bit of a mystery. Sam Arbesman wanted to know how it works, so he created a meme and set it loose.

The Brandeis University senior had been reading various studies that looked at historical data on the way information works its way across the Internet. But he was more interested in seeing if he could figure out, in real time, the trajectory of a meme once it hits the blogosphere. So he came up with a plan to find out. He called it the Memespread Project.

The initial analysis of Arbesman's Memespread Project is posted online (PDF).

Opera browser embedded in i3 set-top box

The Opera 7 browser will display the STB's user interface (UI), offer full access to the internet, and enable features such as Electronic Programming Guide (EPG), messaging, gaming and interactive services.

Webcast: 'Disrupting the News Industry'

The webcast of my panel, Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism, a week ago at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism's and Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism's Internet East & West: China and U.S. conference has been put online. The other panelists were Neil Chase, managing editor of CBS MarketWatch; Dan Gillmor, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the forthcoming book We the Media; and Ken Sands, managing editor of online and new media at The Spokane Spokesman-Review. The moderator was Bob Magnuson, lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and former CEO of InfoWorld.

Personal Democracy Forum - May 25, 2004, NYC

"The Personal Democracy Forum will bring together political figures, grassroots leaders, journalists and technology professionals to discuss the questions that lie at the intersection of technology and politics -- to take a realistic look at where we are now and where we are headed."

- How do weblogs and other alternative media sources change how information moves? What is their perceived objectivity? What is the role of citizen journalists?
- How does the online medium help and hinder public discourse? What are we learning from deliberative democracy, deep democracy and other projects?

Talking about 'We the Media'

I'll be giving a talk about my upcoming book, We, the Media, in Silicon Valley on May 20. It's part of the SDForum's speaker series, and will be at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Details here.

SampleSwap: free audio resource

An Ontology production: SampleSwap, "audio samples and mischief for music makers & DJ's"

All the News That's Fit to Syndicate

Internet users who read weblogs inevitably clog up their browser's bookmarks menu with favorite URLs. Instead of creating a new bookmark for each site, however, these information consumers can simply subscribe to a blog's RSS feed. A comprehensive article on syndication feeds was recently published by Online Journalism Review. New-media expert J.D. Lasica defined RSS feeds in layman's terms, offered suggestions on the best RSS news readers, and provided an explanation on how to set up a blog's syndicated feed. A wide variety of sample feeds also were included for new RSS consumers to try.
(Editor's note: Another (...)

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Delivering HDTV over the Internet

And since we've been talking so much about digital set top boxes lately we figured we'd mentiong that a company called Matrixstream says they have a new way that cable companies to deliver high-definition video on demand over the Internet to their I-MX 1000 IP TV set top box. Even better, they say that they can even deliver DVD-quality video over a WiFi connection (doing that with HDTV is considerably more difficult). There's nothing about what whether or not
there any cable providers are actually planning to use their setup.

PowerPoint as a grassroots media tool

Cliff Atkinson of Sociablemedia came across my Darknet wiki and emailed me to say:

One unexplored dimension of the broader cultural shift in personal/public media is not very obvious, but valid and important - the use of PowerPoint. There are reportedly 400 million copies of the software in the world, and for many people, it is their first and most user-friendly media creation and delivery tool. Although most of the content flowing across it is stultifying bullet points, there are many innovations afoot where people are using the tool to present images and sound in a way that encourages interaction and action, rather than the passivity of most film and television....

(Read the rest of this post at JD's New Media Musings.)

Toward a free (participatory) press in Iraq

It's going to be expensive and hard to develop a free and thriving press in Iraq.

Online and citizens' media could help.

Larry Kilman of the World Association of Newspapers writes a fine piece outlining what needs to be done in ink and paper:

Democracy cannot take root without a viable independent press. But Iraq canít go it alone. Western media professionals are needed to make assessments, provide advice and direction, train journalists and managers, and help build the presses, distribution networks and other infrastructure....

Regulating Canvases

It does matter that the no-camcorder laws may not do much to stem pirating while making it increasingly difficult for artists to do one of the things they do best: comment on the world around them. Our surroundings are so thoroughly saturated with images and logos, both still and moving, that forbidding artists to use them in their work is like barring 19th-century landscape painters from depicting trees on their canvases. Pop culture is our landscape.... We are entitled to have artists, as well as political cartoonists, composers and writers, portray, parody and dissect it.

