unmediated

Responding to INDUCE: Forget the tech industry -- where's our response?

A couple of days ago we posted a couple of links to Dan Gillmor's and Andrew Orlowski's rather bitter lashings of the tech industry for failing to put their political might behind a united response to Orrin Hatch's INDUCE Act. Edward Felten followed them up yesterday with a smart argument explaining why big tech just might not care:

Giving the entertainment industry a veto over new technologies would have two main effects: it would slow the pace of technical innovation, and it would create barriers to entry in the tech markets..... Just to be clear, an entertainment-industry veto would surely hurt the tech incumbents. It's just that it would hurt their upstart competitors more.

What I'm thinking about here isn't an individual response. You can already do that by faxing a letter to your House rep through the EFF or through savetheipod.com. I'm thinking about a group response from the "innovators" who may be most hurt by this legislation, to let Congress know who this is going to affect.

What format of message do we send to Congress? Do we need to be innovative about it? Is it a petition particularly from us? Are the EFF and savetheipod letters effective, and perhaps we should do more to raise awareness? A volley of short videoblog PSAs about the INDUCE Act, shared on p2p networks?

Get info:
EFF - Could the INDUCE Act Kill The iPod?
EFF - INDUCE Act = Hollings II?
Ernest Miller comments on the introduction of the INDUCE Act.

Playlists, Queries, Rules

Today I spent some time discussing playlists with Lucas Gonze, which got me thinking about the spectrum with simple playlists on one end and full-blown cinematography on the other. Both essentially describe sequences of media selected and arranged in a purposeful manner.

What Lucas made me realize is that a playlist needn't be a static record: it can be a query, a suggestion or template that can be realized by a number of possible content sequences. For example, a playlist entry that specifies only ["I Love You" by Cole Porter] could be satisfied by either Ella Fitzgerald's or Frank Sinatra's version of the tune (or countless others).

This realization brought to mind something from a paper I read recently:

The rules used to generate establishing shots are based on cinematographic principles to maintain continuity… [For example, we have a rule that] defines an establishing shot as a combination of two sequences of which both shots are in color, the focus of the first has a wider angle then the next shot, and the weather conditions are similar. Note that the rule can also be described as a query that returns all shot combinations that match a certain description: we found that in this (and probably many more) applications the difference between a rule and query is rather artificial.

This makes the thread of continuity along the spectrum a little clearer. Initially we have static playlists, which arrange specific pieces of content in a sequence. Then "smart" playlists, which define a space of possible sequences as a query over a media database. More sophisticated queries return not just individual pieces of content that match the query but combinations or subsequences that match certain criteria. These more sophisticated queries can be viewed as rules which formalize the techniques involved in creating time-based media.

(Continue reading this post at sindikk.aeshin)

Designing Interactive Systems - Cambridge, MA - August 1-4, 2004

Early registration for DIS 2004 just ended, but advance registration is open until July 18.

It looks like there will be some really interesting papers, and of course you can join me, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Lalya Gaye, Elizabeth Goodman and Dan Hill as we chat about Design for Hackability.

If that's not enough incentive, you can always go to check out the other interesting things in Boston and Cambridge - like the Stata Center, which Dan recently discussed in terms of adaptive design and I considered as an architecture of power.

Gizmodo posts pic of Sony's Black Projection Screen

Gizmodo has a better pic of the cool black projection screen Sony announced last week. Purdy.

AP to Launch Blogs, E&P Reports

Editor & Publisher reports The Associated Press will launch its first weblog at the political conventions in Boston and New York, utilizing Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Walter R. Mears.

Automatic video editing

muvee autoProducer does not quite sound as my idea of an ideal video-editing application: "Artistic Intelligence automatically selects the best scenes from your video, and cuts them to your chosen music with cool effects and transitions synchronized to the beat". According to this article muvee allows phone users to easily convert long video clips in short, fun video clips suitable for sending via MMS. The software identifies "highlights" in raw video and edits clips accordingly to predefined styles.

The examples does not convince me that this is for the best. On the other hand, it's quick, and even if it's dirty I guess there is some potential here.

You can read a little more about the concept of automatic video-editing in this article.

MMPython

A media metadata retrieval framework for Python: parses ID3v2, ID3v1, EXIF, IPTC and Vorbis data into an object oriented struture.

Court Rules Bookseller Can Spy on Customers

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit delivered (PDF) some very bad news for online privacy today. Ruling in U.S. v. Councilman, the court held that it was not a violation of criminal wiretap laws for an email service provider to monitor the content of users' incoming messages without their knowledge or consent. The defendant, the seller of rare and used books who offered his customers email accounts, set up a system whereby he received a copy of any email messages they received from the competition -- Amazon.com. As the court itself admitted, "it may well be that the protections of the Wiretap Act have been eviscerated as technology advances."

"By interpreting the Wiretap Act's privacy protections very narrowly, this court has effectively given Internet communications providers free rein to invade the privacy of their users for any reason and at any time," says our own Kevin Bankston. "This decision makes clear that the law has failed to adapt to the realities of Internet communications and must be updated to protect online privacy."

(Perhaps this is only tangentally related, but after a recent conversation a few of us had on creating trust networks within citizens' media, I thought it pertinent. -kc.)

AOL wins patent for IM TV

A potentially powerful application. Although AOL won't go into details, the patent describes the gist of the new technology: When an AOL user pops up her buddy list, it would show what TV shows her friends are currently watching. Click a link, and her TV would change to that channel. "This enables friends to exchange messages that include links to a particular network or TV show," the patent says. Very intriguing.

(Are alarms going off for anyone else here, or am I just patent paranoid? -kc.)

Flash Lite 1.1 with SVG-Tiny support

Macromedia has released version 1.1 of its Flash Lite player, targeted at mobile phones and smartphones. Flash Lite supports a subset of the proprietary Flash vector-based animation system, widely used on desktop-targeted web sites. The new version also adds support for the W3C standard SVG-Tiny (Scalable Vector Graphics), which offers rich vector-based images and animation using the open XML standard. Flash Lite also supports network connectivity (as does its larger desktop sibling), allowing a Flash or SVG-Tiny animation to access a remote server to download additional content on the fly as needed. The player supports several audio formats, including MP3 and PCM (the most common flavor of WAV file), and includes APIs to allow Flash content that can access MMS, dialing, network status, and other handset features.

Flash Lite 1.1 is available through handset makers and network carriers. So far Bellwave, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Texas Instruments, and T-Mobile have all expressed varying levels of interest in the new software.

bittorrent auto uploader

With a bit of help from Roger I was able to complete my Folder Action script for auto uploading BitTorrent files. Download it here and save it to your /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ directory. Then make a new folder on your desktop, call it somthing like 'torrent drop box' and make sure you have Radio UserLand running. Don't forget to change the username, password, upstream directory and category to route to in the script and you should be good to go. Just drop a torrent into the folder and you will be prompted for a title of the file and a description.

(Continued at Adam Curry's Weblog)

New HDTV card from ATI

HDTV cards for PCs have been out for a couple years now, but are frequently priced in the $300-500 range. Today that all changes. ATI is one of the leading graphics cards manufacturers with a long tradition of producing TV capture cards, and they've recently released the HDTV All-in-wonder card for $199 with an included antenna. I assume due to the mass market nature of ATI's operations, they could finally bring the prices down compared to other cards in the market.

Now, this will only record over-the-air broadcasts from the major networks, not cable or satellite HDTV programming, and depending on where you live that is likely to mean half a dozen channels of standard network shows. ExtremeTech has a so-so review as well as HotHardware's favorable review.

Please don't deep link to my video

VideoBlogging: Deep Linking To Video Etiquette

How Copyright Policy Gets Twisted

The Register's Andrew Orlowski analyzes the latest, and perhaps most serious, threat from the copyright cartel. The legislation, sponsored by senators from both major U.S. political parties (here's my previous posting about this horrid bill), is aimed at peer to peer technology but has a much wider application.

As Andrew notes, citing warnings from critics of this legislation, "It may soon be possible to carry around an AK-47 assault rifle and an iPod with you down the street - and be arrested for carrying the iPod."

He asks how this could be happening, given that Orrin Hatch, the key sponsor, once seemed to be on the side of fair use and other users' rights. Part of it is money, no doubt.

Andrew aims a well-deserved barb at the technology community for not taking its case to Congress in a more organized way, and this is also true. But I think he underestimates two things.

(Continue reading this post at Dan Gillmor's eJournal)

Java3D Source Code Released

Over the past few months (aka year) the future of Java3D has been in question. Not too long ago Apple announced a port to OS X, but still no official update from Sun. A few weeks ago Sun announced that they were going to release the source code and begin collecting comments for version 1.4/2.0. And today they delivered, right before the JavaOne conference. The announcement can be found here and the CVS here. The code includes the core scenegraph, the vector math library, and Sun's own add-on utility libraries.

First Ever Ruggedized Satellite Glove Phone Unveiled

Network Anatomy has revealed that they're working on a multimedia communication system built into a ruggedized, waterproof glove for emergency workers. Called CommanderGauntlet, the glove is powered by Microsoft Windows CE and will feature wireless data, satellite phone, video and text messaging. It will even support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and feature an optional fold-out keyboard, according to published specs.

Up time (Supernova Conference Blog)

The connectivity is much better from Supernova today. Here's the conference blog.

IT Conversations is webcasting the event. More about that here.

Mobo for Vertically Challenged Devices

VIA is shipping an ultra-low profile mini-ITX mainboard suitable for flat TVs, LCD-panel computers, and other vertically challenged devices. The Epia MS uses a minimalistic I/O backplate and SODIMM memory for a slimmer form-factor, and is VIA's first mini-ITX board available with a fanless 1GHz Eden embedded processor. The board has several processor options, but they all include the PadLock Ace hardware RNG and AES encrypt/decrypt features that are now supported by the Linux and BSD kernels.

Free Video Hosting on the Linux Public Broadcasting Network

Linux Public Broadcasting Network.

Wireless a priority for big media

With high-quality wireless video on the horizon, media companies like Disney and Time Warner are thinking about providing full mobile phone services.

FCLA-Digital Archive: File Format Information

A series of technical reports on various file formats, including available metadata.

PHP media file parser

PHP4 script that extracts useful metadata from multimedia file formats.

New Services Improve Access To Independents

"High-speed computer access is not the only way to spare yourself a trip to the video store.

Among the most popular alternatives, rent-by-mail giant Netflix has attracted millions of users with its giant library of DVDs and simple fee structure ($20 for as many movies as you can watch in a month).

It has been so successful that brick-and-mortar video giant Blockbuster plans to expand its online DVD sales service next year to include rentals, for mail delivery.

Now, a subscription service called Film Movement is aiming to bring small independent movies to viewers no matter where they live..."

iChat AV at 35,000 Feet

Can you astroturf your own marketing dreck? I suppose it's just coincidence that in the screenshot Apple's product line manager took for this Apple Hotnews story he casually mentions to a friend that "Sales should be up significantly this quarter." But fine, we'll excuse the iShill since the page is actually pretty cool -- it details the "first commercial in-air videoconference," between two Apple employees, one in Cupertino, and the other on a jet using Lufthansa's wireless high-speed internet ground-to-plane internet.

(via Gizmodo)

Internet Radio Bots

rand()% (yeah, that's a real name) is an Internet radio station that streams nothing but computer generative music. Down Kraftwerk fans down! It means music generated from computer algorithms. Everything you hear here is composed in real-time, therefore in a sense this is an avant-garde jazz station only that the cats are software bots.

A survey of playlist formats.

"This document is a survey of playlist data formats. It is useful in two ways. One, as a collation of data which is normally scattered all over the web, it is a helpful reference. Two, having this data in one place makes it easier to observe patterns.

Playlists are comparatively simple objects. They are nothing but lists -- here is the first song, here is the second. As a result they fail to excite the imagination of many people, because the expressive possibilities seem too limited. But from my background as a musician, arranger and composer, I know that the sequencing of aesthetic experiences has huge expressive possibilities. In my work on playlists I aim to help extend the expressive power of sequencing to objects on the world wide web."

Maxtor SATA MaXLine III

Maxtor has introduced its third-generation MaXLine series of hard disks. Originally introduced over two years ago as the 120GB and 160GB DiamondMax D540X drives, the MaXLine series are designed for larger organisations and ship with a whopping 16MB buffer, native command queuing (up to 32 instructions execution to improve storage subsystem bandwidth), and additional SATA II features.

Apple To Bring H.264 Codec To QuickTime

"Apple on Wednesday announced that the H.264/Advanced Video Codec (AVC) will be incorporated in its QuickTime software in an upcoming release next year. The video technology has been ratified by the DVD Forum for use in the High Definition (HD) DVD format; it was jointly developed by the Motion Picture Expert's Group (MPEG) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and has been ratified into the MPEG-4 specification as well."

Comdex 2004 Trade Show Cancelled

"Computer trade show Comdex, once the biggest event on the tech calendar, has been canceled this year, a victim of the growing interest in shows emphasizing consumer electronics and specialist IT gear. Eric Faurot, vice president of Comdex organizer MediaLive International, revealed the plans in an exclusive interview with CNET News.com, saying the company plans to give Comdex a breather after years of falling attendance, in the number of both..."

(For years I had asked my employers to stop sending me to NAB and Comdex and start paying my way to CES. They thought I was crazy. Maybe I am, but at least I know where the important ideas are. :) -kc.)

FLV Metadata

Some info on FLV (Flash Video) metadata from a Macromedia developer.

FLV MetaData Injector

A Win32 application that can add 'onMetaData' AMF (Action Message Format )data to FLV (Flash Video) files.

The fan films strike back

A well-done look at the fan film phenomenon: The Fan Films Strike Back. Thanks to digital cinema and the Web, geeks are filming their own STAR WARS and STAR TREK stories. "Fan Films" are works that steal characters and situations from a licensed movie franchise without permission.They are usually, but not always, shot by amateurs. The films themselves (which made the bootleg rounds at conventions before the Internet) are now distributed for free online. [Cinema Minima, JD's New Media Musings]

WiFi in Cars

Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press (and his own eJournal) has seen the future; it's a 2004 Lincoln Aviator SUV with Wi-Fi. The concept probably won't show until the 2006 model year, but third-party applications could show up as soon as next year.

Taking the Induce Act to its Illogical Conclusion

What would the world look like under Senator Orrin Hatch's (R-UT) Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act (PDF)? To give you a glimpse, we drafted a mock legal complaint (PDF) against Apple for "inducing" copyright infringement by manufacturing the iPod, CNET for reviewing the iPod, and Toshiba for providing hard drives for the iPod.

As we note in Prelude to a Fake Complaint, filing a lawsuit under the co-called Induce Act is like dropping a litigation bomb on any company that gives users products that have even the slightest potential to assist in copyright infringement. If this bill had been law in 1984, there would be no VCR. If this bill had been law in 1995, there would be no CD burners. If this bill had been law in 2000, there would be no iPod. If this bill becomes law in 2004, there's no telling what we'll be missing.

While the mock complaint is fake, the threat that this bill poses is real. If you care about innovation -- not to mention free speech -- take a few minutes to visit EFF's Action Center and let your Senators know that the Induce Act is a very bad idea.

Another video blogger

See this about the Manhattan Neighborhood Network and all the video content the people want to make and show. It'll all be coming online soon. [via Loic] Earlier exploding TV posts here.

(Go Jay! -kc.)

meshcube

The MeshCube is a new hardware platform dedicated to WirelessLAN mesh routing, developed by 4G Systems, Hamburg.

The future of wireless internet? If I understand this correctly, this allows anyone to create a wireless backbone.

(Darrel of The Thing just got a couple of these in the other week for a wireless project. Hoping he'll let the meshcubes come out and play in a bit. -kc.)

