unmediated

"The NYTimes has a story, with some spooky-cool pictures, about software to extract exactly what image a person is seeing with their eyes, just from the reflection on their cornea. You can see even a wider image than the subject and tell what they're specifically focusing on. It's too bad the coolest tech is immediately subverted for evil. The possible applications listed include 'surveillance cameras that spot suspicious behavior.' Remind anyone of that scene in the movie 'Wild Wild West' where they extract the last thing the dead guy saw?"

Cellpop is a humorous look at the dark side of the music industry. It follows the lives of the people who make the hit music we listen to. Each day a new episode is delivered straight to your phone. Website doesn't say though whether they send out a video clip or just plain text messaging.

Michael Sippey points us to an interesting article which, while not directly related to PVRs, should be interesting for those of us who enjoy more control over our own media consumption.

Backchannelmedia, who is in the business of selling direct-response tv advertising (bias beware) has compiled a lot of data showing the fragmentation of attention due to new platforms and technologies, be it the Internet, game consoles, DVRs, etc. Media companies, according to the Financial Times, have responded with either, "horizontal integration, vertical integration," or, "the search for new sources of revenue." The article argues that the marketplace is moving towards a mass customization future, an argument that Sippey disagrees with due to the costs involved (and I would agree.)

The combination of atomized consumer markets and digitized media technologies are spreading and speeding this process. When tens of millions of consumers live individualized lifestyles, and utilize individualized media and technology (PCs, PDAs, DVRs, iPods, cell phones, etc.), we are well on the way from mass markets to mass customization - markets of one.

DRTV Connected: 1 - the Mass Market is Dead Sippey says:

The technology and culture trends point towards more customer control, not more marketer control, so anyone who wants to play in this game is going to have to give up the ghost of one-to-one marketing and instead enable customers to do their own media mix creation. Smart brands will give customers information and services that are easily syndicated, time-shifted, remixed, reused and repurposed.

Consumer-trends newsletter Trendwatching.com has an interesting analysis of how people are guided on what to buy, experience, wear, read, and so on. The editors defined the trend as "curated consumption." In their words, "Curated consumption is behind magazines morphing into catalogs, which then morph into eclectic stores; it's behind DJs, restaurant critics, opinionated bloggers, and rap stars giving consumers access to their playlists, their cribs, their top 10 lists." Trendwatching lists Josh Rubin's Coolhunting website as an example, but the article is worth reading for its broader analysis of consumer choice. Advertisers' strategies inspired by trends like these (...)

Entry continued...

Our monthly meeting focus was on Producing TV with/for SMS and MMS (Cell Phone Interactivity) from 6:30p - 8:30p at the NATAS Offices, 111 West 57th Street, Suite 1020, New York City.

The meeting started with an overview of CTAM and the AFI ETV Workshop 2004 by Shelly Palmer. Then Mr. Palmer posed a thought experiment for the group: "It's 2008, there are over 50 million video enabled cellphones in the United States. You have one in your pocket. Almost everyone standing in the street is a self contained news gathering crew. How do you aggregate the video? What interface do you create to distribute this wealth of information?"

Then he introduced Timothy Shey, Creative Director, Proteus who spoke about the state of the SMS/MMS business and described some of the most common business models. He also spoke about the limitations that business rules impose on the process and the differences between what's happening in Europe and what is happening stateside. Europe has had this technology for longer and they use it more - they have less Internet access, so Cell phones are their text interface.

(Continued at EmmyAdvancedMedia)

(Two things about this post make me feel good about television again: Shelly's 2008 scenario and that they brought Tim Shey in to speak to them. -kc.)

Motorola has a series of short films shot with their new V710 cameraphone. Gizmodo has taken a bullet for you, watching and digesting the ad-shlock (and mixing metaphors without gloves) to exhume these five core messages:

• Hot asian girls can be shallow.

• Bears hate your ringtone, as well.

• Dogs are awful at voicemail.

• Some people like cake.

• Socially unstable people usually marry within one week of writing a sad song.

There's an upcoming mesh wireless conference in Boulder that's looking for papers on subject like Software Defined/Cognitive Radios, GPS, Galileo, Glonass Interoperability and standards, Effective Spectrum Management and Propagation Modeling in Urban Environment.