Proposal for Internet Newsgathering

Lorenzo Manes, from Lulop, is looking for feedback on his proposal for (Public) Internet Newsgathering. He states via email, it's "a tool to decentralize the news agency processes around open publishing and XML (or weblogs and RSS)."

Internet Newsgathering is a two-fold proposal that includes:
-a standard commercial license along the lines of creative commons, to be applied to newsworthy material published over the web
-an extension to RSS to carry around enough licensing info to enable automated trading on news posts from websites and weblogs


Detailed info is available at www.netnewsgathering.com.

OURMedia / NUESTROSMedios IV Conference, July 22-25, 2004 in Porto Alegre, Brazil

"Our work spans many fields: community media, independent media, radical media, citizens media ... grassroots networking, telecommunications policy, indymedia activism, cultural arts, communications theory, social-movement research, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, development communication and communication for social change. Our annual meeting is a time to learn from each other and to strengthen our analyses, strategies, collaborations and campaigns."

- Connecting Research and Advocacy for Citizens' Media
- "Best Practices" and "Notable Failures"
- Current Policy Issues and Implications
- The Evolution of OURMedia and Project Working Sessions

Micropayments

The cartoonist, Scott McCloud, writes a good essay clearing up Micropayments .

He says, "The effect of fame on the Web is often to rob the author of his or her fortune through excess bandwidth charges. To accept any system that punishes success in this way is to perpetuate an intolerable status quo."

It's an old argument, but why can't I charge 5-cents for you to view my video or read my comic.

Blogging Out of Context

Matt Webb has posted a nice essay on designing social software which puts together a pragmatic framework for discussing this sometimes slippery topic.

The sentence that stuck with me the most, however, was somewhat of an aside:

Clay Shirkyís essaysÖ figure pretty big when the areas of concern to social software are summarised. Thatís not a surprise, theyíre great essays. But also, looking back, theyíre the only standalone, well-written essays there are. Outside the context of the early 2003 discussion, most of the weblog posts just donít make any sense.

Too Kewl for School

During some discussion at the presentation at SIAL a student showed me this URL, which has the very wonderful TouchGraph Google Browser. Type in your URL and you get an interactive graph of the link architecture. Move nodes around, retrieve them, get information on them. I like this and I think it might even be useful in relation to teaching with blogs to draw emergent blog architectures.

Zen Master Wonkette

Ana Marie Cox, the Wonkette, in her Washington Post online chat (registration required), punches some words of wisdom out of her Powerbook. From the Transcript:

Denver, Colo.: Blogging seems to be a good fit to your personality and subject, do you ever long for more traditional journalism?

Ana Marie Cox: Yes, I do. But I really hate pitching stories. . . That's why I started a blog, actually. Because I wanted to just write stuff without having to prove to an editor it was a good idea. If the only thing I get out of Wonkette is the ability to get editors to assign me stories without my having to _sell_ the pitch, I will be happy.

BrowseTV episodes available as BitTorrent downloads.

So I encoded four episodes of the laptop TV show -slash- videoblog that I produced for my site and for cable access television, BrowseTV and posted them to Drazen's DV Guide for d/l. Although primarily for teevee, I call it a videoblog b/c I used the net (blogs in particular) as my source of content, created audience participation by allowing folks to engage me in IM conversations live on air, and distributed it as a live stream for the web and as a live TV show for access (free, baby!) Who said videoblogs had to involve lots of polish and editing? Just go video in through a webcam, mirror your desktop and record it to tape/disk, give yourself a loose script, get handy with app switching, and show interesting links for five minutes at a time! ;)

The Video Blogging Timeline

Inspired by the Social Software Timeline, this is the videoblogging timeline, listing relevant events in the history of videoblogging.