All-Digital Brazilian Cinema

The future has landed on Brazil, among the most technophiliac of developing nations, in the form of digital cinema production and distribution. Because it's so tough lugging film reels into Brazil's almost inaccessible hinterlands, the Brazilians have created a digital network of 100 movie theatres that pick up new films via digital download. Suggested by Emeka[Link]

Brazil has one of the highest rates of Internet use in the developing world, with 95 percent of taxpayers using the web to make their annual income-tax declaration. The country's voting system is fully electronic and its banking software is among the most advanced in the world. Even Brazil's computer hackers are so skilled that a leading expert recently warned, "Brazil is both a laboratory for cybercrime and also its largest exporter worldwide."

But it's also home to the creative spark that was harnessed for more practical ends by Rain when they sought to develop a new digital exhibition and distribution platform. Using Windows Media 9 soft- ware, engineers came up with MPEG-4, video compression software that is cheaper and faster than the current system. The MPEG-4 software can squeeze a feature film onto a file of just five gigabytes, 15 times smaller than the MPEG-2 technology presently used.

Government RSS Feeds

One of the cooler bits of network tech is RSS ("really simple syndication" is probably the most common defintion), which is a way of distributing updated site content to subscribers. For people who read a lot of websites over the course of the day, RSS is a life-saver. Most blogs (including WorldChanging) have RSS feeds, and an increasing number of news outlets do, too. But any website that publishes regularly updated information can provide an RSS feed. RSS in Government is a site dedicated to collecting and promoting the use of RSS feeds by government agencies, whether local, state, federal, or international. The main site page mixes general RSS and blogging news with specific updates on government-related RSS feeds.

Sony Projector Gets Bright Images From Black Screen

"Sony has developed a new projector that can give a bright, unfaded picture without the need to eliminate ambient light. The secret is that they project onto a black screen instead of a white one. Their screen uses species filters so that white ambient light is absorbed, but the red, green, and blue light from the projector is reflected. Sony sees a possible use in home entertainment systems because of the ability to have a much bigger picture than conventional TVs as well as businesses adopting the projectors for presentations."

Sky TV Game Channel enables viewers to transmit camera phone photos during program

From picturephoning.com I learned that today the first "mobile to TV" service would be launched, enabling camera phone users in the U.K. to transmit photos to a television program for display during the program.

According to the press release from Requestec, a London-based messaging company, the Game Network (a TV channel for computer gamers) on Sky TV will begin accepting photos from camera phones. The phone also will appear whenever the sender transmits a text message for the live TV chat feature.

Tapeless cameras gaining traction

Videotape is nearly history. From EditCam to XDCam to P2, TVTechnology breaks down the tapeless cameras on the market by talking to the early adopters who put them to work.

Mime Types

Common MIME types and their corresponding file extensions.

The XSPF Playlist Format

XML Shareable Playlist Format specification.

An RDF view of REST

Modelling REST resources using RDF.

Junxion: Shared Internet Over Cellular

Although they're still in the prototype stage, a Seattle company called Junxion is doing something potentially very useful. By plugging any number of cellular network PCMCIA cards into their 'Junxion' box, which then acts as a router over Ethernet or WiFi to any number of local machines, the company plans to capitalize on the ever-expanding data bandwidth available on modern cellular networks. So instead of scrambling to find a WiFi connection -- which is still a good option, of course, especially if it's a free node -- you can set up a mobile workplace with a decent internet connection anywhere you can get a cellular signal. You're limited to the speeds of the cellular network, of course, but between a Junxion box, which is pretty large now, but will surely get smaller, and built-in WiFi, you should be able to get wireless internet just about anywhere. And that, as they say, owns. (Thanks, Oliver!)

Lucent and Microsoft TV to collaborate in digital TV services provision

Microsoft and Lucent Technologies have signed a memorandum of understanding to integrate the Microsoft TV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) software platform with Lucent solutions to enable telecommunications providers to add digital TV services to their existing broadband product offerings.

Microsoft is keen to push its own technology platform for delivery and management of next-generation digital TV services via broadband networks. The two companies are working together in a nonexclusive arrangement to offer end-to-end network solutions integration, including OSS/BSS integration, consulting, design and deployment, through Lucent Worldwide Services.

This integration between Lucent Technologies and Microsoft enables the delivery of standard-definition, high-definition and on-demand programming to the Microsoft TV IPTV-based set-top box via the Lucent Stinger IP-Enabled Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexor (DSLAM) and Lucent ADSL2+ modem.

Multimedia Filetypes

A decent collection of info on the metadata available from various multimedia formats.

Codec Comparison

A fairly comprehensive comparison of various video codecs.

SBC Plans FTTH

SBC Communications said Tuesday it could spend up to $6 billion over five years to deploy a superfast Internet-based network capable of delivering digital TV and other premium services.

Beginning this summer, SBC said it plans "neighborhood-level" tests with the help of Microsoft, whose fledging Internet TV technology will get its first major tryout as a result of the deal.

Verizon, the largest U.S. local phone company, has previously said it will spend $1 billion to lay the foundation for a fiber optic network connecting homes and businesses in nine states with plans for video services next year.

Future of Media Meeting, Portland, Or. June 24, 2004

A Portland Town Meeting on the Future of Media will be held in Portland, Oregon June 24, 2004, 5:30pm-9:30pm at the Oregon Convention Center.

This event is free and open to the public. It is presented in partnership with City Club of Portland, MIPRAP, Jobs With Justice, Communications Workers of America Local 7901, American Federation of Musicians Local 99, and the Mt. Hood Cable Regulatory Commission.

Speex - speech-friendly audio codec

Speex is an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech. The Speex Project aims to lower the barrier of entry for voice applications by providing a free alternative to expensive proprietary speech codecs. Moreover, Speex is well-adapted to Internet applications and provides useful features that are not present in most other codecs. Finally, Speex is part of the GNU Project and is available under the Xiph.org variant of the BSD license.

VideoBlogging: Video Blogging Week

I just signed up to participate in Video Blogging Week.

That means one video blog post per day, starting on June 20th.

This is going to be challenging.

Predicting The Shape of TV Over IP

"TV over broadband is coming, but it could manifest itself in any of several different forms, with significant consequences for ISPs large and small.

Whether it's downloading or streaming or traditional broadcasting, television service has not yet arrived in people's homes. Before it does, ISPsóeven small independentsóare trying to suss out how they can get a piece of the action, or at least avoid being left in the dust or out on a limb.

In the first in this occasional series on video over the Net, we talk to two small ISPs who are carefully watching the brave new world of broadband video unfoldóand taking some baby steps..."

(Thanks, hollywood liberation army)

giFT-FastTrack

"giFT-FastTrack is an Open Source implementation of the FastTrack P2P protocol used by KaZaA, iMesh and Grokster. giFT is a portable filesharing daemon which can be used with different front ends and can connect to multiple networks via plugins."

CreativeCommons SMIL Module

A format for metadata regarding the copyright license under which a SMIL document is released.

FAIRCOPY lets your fans make you money

FAIRCOPY has developed an innovative way for musicians to distribute their content over P2P networks and get paid. They've also built in a way for fans to leverage the power of P2P to resdistribute their favorite FAIRCOPY artists, and make a commission. Musicians can also offer free samples of their work under Creative Commons licenses.

Lessig speaks on tech IP law and indie filmmaking at LA Film Festival

Not tomorrow, but next Saturday June 26 at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles from 10AM - 1PM:

Symposium on Copyright, Piracy, and the Future of Independent Filmmaking: The MPAA's screener ban was a wake-up call to the independent film community. With our future threatened, the community joined together and was eventually successful in defeating the ban in federal court. But policy is being created every day, at every level, that impacts the channels for distribution, access to independent films, and the protection of creative rights. This symposium (the first of two parts) offers a forum for critical analysis and debate about these important issues -- issues that are not easily or often addressed among the very people they impact most: independent filmmakers. Our goal is to form strategic alliances that will help us maintain and extend a production and distribution environment where independent filmmaking can continue to thrive. Part II of the Symposium will take place at the IFP Market in New York on September 26.

Join Lawrence Lessig, named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries and author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace examine copyright and anti-piracy policies affecting the motion picture industry today and the future of the independent filmmaker. Following a coffee break, a panel of experts and advocates will join him, including Robert Greenwald, (Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, Burning Bed), producer, director and documentary filmmaker.

Torrentocracy

Torrentocracy (alternate) "is the combination of RSS, bit torrent, your television and your remote control...By running torrentocracy on a computer connected to your television, you not only become a viewer of any available content from the internet, but you also become a part of a vast grass roots media distribution network." I'm really excited about this. I bet Dave Winer, Adam Curry, Ernest Miller, Steve Gillmor, Paul Boutin, Jon Udell and a lot of other people will be too. The author says it's written to be integrated within MythTV. I wonder if it works with a connected DVD player? Update Torrentocracy gets Slashdotted. Update2 There's a comment in there from someone named "Grummet". It ain't me. But it could very well be a cousin.

(Looks like p2pvod is here. Just spoke with Alan about similar functionality in a forthcoming Freevo release. this should be a busy but fun summer. -kc.)

Feedster enclosure lists

Looking for RSS enclosures and feeds? Feedster has a new section that lists the latest enclosures it finds among the hundreds of thousands of feeds it scans continuously. Images, mp3 files, .torrents, basically any kind of file that can be dropped at a URL. Scott, you rule.

NYC Municipal Wireless Data Cloud

"New York City looking to spend up to $1/2 Billion to build huge wireless data network, to serve all public safety agencies, city wide, at 2 Mbps or faster, supporting multiple concurrent data and digital video streams, everywhere." [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]

Does Participatory Journalism Go Too Far?

Trudy Schuett: Did Denver Big3 Deliberately Endanger Citizen Journalists?

Because I have a satellite dish, I happened to be watching an evening newscast of a Denver station, KCNC Channel Four. Early this week, the Denver area experienced a spate of tornadoes. They included in their coverage a number of photos taken by citizens with digital cameras or cell phones. As you can imagine, many of these were very well done, close up and quite dramatic.

The newscasters also encouraged viewers to send in their pictures of the event, which is where this kind of citizen journalism stopped being a positive thing.

I can’Äôt imagine what they were thinking. They were actually suggesting their viewers go out, put themselves in harm’Äôs way, and take pictures of tornadoes.

Making wikivideo in a videowiki

I'm thinking about a system for editing individual videoclips, from videoblogs, into sequences which then can be stored as SMIL-documents in the editors blog. Afterwards the sequence might re-edited and stored as new versions by others without changing the original sequence or the video-clips. From now on I will refer to this concept as "wikivideo". Actually I'll probably end up writing about the wiki-like part of the system more than about the blogging part.

Anyway, wikivideo it is: Being "fast" and "collaborative" videomaking, but still crediting individual effort.

Music Metadata

Music metadata wiki workspace at Socialtext.

More Exploding Jeff Jarvis :)

More great information for those following the exploding TV thread: Drazen Pantic, a pioneer in bringing the power of video to citizens, has two great pieces on his site:

: This one describes how a peer-to-peer TV network can work.

: This one -- called Anybody Can Be TV -- briefly gives details on such things as open-source video editing and streaming tools.

: More exploding TV: Disney starts its own direct-to-TiVo-like-box service, Moviebeam.

It's every mogul for himself out there. Add it up: Disney goes around cable and DVD distribution channels. Starz teams up with Real, risking the ire of cable. TiVo starts its own direct-to-TiVo service, challenging cable and satellite. CNN starts a broadband channel, which would have enraged cable operators except its parent is a big cable operator. McDonald's starts abandoning TV advertising.

We're witnessing the disruption of the TV business by the Internet. Fuse is lit. Explosion coming.

moops

Aisling Kellher and co at MIT are working on a Nokia interface for vogging. They've got a mupe server up and running and some test movies to have a look at.

Running a G4 Laptop with the lid closed

macosxhints - Run newer PowerBooks with the lid closed.

New PJ Educators Discussion Group

In an effort to start a broader conversation on the issues journalism educators face as they try to apply a civic focus into existing courses (or create new courses dedicated to the practice of civic journalism), I have initated a new online discussion group via Yahoo Groups: Public Journalism Educators.

For those interested in the educational implications of this movement, consider joining and chiming in.

Radio for Kids

"La Caja de Msica" (The music box) is a website which broadcasts a weekly radio program devoted to Chilean kids. Every Monday it uploads a new 45-minute long program with news, songs, and information for children. The news is it does not belong to a media company, but a musical producer, as El Mercurio explains in a recent story (in Spanish). Its success on the Internet has been followed by traditional radio, as stations in five cities are now broadcasting the program.

FAAC

Lesser GPL-licensed AAC/MP4 encoder.

National Summit For Community Wireless, August 20-22, 2004

From their press release:

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN), Prairienet, and Free Press invite you to join us for a national Community Wireless Networking Summit August 20-22, 2004 in Urbana, IL. "Making the Connection: The 2004 National Summit for Community Wireless Networks" will focus on grassroots action, impacting national regulations and policies, and building a coalition of local groups, researchers, policy leaders, decision-makers, and community activists.

It's time we organized to take the public airwaves back from corporate interests. Community Wireless Networks offer more services for cheaper prices and are owned by the communities that deploy them. Anyone interested in making the "public interest" the number one priority in our wireless telecommunications infrastructure should definitely attend this summit.

Community Wireless Developers from across North America will be demonstrating cutting-edge technologies; researchers and programmers will discuss recent breakthroughs and developments; and policy-makers and funders will strategize with participants on how to launch new initiatives.

I just had a brief e-mail exchange with Sascha, one of the conference organizers, about adding a session on streaming media over wireless. He seems enthusiastic, so it's all about the details.

A Brief Introduction to GPS Photo Linking

Digital cameras record EXIF data that tells us when we took a picture, but what if wewant to know where; too? Contributor to O'Reilly's Digital Photography Hacks, David Goldwasser introduces us to using GPS positioning data with EXIF timestamps to build interactive maps showing pictures of markers. What a sweet convergence of technologies.

AudioCoding.com

AudioCoding.com's goal is to provide the community with free MPEG-4 audio codecs.

'Mass media marketing is over'

McDonald's marketing chief has a wake-up call for the networks. "The time has come for us to agree that mass media marketing is over," said Larry Light. McDonalds is shifting dollars to cable TV and the Internet. "We're asking media to come to us with creative ideas," he said. "Just like the (advertising) agencies compete, why don't media compete?"

NHJ's New Lineup, Plus D'zign DV-5 2GB Hard Drive Videocamera

Japan's NHJ announced a boatload of new products recently, including updates to their Che-ez! cameras (which tend to live up to their name), a new 1" hard drive player with a 1.5GB drive for Cornice, new V@MP players, a 5-megapixel camera, and, most interestingly, the D'zign DV-5 video camera [pictured] with an integrated 2GB hard drive. Slated to go on sale for around ¥40,000 (~$360), the DV-5 does have a 2-inch TFT LCD monitor, but no optical zoom. The 3-megapixel CCD can record still images or record video at 640 x 480 at 30fps (MPEG4). Sounds great to me -- I see flash memory as a necessary evil in small devices, and the sooner we can start migrating to hard drives the better.

Hatch to Introduce INDUCE Act

Fred von Lohmann at EFF Deep Links reports that Sen. Orrin Hatch is planning to introduce, possibly today, a bill to create a new form of indirect liability for copyright infringement. The full name of the bill is somewhat bizarre: the "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act".

Not being a lawyer, I can't immediately say what impact this bill would have. But Fred von Lohmann, a very smart copyright lawyer, sees it as a threat to innovation, and Ernest Miller, who is also well versed in copyright law, uses me as an example of a person whose legitimate activities might be threatened by the bill. That's definitely not the kind of thing I wanted to read over breakfast.

We'll have to see how the Hatch bill is received. If it passes, it looks like computer security research may become even more of a legal minefield than it already is.

Tidepool and Storymill

Organize, browse and share photos using semantic web tagging technology.

Greenstone Digital Library Software

A suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections.

"It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License."

Metadata Features

Metadata features of the Windows Media Format.

3G/WiFi Combo Card

GlobeTrotter Fusion announced the first combo wireless card with everything to go; 3G UMTS, GPRS and 802.11g WiFi, in a single PC card.