The ISART technical program committee is soliciting papers for the 7th annual International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART) to be held in Boulder, Colorado March 1-3, 2005. These papers will discuss new technologies, research and development, innovative ideas, enabling technologies, standards, protocols, business practices and policies, and government regulation for the purpose of forecasting the future development and application of radio frequency technologies into the next decade.

Paul Ford explains how Google's understanding of the value of relationships allowed them to take over the world [in 2009]....

The JibJab controversy continues unabated. Here are a slew of links.

First, listen to 45 seconds of Guthrie's original, courtesy of the University of Virginia Library's Lift Every Voice exhibit (This Land is Your Land [MP3]).

Original "The Importance Of..." coverage:

Parody or Satire? iRaq Posters, JibJab Animation, Fuse's Silhouette Ads

EFF Defends JibJab Animation as Parody

Chris Cohen is having doubts, somewhat, about his original position that the flash animation was satire and not parody (JibJab video: am I to be labeled a flip-flopper?).

(Continued at The Importance of...)

Part of the business of Social Media discussed at BlogOn was adoption patterns. Lycos's Tripod and Angelfire blog hosting services shared the results of their survey of 2,000 users. They make the case that blog adoption is being driven by media sharing, abundant connectivity and advances in ease of use.

Whereas 14% of Internet users own digital cameras, 68% of their bloggers do:

When asked what kind of content their users create, the results mirror ownership of devices. How they share, however, is still dominated by email (72%), burning a CD (58%) and then posting to a site that offers storage (40%). Its implied that posting is on the rise.

Camera phones are the fastest-selling consumer electronic device ever. I'll assert that photo blogging and moblogging are the fastest growing segments of our little space. Our Corante neighbor is calling this the year of the photoblog.

This directly related to why Blogger bought Picassa, the popularity of Fotologs (especially among Brazilians), embracement by incumbents, the popularity of album complements to blogs and the rise of Flickr.

(Continued at Many-to-Many)

She covers the convention, the Times dismissal of bloggers as "web diarists" and the comparisons to journalism ...

As a practice, journalism espouses an air of objectivity, purporting to cover all sides of a debate, equally and with emotional distance. While few believe that journalists are unbiased, it is considered a respectable aim of the profession and readers expect them to be as objective as possible. Bloggers, on the other hand, have no such cultural code and their readers rarely hold them accountable for objectivity. In fact, what makes blogging confusing for many is that the practices encompassed by that term are quite diverse.

My friend, Andreas, made a good argument for respecting copyrights in videoblogs. Please comment if you think differently. I can't see the problem.

"Don't screw copyrights unless you want to get screwed over yourself. Not to mention that you would never be able to go beyond the "wee, we're just goofing around" stage. If you want people to take you seriously, if you want to have companies build software for you you can't ignore copyright laws. Basing a business plan on copyright infringement is a quick recipe for disaster. If you on the other hand is happy to have an underground phenomena then feel free to ignore copyrights. I'd like videoblogging to be just a little tiny bit more than that, and that's why I take copyrights seriously.

Fair enough. You make a good argument. Here's my confusion: Let's say I make a video today. Tomorrow i wake up and someone has put it up on their site as their own. What do i do? call the internet cops? I can bitch and moan, but in the end Im not too worried about it. If someone kept stealing my material and calling it his own, I'd just get the word out and we'd all hate him.

(Continued at Momentshowing.)

(I've been following this discussion on the videoblogging yahoogroup but haven't had a chance to respond, so I'll just post imy thoughts here -- for those who don't want to share: use copyrights and either stream or disallow saving. For everyone else, use cc licensing. No? -kc.)

Steve got a hit of the fever today. Once you start thinking about the possibilities of videoblogging, you can't stop. He even has proof of concept.

"I've got a new word, V-Span. It's like C-Span where we get coverage of events that are not normally covered by mainstream media. V-Span is Citizen Journalists who are there with their video cameras, documenting events as they happen. When this gets popular, we'll be able to see things that up till now, we've just been able to read about in the newspapers."