The Fourth Network

After PSTN, Cable Networks and Wireless Networks, uber venture capitalist Gary Morgenthaler thinks it is time for the fourth network, or what I would like to call the MegaNET

What I am suggesting is nothing less than the creation of a 4th Network. The new network would offer not the five channels or 70 or 500 channels typical of the broadcast, cable or satellite networks. Instead, it would offer 50,000 or even the 500,000 channels made possible by the Internet. The industry could thus take full advantage of the seemingly insatiable consumer drive for increasingly personalized communication and entertainment. Viewers would draw on this infinitude of programming to select precisely what they want and when. Call it "TiVo Meets the Internet." Imagine a world where anyone can ask for and automatically receive any program: recent Bosnian soccer matches, Great Lectures in Physics,Tomb Raiders XXVI, Tai Chi lessons, or a videoconference with a daughter in Chicago.

Emergence of Blog and Wiki Research

When we have our Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism conferece on Aug. 3 in Toronto, we want to discuss research possibilities. Here are some research examples from the recent 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin:

Blog, Blog, Blog: Experiences with web logs in journalism classes by Eric M. Wiltse, Senior Lecturer, University of Wyoming

Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource by Andrew Lih, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong

When the Audience is the Producer: The Art of the Collaborative Weblog by Lou Rutigliano, Masters Student, University of Texas at Austin

See other symposium research papers here.

Thanks to Micro Persuasion for pointing us to the research.

FCC looking at wireless broadband

The FCC has created a Wireless Broadband Task Force that is seeking comment (by June 3) on what policies could facilitate further growth of wireless ISPs.

Are camera phones dumb?

Here's an interesting article by Douglas Rushkoff .
He gives the same argument that camera phones are great, but that it just allows us to take more bad pictures.
For those of us who work in community media, it's always about skill.
Certain people have the good eye.
For me, camera phones will make sense when I can post little video moments directly to my blog(already optimized) from a street corner.

Making Screen Captures using WM Encoder 9

Capture a WMV demo of any Windows application.

Simon Woodside releases semacode URL software for Symbian camera phones

Computer programmer Simon Woodside has released version 1.0 of his semacode software for Symbian/Series 60 camera phones that, in essence, incorporates a URL within a barcode.

You snap a photo of the semacode graphic (left), the URL is displayed and you can click on it to access a Web page without having to laboriously enter the URL on a keypad. Simon has a Weblog that explains in detail the use and creation of semacodes.

Discussing his view of barcodes, Simon writes, "For a long time computer scientists have been looking for a cheap, inexpensive way to create a gate between the real world and virtual world of the internet.

Continue reading this post at Reiter's Camera Phone Report

New chips for mobile videophones

Intel has announced a new family of processors that "can handle multiple forms of wireless broadband access with enough computing power to provide cellphones with full motion video conferencing capabilities, and PDAs with DVD-quality video playback" Asia Computer weekly reports. The article says that users can expect products with these processors to be out in the next quarter or two.

Intel rolls out new chips for mobile phones and PDAs

PBS May Launch "Video Blogs"

Deep within this Current.org Q&A with PBS programmers, Programming Exec Jacoba (Coby) Atlas says PBS is toying with launching video blogs on the Public Square public affairs channel that they are developing with funding from the Knight Foundation. Current.org is the Web site of Current, a newspaper that covers US public broadcasting.

"We need to find out from the technological geniuses what the next thing will be. How do we ratchet that up for even greater engagement? There are all these chat rooms ’Äî is there a way to turn that into a program? Also blogs. We've talked about using video blogs as interstitials," Atlas told Current.org.

Sign me up!

The Broadcast Flag: Dare To Be Naive

From Freedom to Tinker: Ernest Miller at CopyFight has an interesting response to my discussion yesterday of the Broadcast Flag. I wrote that the Flag is bad regulation, being poorly targeted at the goal of protecting TV broadcasts from Internet redistribution. Ernie replies that the Flag is actually well-targeted regulation, but for a different purpose:

[Y]ou'd have to be an idiot to think that the broadcast flag would prevent HDTV content from making it onto the internet. Since I don't believe that the commissioners are that stupid, I can only conclude that the FCC is acting quite cynically in support of an important constituency of theirs, the broadcasters *cough*regulatorycapture*cough*.

In other words, the purported purpose of the broadcast flag (to prevent HDTV from getting onto the internet) is not the real purpose of the broadcast flag, which appears to be to give content providers more control over the average citizen's ability to make use of media.