On a 3G network the card connects up to 384kbps. Within range of a public WiFi hotspot, it can go 54Mbps. In areas where 3G or WiFi services are not available GlobeTrotter Fusion still ensures reliable and secure data connection over the widely available GPRS services (20-40 kbps).

Wireless Network Storage - Cheap

Are you creating a Terabyte LifeLog and don't know where to put it? Now you can take it with you.

The Linksys Network Storage Link, with street pricing as low as $75, breaks open the Network Access Storage market, reports Tim Higgins. It converts any external USB hard drive into networked storage.

The Linksys Network Storage Link has two USB ports that support connection of two USB 1.1 / 2.0 external hard drives or one USB hard drive and one USB flash-based storage device. It has browser-based administration with built-in disk utilities that include a backup program. The backup program can perform scheduled backups between two USB drives attached to the NSLU2.

NEA media grants deadline 2004 September 10

The U. S. National Endowment for the Arts grants are available to support the development, production, and national distribution of radio and television programs on the arts. Complete Application Packages must be postmarked (or show other proof of mailing) no later than 2004 September 10. [Listen Up! Newsblog]

Talking about disruptive journalism

Talking about disruptive journalism.... "I'm noticing a trend in how I get certain news... and it's less and less from the media. Here's an assignment."

[Eric Rice]

BBC opens content floodgates

"The Creative Archive is fuel for the creative nation," said Paula Le Dieu, co-director of the initiative. "It allows people to download these excerpts and be able to edit them and incorporate them into their own creative works."

Outloud: Upload video from the internet to television in Amsterdam

With Outloud it becomes possible for everyone to show their own video clips on television. The Crossmedia jukebox offers a platform for media makers to show their films on TV. Upload short clips via the internet to the outloud server whereupon they are transmitted on salto TV... finding their way to the Amsterdam public.

Make Your Own Damn Movie! by Lloyd Kaufmann

Lloyd Kaufmann, of TOXIC AVENGEr fame (or infamy), wrote a book called "Make Your Own Damn Movie!" with a lot of very practical tips for indie/guerilla filmmakers, such as keep a copy of the script with no sex or foul language for city permit people, neighborhood groups, etc. to see. [HD For Indies]

Contrary to Reports, RSS Feeds Can Be Searched

MediaPost today has an article on ShadowTV. The service provides video clips of TV programming for businesses and consumers through a searchable database made possible by the closed-caption transcripts of each television program. Their primary business serves PR agencies, advertisers, and advertising agencies.

This quote from the story jumped out at me...

ShadowTV is similar to RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) in that RSS feeders filter news content by desired category, but (ShadowTV President Joachin Kim) notes that ShadowTV offers more granular targeting than RSS; RSS feeders can't be searched--yet.

LimSee2

A free, open-source SMIL 1.0 and 2.0 authoring application, written in Java.

Upcoming conference on Fair Use

The New York Times has a great story about the painful process a college professor went through to clear the rights for a short, informative video to be given to incoming students:

"It's crazy," Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video clips included on the CD, which was paid for by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The process took months, Professor Turow said, and cost about $17,000 in fees and royalties paid to the various studios and guilds for the use of clips. The film used ranged from, for example, a 1961 episode of "Ben Casey" to a more-recent scene from "ER."

Open Source Cinema

Brett Gaylor is a documentary filmmaker based in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. He plans to put online all the source materials for his next movie, BASEMENT TAPES. He says that It will be available for anyone to download, and that he plans to have certain sections of the film specifically left in the hands of open-source filmmakers, to test out the idea. [Fourthwall Weblog]

Roll your own pirate radio station with an iPod

BoingBoing reader Philip says, "After playing around with the new iTrip mini, the FM broadcasting accessory for the iPod our little minds got working on some ideas. We thought we might be able to make the range of Griffin's iTrip mini a little better if took it apart and exposed the antenna, turns out we could. And then we thought, hey -- we could use a couple iPods to broadcast something we wanted to get out there. Perhaps not 'should' that is, but could. Here's the How To."

Collaborative, open textbook

OpenTextBook.org is a collaborative project wherein university students (and others) can turn their course notes into a giant, open textbook. You need to know how to use CVS to contribute and edit the book, but there's a daily PDF snapshot of the state of the project, which is looking pretty good!

Link

(Thanks, Steve!)

CombinFormation

A generative information space for browsing, collecting, and organizing information samples from the net."You can express yourself with the program to create information spaces on a topic. These are visual collections of information samples. The spaces may help you get a fresh perspective on materials with which your already familiar. You can also share these information spaces with others by publishing them on the web. The information space will act as a special sort of active web page. The people who browse your information spaces will be able to modify them with the same tools you have. They can navigate back to the original and hyperlinked documents. They can use the generative capability to bring in more stuff. They can publish their own derivative versions.

The program can also be used by presenters of collections of internet content, especially when it is rich in images. Presenters, such as digital libraries, and catalogs, may wish to use the generative information space to provide active and fresh views of their collections."

TI Proposed Standard for Video Over DSL

Texas Instruments announced "a new high-bandwidth DSL technology that is backwards compatible with operators¥ current infrastructure and will make it possible to add competitive video service revenue to their existing data and voice services."

"Video is the next big growth opportunity worldwide for the entire DSL market from technology and equipment providers to operators. The UDSL architecture enables operators to deliver triple-play services for voice, video and data to consumers while saving capital expenditures throughout their network since it supports all ADSL and VDSL standards and requires limited fiber investment," said Joseph Crupi, vice president of TI's Broadband Communications Group.

"TI expects to introduce its first UDSL solutions next year. UDSL-based equipment is expected to begin rolling-out in 2006 to deliver ADSL-, VDSL- and ultra-high speed services to consumers. "

2006. Well within the 5 year mark.

(Via PaidContent.org)

Pirates, sharks and moral crusaders

"Pirates, sharks and moral crusaders: Social control in peer-to-peer networks" is the title of a study conducted by European researchers published on FirstMonday.

The article proposes self-regulation as an alternative to music industry ongoing tactic of inciting fear with lawsuits, fines and even jail to compensate damages. Jurgen S. Svensson and Frank Bannister investigated two different P2P networks with its social norms and the informal social sanctions that are used to enforce these norms. There’s some evidence that in P2P networks in which its users are not anonymous and have an ongoing relationship with all other peers will have lower incidence of exchange of unlawful content (e.g. child porn and pirated music.)

The results of this investigation indicate that some self-regulation already exists and suggest that it may be possible to strengthen this self-regulation to reduce the occurrence of some types of offences. However, there is a limit to the effectiveness of peer control of illegal and antisocial activities on the Internet.

Videoblog email list

At http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging you can join a video blog email list. Jay Dedman in Manhattan has set it up, and when I subscribed there were ten on the list. Its charter is broad, largely to facilitate discussion about video blogs with particular interest in things like compression problems and those sorts of things. Sounds geeky? I guess so, but compression and bandwidth is to vogging what leading and kerning is to typography.

Mini HDD Seen Bringing Music, Video to Cellphones

A story on the spread of Mini HDD as a digital media storage devices for music etc...
Toshiba, which supplies 1.8 inch drives for Apple's original iPod, plans to launch stamp-sized 0.85 inch drives, certified by Guinness World Records as the world's smallest HDD, later this year, targeting the market for cellphones and other mobile devices.
Hitachi makes matchbook-sized one-inch drives which are used in mini iPods and can be squeezed into cellphones.
Crowding the market further, Seagate Technology HDD Holdings , the world's largest maker of HDDs, aims to launch its own one-inch drives, possibly by later this year.

(via PaidContent.org)

Using Dublin Core

An entry point for users of Dublin Core; a useful point of reference to the documentation of Dublin Core.

RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: Streaming

RSS module for metadata about the associated application for the media stream, the codec the stream is encoded with and additional tags for the segmentation of live/continual broadcasts.

One way or more?

Anybody seen the Radio YourWay AM/FM recorder? The promo poop on that page says it's compatible only with Windows, but I wonder if that's actually the case. It has a USB interface, and stores its recordings in MP3. If it shows up as a USB device, there shouldn't be a problem with accessing the files with a Linux or OS X system, I would presume. I kinda wish it had a stereo microphone input; but it has line-in and built-in mike features instead.

I also wonder how it works as a radio.

Linux set top box

My Settop Box - Very interesting is the Knoppmyth section.... Looks like a Knoppix/MythTV distro.

The purpose of mysettopbox.tv is to provide you the end user with the knowledge needed to assemble your very own settop box using Linux. Utilizing open source software and off the shelf hardware you'll be able to assemble a box that has the following functions:
- PVR
- Jukebox
- Image viewer
- Game station

Bitzi OpenBits

Open catalog of media file metadata.

More on the information commons

David Bollier, Why We Must Talk About the Information Commons, Law Library Journal 96, 267-282 (Spring 2004) . Excerpt:

At stake are the abilities of libraries to offer universal access to information;consumers to have competitive access to diverse sources of content, including noncommercial content; citizens to have free or cheap access to the government information that their tax dollars have financed; and students to perform research and collaborate online with each other. At stake are the ability of musicians and other artists to pioneer new forms of online creativity; creators in all media to freely quote and use a robust public domain of prior works; computer users to benefit from the innovations of competitive markets; and individuals to control how intimate personal information will be used.

Participatory Journalism, an Institution of Civil Society

Participatory journalism seems to be back in fashion after many years of an exile imposed by powerful media corporations. It's a tremendous comeback, given its potential impact on the meaning of democracy.

For some 2500 years now, political scientists have found it hard to converge on a crisp definition of democracy, even though they agree on several universally acceptable connotations of the term. Perhaps the most central of these connotations is citizen-participation in politics. This is the context that participatory journalism frames.

(Continue reading this post at PJNet Today)

The Power of Metadata

The importance of metadata for P2P filesharing.

The new protocols being developed at breakneck speed for peer-to-peer applications also add to the mess by disconnecting data from the fairly bounded arena of the Web and the ubiquitous port 80. Loosening the hyperlinks that bind all these various resources together threatens to scatter hay and needles to the winds. Where previously we had application user interfaces for each and every information system, the Web gave us a single user interface -- the browser -- along with an organizing principle -- the hyperlink -- that allowed us to reach all the material, at least in theory. Peer-to-peer might undo all this good and throw us back into the dark ages of one application for each application type or application service. We already have Napster for MP3s and work has begun on Docster for documents -- can JPEGster and Palmster be very far off?

Copyright and the Information Commons

Gary D. Price, MLIS, of The ResourceShelf points us to this: Nancy Kranich, former president of the American Library Association, has written a report for the Free Expression Policy Project titled, The Information Commons: A Public Policy Report. Here's a summary of the report's findings from the Library Journal web site:

[The report] warns that the rapid, continuing migration of information to digital formats is threatening the pillars of our democracy. The 58-page report, The Information Commons, warns that public access in the digital realm is increasingly threatened by restrictive technology, unbalanced changes to intellectual property and copyright law, industry consolidation, and onerous licensing terms. If such information trends are allowed to continue, the report argues, creativity, free speech, and vibrant political discourse will all suffer. 'Building the information commons is essential to the 21st century democracy but it is neither easy nor costless,' Kranich writes. 'But if the public's right to know is to be protected in today?s world, citizens must have optimal opportunities to acquire and exchange information.'

Inventory of Metadata for Multimedia

An inventory of current standards, emerging standards, and some products serving as examples of current implementations in the area of metadata for multimedia.

The focus of this inventory is largely on these two perspectives on metadata. In addition, when dealing with search and retrieval in a complex interactive networked environment, other perspectives may come into play as well, but are not covered in detail here:

- From the perspective of the network provider, metadata may be needed on quality of service parameters such as latency and network throughput required to properly stream a particular resource, or billing and accounting information.

- From the user perspective individual metadata such as user ratings can be added.

This Week in Amateur Radio

People from all around the world get together via a technology medium that allows them to form relationships through a global, far-flung community even though they have never met face to face. It may not be the first thing that comes to your mind, but amateur radio is alive and well thank you very much.

Just ask any one at "This Week in Amateur Radio" which produces a weekly show devoted to nothing else. A 100% volunteer effort, a typical show will be at least 80 minutes. "You wouldn't think there is that much information week in and week out about a hobby," says George Bowen, Executive Producer of TWIAR "but other than Christmas and Thanksgiving week it's there." There are plenty of stories about government regulations in broadcasting but you are just as likely to hear stories like the one this week about the military radio broadcasting that is jamming garage door openers all over Florida.

Segment producers will record their own stories and then upload to one of the mirrored ftp sites which George then downloads and compiles for the show. The result is broadcast on bandwidth made available by commercial satellite feeds but according to George more and more listeners are simply picking up the MP3 version from TWIAR's website.

These MP3s and all the material on the site used to be marked with an "All Rights Reserved" copyright because "that's what everybody else was doing. Then I saw this piece on Creative Common on TechTV and I thought 'Hey, that's what we're doing!'"

Indeed, segments are regularly shared with one of the other six such shows produced around the world from New Zealand to Europe. They are now free to do so legitimately thanks to George having put all the shows on the web under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

PublicAccessTV: Getting Funding

How does one go about raising the money to produce a program? Generally, there are two sources: sponsors and grants. This essay examines various aspects of sponserships.

Samsung Turns Camera Phone Owners Into Directors

If the thought of seeing another lame summer blockbuster has you gouging your eyes out, wait until you see what Samsung is promoting. The mobile phone manufacturer is running an ad campaign that shows the ease with which one can use their camera phone to capture every minute little detail of their life and turn it into a movie. As part of it's "Show Your World" campaign, Samsung apparently wants us all to walk around staring into our mobile phone screens framing shots no one will ever see instead of actually living life. See this and more at Ad Ages' TV Spots of the Week.

DVD Forums Approves HD-DVD, Microsoft Codec

Looks like DualDisc wasn't the only format approved by the DVD Forum last week -- the HD-DVD specification was pushed through, as well, including the VC-9 codec (read: Windows Media Player 9) from Microsoft. That means along with MPEG-2 and MPEG4 codecs, all certified HD-DVD playback machines will bundle Microsoft's technology, passing along royalties to the company with every device sold. That is, of course, if HD-DVD becomes the next generation DVD-replacement standard of choice. Sony and friends are still pushing the non-compatible Blu-ray format which has a pretty major head start, with one preliminary Sony device already shipping (with more consumer hardware on the way, but no content).

Raw format demystified

Err... you have used a digital camera before haven't you? If not please crawl back under the rock whence you came while others read on. For you digitally blessed, Photo.net has a succinct article by Bob Atkins explaining what the Raw format is and when to use it.

DVD Forum Approves DualDisc

The approval of the DualDisc audio standard by the DVD Forum could open up some potentially interesting options for not only DVD-Audio but plain ol' DVD-Video, as well. The DualDisc format basically glues a standard audio CD onto the back of a DVD, allowing the DVD to be played in both DVD-Audio and regular CD players. But there's nothing that says the DVD side has to be audio -- the single-layer DVD could instead have a video, like say live concert footage, while the CD side has the live album. The options abound, I say.

AOL To Charge for some AIM Videoconferences

(Reading the article leads me to believe that AOL will charge for many to many videoconferences but not one to one chats. Still interesting nonetheless. -kc.)<

"In some of my college computer classes, we discussed the necessity of some sort of profit to be made eventually from major software. AIM was often sited as a rare example of a large company offering up a free service that generated almost no profit whatsoever. Well, that's all changing. It seems that AOL will begin charging for both voice and video conferencing services via the buddy list. Some AIM addicts are surely getting worried that AOL may eventually charge for regular usage."

AnandTech: new digital audio

While the labels moan and whine about mp3, high fidelity audio format wars have already begun with DVD Audio (DVD-A) and Super Audio CD (SACD) as the two strongest contenders.

"While little is known outside enthusiast high fidelity circles, some DVD-A media and sampling are already shipping," says AnandTech.

Mitsubishi's newest line of DVD players uses the processor that supports DVD-A with 'DVD-A' no more than a higher fidelity audio written to DVD media instead of CD.