"I just drove by the Loius Boston, where the Red Hot Chilli Peppers were performing. I stuck my cell phone put he window and recorded the audio directly to my blogger blog with the new audioblogger. Listen to poor quality audio here:
"

"Just wait until we can stick out cell phone / video recorder and post that directly to our blogs! That'll be amazing."

(V-Span. Sounds familiar. :) Good to see so many people thinking the same. -kc.)

Kaye Trammel posted this Doug Marlette cartoon and I couldn't resist...

ABCNews.com has a six-part article on how blogging is now basically a form of media.

"People are recognizing that there is a shift in the way consumers consume media. It's an indication that the parties believe these people will be listened to," said Gaby Darbyshire, director of business development for Gawker Media, which publishes five of the most widely read blogs in the United States.

The cable industry has started to reap the benefits from its spending and building binge started in the 1990's.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has recently published a booklet on the practical ins-and-outs of TV writing. It was gang-written by a number of writer-producers and was just this month sent to all WGA members. The booklet is called "Writing For Episodic TV: from freelance to showrunner" and the best thing is, you can print your own a copy for free. [Filmmaker.Com]

The cinema of 21st Century is going to a be produced and consumed a lot like like online multiplayer video games. The stars of this new medium will be the most prolific participants. The directors and writers will be the game designers and systems architects. The experience will be ubiquitous, with the movie theater itself augmenting a range of other mediums. And while the theaters will look the same, the audience will be busy watching and playing with handheld devices while moving pictures and sounds fill the room.

Current event documentaries like The Corporation, F911, Outfoxed, and Control Room are particularly mundane in their current form. Two hours of silence and we walk out like zombies, barely remembering a handful of the topics, people, or events we became curious about. Some of us defend or attack the film's talking points. Others let the film wash away. But the whole point of these films is to teach or inform or persuade. Yet we walk away with almost nothing! How do we continue the dialogue? How do we talk back?

The cinema (and the filmmaker) needs to deliver a much richer contextual experience in order to succeed. And we the audience need ways to annotate, link, and bookmark as we watch, and ways to share this info with each other once we leave the theater.

In the meantime, gaming is adopting TV techniques and themes, pulling us away from the set and delivering us from isolation into shared online experiences. The trend is towards choice and control, participation and productive consumption, and shared competitive connecting experiences. The linear broadcast one-to-many egomaniacal punditry of traditional media and entertainment has left the industry ripe for disruption. And it's only a matter of time until investor attention and capital starts hucking personal, peer, and participatory media and entertainment startups at that low-hanging fruit.

Continued here

Companies are launching fake blogs: some actually look like blogs but pretend to be genuine ones and hide their marketing intention. Others claim they are blogs when they are just gross imitations.

Heinz is launching its first ad campaign for baked beans in ten years this week.

The campaign revolves around a 'Superbean' character who will have his own blog on a specially created microsite.

I agree with Jeremy Wagstaff who writes: "the blog itself is a travesty of the genre. It's viewable only in pop-up mode, which I suspect will not work with many browsers. There's some Flash in there (a bean bouncing around a can), and frames to make the material itself virtually unreadable. The blog entries all carry the same date (today) as far as I can see, and are along these lines:

OK, listen, there's something I've gotta share. I'm worried about your salt intake. Hey, the government's worried about your salt intake, you're worried about your salt intake! So what do we do? We cut back on the salt baby. I mean, we ain't gonna tamper with the taste, don't get me wrong. But since 2001 I've reduced my salt content by 30%."



Three days ago, Michael O'Connor Clarke found out that a new game called Halo for Xbox tried to create a fake site and weblog which would have ultimately been used to promote the game upon launch.

Rick E. Burner draw the parallel with a similar hoax back in March. This one was supposedly written by a beta tester of the ESPN NFL computer game, from Sega. The tester was supposedly so disturbed by how violent the game is that he started experiencing blackouts during which he tackles his colleagues at work, trashes his own apartment, etc. The conspiratorial tone, footage from surveillance cameras, unauthorized interviews with product managers, hacked rejected clips from TV ads for the product, etc made the success of the blog which blog ended when the game was launched.

I haven't been posting all that much about broadcatching (aka RSS + BitTorrent) lately, not because there isn't anything going on, but because there has been so much going on. I also like my posts to be comprehensive and make additional connections, so I just haven't jumped back into the fray. Nevertheless, here is just a small sampling of relevant articles from the past few days.