First, even if you believe the theory, it's often a useful debating tactic to pretend that the other side actually believes what they say they believe. It's hard to prove that someone is lying about their own beliefs and motivations; it can be much easier to prove that their asserted beliefs don't justify their conclusions. And proving that the official rationale for the Flag is wrong would do some good.

Second, if Ernie's theory is right, the fix is in and there's not much we can do about future Broadcast Flag type regulation. If we want to change things, we might as well act on the assumption that it matters whether the official rationale for the Flag is right.

And finally, I am convinced that at least some people in the movie industry, and at least some people at the FCC, actually believe the official rationale. I think this because of what these people say in private, after a few (literal or metaphorical) beers, and because of how they react when the official rationale for the Flag is challenged. Even in private, industry or FCC people often react to criticism of the official rationale with real passion and not just with platitudes. Either these (non-PR) people are extraordinarily good at staying on-message, or they really believe (as individuals) what they are saying.

So although Ernie's theory is very plausible, I will dare to be naÔve, and will continue to act on the assumption that he is wrong -- even if I suspect otherwise.

The VigoBox: a digital set top box that records up to 5 shows at once

Somehow we're guessing that there aren't going to be enough cable operators to carry all the different obscure digital set top boxes that are cropping by the dozens these days, but Vigoto's Vigobox stands out from the rest if for no other reason than that it has a built-in digital video recorder than can record up to 5 different channels at once and then stream the saved programs to TVs in different parts of the house.

[Via Designtechnica]

Know of any community tv centers that need a cheap multichannel video server? -kc.

Motorola's broadband video phone

Video phones over regular phone lines are crap, video cellphones are still a year or two from reality here in the US, but Motorola and WorldGate have a new broadband video phone coming out that makes video calls over a regular high-speed Internet connection. So it will work (they say it can get 30 frames per second video with full duplex speakerphone for the audio), but obviously this is really only a step up from just using a headset and a webcam, not some major advance in and of itself. And in fact there are already several other broadband video phones (like from D-Link) that you can buy right now.

[Via Digital Media Thoughts]

Gore gets his cable network

After some bumps along the way, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt announced at the National Show that they've successfully acquired the Newsworld International channel from Vivendi. Gore's new company is called IndTV. "This will not be a political network," said Gore. "We are launching an exciting television network for young men and women who want to know more about their world and who enjoy real-life stories created with, by and for their own generation." (Note Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on IndTV's advisory board.)

Heh. I remember a friend telling me about Gore taking Final Cut Pro classes over at DV Dojo a few months back. Apparently the secret service was in there the next week asking what the hell Al was doing there. Anywho, this is interesting b/c of Gore's plans to tap Camera Planet braintrust to create a bottom up production network. Eli: perhaps you want to comment on this? -kc.

News Publisher Creates a 'Website on TV'

South African news publisher News24.com has raised the convergence stakes for its competitors by broadcasting a version of its website via satellite to television sets. Viewers "surf" the interactive TV channel with their remote controls and get access to News24's latest news stories. The channel, which is broadcast throughout Africa via local satellite television company Multichoice Africa on DSTV, is described as an "African first." The company has brought together web expertise and technology with that of television and satellite technology to create synergies on both a technical and content level. Newspaper content (from the print (...)

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BBC Gives Free Television Downloads a Whirl

The BBC, which last August promised to open up its archives for free via the internet, may be taking the first step in a new program that allows users to download television shows to PDAs or burn copies to DVDs. Although the trials for the program will initially only be open to BBC employees, wider trials will follow, ending eventually with a system that will allow BBC subscribers to download all television programs from the previous week using a handy program guide, similar to that used in cable/digital television.

It's notable that the BBC has claimed their primary impetus to be something other than uncontrollable media piracy:

By launching iMP, the BBC hopes to avoid being left at the mercy of a software giant such as Microsoft, which could try to control the gateway to online television.

Darknet: an experiment in group editing

As I've been noting for a long while on this weblog, I've been working on a book for nearly two years now for a major publisher.

Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television will detail the rise of the personal media revolution and the escalating conflict between entertainment companies and individuals using the power of digital technology.