"However," emphasises AnandTech, "DVD-A has a data rate of almost seven times that of an audio CD. This allows us to encode/playback more channels at higher frequencies and bitrates. DVD-A supports five-channel audio while CD uses only two."

Telecom's continuing death spiral

Telecommunications, the sixth largest industry in the United States has been in a death spiral for the past three years. More than a million jobs lost, nearly a trillion dollars in wealth gone. Since last summer, the telecom stocks have appreciated considerably, with investors betting on better times ahead for the telecom business in recent months, but this is just a pause before the industry continues its meltdown. Those who disagree, should look at the price war that has broken out in the VoIP space. Primus, Vonage, and everyone else is cutting prices, perhaps waiting for Verizon to make its move.

The first phase of the telecom meltdown began in the Fall of 2000 with the failure of wholesale bandwidth providers. Overcapacity and competition mostly because of indiscriminate funding and the stock market bubble led to price wars and the collapse of newer telecom operators. This was the first phase of the telecom meltdown that started in the Fall of 2000. The descendants of AT&T, the regional Bell operating companies and most wireless carriers escaped the carnage because they had a monopoly on the connections to and from our homes, that aging piece of copper wire called the "last mile connection."

Over the past two years, a new alternative to this last mile connection has emerged. This is the cable television network.

Continued at Gigaom

TIME Calls Blogs a Growing Media Alternative

TIME magazine has a significant story this week on how more and more people getting their news from blogs.

Over the past five years, blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence. Which raises the question: Who are these folks anyway? And what exactly are they doing to the established pantheon of American media?

Many-to-Many Censorship?

Call it state censorship M2M model: Chinese government just launched a new website for people to report on what officials describe as illegal or unhealthy information on the internet. A China blogger called this "a crackdown that employs a public open-ended architecture" and asked "Isn't that just inviting random, pornographic, illegal, and inappropriate comments?"

My view is actually this form of censorship can be quite powerful. This strategy is complimentary to, yet much more effective than simply controlling internet use through law and regulations, and blocking access to foreign sites. It goes together with the governments other efforts such as forcing ISPs and ICPs to show what it calls self discipline and using internet police units to monitor online activity, including people surfing in the many thousands of internet cafes.

The Chinese authorities are once again using a strategy which mixes intimidation, uncertainty, and divide and conquer techniques to create fear and distrust among people, therefore forcing internet users to censor themselves online. (If one wants to know more about how censorship works in Chinese society, you can read an excellent article written by Princeton professor Perry Link.)

However, in the long run, I am optimistic that the growing demands for free expression among Chinese netizens will ultimately topple any censorship regime, including this "M2M" type.

Python for UIQ smartphones

Tim O'Cock has created an independent port of the Python programming language to Symbian OS devices like the Sony Ericsson P900.

This is my independent attempt to port Python to Symbian OS devices. It is a new port from the generic Python 2.3.3 sources. It does not contain any code from my Amiga port of Python. The Python interpreter works in console mode, and most of the standard library modules work as expected.

I am launching the project publicly now as I have completed the first proof of concept and am now inviting ideas and contributions. There is still lots of work to do. The software runs inside the emulator, but is of no use on a real device as there is no way to enter text (except possibly with an IR keyboard, but I haven't tried that).

I have not seen the Nokia Series 60 runtime, but am aware of it. I don't know what their intentions are regarding open source licensing, but if their work is available on appropriate terms, then I would rather use that for this project than reinvent the wheel.

Currently, the Python interpreter runs and you can interactively enter Python programs or code fragments.

RSS: The Instant Newspaper

RSS: the instant newspaper. An interesting illustration of the power of social software came up while I was giving my RSS presentations at the DevEssentials conference. I explained that years ago there used to be science-fiction-like predictions of the future with magic-like electronic newspapers that updated themselves as the news broke. Then I showed them Radio Userland's news aggregator, with postings from the FoxForum Wiki, the FoxCentral announcements, my web site, and Craig Bernston's posting while in the session.

The future is here.

They got it.
[Ted's Radio Weblog]

Nikhil Moro on Participatory Journalism and Social Capital

Andrea, considered rhetorically, your question about teaching civic journalism actually revisits Putnam's old theory of television causing a decline in social capital. Participatory journalism seems like an antidote to decreasing civic engagement ó if we can operationalize "participatory journalism" in a widely acceptable manner. One type of participatory journalism is spawned by Internet-based technologies such as blogging, while another springs from hyper-localization in traditional community reporting.

I believe both these streams might be served, and served well, by a curriculum that covers areas such as the nature of civil society, the motivations of engagement in hyper-local environments, and the power of the Internet to rejuvenate the Habermasean public sphere. (In addition to, of course, the nuts-and-bolts skills of reporting and copy-editing).

In other words, the study of civic or participatory journalism might actually become a byproduct of appreciating the notion of social capital, with participatory journalism addressed as a form of civic engagement. As they say, it all comes together in the end! What say you.

Magazine to Publish Blogger's Postings

AP reports that The San Diego Reader, a free newsweekly, is publishing 8,000 words from Brian Dear's blog as its cover story this week. Brian posts details here.

International exhibition of mobile video deadline 2004 November 31

Mobile Exposure: an international exhibition of Mobile Video. Do the intimacy and mobility of the video-enabled cell phone represent a culture of surveillance where there is universal intimacy but a complete lack of private space? Deadline 2004 November 31. [Microcinema International]

Mini wireless webcam

Silicon Graphics' Japanese subsidiary has come up with a pintsized (95 x 65 x 24 mm) 2-megapixel webcam that incorporates a server and can stream video via your preferred flavour of Compact Flash-format communications card (WiFi or 3G cellphone, for example). It has 64MB of SDRAM and 16MB of flash memory, which equates to storage for about two hours' worth of VGA-sized MPEG 4 video at 15 frames per second. There's also an NTSC model (left in the photo) that
loses the camera in favour of an external camera connection and Ethernet port. Pricing looks set to be rather steep, at around Y150,000 (about $1,400), though this is firmly aimed at corporate and government clients, who have more money to throw around than us plebs. (Doesn't look like SGI will be releasing this in the States, incidentally.)

Lack of Media Trust to Bolster Personal Journalism

The editors weblog reports 53% of Americans don't trust the news. The data was compiled by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

If the majority of Americans don't trust the media, we will increasingly turn more to each other as credible sources of information. I have blogged about this in the past, but the data really convinces me that personal journalism will only gain steam from here. It will really hit its stride as social networking, influence measurement tools and blogging converge and become more popular. This converging landscape will enable us to identify the most reliable and credible sources of information. Big media isn't going away, but another sphere of influence is certainly here to stay.

Saving Streaming

"No, it's not the industry that needs saving. But more and more people want to save streamed content onto their hard drives. For companies like ZyGoDigital and Twinklesoft, that spells opportunity. For content creators, it might also spell trouble..."

Stowe on Social Tools

Stowe Boyd's latest Darwin collumn is on The State of Social Tools. In it, he lays out his four Co's:

Communication: instant messaging, e-mail, Web conferencing, streaming video and voice tools, and other messaging solutions

Coordination: calendaring, task and project management, contact management, and related technologies

Collaboration: file and application sharing, discussion, wikis, blogs and other shared-space technologies

Community: social networking, swarmth (digital reputation, also called karma or whuffie), group decision and other explicit community supports.

Communication - rich electronic messaging;

Collaboration - facilitating a rich, shared, virtual workspace; and

Coordination - adding the structure of business processes to communication and collaboration, so as to implement an enterprise's policies.

Son of Sam Is Web-Enabled

Gothamist hasn't been tallying the covers of the Daily News or Post, but it seems that they like to pull out the ol' file photos of some of NYC's infamous figures to put on the cover from time to time. Take today's Daily News cover that reveals that David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz has a website. Yes, Berkowitz has a website where he writes about everything, from September 11, gay marriage, wanting forgiveness, and prison life. Man, everyone has an opinion these days! Prison officials say that Berkowitz is doing nothing illegal, as he's exercising his First Amendment rights, but the families of this many victims are angry. It's hosted by "Rock Christian Church in San Diego, CA," who write:

We host this page because we truly believe that David is sincerely sorry for the pain he has caused in the past, and that he has truly repented and become a new person in Jesus Christ. We do not worship David Berkowitz or who/what he has become. We worship the God who changed a person like him, and can also change you.

Andrew Grumet Likes Connected Media

"I connected up the Gateway DVD player last night, then used the infrared remote to queue up and watch Adam's streaker video, downloaded originally as an RSS enclosure, on the living room tv set. Totally changed my perspective on what is possible. With enough little boxes like Gateway's and the right tools, people will be able to build, cheaply, their own multimedia networks that compete with broadcast and cable. At that point, which I don't think is far off, the rules are going to change."

Deja View's instant-replay cam

Deja View has finally found someone to build the Camwear Model 100, their wearable instant-replay camera which doesn't save everything you see, just keeps a 30-second buffer so that if something interesting does happen, you've got it and you can keep recording things on a memory card (and expect to get very sick of people describing this as "TiVo for real life"). Mainly means you'll be able to save for posterity every time someone asks you what the hell you have attached to your sunglasses.

Telecom Italia introduces fixed-line video telephony

By upgrading to a new fixed-line phone, Telecom Italia customers are now able to make video calls from their fixed-line telephone service, without any changes to the line, and without any extra devices. Telecom Italia will soon be rolling it out to customers in France and Germany as well.

The videophone, from technology partners Hi-Tel of Bologna, features a small video camera attached to the upper part of the display. The 4-inch screen offers a resolution of 480 x 234 pixels, and can handle video at around 15 frames per second, compared with 7 to 8 frames per second on 3G mobile phones. The device can also be used to send and receive SMS text messages. By the end of the year videophones will incorporate a SIM card reader for sending MMS messages.

Old Geek Invents New Stick

According to the EE Times and Science Blog, a scientist at University of Rhode Island has developed a new type of antenna design that, by increasing the efficiency, performs as well as the convential quarter-wave design but is only 1/3 as large."

Murata Unveils World's Smallest Wireless LAN Module

Murata Manufacturing has created a new ultra-slim wireless LAN transceiver module designed for use in cell phones. It was presented at the IEEE MIT-S International Microwave Symposium 2004. The 9.6mm x 9.6mm x 1.8mm component. It's friggin' tiny.

Andreessen Comments on RSS

Browser pioneer Marc Andreessen participated in an online chat on The Washington Post's Web site today (reg required) and he had an interesting thing or two to say about RSS...

Washington, D.C.: Do you think RSS is the future of distributing information via the Internet?

Marc Andreessen: It's *a* future of distributing information :-). It's a very useful approach (this is the idea that you read "feeds" of content that are pushed to you, rather than browsing and searching). It's kind of Pointcast done right, for those of us who remember the late, not-much-lamented Pointcast from the late 90's. Plus the approach will work for a lot of other things too like being notified of auction results, new products, new classified ad listings, or whatever. It will work very well and lots of people will use it and the aggregators and software that are designed to support it but it won't replace browsing or searching, I don't think.

It's a good example of how the Internet keeps changing -- since the Internet is built on software, a new software approach like RSS can change how we think of the Internet without requiring anyone to rewire any networks. That's what I really like about the Internet. First it was email, then web, then IM, then Napster/Kazaa, then Apple iChat, now RSS... one thing after another after another...

Media Ecology Assoc. Conference, Troy, NY - June 10-13, 2004

Well, maybe not "on parade" exactly, but three (Many-toMany authors) are speaking as part of the same event tomorrow.
Those of you in the Rochester area might want to attend the panel on "Weblogs and Cross-Disciplinary Communication" being held Friday from 4:30 - 5:45 on the RIT campus (it's part of the Media Ecology Association Conference.)
I'll be chairing the panel, and the other participants include fellow M2M authors Clay Shirky and Seb Paquet, as well as Jill Walker from the University of Bergen in Norway, and Alex Halavais from SUNY Buffalo.
It will be held in RIT's Liberal Arts building, room 06-A205.
Hope to see you there!

Bluetooth EDR: Triple Speed Bluetooth

The Bluetooth SIG, the group that controls the standards that define the short-range radio networking technology has announced a proposal for a new version of Bluetooth that offers data rates almost 3 times as fast as the previous version. Called Bluetooth EDR (for Enhanced Data Rate), the new specification claims data rates of up to 2.1Mbps and remains backward-compatible with the original Bluetooth spec. No word, however, if the enhanced data rate will causes a proportionate decrease in range, not unlike 802.11g compares to 802.11b.

HP's new ultrahigh-resolution projectors

In case you were looking for yet another reason to wait on dropping this (and next) year's tax return on a digital projector, HP announced today that they've developed a technique for effectively doubling and even quadrupling the resolution of its line of consumer digital projectors. They refer to the process as "wobulation" (seriously, we're not making this up), which is supposed to lower production costs while dramatically increasing resolution. The second-generation of "wobulating" projectors will produce an expected 4,096 by 3,072 resolution, which starts to rival the grain of 35mm film projection. As usual, don't look into the lens while activated, and use caution when viewing particular episodes of the Pokemon TV show.

Epson bumps up its wireless projectors to 802.11g

It was bound to happen sooner or later: Epson has bumped up the WiFi on its line of wireless digital projectors from 802.11b to its roughly five times faster cousin 802.11g. We're sure that everyone else who makes a wireless digital projector will follow suit. The PowerLite 835p and PowerLite 830p should both be out in mid-July.

Administration to Local Phone Monopolies: It's All Yours

AP: Bush won't contest phone ruling. "This decision is the final nail in the coffin for local telephone competition,'' said Gene Kimmelman, senior director of public policy at Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine.

You expected a different result?

FCC Alters MMDS Band

The FCC today announced a plan to reform spectrum rules in the 2.5-2.7 GHz MMDS/IFTS band. This spectrum, assigned to the Multipoint Distribution Service (MDS) and the Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS) is the frequency band most likely to be used by WiMax in the United States for competiton with DSL and cable modems. Currently Nextel and Sprint own about 2/3rds of those commercial frequencies in the United States.

Starz to Launch Online Movie Service With RealNetworks

Starz to Launch Online Movie Service With Real: Our buddy Rafat Ali scores a major scoop and is telling us about this landmark deal, which is going to make Comcast think about the future a little bit harder. "The service will offer about 100 movies for download every month, and unlimited streaming options, for $12 a month," writes Ali and adds, "The deal is exclusive for both Starz and RealNetworks for at least five years." I think the killer aspect of this is the streaming and the pricing of the package. I think downloading is a bit of a bother right now because that is something Comcast and its brethern could turn off any time. In case you were wondering, I am also thinking about: Do I want to watch Seabiscuit on my PC? What If I don't have a big ass Plasma screen hooked up to my computer?

CTCNet Conference: Seattle, Wa. June 11-13, 2004

The 13th Annual Community Technology Center Conference will be held in Seattle, June 11th - 13th, 2004. It will explore the relevance for community technology centers as they engage and connect diverse communities to effect positive change.

Nearly fifty sessions and a variety of special features, networking opportunities and other events, including a June 10th Pre-Conference Day of workshops and activities. More information on conference themes & content can be found here, and for schedule and session information see the conference program.

Click here for confereence registration details and hotel information.

The Internet's Third Age

I settled into a chair in the conference room of Tallent Communications here in Nashville yesterday for a presentation on a new product, but the moment Joe Moore opened his mouth, I knew it would be much more. Joe's the marketing guy (among other things) with Tallent, and his opening statement was this.

"We're entering the third age of the Internet, the age of the application."

Apache, meet BitTorrent, BitTorrent, meet Apache

Mod_torrent is a drop in solution for Apache servers when deploying the BitTorrent file swarming technology. With mod_torrent your visitors share the bandwidth burden when distributing large files on your web site. The module transparently makes all, or optionally only certain types of files, retrievable by any client implementing the BitTorrent protocol.

Broadband Usage Up 42% In The U.S. In 2003

As reported here by Reuters, broadband usage in the U.S. jumped 42 percent in 2003 as compared to 2002. As more people sign on to high-speed access, how long will it be before we start seeing the cable companies (such as Comcast) start dropping their prices to levels which compete directly with dial-up?"