(Continued at The Importance of...)

As I reported before, the controversial streaming media patent company Acacia is set to pursue licensing agreements with WiFi distributors and outlets under a newly acquired patent.

According to Acacia's earnings report released July 22, the company's Q2 2004 license fee revenues totaled $666,000 compared to $19,000 during quarter two 2003. It has entered into 160 licensing agreements to date, including 9 new licensing agreements in the past 2 weeks days following the Markman Order.

Check out this videoblog tool. Wow.

Welcome to vBlog Central

This guy Sean Gilligan created it. This is a conversation I had with his friend.

"vBlog Central is an alpha-stage project by my friend Sean Gilligan (cc'd above). ¬ He has built a tool that provides a drag-and-drop interface for video blogging. Basically, you drag an MPEG or JPEG file onto his Java destop app, provde a text entry, and the tool uploads the file and text and creates an entry in your blog. The tool and back end system does not provide video editing, but it does provide compression and encoding into formats that make any video viewable on via QuickTime, Windows, and Real players."

(Continued at Momentshowing)

From today's San Jose Mercury News Read This! teen page, a high school junior writes about why young people are drawn to weblogs....

"Teens have been drawn to blogs for two basic reasons: They're easy and they're free."

The Bandwidth wars are starting. TW Cable announced it's upping its service to 6 MBits. Not to be out done, wounded but fiesty, RCN said that it will up its service to 7MBits. And so it begins ... the Broadband Wars. At 6 MBits, you can receive full 30 fps video that looks like television. At 20 MBits, the signal can be HD (on multiple sets). Who's going to get there first? More importantly, which CE devices are going to be part of the "new" business of broadband. Candidates include: Sony, LG, Westinghouse, Epson, HP, Intel, Samsung and Sanyo to name a few. Basically, every CE manufacturer has broadband and WiFi enabled hardware to take advantage of the bigger pipe.

In other news, NBC Universal, Fox Sports Interactive Media and Comedy Time have entered into an agreement with MobiTV, the TV service for mobile phones users, to provide TV programming to Sprint customers via its Sprint Nationwide PCS Network. Programming content will include headlines and breaking news from NBC News, which is in addition to NBC Universal and MobiTV existing deal which features programming from MSNBC and CNBC. The FOX Sports channel programming will FOX Wire national sports coverage, and regional sports news via its Regional Sports Report, and a variety of programs like Beyond the Glory and Fox Sports One, College Football Saturday, NFL on Fox and MLB on Fox. Comedy Time will feature stand-up comedy acts. Some of the other broadcasters that provide TV through MobiTV's monthly subscription service are ABC News Now, College Sports Television, and Discovery Channel, Discovery en Espaˆ±ol, Discovery Kids, and The Learning Channel.

Similar to MSN Newsbot offerings in 16 international markets, MSNBC.com Newsbot will extend the search technology of MSN to the news environment of MSNBC.com. The service delivers headlines in seven categories of news and information, and offers consumers suggested news stories based on what they have read previously.

The European Commission has encouraged member states of the union to free up parts of the radio spectrum more quickly to expand the market for new wireless technologies.

The potential for digital cameras to capture breaking news is in itself old news. News programmes have been using stills and footage sent in by viewers who happened to be in the right place at the right time for ages.

But I saw for the first time this morning an example of the ultimate in moblogging: Mobroadcasting. BBC Southís news bulletins have this morning been illustrating a breaking news story with a still photo taken by a cameraphone, and have explicitly stated it as such.

The photo, of the plume of smoke caused by a serious fire that had just broken out, was easily as good as the stills youíd get from a ëproperí camera - testament to the quality of cameraphones now. Strangely, although the photo made it on to tv, it isnít yet on the relevant BBCi page.

I wonder how long it will be before we have open collaborative mobroadcasting on our screens.