I'm nearly done writing it, so we're at the stage where it's time to bring in "the former audience," as Dan Gillmor puts it, and invite the blogosphere to participate in the book's editing (before it makes its way to its final editor).

Ross Mayfield at Socialtext was kind enough to set me up with a wiki last week. Don't be scared -- wikis are very cool new collaborative workspaces that let people edit and contribute to a work in progress.

Check it out at the Darknet wiki. Much of the book has to do with participatory media, so I hope many of you will join me in this experiment in collaborative editing.

DV Guide /BitTorrent & RSS/ in 5 Easy Steps

There was a text here already about DV Guide, but I think video blogging and BitTorrent require more elaborate explanation. The concept is explained in detail at P2P-TV. The basic procedure is:

1. Goto http://dv.open4all.info/bblog and enter username and password, (or post a comment here if you do not have username/password)

2. Make a torrent (using your local BT client) having set http://dv.open4all.info/bblog/tracker.php as the tracker name.

3. Upload torrent like it says to in torrents link. if it messes up try to recreate torrent with a simple name -- no crazy characters.

4. Once you upload successfully, go and post a message in the blog. To link to your specific torrent in the message use this tag in the entry: {torrents specific=mytorrent}. When you create your link, in the name of your torrent do not use the extension .torrent...example: if your torrent is called boobaa.torrent you would put: {torrents specific=boobaa}.

5. Don't forget to seed the torrent on your local, meaning start a download on your machine even if the file is there: it is necessary that there be at least one download complete.

Vlog: Brussels in the Park

After quite a lull (teaching tends to do that) I've just finished another small vog, part of the holiday series I've been working on. This vog, Brussels in the Park, was shot while overseas in January but I've only just got around to capturing and scripting the work. I shot it on my Canon Ixus so it is all very lo-fi, and I then stretched its duration in QuickTime Pro to make it run about 8 or 10 times longer. The effect of course is very slow motion, but how this plays in QuickTime is as a series of discontinuous stutters, more like one frame then slowly move to next frame, pause, and so on....

PJNet Conference Info, Aug. 3, Toronto

Participatory journalism tools in the form of weblogs and other electronic communications are changing the face of mass media, but are complementary to public journalism. These are powerful tools as Howard Deanís campaign proved by using weblogs and MeetUp to get 170,000 people nationwide to sign up for face-to-face meetings. The Daily Kos, a citizen run weblog, has 1.5 million unique visitors a month. These are just two of many impressive examples. Learn how we can borrow from or incorporate these tools to improve the state of journalism.

You can get full conference information here and register here. You can book a hotel room here. Special Airfare...

Italian TV journalists use videophones to submit stories

Using a solution jointly developed by Italian 3G mobile operator Tre and financial TV news channel CFN/CNBC, the network's journalists have begun using Tre videophones to capture and submit stories directly to the TV studios.

DRUMS: Scott Mathews Proposes a File-Sharing Solution for Media Metadata

DRUMS is here. Scott has been working on Andromedia, an MP3 server system for a while. c|net, PCUser, techTV, Macworld, ClearChannel, O'Reilly and more have all used and endorsed that system for streaming your MP3s. Scott's new idea, which stands for Digital Rights Uniform Metadata Service, is worth considering and while it's a work in progress, it's a great start. It's a "new centralized/distributed metadatabase of authored works."

Essentially, the idea is to create a central database, along with an authority (or a handful of authorities) that can add/update it. The root DRUMS database would likely include data such as author names, work titles, publication dates, types of work, file checksums, flags indicating which rights remain reserved and which rights have been granted, and so on. It would not contain the actual works themselves.

Resource for Videoblogging

My friend PeterÝVanÝDijck has created a resource for the developing world of Videoblogging.

It's an open site, so please contribute any experience you have.

Because of the posts on Unmediated, we have tried to get videoblogging to work.
But the process is still too cumbersome.

We imagine someone creating a tool that instantly optimizes, uploads, and posts the video to my blog.

GPS attachment for Sony digital camcorders

Opening up whole world of possible new ways to memorialize the minutiae of your next vacation, Red Hen Systems has a new GPS attachment for digital camcorders (though it only works with Sony cams, right now) called the VMS-X that stamps your video footage with the precise location of where it was shot.