Wiki playlists for for "Rich" collaborative sounds

Wow this is so cool!! How do we get the Collaborative sounds from the WIKI to move and keep their richness (images, comments, descriptions, etc. ) into services like WebJay? And then how do we get the rich sounds into an audio player and also into my blog and playlists (each time preserving the richness). Audio Wiki? RSS playlists?

I love to try an experiment doing a threaded audio discussion in this WIKI! If I only had 2 other collaborators/volunteers to do the experiment with. We could talk about "Tuning RSS 2.0 for sound". All a collaborator would need is a MP3 recorder, a place to put their MP3s and a way to get their MP3s there. The WIKI and WebJay would do the rest.

WebJay: "Interested in experimenting with Wiki playlists? Check out Seb's Trial Ballon."

Fifteen-second film contest encourages mobile phone movies

Director Mike Figgis supports a contest where film-makers must show their talent in just 15 seconds. Entrants to the Nokia Shorts contest will have to submit a 15-second digital film, encouraging the making of movies for mobile phones. The winner will get to make a longer film, while finalists will have theirs shown at London's Raindance festival. [BBC News]

Explode your TV

TV is about to explode, just as publishing is exploding thanks to the web and weblogs.

Many elements are coming together that will mean the barrier to entry to TV is dropped to the ground. Anybody can produce TV. Anybody can distribute TV. And TV will thus be able to serve any interest. Just as you no longer need a printing press to publish, you no longer need a tower (or cable or satellite) to broadcast.

Of course, that's hardly a new prognostication. Many smart folks, like Adam Curry and Ernie Miller, have been writing about this for a long time (more links shortly). But now all the things that will make this happen are coming together quickly -- why, as fast as global climate change in The Day After Tomorrow.

I've been thinking a lot about what Doc Searls started here and continued here regarding radio and I believe that the tsunami will come first to TV because:

: TV is more exciting to consumers.

: TV is more exciting to advertisers (who have been trying to turn the Web into TV ever since it started).

: Thus there's more money in TV.

: There are also far greater savings in TV. Radio's already cheap to produce. TV isn't. But with new cameras and tools and citizen producers, just a few people (or even one person) can turn out decent TV today.

: TV does not bring with it the added expectation and difficulty of portability; we do expect to get radio everywhere but we don't (yet) watch it in our cars (much).

(Continue reading this post at BuzzMachine)

Monolith and digital copyright

BoingBoing reader Jason Rohrer created an app called Monolith, which "munges" together two arbitrarily-selected binary files (called a Basis file and an Element file) to produce a Mono binary file (with a .mono extension). Jason says the resulting Mono file will not be statistically related to either file, hence becoming an interesting tool for exploring the boundaries of digital copyright (what is the copyright status of the resulting .mono file?)

Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not "owned" by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.

Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.

What does this mean? This means that Mono files can be freely distributed.

BlogOn - The Business of Social Media, Berkeley, CA - July 23, 2004

"BlogOn is the first conference to examine in-depth the business of social media. It is not just for the professional blogger, but for forward-thinking investors, smart marketing executives and media company professionals who understand it is time to understand and harness this gathering disruptive phenomenon. BlogOn is for executives who want to see a sharper Big Picture for social media and to identify their options and opportunities."

Check the writeup at Napsterization:

"The conference proposes to address what the business cases are for social media and look at some of the latest experiments companies are having conversating with users, making interesting interactive technologies and figuring out how users are pushing media with blogosphere filtering and RSS (that goes for radio and video, not just news)."

BTbot - BitTorrent Search Engine

BTbot is a BitTorrent search engine.

BTbot is a new efficient and fast search engine for bittorrent files. The complete index is build automatically and all links to bittorrent files are updated several times a day to minimize the number of broken links as much as possible. Currently BTbot is in an experimental state. Therefore we do not guarantee proper search result. If you notice problems or if you have comments let us know.

List of Resources for Nonprofits That Want To Blog

I was a panelist today at the Georgia Center for Nonprofit annual summit. My topic was how nonprofits can use nontraditional media--including blogging and online communities--to effectively get the word out to the general public. Unfortunately, the access to the Internet was down. Still it went okay. We had a full room of more than 100.

Instead of a hand-out I thought I would blog my resources, and then the audience members can later come here and click on things of interest. Plus maybe others can use it.

(Continued at PJNet Today)

Wireless USB

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is used as the peripheral equipment interface in PCs shipped worldwide and is also found in digital cameras, music players, mobile phones, game systems and personal digital assistants (PDA).Worldwide USB port shipments have surpassed a billion, and Intel forecasts the total will hit 3.5 billion by 2006.Nikkei Electronics Asia has as it's cover story the development of wireless USB and reports that Intel Corp has declared that "in 2005 we will make USB wireless."

Wireless USB Enables Secure Connection at 480Mbps

New report documents connection between democracy and public access to information

Nancy Kranich, The Information Commons: A Public Policy Report, The Free Expression Policy Project, June 8, 2004. From the executive summary: "Libraries, civic organizations, and scholars have begun to turn the idea of the commons into practice, with a wide variety of open democratic information resources now operating or in the planning stages. These include software commons, licensing commons, open access scholarly journals, digital repositories, institutional commons, and subject matter commons in areas ranging from knitting to music, agriculture to Supreme Court arguments. These many examples of information sharing have certain basic characteristics in common. They are collaborative and interactive. They take advantage of the networked environment to build information communities. They benefit from network externalities, meaning that the greater the participation, the more valuable the resource. Many are free or low cost. Their governance is shared, with rules and norms that are defined and accepted by their constituents. They encourage and advance free expression." Kranich, a past president of the American Library Association, has entire sections on open access and digital repositories.

In a 'free culture', how do artists get paid?

When free is used in the phrase free culture, it is being used in the free speech sense, but some people appear to be interpreting it in the unpaid sense, equating free culture with unpaid culture. This confusion has resulted in one question being asked over and again: In a 'free culture', how do artists get paid? - Free culture strengthens the position of both artists and their work, a position that has been eroded over the last half century by corporations who are too eager to retain too much control over too much of the culture that passes through their doors. [Chocolate and Vodka: Suw Charman]

TiVo to announce web download service

TiVo is expected to announce today the details behind a new service that will allow TiVo subscribers to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drives on their DVRs. (Thanks, Shirley!)

Study: Cable news viewers more partisan

More Republicans are gravitating to Fox News and Democrats to CNN, suggests a new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. ìTo a certain extent, the media has reaped what it has sown,î said Andrew Kohut, the Pew centerís director. ìThe emergence of the shout show as a significant piece on all of the cable networks ... has made the news seem more partisan and Republicans increasingly look at the news one way and Democrats the other.î

Wi-Fi, UMTS, and GPRS on one Option card

Swisscom will soon begin offering its subscribers transparent roaming across Wi-Fi, UMTS, and GPRS data networks, no configuration or wires attached.

No wireless data system currently has 100% coverage. That's why Swisscom Mobile has announced a new service it terms Mobile Unlimited. The subscription includes a new PC Card for laptops made by Option that supports Wi-Fi, UMTS, and GPRS all on one radio.

The Option card comes with all necessary driver software, presumably only for Windows laptops, and includes support for GPRS packet radio, UMTS (the 3G flavor preferred in Europe), and Wi-Fi data standards. The driver layer hides that from the user, however, and automatically selects the fastest service available that it can detect. That includes Wi-Fi at 54 Mbps (although whether it uses 802.11a or 802.11g is unclear), then UMTS at 384 kbps, and finally GPRS at 30-40 kbps. The goal is to provide customers with the same degree of "always on" connectivity wirelessly that DSL and Cable modems provide to wired customers.

To Watch These Programs On Cable, You Have To Find Them First

"Other networks...are being cajoled, or pushed, by cable companies to place their programs exclusively onto cable's new frontier - video on demand. Like digital channels, video on demand is available only to digital subscribers, but viewers cannot surf past these networks: they have to seek them out.

"With video on demand, you can put niche programming on air that might not otherwise be available," said Matt Bond, the executive vice president for programming at the Comcast Corporation, the nation's largest cable operator. "There are literally hundreds of programmers out there, like the proliferation of Web sites. There might not be enough content to support a 24-hour-a-day channel, but these programs could exist on V.O.D..."

HOW TO: Make digital movies the easy way

According to some estimates there are about 60 million (if not more) of you out there with Digital Video Camcorders, just about all DV cameras have Firewire (IEEE 1394)
output/input and there are hundreds of millions of DV tapes being shipped per year. The bad news is, we know exactly what happens - you record a lot of stuff to DV tape and never do anything with it. It's a bit of a hassle to sit and
edit for hours when all you want is a 2 minute clip from that birthday party or event. And the truth is, most of the stuff we all shoot is crap since we just aim and record everything. So in this week's HOW TO Tuesday we show you how to
make use of that footage to quickly and easily make movies and automatically add a soundtrack.

(Read the rest of this post at Engadget)

HotSpot on a Dongle

ZyXEL Communications today introduced the ZyAIR G-220 802.11g Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter/AP. The G-220's stylish plug-in "stick" design and dual mode capability combines client and access point (AP) functions into a single adapter that costs under $100.

ZyAIR claims the Plug-and-Play (PnP) feature and USB connection allow virtually instant wireless network access. By simply plugging the adapter into a desktop or notebook PC, a flashing blue LED indicates that the wireless network is established.

Users can instantly create an access point using the built-in software AP feature by bridging a wired and wireless connection. By plugging the G-220 to the host computer with the Ethernet jack, all other users in the room can access the Internet via wireless connection through the G-220 and the host computer.

Blogging tool supports movie uploads

A weblogging tool, Ecto, has a new feature: Movie upload. It offers users an option to indicate how an uploaded movie is used in the weblog (blog) entry. There are two options: Ecto creates a link to the movie inside your blog entry. The second option: the movie is then inserted right into your blog entry. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Singingfish audio/video search engine

Singingfish technology enables Internet users to quickly and easily locate and play popular streaming media ó including music, news, movies, sports, TV, radio, finance, and live events ó via any Internet-accessible PC or CE device. Singingfish offers the worldís largest index of streaming media, with currently over 10 million streams, mp3s, and downloads, and 200,000 to 300,000 files added monthly.

How Low Can You Go?

Why does it matter that wireless capacity be freed up at low frequencies? And what is low, anyway?

A rough definition of "low-frequency" is below one gigahertz (1 GHz). That's where broadcast services operate today, taking up most of the allocated frequencies. There's a reason why these bands are referred to as the "beachfront property" of spectrum -- it's the easiest and cheapest place to build systems designed to reach large numbers of people.

(Read the rest of this post at Wireless Unleashed.)

New Electronic Paper Achieves 400 Pixels Per Inch

Toppan Printing and E Ink have developed electronic paper with a resolution of 400 pixels per inch -- the highest resolution yet achieved. The companies are behind the currently available "LIBRIe" electronic-book terminal designed by Sony. The resolution is so high, it's just like real paper, except thousands of times more expensive and totally reliant on batteries.

Art in Age of Abusive Copyright Enforcement

Negativland and Public Enemy are two '80s groups that became experts on copyright whether they wanted to be or not. U2's overbearing record label forced Negativland to defend appropriation theory in court (and radicalized them to a point of complete obsession on this issue, as trauma has a way of doing); Public Enemy quickly learned what they could and couldn't create after sampling suits brought hiphop's most innovative phase to a halt. Negativland now maintains an online database relating to "fair use" and other copyright issues (be sure to check out their interview with U2's The Edge if you haven't), and Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee recently gave an industry-savvy interview on "how copyright changed hiphop." Along with law professor Lawrence Lessig (and many others) these groups are urging fundamental changes to American copyright laws; this is important but don't expect it to happen anytime soon given the strength of music and film industry lobbies. For those planning to make art in the meantime, these are your sole and only options:

1. Stay poor. The humorless twit who sued Jeff Koons over that "string of puppies" photo would never have done it if Koons hadn't been an "art star." Very few people sue to make a point (except RIAA); it's too expensive.

2. Record live versions of other people's songs, or song fragments, for the sole purpose of sampling them--you avoid the "master recording" fee for the sample and only have to pay the "publication" fee. Just kidding: this is actually done by the big-bucks hiphop performers, as described in the Chuck D/Hank Shocklee interview, but it sounds fake as hell--essentially having a lawyer as a creative partner.

3. Stay several steps ahead of the shysters by mutating the sounds so they're virtually untraceable. A lot of drum and bass producers do this. You don't get that bang of recognition ("Oh that's Richard Dawson in Running Man!") but the texture of the sound is yours to play with.

4. Make completely original art. No more samples, no more collage, it's back to the Modernist dictate "make it new." It's always possible you heard or saw something subconsciously that crept into your work and could get you sued, but creativity isn't just about mixing up other people's stuff. (Dumb, I know; I just put it in in case Jed Perl stumbled across the page)

Sunpower Solar Powered Cellphone Batteries

Gawker Media Web Dork Prime Nick Aster sends us this link to Sunpower's solar assisted cell-phone batteries available for a variety of Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, and Nextel-branded phones. You won't be making phone calls with our star's light alone, but on a sunny day the Sunpower batteries can manage to add about 15 minutes of talk time to your battery for every hour they spend charging. Depending on how actively you use your phone (and what part of Arizona you live in), your phone might not have to hit the charger at all. Prices run from about $40 to $60 per battery via their website.

Read

Buttress: BitTorrent RSS application

Buttress will be an application to automatically download and run .torrent files from RSS feeds, without user input.

(This will be known as The Day of BitTorrent RSS Downloaders. The "blackout baby bumper crop correlation" may not have panned out, but me thinks there's a three-month "interesting idea to interesting app thing" going on. -kc.)

Wee little Pekee robot

In case your first attempt at a world-conquering robot fell through, Wany Robotics has introduced its Pekee robotics development platform to get you up to speed. It's a fully assembled robot running embedded Windows or Linux with about a million sensors. It has built-in infrared, temperature, and light sensors, shock detector, and gyrometers so you know exactly what is going on at all times. It also has a plug-in cartridge with Ethernet, USB, color video camera and connectors for a mouse, monitor and keyboard and another with WiFi for remote control and data-streaming. To top it all off they also give you casings for five more cartridges, so you can make custom ones (laser gun, jet pack, rocket launcher, etc) if you want.

(Via Sensory Impact)

Dave Winer: Users Should Take Over RSS

Late today I had an interesting phone conversation with the illustrious Dave Winer. Dave said (many times) that he wants to see the users take over RSS. In other words he envisions the community creating new applications for RSS so that it becomes something even more useful and powerful than it is now. Dave reiterated this thought again in a post tonight on his blog. He also told me that we should be wary of the day Microsoft enters the RSS aggregation game. He fears this will kill innovation, as it has done before.

Terry Heaton echoed a similar theme earlier today...

"Here's a radical idea. Why don't we just let this new medium find itself instead of trying to cloak it in the status quo? I have the same beef with political use of the Internet. Heretofore, in this country anyway, the Web has been used only to feed the mass marketing political monster. Others have proved that it can be used to undercut the political status quo. Why can't we see that here?"

Detroit Sensor Conference - June 7-10, 2004

The combination of sensors and low-power wireless networking is giving inanimate things an identity," says Ian McPherson, president of Wireless Data Research. Perhaps nowhere has sensor networking become more alive than at the Sensor Expo & Conference June 7-10, 2004 in Detroit.

Nortel Meshing Up

Unstrung reports that Nortel Networks says it expects to see the first commercial deployments of its 802.11-based mesh networking technology by the end of this year.

Nortel's mesh uses dual band WiFi, connecting via 802.11b (11 Mbit/s over 2.4GHz), although Nortel may offer an upgrade to the faster 802.11g standard (54 Mbit/s over 2.4GHz) on the user channel. Backhaul to a wired Internet connection is handled over a separate 802.11a channel.

Nucleus - RSS BitTorrent downloader

Nucleus will download a specified RSS file, and look for .torrent files that match any of the specified keywords. If a match is found it will queue up that file for download." Excellent!