Blogging has terrified mainstream media for a while now. Journalists want to know if blogs are going to degrade their profession, open up new possibilities or otherwise challenge their authority. This also means that whenever the press writes about blogs, one must critically consider what biases are embedded in their reporting. This morning, the NYTimes took their bias to the headlines:

Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps

As I've written before, blogging is rhetorically situated between journalism and diarying. Most often, people label blogging as one or the other in order to degrade it. The NYTimes pulled this act today because they have a professional interest in portraying convention bloggers as "low-brow" and unworthy of reading, while the NYTimes will present the real "high-brow" convention story. By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. They further perpetuate this view by pasting a picture of a youth on the front of the article to suggest that bloggers are all inexperienced and naive, further implying that their reports will not have the value of the more "adult" perspective of "real&" journalists.

(Continued at Many-to-Many)

Although its limited to USB 1.1 speeds, the new USB Flash Drive Duplicator from Nexcopy could come in very handy to the select few that could make use of it. Functioning as a standalone device (no PC needed), up to 20 USB flash drives can be duplicated from a single source; you can even daisy-chain multiple units for more mass copying. Loading up the day's data for your fleet of pestering salesmen has never been easier!

Motorola and Apple have announced . Although the number of songs will be limited to the flash memory storage space inside the phones, most units should be able to hold a few dozen songs, at least, making them the missing piece in Apple's music playback device plan. iPod and iPod mini for those that want a dedicated, large-capacity music device; iTunes phones for those who just need a few songs here and there.

When the service launches in the first half of 2005, songs will be transferred from PCs to phones via the standard USB or Bluetooth interfaces, but hopefully later versions of iTunes Mobile will be able to download over the airwaves. And does this mean that Motorola has decided MP3s are the ringtones of the future? That's going to make some people (read: carriers) a little pissy, especially considering an iTunes download is cheaper than most ringtones.

Interactive TV, wireless and broadband news from the Advanced Media Committee of the NATAS

Research and learning are increasingly supported by digital information environments. The as yet unfulfilled promise is a rich fabric of scholarly resources, learning materials, and cultural artifacts, seamlessly integrated and readily accessible, organized in ways that facilitate traditional uses and encourage new uses as yet undefined.

Fulfilling this promise requires the cultivation of stakeholder communities that, through their working and learning experiences, meaningfully engage with digital information environments.

A concise overview of making a video by yourself. The art of the single-camera shoot, and insert-editing techniques that will ensure that you have all the angles covered. [DV For Teachers News]

Going tapeless. MiniDV brought digital video (DV) recording to the masses, but dropouts, head clogs, and the post-production lag of real-time capture make it a less-than-perfect medium for pros. Videographers are turning to hard disk digital video recorders to back up, or even replace, tape. [DV For Teachers News]

A new education and direct buying symposium series will show educators and the public how to harness the latest in digital technology. The Digital Lifestyle Expo (DLexpo) will kick off in Long Beach, California 2004 August 14-15, with shows following in New York City 2004 September 25-26 and Atlanta, Georgia USA 2004 November 13-14. The DLexpo is a "convergence program" that bridges the gap between low-cost professional equipment and solutions and individuals who never before could afford to utilize this type of equipment. [Editors Net]

This week's Engadget HOWTO is a project to turn your iPod into a universal remote.

How did we do this? Basically,
we "recorded" the "sounds" an infrared remote makes on a PC and then put them on an iPod as songs. Adding a special sound-to-IR converter then turns those sounds back to IR and allows you to use your iPod as a remote control. As an added bonus, it works up to 100 feet. It's a slick all-in-one unit and we're never going back to 6 remotes ever again.

I was blushing this morning when I heard my name mentioned on Morning Coffee Notes, which I've added to my iPodder Audio Network- (see screenshot). I've cobbled together a combo of applescript and a few shell commands (called from applescript) that automatically updates my iPod with any new audio updates in weblog feeds I'm subscribed to, even putting them into a neatly organized playlist structure. I'll be releasing the code as soon as I feel it is past the 'embarrassing' stage.

I also had to laugh all over again about a conversation we had as Dave was preparing his blogging kit for the DNC in Boston, he was picking my brain about microphones, which one to use for his audio posts. I suggested he get a nice solid handheld mic from Radio Shack, the price/quality ratio is in the blogger range and it is important to have a manly looking microphone when conducting one on one interviews.