Learning Digital Video with Auntie

The BBC offers some handy reference guides for budding DV filmmakers and journalists. One of the more obscure, but, as far as budding DV filmmakers are concerned, useful corners of the BBC’s sprawling internet presence is the online courses section... [Hollywood Liberation Army: Chronicling the Internet movie revolution]

(via Cinema Minima)

LGE's TV Fridge

If LG Electronics is really trying to make a name for themselves in the American and European markets, I'd say this refrigerator with a built-in 13-inch LCD TV is a pretty good way to do it. It also has a built-in radio function, and uses 'bio silver' -- tiny particles of silver, which is naturally anti-bacterial -- to, uhm, kill bacteria (like those people who use colloidal silver generators to clean everything, sort of). The release doesn't say what sort of inputs the TV has -- it'd be great if you could use this as a monitor for a networked PC. It even has a 'Carbon Nano Ball' to help deodorize, which is probably just made up of nano-scale carbon pieces, known as 'molecules.'

Read [DesignTechnica]

More on portable power: $100 Roll-up Solar Panel from ICP Solar

ICP Solar Technologies offers a roll-up solar panel designed to power 12V batteries and gadgets. It's made of CIGS solar cells and comes in 5, 10, 20 and 40 watt versions. A 5 watt version retails for $100 at Amazon. (Search for "Coleman 50200 Exponent Flex 5")

(via i4u)

TimeshiftTV Will Speak In Tongues

TimeshifTV, a broadband content startup service, is targeting immigrants in U.S. with languages other than English. The subscription-based service initially will be offered as a set-top box that uses the Internet to deliver the viewer's choice of programming, on demand. The parent company Broadband Networks is an IPTV company based in Los Gatos, CA...

The service seems to be similar to what startup Akimbo launched recently in U.S.

(via PaidContent)

The Free & The Unfree

This month's issue of Wired brings a great infographic section called "The Free & The Unfree" depicting an atlas of the intellectual property world.

The maps and charts on the following pages show how IP enforcers are manning the ramparts while IP antagonists are challenging the protection regime. We focus on four industries: media, medicine, agriculture, and software.

• Streaming Media
• An Atlas of The Free & The Unfree
• Open Source Everywhere

The revolution will not be choked

In The future of music playback, Jay Feinberg says,

The future playback of recorded music will not be tied to physical media (e.g., compact discs) or singular virtual players (e.g., iPods), but to many objects with shapes and sizes designed to appeal to our tactile relationships with music and, at the same time, to have the features of a virtual music device. I imagine these being called Playbacks (not really, but just to give them a name)...

Playbacks will have three important sets of features: 1) physical style and symbolism. 2) wireless receive and transmit. 3) virtual music libraries and playlists.

Interesting to reconcile this with Marc's idea that "the money is always at the aggregation point" (rather, presumably, than in manufacture, distribution, or control of choke points along the ways between first sources and final customers).

Mercora - New Radio P2P Network

The maker of P2P Client, Shareaza, is working on a new Radio P2P project called Mercora. This network gives users the ability legally webcast music to other users on the network. Users can also share images, send instant messages, and join groups where they can participate in forums and chatrooms. Although the program itself is still in beta, the project looks promising.

China to censor digital video

In a new censorship move, China has "stipulated a set of rules on broadcasting DV (digital video) productions via TV stations, cinemas, film festivals or exhibitions, and the Internet, in a bid to step up regulation of their content".

The clamp-down is being imposed, "in a bid to step up regulation of their content, according to the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT)," says the People's Daily Online here.

Under the new rules, people running web sites will have to get special licenses "for releasing audiovisual programs before broadcasting DV productions".

Shades of the CueCat -- But This Might Work

The CueCat -- a mouse-like object that was designed to scan codes in print ads and take users directly to website links -- was, to put it bluntly, a colossal bust. However, this might work. Japan's Corporate News Network reports that Daily Focus, the leading free newspaper in Korea, is now printing a special mobile code with some of its sports articles. Users can access the latest sports news in video by simply holding the phone against the printed code. Ico, the company providing the content, hopes to sign up more than 200,000 users. What works best online? (...)

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Why Silicon Valley Does Not Get Mobility?

Russell Beattie is really outraged by the lack of any understanding about mobile technologies in his latest post, Where's the Mobility?

Does Silicon Valley have blinders on? Did they get a technology-lobotomy? These entire conferences could be filled with *nothing* but analysis of mobile tech - their impact, their influence, the opportunities and more. What are these organizers doing? Do they not read? Do they not travel outside of the country ever?

You know what the mobile industry needs in the U.S.? An evangelist. We need a Mobile Guy Kawasaki. There's no point-person right now for this stuff. The GUI had Jobs, the web had Andreeson, blogs have Winer. We need someone to explain to the masses the difference between what "wireless" means and what true "mobility" is.

Meet the Wi-Bro

Meet the WiBro: Just when your thought you were done dealing with all the Wi-Somethings, here comes another one, and this time it is from South Korea. It is called Wi-Bro. Apparently the South Koreans have been working with a 2.3 GHz wireless broadband technology called high-speed portable Internet (HPi). They want it to be part of the WiMAX standard, there are some legal problems. So HPi has now been reborn as Wi-Bro - making it appear more standardized (another trait in common with Wi-Te(chnologies) is their need to hype up the brand name before a standard exists) and more easily integrated into WiMAX. Or as I have often said, perception is everything.

Georgetown Student Studies Teens and Blogs

Georgetown University grad student David Huffaker has published a thesis that indicates teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs. This includes their name, age, and location, as well as contact information in the form of an email address, an instant messenger name or a link to personal homepage. The BBC has the scoop and Huffaker's full thesis can be found here (PDF).

How to Find Your Blogging Voice

Blog Business World offers some good advice on how to find your "blogging voice" and differentiate your weblog from the herd.

"If your blog looks, reads, and parrots every other blog on the Internet, your traffic levels will drop."

Video of TV on Phones (on the Web)

Wireless Watch Japan has video of NHK's digital terrestrial TV broadcasting service on a prototype modified Hitachi W11H handset -- that means someone watching TV on their phone. It looks slick, too, although I must admit I was initially dubious. While most people would rather watch TV in a more comfortable setting, catching the morning news or last night's sitcom while waiting for the train wouldn't be so bad at all. The full WMV video is available to subscribers only, but their preview clip is long enough to give you the idea.

Digital Video Editing - "Comparing CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP Displays"

Digital Video Editing has posted a three part series on display technology. Part I measured, analyzed and compared primary specs like Black-Level, Color Temperature, Peak Brightness, Dynamic Range, and Contrast for each display. Part II looked at Gray-Scale, Gamma, Primary Chromaticities and Color Gamut to see how they all affect color and gray-scale. Currently Part IIIa looks at Artifacts and how they affect Image Quality. Future article,Part IIIb, will discuss the computer and video viewing tests. They then plan to analyze and assess each display technology in detail and tie together all of the results from Parts I to IIIa.

Notation3: A Rough Guide to N3

Notation3, or "N3" as it is more commonly known, is a shorthand non-XML serialization of RDF, designed with human-readability in mind. According to the Notation3 Specification, it was created as an experiment in optimizing the "expression of data and logic in the same language".

The format is being developed by Tim Berners-Lee, with input from Dan Connolly at al.

McCain Tries to Restore LPFM

Yesterday Sen. McCain made good on an earlier promise to submit a bill to restore LPFM to the FCC's original 2000 standards. The bill cites the FCC's Mitre report, which soundly falsified the NAB's contention that LPFM poses an interference threat to full-power stations, as justification for reversing Congress' evisceration of LPFM back in 2000, which required LPFM stations to obey the same spacing requirements as full-power stations, operating with as much as 100 times more power.

If passed, this bill would probably allow for thousands more stations to go on the air, especially in urban areas--including the top 50 largest radio markets--where there are no frequencies available for full-power stations.

(Read the rest of this post at mediageek)

Psiloc miniGPS

Perform defined actions based on your location taken from your network.

Psiloc miniGPS is a powerful tool to locate yourself in the GSM network! Its main goal is to perform defined actions based on your location taken from your network. It also shows the details of the network cell, to which your phone is logged in at the moment.

EV-DV Cell Chips

STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments today announced they are sampling the industry's first standard 1xEV-DV chip (for Evolution - Data and Video).

The 1xEV-DV standard can send voice and data on a single cellular channel and provide both voice and broadband to cell phones, PDAs, and laptops. By contrast, 1XEV-DO (Data Only) standard, exemplified by Verizon's $79/mo EV-DO data service, can only provide data. Voice users need another service.

Developers claim EV-DV will deliver ten times the speeds provided by current cdma2000 1X and GPRS solutions, while simultaneously supporting voice.

TI's dual-processor TBB5160 digital baseband communications engine provides high-speed packet data service (up to 3.1 Mbps), quality-of-service functions to support real-time services and simultaneous voice-and-data services. In addition, 1xEV-DV is backward compatible with the IS-2000 1X and IS-95 standards for compliance with both standards.

To ensure availability of devices and equipment ready for commercial deployment of 1xEV-DV technology, TI and ST are collaborating with Nokia for interoperability testing with South Korea-based LG Telecom. The Korean wireless operator plans commercial deployment of EV-DV services in South Korea.

Sprint has yet to jump (see DailyWireless The Other Broadband Standard).

Meanwhile GSM provider Cingular may counter with HSDPA (see DailyWireless Cellular At The Races).

Robert Scoble on The Blogging Camera

I'm probably the last one to point to the OJR article on RSS, but the traffic graph there matches the ones I've seen. RSS traffic is doubling every month. And has been for the past year.

Dave Winer is saying now that new innovation is needed to really take syndication to the next stage.

Imagine a digital camera with Wifi built in, and with something like Radio UserLand built in. Now that'd be crazy, huh? Take a picture, have it automatically thrown up to a weblog whenever there's connectivity (which is quite often now -- even the San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium has WiFi).

Nikon has a camera with Wifi built in (quite cool, but quite expensive -- a Microsoft engineer used that at the recent WinHec to take pictures and automatically display them on a new picture frame. You can see Ivan's notes on how to build your own digital picture frame here on Channel9. All you need is an old laptop you aren't using anymore. I got a demo of this and it's crazy awesome.)

(Found @ buzzmachine)

Good swarms

Steven Johnson not only gives some link charity to Spirit of America, he also seems something bigger going on here -- good swarms:

But the site makes me wonder whether this isn't the beginning of a fascinating new chapter in the web's gift economy. Thanks to the passion of the bloggers themselves, and clustering technologies like Technorati and Blogdex, we've already mastered the art of locating and quickly swarming around the week's hot news item or thinkpiece. (You know the drill: Clay posts a provocative essay about power laws on Monday, and by Friday there are fifty in-depth responses, a dozen fact checks, ten suggestions for future research, and a handful of requests for the Lazy Web.) What Spirit Of America suggests is a version of that swarming directed towards Good Causes: someone halfway across the globe (or halfway across the country, or the county) puts out a call for help setting up a wi-fi network in an under-funded school, or repairing a sewage treatment facility, and within five days they're flooded with funds, spare parts, technical expertise, and good will. And when the network goes online, or the sewage starts getting processed again, we all get to see the results. (Maybe not so fun for sewage, but you get the idea.) And then we get to move on to the next cause.

Doc Searles on 'Radio Really Simplicated'

Doc Searles has a four-step program for reinventing radio. I just spent the last half hour trying to write a summary of his post when someone forwards me a link -- it seems Jeff Jarvis' has already put it perfectly:

Doc sees that bet and ups it four four big ideas. He wants stations, starting with NPR et al, to send out RSS notifications with programs. I want to hear more about what that can do (which is my way of saying I'm too stupid to get the full potential). Second, wants big companies to partner with small developers and he links to some examples. Yup. Third, he wants to improve the software we use to play Internet radio. Amen. Fourth, and this is where the brain starts to blow, he said:

...we need to take this chance to break radio free from the notion that it's just a commercial utility controlled by government and exempt from constitutional as well as common sense protections of free speech. That means we start our own stations, on which we play, much as we now blog, what we please. But not on the old broadcast model. Instead, on the new RSS-fortified interactive model. The one with the civic gestures we call links.

Imagine a world in which all this comes together to take an old medium and explode and reinvent it:

: New means of transport bring richer data.
: New means of transport bring two-way communication.
: New means of transport bring new commerce and financial support.
: New high-speed, always-on-everywhere means of communication (3G cellular, wi-fi, and their successors) bring high-quality entertainment and communication to you wherever you go.
: New authoring tools allow anyone to create high-quality entertainment and distribute it to the world and even raise support for it.
: New tools yield new passion and new outlets for talent (see blogs)
: The result, as Doc says, is blog radio: an explosion of choice, talent, commerce, communication, interaction, entertainment.

MusicBrainz Wiki

Development wiki for the MusicBrainz music metadata repository.

WiFi WANs and LANs

A recent Register article on a new program that permits automatic discovery and creation of a filesharing LAN via WiFi has been getting a lot of attention recently (Promiscuous BluePod file swapping - coming to a PDA near you). I didn't really look closely at the article because, to be honest, I kind of assumed such a tool already existed. This is important software, but I think the spin is missing much of the point.

It is clear to me that the basic software concept is a no brainer and even a necessity in our increasingly unwired world. After all, there are many obvious legitimate uses for such a service. Anytime people gather physically such software would be very useful in transfering all sorts of files and information. Papers and notes can be zapped around during meetings, conferences and class. For more examples of non-music related uses, see Social Twister: Pocket Rendezvous: Spawning Connectivity.

However, the music sharing aspect is less impressive to me. I have to disagree with Derek Slater on how interesting it is (WiFi File-Swapping). I don't really see much more than novelty value in being able to join a filesharing network with complete strangers in a physical space. Are you really going to want to share that much with strangers you pass on the street or a local coffeeshop? It is one thing to be able to transfer with someone you've made some connection with, but to promiscuously advertise your files and interests to everyone around? Sure, such software would make fileswapping parties a bit easier, but they're not that hard to set up in the first place.

(Read the rest of this post at Copyfight.)

Seth Says We're All Journalists

Seth Godin wonders out loud: "Now that anyone who wants to be a journalist CAN be a journalist, are the ethics going to get better... or worse?" It's something PR pros should definitely ponder. We're entering a new world where many personal journalists will not follow the white line that most journalists adhere to. Some will, some won't. It could get wild and woolly.

Blogosphere Keeps Cosby Story Alive

Bill Hobbs points to a story by Matt Rosenberg on how the Cosby story spread slowly but steadily throughout the blogsophere, even as big media ignored it.

New JIME on educational semantic web

The current issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education is devoted to the semantic web in education.

Horse-powered laptop

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the sun will eventually be one of the primary sources of power for p2p-on-the-move.

And indeed, "gadget lovers are using solar panels to power their toys in the remotest places - like Mt. Everest, altitude 29,029 feet," says a Reuters story, going on:

"In the wilds or on the road, solar panels that fold into notebook-size cases are charging everything from notebook computers to cameras and Palm Pilots. And bikers and backpackers have been testing systems, "many of them homemade contraptions that include a few batteries wired together to provide current for laptops that will last a few hours".

Is It News or Opinion or Does It Matter?

Excellent piece by Jay Rosen at PressThink on changing dynamics of the political press. His main conclusion:

He said, she said is nowhere near enough, and every time things are left that way the press loses influence. Advertising that you're unbiased is also not enough. The press should go further. It should draw defensible conclusions, and make its way forward by defending, explaining--publicly justifying--those conclusions.

A couple other interesting points include:

"the press" (including the campaign press) isn't confined within news organizations anymore. Universities (Columbia, Penn, USC) have a piece of it, as they have for a long time in book publishing.

Authority in journalism is up grabs today; credentials matter less, but they still matter. ... But having good informaton matters more, relative to an "established" reputation, because people will find what's good...

(Found at PJNet Today)

Bootstrapping a directory of aggregators

Every news site has to reinvent the wheel with a page that explains their RSS feeds (a good thing) and an incomplete list of pointers to aggregators. Further, the lists don't include objective information, they just point to the marketing sites for the programs. They're usually very nice-looking, but rarely tell the whole story.

One of my goals in starting the Really Simple Syndication site was to develop a list of aggregators, and a process for keeping the list current. I'd like the vendors to participate, in several ways -- by keeping pricing and technical information about the products up to date, and to help us understand features supported by their product, and how they compare to competitive offerings. Of course, I'd like to have all the claims verified by users of the products.

I want to do this for a couple of reasons. First, the obvious one -- with better information about products this small industry can develop into a healthy industry. The best products rise to the top, and the new ones have a clear understanding of what the competition does. It will make features and performance the basis for comparison, and that's a good thing.

(Read the rest of this post at reallySimpleSyndic News)

Cartoon Guide to Spectrum Policy (no, really)

The New America Foundation, publishers of Kevin's terrific Radio Revolution paper as well as a graphics-heavy presentation of a Citizen's Guide to the Airvaves, has now published a Cartoon Guide to Spectrum Policy, which describes the current limitations of spectrum policy in citizen-friendly terms.

It's a tool for getting your non-techie friends to understand both what's wrong with the way we mis-allocate spectrum today and what's at stake for the future.

RIAA wants your fingerprints

Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.
Established biometric vendor Veritouch has teamed up with Swedish design company to produce iVue: a wireless media player that allows content producers to lock down media files with biometric security. This week Veritouch announced that it had demonstrated the device to the RIAA and MPAA.

NTT DoCoMo hits 300Mbps in 4G research

NTT DoCoMo said it achieved a maximum downstream data rate of 300Mbps (bits per second), with an average rate of 135Mbps. The data rate was achieved during a field experiment in a car running at a speed of 30 kilometers per hour at distances between 800 meters and 1 kilometer from 4G wireless base stations.

Esther Dyson on Participatory Media

"...the rise of user-generated content marks a huge shift in the media business. The inclination to represent ourselves in word and image may have existed practically forever, but the tools for creating and distributing those words and images are new... The implications for businesses are broad, starting with relatively reduced demand for "asymmetrical" bandwidth, such as cable or satellite, where there's lots of communication capacity to download content but not much to upload it. People aren't just downloading music; they're uploading their own creative efforts... Lisa Gansky, chairman and president of Ofoto, says, "In Western Europe, Korea and Japan, where the cameraphone markets are most mature, we see that group or community authoring of online photo displays is a regular practice. The ability to do 'storytelling' and rapid-share or live shares is pretty compelling to many kinds of folks.""

Excerpt from Mirror of Our Lives, by Esther Dyson, 3/31/04, (via Seb's Open Research)

We Media Same as Community Journalism

Article in Newspaper & Technology says We Media, participatory journalism, as spelled out by Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman, is no more than old-fashioned small newspaper community friendly journalism.

The New Communications Ecosystem

The movement to free up wireless capacity for innovative uses is part of a larger shift in the communications world. Services and business models are changing, but so are the players. The neat separation between "technology" and "telecom" companies is breaking down.

Telecom policy used to be the preserve of a fairly well-defined club. There were the wireline carriers, mostly dominant incumbents but in recent years including competitive entrants. And there were the mobile phone operators. Throw in the relevant equipment vendors, and you had a pretty comprehensive list of companies focused on the business of providing communications capacity.

Enter unlicensed wireless. The leading vendors selling WiFi gear are data networking companies like Cisco/Linksys. The service providers getting into the market are focused first on Internet access and related data services. Usage growth is being driven by connections in laptops and new applications such as networked gaming. New markets are being created.

(Continue reading this post at Wireless Unleashed)

Broadcatching, the Future of Television News and the Death of Chattering Monkeys

This was actually a piece I had been planning to write for some time and never quite got around to and now it seems that Jon Udell has beaten me to it (Broadcatching: the RSS-ification of television news). Udell is considering the implications of Brett Singer's television news clip playlist (News Video-Daily), which I noted last week: Video Playlists. Lucas Gonze, one of the leaders of the playlist community, also has a couple of comments on the issue: Brett Singer's comment on his collection of news video clips and Jon Udell on Brett's video playlists. In fact, Gonze points out one of the more interesting implications of "broadcatch news": the lack of a need for "chattering monkeys inserting patter between clips."

As Udell notes, television remains a very popular and important medium. It is precisely because of its importance that I think broadcatching is a critical element in democratizing media, something I also noted earlier today on Copyfight (Commercials - Rip, Mix, Post on a Website).

(Continue reading this post at Corante:The Importance of...)

New York City Film Resource

New York City Film Resource. The New York City Film Resource is a directory for film and media professionals! This independently-run website is made for the New York City filmmaking and media community. [New York Film Blog] [New York City Film Resource] [Cinema Minima]

Fair Use for photos on the web and in blogs: a modest proposal to avoid a major battle.

Let's face it, blogging has been a copyright free-for-all over the past couple of years. People grab photos here, quote a paragraph (or more) there and no one seems to care since a) blogs aren't making money and b) if you're grabbing a photo or paragraph you're linking to the person. Additionally, some more sophisticated users know that there are provisions for "fair use" of others content when reporting news.

No attorney can tell you for certain if it legal to use someone else's photo or text - it is a judgment call based on a number of factors like how much of the original you use and if the use of that original content damages the authors ability to make money.

Today, for the first time, someone got upset at us for using one of their images in a 70 word blog post that is sending dozens of people a day to their website. I'm trying to explain to the person that we'll take it down if they want, even though we could use a thumbnail/cropped photo by the fair use provisions as reports, but that we would rather work with them to come to a partnership.

I mean, we could just not send this person any traffic ever again. Blacklist their site. Ban them getting out traffic. It would be no problem for us. However, that is not good for the audience looking for links to important information and it is not good for them because, well, they could use the free traffic!

(Read the rest of this post at The Nanopublishing Weblog)

Who owns a weblog's content? (Seb Paquet)

For a year or so the Invisible Adjunct weblog has provided a forum for academics to (mostly) discuss issues relating to campus politics and working conditions in academia. Last March the anonymous author decided to leave the profession and sign off from her weblog. The only problem is that over time a real community has gathered around that weblog, and those people clearly want to continue talking - as the 200-odd comments on the sign-off post attest.

I figured some of them would rather switch boats than go down with the sinking ship, so I created an Invisible Adjunct channel on the Internet Topic Exchange to aggregate relevant posts from members of the community. Much to my pleasure the channel has been put to good use by interested parties: about a hundred posts have appeared on the channel so far.

But another threat is looming on the horizon - the IA is planning to take down the site a week from now. This means all the content will vanish. The site hasn't been indexed by the Internet Archive since June of last year. (Ironically, the last post that shows on the Wayback machine is precisely about the loss of archives!) And the IA hasn't allowed mirroring.

(Read the rest of this post over at Many-to-Many)

The End of Work as We Know It

Movie Making - A Cottage Industry? - The end of work as we know it. I normally pass by pieces about Apple on my Apple Splash Page but this one caught my eye.

The essence of the Industrial system is that it used very expensive tools and processes that could only be owned by the corporate entity. So we all became employees and went off to work. This post is about how the producer of the BBC's most popular Gardening Show, Ground Force,who with his partner and assistant edits his show at their cottage in the country using an Apple system and software (A G4 and Final Cut Pro)....

[Read the rest of this post at Robert Paterson's Weblog]

Bram Cohen tips-off Bit Torrent 2 protocol features

Here's a quite technical description of what's being implemented for version 2 of Bit Torrent protocol.

After much arguing, cogitating, arguing, and cogitating, the bt2 protocol

designs are now further along than they were before.

Features planned for bt2 -

merkle hash trees - this is by far the most compelling reason to break compatibility. Files in a multi-file will each have their own hash root.

udp-based tracker protocol (with http-based alternative for those who care less about bandwidth than convenience)

The Wireless Backpack Repeater

"So, you've decided to do a webcast around the streets of Bristol, but your puny wireless NIC isn't up to it? You need the ultimate wireless repeater! Built from an old backpack, a lead acid battery, a Linksys wireless device, and a rather scary antenna, this wireless repeater will get you webcasting from over a mile away." You'd definitely burn extra calories hiking with that thing.

How Do You Create a Community?

I've been thinking a lot about online communities. I have a team of graduate students this quarter who have been exploring what we're calling "hyperlocal citizens' media." The question they're trying to answer is whether it's possible to build an online community oriented to a town or neighborhood -- one where citizens share information and make connections that aren't being fostered by metropolitan newspapers or local TV. To test some of their ideas, they've launched a real site (GoSkokie) that real residents of their chosen community have begun to really use. They've also been posting periodically to a (...)

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Coming soon, TiVo on the Go

For past few months I have watched Microsoft flex its muscles, and use its hype machine to talk about its portable media players. Actually what really intrigued me was little or no response from TiVo to all the noise. When I posed this question to one of my supremely connected sources in Silicon Valley, he said, just wait. Intrigued, I made a few phone calls and found that TiVo could be announcing TiVo on the Go, before end of the month.

Apparently, the company is likely to announce a spec (that will feature some sort of a micro drive) and will allow device makers to come up with a non-Microsoft portable media player. I am not too sure, because earlier in the year, TiVo had talked about a laptop centric TiVo On The Go.

For the first time, TiVo subscribers with Home Media Option will be able to move their favorite programs stored on a TiVo DVR to a laptop for viewing on the road, or to any PC. For those who have a PC equipped with a DVD burner, programs can then be burned to DVD so users can take the TiVo experience with them wherever they go.

Audiovisual Granular Synthesis for Composition and Performance

Parsons' Michael Bernstein created an application/process Audiovisual Granular Synthesis for Composition and Performance, "an investigation of the atomic elements of digital sound and graphics, and how they can be related and expressed through performance . . .Once audio and visual grains are composed separately, they are linked together by mapping between intermediate representations, a technique used to ascertain sameness between signals. The final manifestation of these paired grains are viewable as a full screen animation for the visual component and a stereo sound component. The graphical explorations in this thesis have led to an advancement in the augmentation of texture synthesis to include controls for temporal coherence during synthesized textural animations."

Commix

Commix, created by Parsons' Ming-Yen (Booker) Chen, is a clever idea and a fun interface for instant messaging. Login in and chat with a buddy by creating a comic strip out of the conversation.

SpyBot Wall Climbing Camera Bot

Okay, if you're not a filthy pervert, skip to the last paragraph. Thanks.

So what I need from you is $14k. I know it sounds like a lot, but if you cough it up I can get you one of these SpyBot Climber R/C robots that traverse and adhere to all sorts of surfaces, like the brickwork on that building across the street and you'll be able to wireless transmit images from the apartment of your 100% authentic girlfriend. Sure, you haven't talked to her yet, but with after reconnoitering her place for a while you'll be able to finally break the ice with openers like, "Hey, I'm out of toilet paper, too!" Okay, now go away.

For everybody else, isn't creepy how much this looks like a normal device, like a service box or something? Except most gas meters don't crawl up the side of buildings, at least not during the day. I wonder if the 'patented technology' allows it to stay in place even when the battery runs out? It better for $14,000.

Read [iOffer via TRFJ]

Future Intel Mobile Chips to Add Location-Based Services

Though it's impossible to consider without thinking of the inevitable exploits (from Big Brotherish agencies and rowdy script kiddies alike), Intel has said they are developing support within their mobile processor line to allow computers to be aware of their physical location at all times. Although nothing is set in stone yet, Intel is working with others (Microsoft, for example) to add features that would integrate simple things like, say, selection of which printer to use based on proximity into future laptops and mobile devices. Sounds okay, but also the sort of thing that will probably hit all at once as mobile phones are already gaining GPS abilities and Bluetooth short range communication -- soon all of our devices will know where you are and will be happy to tattle to each other where you're hiding, whether you like it or not.

Read [Computerworld]

Lifelike Ultra High Definition Video

Hey, who told the Times' Circuits section about something interesting? You made us miss a incisive column they were going to write about why spam is bad how some people like the iPod. Instead, we got this profile of Japanese broadcaster NHK's work to develop Ultra High Definition Video (UHDV), the 7,680 by 4,320 pixel resolution television standard that aims to hit 'as good as really there' levels of visual fidelity (you know, the kind of quality so good that it makes people puke from watching it. The awesome kind, I'm saying.) Take that massive resolution, add a 60 frame per second refresh and 22 channels of surround sound ("10 speakers at ear level, 9 above and 3 below, with another 2 for low frequency effects") and you end up with video files that end up taking up 3.5 terabytes of storage for just 18 minutes of footage. Don't expect UHDV anytime soon, of course. NHK started developing HDTV, which is just now taking hold, in the 1960s. (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

Read [NYTimes]

the top sample sources

First of all there is The Top Sample Sources List which ranks the most popular movies, TV-series and other similar kinds of sample sources based on how frequently spoken lines from these sources have been sampled and used in some sort of musical context. Then there is The Top Sampling Groups List which is based on the former, but its ranking is instead based on how frequently these groups use samples of spoken lines. These lists started out to as being compiled mainly by the help of, and contributions from, the readers of the Usenet group rec.music.industrial, in which these lists once upon a time were born. Today the lists have grown to include most other music styles as well.

Chaku-motion! Video clips replacing ringtones in Japan

We thought we were pretty hot when we put The Final Countdown as the ringtone on our Treo, but in Japan, a country which regularly shames us with its gadget savvy, ringtons are so over. These days it's all about chaku-motion, short video clips that play on your phone everytime it rings, like of guitar solos or pop singers shouting out "You've got a phone call!" or whatever.

[Via Moconews]

Commercials - Rip, Mix, Post on a Website (Ernest Miller)

GrepLaw points to an excellent group of remixed commercials that take familiar sales imagery and turn them into political and social commentary (Commercial Remixes). You can see the commercials here: Commercial Jams. GrepLaw guesses that,

Hummer , FOX, Army, Air Force, Kodak, Sports Center, Ravioli, and Fleet aren't too happy about seeing their content ripped, mixed, and burned in this fashion.

BBC opens up to CC

The BBC recently announced they'll be opening up their archive and applying Creative Commons licenses to the works. A group of interested folks have started a list to talk about the release and produced a petition to support the decision.

Plogs

Amazon uses the blog form to make recommendations in what it calls a plog -- a personalized blog.

Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog.

The Economics of Connectivity

One of the key differences between traditional wireless networks and unlicensed systems such as WiFi is the way they distribute costs. It's not just a question of cheaper or more expensive. Who pays, for what, and at what point can determine adoption patterns more than the aggregate level of spending.

Continue reading this post at Wireless Unleashed.

Dave Winer: why big media should embrace RSS

Dave Winer has a new RSS blog.  Today's post gives a very persuasive explanation of why and how major news companies will benefit from embracing RSS, ASAP.

In response to Dave's blog, Ben Sinclair has started a syndication blog. Dave has pointed to it.

Dave also pointed to a great post on feeds by Julie Leung: " ...if you give a girl a blog then she'll want an RSS feed. And if you give a girl an RSS feed, she's going to ask for an aggregator...." Be sure to read the comments.

Music Industry DRM Firms Want You To Pay To Restrict Your Fair Use

You know, I wrote this big, stupid rant (which is after the jump if you really want to read it) but let me cut to the quick: The music industry just took your lunch money, and now they want you to pay them to do it again.

Read [CNet via TechDirt]

Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta

Microsoft released their technical beta of Windows Media Player 10 for download. The major features include a new interface, a built in online store (with choice of stores), an all in one smart jukebox as well as the most important item: enhanced device support. The enhanced device support includes Auto-Sync which "enables the seamless, automatic synchronization of music, video, and even recorded TV and photos to supported portable devices". It looks like you'll be able to map a hard drive or storage location like a PPC or Smartphone to Auto-Sync as well as transfer TV shows from the media center to a portable media center, we're not sure what is and isn't supported yet but we're going to check it out now.