A point of debate for Dave, as he wanted something lightweight to carry with him. I successfully argued that people respond better if you hold a nice phallic sound stick to their face. Show your subjects respect! Dangling a teenie weenie mic is insulting on so many subliminal levels :)

Steve Garfield is videoblogging the democratic national convention.

So I've edited together another Video Blog report from the DNC. This one shows the excitement of the crowds in the lobby of the Sheraton Boston hotel. Just outside the hotel volunteers were handing out flyers inviting the public to the Veteran's Caucus.

AOL will broadcast a sneak preview of a new TV series, "Jack & Bobby," over its broadband service, marking the first time a media company debuts a new show over the Internet in its entirety.

The show, slated to air on the WB Network in September, will be shown to AOL for Broadband subscribers about two weeks prior to its scheduled broadcast date.

Now all I'm waiting for is HBO over IP...

Ever since I wrote "Incredible importance of IM clients" I have been meaning to do a follow-up piece on how this technology which seems so simple on a day to day basis, is going to become even more vital to our interconnected lives. Well, Bill Burnham, beat me to the punch. Here is an excerpt from a must-read post.

In the beginning, IM communication was strictly a human-to-human affair. A few years ago companies starting sending alerts (and increasingly spam) via IM making it a computer-to-human affair. Now, with the advent of Data over Instant Messaging (DIM) technology, IM is rapidly set to become a computer-to-computer affair. Why send data over IM? One reason is that IM infrastructures have solved a lot of tough technical problems such as firewall traversal, multi-protocol transformation, and real-time presence management.

The New York Times today has one of the better articles about the bloggers covering the convention (registration required).

JD has an interesting post over at New Media Musings where he names seven of the things RSS is good for and asks for feedback.

1. Saving time. Just as TiVo lets you watch TV more efficiently, RSS feeds do the same for the Web. It lets you speed-read the Net.

2. Convenience: By collecting headlines from dozens of sources on a single screen, RSS (rich site summary) -- a combination of push and pull technology -- enables users to see at a glance when a site or blog has been updated without having to keep revisiting the site. RSS cuts to the chase: no pop-up ads (at this point, anyway), and you can set your news reader to allow or disallow photos and graphics.

Go check out the other five good things at JD's New Media Musings

Food for thought on the relationship between digital copyright and a functioning democracy:

Seth Finkelstein, arguing that the Induce Act (PDF) is to the Betamax doctrine as the DMCA is to fair use: "The Induce Act may preserve the 'substantial non-infringing use' standard of _Sony_, in the same way the DMCA preserved fair use: only as a very abstract theory, not in practice."

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz, on reactions by Fox News President Roger Ailes and the New York Post to OutFoxed: "If you allow people to use news in a critical film, the journalists concerned will face the risk of criticism. Which is exactly what the right of fair use is there for.

If you can't live with the idea that people might criticise your work, you have no business to be a journalist in the first place. And if you try to abuse copyright to silence criticism, you deserve to be laughed out of court."

Korea Times article reminding us that not everyone has our conception of "fair use" to lose: "The court said in the ruling that everyone has the right to express their opinions by creating works, including parody works, but Shin's work passed a limit and tried to influence politics."

(Has anyone else drawn the loose "Outfoxed is to Big Media what comments are to blog posts" comparison and gotten a chuckle out of it? -kc.)

CNN is currently carrying an interesting interview with musician Peter Gabriel. Gabriel always seems to be at the bleeding edge of technology, and he describes two of his net music ventures, On Demand Distribution, a backend company that works on music payment and fulfillment systems, and his pet project with Brian Eno, The Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists.

When asked why he has embraced the internet while record companies have feared it, Gabriel says:

A new world is being created -- one is dying -- and if artists don't get involved, they're going to get screwed, like they usually do.

At the other end of the musician spectrum, indie rock artists The Mountain Goats recently gave their stamp of approval to the Internet Archive's hosting of their live shows. Frontman John Darnielle shares why he supports it:

I am totally in favor of tape trading, and file sharing never did anything wrong by me. People got into The Mountain Goats after downloading my stuff.

It's great to see a superstar like Peter Gabriel continue to embrace and extend technology and it's also great to see a small artist like The Mountain Goats realize new avenues to gain fans.