Group-Blog on Spectrum Issues

Kevin Werbach, Clay Shirky, Andrew Odlyzko, and David Isenberg have launched Wireless Unleashed, a group weblog. Kevin says:

The site focuses on the benefits of reallocating low-frequency wireless capacity from broadcasting to unlicensed applications, both here and around the world. There is a huge amount of capacity which could be used for two-way applications like broadband to the home, but which is locked up in broadcast allocations based on 1950s technology. Freeing up that capacity could create massive opportunities for innovation, and could dramatically lower the costs of wireless connectivity in developing countries. The blog will serve as a sounding board for our commentary on this issue. We will be writing whitepapers as well.

Solid-State Mini-ITX Linux Recording Studio HOWTO

"LinuxDevices.com has posted a project howto on building a dedicated music recording and editing computer that uses a CompactFlash card instead of a hard drive, to eliminate hard disk chatter. It uses the latest release from the Agnula (GNU/Linux Audio) project, and the newest Epia MII-12000 mini-ITX board from VIA. The method described in the article applies to embedding most any Knoppix-based Live CD onto CompactFlash boot media."

Shareaza 2.0 Released Under GPL

RageEar writes "Today it was announced that the latest version of Shareaza, a popular P2P application for Windows, was released under the GPL. Currently the source code is hosted by the Shareaza servers, but the announcement makes mention of the code becoming a project on Sourceforge. The binaries are still available for Windows only, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a Linux port emerges."

Open source QuickTime initiative

Very interesting project, includes a beta version of a broadcasting app as well. From the site:

OpenQuicktime aims to be a portable library for handling Apple's QuickTime popular media files on Unix-like environments. It is aim is to provide encoding, authoring and editing support as well as video playback.

Future news models

Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin, Co-Directors of the Media Center at the American Press Institute, told an international gathering of editors over the weekend of their "visible future" for the news business. This involves creating models based on "the things we know are happening, and how things are emerging." Interesting stuff.

The first is called the "know-trust network" ó a personal community where informal networks are exchanging news, information and conversation. "They are becoming the principle means of learning and discovery," said Mr. Peskin and they could eclipse traditional media.

The second is referred to a digital everything. "All news and information will need to be virtual, digital and mobile," he said.

And the third proposition is the power of an individual person. "The individual ó not large institutions, will exert unprecedented power," he said.

Significant Procedural Victory in Broadcast Flag Lawsuit

Prof. Susan Crawford reports good news regarding a court challenge to the broadcast flag (Broadcast flag order).

Several groups, including the American Library Association, Public Knowledge, Consumers' Union and others, have challenged the FCC's jurisdiction to issue the broadcast flag rule. A very short version of the argument is that Congress didn't give the FCC carte blanc to regulate all consumer electronics that might have to deal with a video signal. Anyway, the FCC claimed that the court should wait to hear the challenge until the FCC has considered requests to make the existing rule even more aggrandizing. The court has rejected that argument and ordered the case to continue undelayed. Read the one page court order: American Library Association v. Federal Communications Commission [PDF].

More evidence that permission barriers endanger preservation

J. Carlos Fernandez-Molina, Contractual and technological approaches for protecting digital works: their relationship with copyright limitations, Online Information Review, 28, 2 (2004) pp. 148-157.

Abstract: "To deal with the new circumstances arising in the digital environment, with its particular conditions for the access, distribution and use of intellectual works, three distinct approaches exist: legal (copyright laws are modified to adapt them to the new context), technological (systems designed to control access and use of works), and contractual (through licenses to regulate the conditions of use of the works). The joint use of technological measures and licenses, together with the laws that protect both, are seriously endangering the effectiveness of the limitations to copyright set forth by law to benefit libraries, their users and citizens in general. This represents a strong privatisation of access to information. Using as a point of reference the laws of countries that are on the front lines of this terrain - the USA, the European Union and Australia - some problems created by the new forms of protection of intellectual works are examined."

Does RSS Cause the Media to Lose Traffic?

Would a big media company lose all their traffic (and thus revenues) if they supported RSS? Dave Winer has answers.

Allied Media Conference, June 18-20, 2004

In just a few weeks I will be making my third trek to the Allied Media Conference in Bowling Green, OH, happening June 18 - 20. This event, which started as the Underground Publishing Conference, is an amazing meeting of the minds of independent media that keeps growing and improving this year. I'm really excited for the keynote address by Mark Hosler of Negativland and the Saturday night performance by the Evens, featuring Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina.

I saw Hosler at the Reclaim the Media Conference in 2002, where he related some engaging anecdotes and showed some of Negativland's video work. At the AMC, Hosler will premiere Negativland's "The Mashin' of the Christ."

I am preparing the second mediageek to be ready for the AMC. mediageek #1 made its premiere at the AMC last year. The kind folks at Clamor Magazine put on the AMC, and they also put out the annual Zine Yearbook, which compiles some of the best writing and illustration that appeared in zines during the last year. I'm pleased and honored to note that this year's edition, Zine Yearbook 8, has a piece from mediageek #1.

If you can make the trip to Bowling Green, OH for one weekend, the AMC is worth the trip. Even if only to see an energetic bunch of independent media makers take over this sleepy college town for three days.

Samsung A700 Won't Support Videophone

SprintPCSInfo is reporting that the upcoming Samsung A700 will not be able to support two-way live video streaming as has been rumored, allowing only video clips to be sent from phone to phone in much the same manner as almost every newish phone on the market. The Qualcomm encoding/decoding platform does look fairly robust, though, with the ability to stream television near 30 frames per second and play back MPEG-4 Level 2 video clips (DivX/XviD, for instance) as well as 3GPP, H.263, RealVideo, and MotionJPEG. Basically, you'll be able to watch pretty much any video you want on this phone, if that's your thing.

3G is so last week

This may seem a touch premature when most of the world is still getting to grips with rolling out 3G services, but Japan's NTT DoCoMo is already doing tests for 4G, and the numbers are stunning. Get this: 300Mbps from a moving car, and the target is to achieve downstream speeds of 1Gbps when stationary. They're getting an average of over 100Mbps, too, which is as at least as fast as any fiberoptic connection you can get at the moment, and means you can stream HDTV to your phone. That seems a touch pointless given that the small screen size would mean you miss out on a lot of the detail HDTV offers, but then again seeing every pore on Britney's face isn't near the top of our list of
things to do before we die.

Sun confirms decision to open source Solaris

In an announcement made today at a press conference in Asia, Sun President and Chief Operating Office Jonathan Schwartz said that Sun plans to open source its Solaris operating system. However, Sun still wants to maintain a high level of control over the OS. According to Schwartz, this is out of a desire to avoid having Solaris split up into different distributions ? la Linux.

Lightening the load for sneakernets?

As reported in Wired, Japan's NTT has developed this new media format, a small, plastic card called Info-MICA that can be cheaply mass-produced and can now hold 1GB of data (they plan on upping this to at least 10GB in the future).

They're read-only and the per-unit cost will supposedly be low, but only when produced in large batches on expensive machines. NTT is shopping Info-MICA to music labels who they hope will show interest because they claim the media will be tough to pirate.

Keep your desktop in your pocket

If you're really hardcore about traveling light, you might want to become the ultimate road warrior and dispense with your laptop or PDA altogether and get M-System's Xkey 2.0, a USB key drive with a 32-bit processor inside it that lets you run programs right off of it.

The idea is to have everything you need for work (email, databases, Java applets) stored on the portable drive, and then you can just plug it into any PC you can find (maybe hotels could even offer loaner laptops to business travelers), and you have a fully functional workstation, exactly like the one you use at work. Even better than that? Unplug it from the PC and it leaves no traces of your work behind - the Xkey 2.0 even removes web browser cookies and all temporary files.

Open access to images and image metadata

The W3photo Project is creating photo archives with OA (open access) images and OA image metadata. The OA metadata will include semantic-web information designed to make the images "more available to the visually impaired".

Despite efforts to avoid piracy new Harry Potter already available for download

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban opened yesterday in Europe. Armies of ushers using infra-red vision goggles were seen at British theatres trying to avoid the unavoidable. The movie is already available through P2P networks. The ITIC identified various qualities and versions (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian…) which now propagate at a rate of 318,592 downloads per hour (minimal values). While uploaders seem to remain online and active, the number of downloaders is still growing up all around the world

Vue Cinemas said its staff will spend all two hours and 22 minutes of the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban scanning the theaters in an effort to uncover anyone trying to secretly record the film. The goggles were distributed to Vue Cinemas around Britain, along with copies of the film, by Warner Bros. The company is determined to fight back after a deluge of poor-quality copies of the first two Harry Potter movies hit the black market.

ISWC 04 Wearables conference

ISWC '04 Colocated with IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. ISWC 2004, the eighth annual IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, will bring together researchers, product vendors, fashion designers, textile manufacturers, users, and all other interested parties to share information and advances in wearable computing. We invite you to attend ISWC 2004 and submit to one or more of the following categories: papers, posters, demonstrations, tutorials, and exhibits.

Need a Max object, look here:

Max Objects Database From the site: We all waste time in looking for objects and unless having the memory of a genius, it's impossible to keep in mind all of them and what they are designed for.

First Live Shot From An Airplane Used Two PC's

It's a Bird. It's a Plane. It's a Live Shot From 35,000 Feet

The Internet service on the plane sent the signal via satellite, while Mr. Knutsson used a Sony laptop and a Toshiba laptop computer-one for audio and one for video. He relied on a voice over Internet protocol service to send the audio signal and used a regular interruptible feedback earpiece to hear the anchors.

Quorum offers multimode GSM+Wi-Fi radios

Quorum Systems has demonstrated the world's first fully-integrated multi-mode GSM and Wi-Fi transceiver chip. The Quorum Connection 2530 integrated radio frequency transceiver is able to support both wireless local area network (WLAN) and Quad Band GSM cellular applications simultaneously, without interference between the two signals. That opens up the possibility for smaller devices that fully support both GSM and Wi-Fi signals and can transparently switch back and forth between the two as needed. Such devices could, for example, automatically use Voice-over-IP (VoIP) for voice transmission while on a Wi-Fi network or switch to traditional GSM when outside of a Wi-Fi hot spot. The chip is available to sample to OEMs, and Quorum is currently assisting potential adopters in testing the chip in prototype equipment.

The Creation of the Media

I just finished reading "The Creation of the Media," by Paul Starr, a sociology professor here at Princeton. This is an important book and I recommend it highly.

Starr traces the history of communications and the media in the U.S., from the 1700s until 1940. The major theme of the book is that the unique features of U.S. media derive from political choices made in the early days of each technology. These choices, once made, can be very difficult to unmake later -- witness the challenges now in reconsidering the use of the radio spectrum. After reading Starr's book, there can be little doubt that the choices we make now will shape the development of the Internet for a very long time.

For a concise summary of the book, it's hard to beat the review in Sunday's New York Times, by James Fallows.

In his limited space, Fallows leaves out one pattern noted by Starr that carries obvious lessons for us. When U.S. policy was at its best, it refused to give the titans of one technology control over the next technology that came along. For example, the Post Office was not given control of the telegraph; Western Union did not control the telephone; and AT&T was locked out of radio. The lessons for us now, when the masters of old technologies, such as the movies and recorded music, want to control Internet technologies, should be obvious.

A radio station on your shoulder

UK readers may recall with nostalgia the radio Outside Broadcast vans that you used to (and can still, in fact) find outside sporting events, bristling with antennae and hooked up to a sheaf of cables running to the commentary box inside the stadium. However, following that most Japanese principle that anything large exists only to be made smaller, and anything small smaller still, the outside broadcast van (minus the vehicular bits, obviously) now fits into a brick that you can hang from a shoulder strap. NEC's mobilestudio is a 10 x 25 x 23 cm box that comes in orange and sky blue as well as the obligatory black, and houses an ISDN router, amp, mike sockets, and a slot for an NTT DoCoMo FOMA 3G data card. The use of the cellphone network obviously means that you can broadcast from pretty much anywhere, though the fact that 3G waves don't go around corners all that well leads us to wonder how good this is indoors. We hope the battery's replaceable, too, as it only lasts an hour.

The biggest question, though, has to be why one of these is strictly necessary when every radio station in the world is set up for phone-ins and there are noise-cancelling headsets like theBoom on the market (the higher-quality audio that comes from NEC's proprietary MPEG-4-variant codec, perhaps?). Especially since a mobilestudio will set you back Y990,000 (US$9,000), or Y2 mn if you go for the fully-loaded version, and you need two - one outside and one at the studio - to actually use the system. Ironically, many Japanese TV stations are already using FOMA videophones to get quick, rough-and-ready on-the-spot reporting, without the need for a 3kg lump
hung over your shoulder.

Canada to Embrace Permission Culture? (Donna Wentworth)

Michael Geist's latest column on copyright law in Canada contains yet another argument for the necessity of Creative Commons licenses: Toronto-area MP Sarmite Bulte is pushing for an interpretation of the law that embraces and codifies permission culture:

Although [Bulte's committee] acknowledges that some work on the Internet is intended to be freely available, the committee recommends the adoption of the narrowest possible definition of publicly available. Its vision of publicly-available includes only those works that are not technologically or password protected and contain an explicit notice that the material can be used without prior payment or permission.

The future of news

The Editors Weblog is blogging a worldwide confab of newspaper editors in Turkey (to which I wish I'd managed to finagle an invite). A report on the future of news by Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin of the American Press Institute, who propose three new models for news:

The first is called the "know-trust network" -- a personal community where informal networks are exchanging news, information and conversation. "They are becoming the principle means of learning and discovery," said Mr. Peskin and they could eclipse traditional media.

The second is referred to a digital everything. "All news and information will need to be virtual, digital and mobile," he said.

And the third proposition is the power of an individual person. "The individual -- not large institutions, will exert unprecedented power," he said.

"Buffett said, 'the economics of newspapers in the United States are very close to certain to deteriorate over the next 10 to 20 years.' This would be due to increased competition for advertising dollars from other media. Now, you ignore Warren Buffett at your peril. But I think it is relevant that he singled out United States newspapers, which in general have not kept pace with the product developments being seen elsewhere in the world. US

newspaper houses must innovate to survive."

[They] agreed that the newspaper "editor's role becomes more important" in a new media environment in which news can be produced and disseminated through online means such as blogs. Mr Cebri·n welcomed blogging and said he sees no obstacle to the emergence of these new forms of media, as long as editors still play an active role in monitoring and directing content.

Hacking a Linksys WRT54G "Hot Spot Blog"

How about we create a hacked "hot spot blog" version of the WRT54G? The file system out of the box has somewhere between 2-5M. We could have the units broadcast their name and IP address (something simple like - "blog: blog site name: ip address") as they quickly hand out DHCP based temporary IP addresses to the travelers/users entering their "hot zone".

The units could act as mix between a real physical blog site and a wireless/electronic billboard. Would be great fun for long trips. Bloggers along main highway exits (location, location, location) could use it for marketing and to syndicate some thin and quick local content like the local weather forcast, theater info, restaurant reviews, aggregated local blogger content, etc. Gives a true, respectible use to war driving. Kids and parents alike would love it. We could call it "blog driving". I'm sure we could come up with other uses and a better name.

Do I have any buyers for the first unit that I build and sell? The initial unit will be an alpha test unit aimed at early adopters, potential content and software developers and/or any one that is just curious of where this may all go and wants to get in helping to shape the idea early.

Phone consultants condemn sophisticated handsets for empowering users

Mako Analysis is a consultancy that recently issued an hysterical report on SymbianOS phones, warning that giving telco customers devices that they can install software on created a "loophole" that allows "consumers" to avoid the extortionate tarrifs charged on things like information services and ringtones. The consultants advise carriers to provide less-capable phones to their customers as a way of protecting their rackets:

"The increasing sophistication of high-end mobile devices opens up a range of additional problems and will continue to undermine the data revenue streams of mobile operators at a time when they desperately need them to be increasing," a Mako spokesperson said...

"As with any new device feature," the spokesperson continued, "it will eventually infiltrate into medium and low-end terminals, in the case of practically every other advancement this would be welcomed. This historical approach has lead us to blindly encourage the addition of increasingly sophisticated devices throughout the range, in the case of open platform operating systems our approach surely has to be one of caution."