Orrin Hatch's Draconian Induce Act -- which would criminalize iPods on the grounds that shipping a high-capacity personal stereo practically begs the public to use file-sharing services to fill it -- continues to draw fire from all quarters. Between EFF and SaveTheIpod.com, over 30,000 Congresscritter letters have been sent by voters in every state in the Union, asking government to save America from Orrin Hatch and the cartel that has put him up to this insanity. Click below to send your own letter:

Link

The Guardian's Jack Schofield has a chat with the founder of OhmyNews.com, the Korean online newspaper. Could it work elsewhere, he asks? (My answer is at the bottom of the story.)

Drazen Pantic is a big picture guy.

Starting as a mathmetician in Serbia, the emergence of the internet and the Kosovo war woke him up to the possibility of citizen journalism. He now lives in Manhattan and explains how it's all going to work. Videoblogging is here. His article lays it out.

PlaNetwork Journal -> Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News

He focuses on citizens documenting and reporting the important, violent struggles around the world that are usually glossed over by traditional big media outlets. But I think it's just as important that people fool around, tell jokes, and ponder at their bellybutton. The point? With video, we can be more connected than ever before...more than writiting..more than voice.

Some choice points:

'How long will it be before our news reports come direct from local sources with their own video production facilities, in real time, over the Net? Who needs a cable network's team of celebrity reporters, with their jingoistic coverage of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," when I have unfiltered access to images and testimony from the war zone?'

The tools suites are appearing. But more than anything else, we need education. People have to learn that they can produce video comparable to professional broadcast quality using these inexpensive, open source tools. What can be more important to the future of democracy than giving citizens the ability to better communicate with each other?"

"Web logs are another example of how people are shifting from passive media spectators to active media producers. Now that a rich media layer is being added to blogs -- with the appearance of video blogs -- it seems that a viable alternative to centralized TV networks is emerging. For example, consider what might happen through the joining together of video blogs, Real Simple Syndication (RSS), and BitTorrent. This is a very powerful combination."

Ramesh Jain on Multimedia Search:

We do not have any similar structure defined to consider atoms, molecules, and grammars for pictures. Current image search engines that claim to use image attributes use things like histograms or textures which are neither atomic features nor molecular. They are usually aggregates of atomic features. Just imagine how useful it will be if a document was characterized by saying that it has 5396 a's, 9456 b's, 1294 c's, 529 x's, 1289 y's, and 67 z's. Similar techniques are currently tried by people to search images based on their content. What is needed is to define a "language" to describe pictures.

"This requires knowing those patterns and we don't yet know those patterns. Research in many fields have been addressing these problems and once they have concrete answers, it may be possible to build on top of those. But our spoken languages were not defined like that. They evolved by standardizing certain patterns and then building using those patterns. Should we adopt a similar strategy?

The Readership Institute, which once seemed rather dismissive of websites, now says that newspapers should launch interactive weblogs "to provide a place for a segment of young readers to have something to talk about and to feel they're getting smarter about topics of interest to them." It's part of a call to action titled "Reaching New Readers: Revolution, not Evolution," which resulted from shocking data about twentysomethings compiled earlier this year. The research showed that "tweaking" newspapers to increase readership was working somewhat with older, existing readers, but the troubling loss of younger readers actually accelerated.

(Continued at Poynter E-Media Tidbits)

At Thursday night's introductory panel at the BlogOn conference ...

Someone (perhaps John Roberts of CNET) said: "RSS is a Napster for ideas."

Tony Perkins: "I think this is the biggest thing that's ever happened [in media]. Just as big media was bottoming out, bloggers came in and said, Wait a minute, we have something to say here. We'll see the complete blowing apart of the media world and get high quality content that fits in your pocket. Ö

"In an era where big media has been producing junk food -- when the New York Times pisses you off and you want to talk back or post a comment or contact the writer but can't -- people won't trust brands that don't succumb to the open media model. I think this is happening fast and media that don't open to the open source media concept are going to be voted out."

(Continued at JD's New Media Musings)

French satellite channel "Tchatche TV" features several programs targeted to 15-25 year-olds. They are about movies, music or video games but what is unusual is that the program itself is only displayed in a small window on the upper corner of the TV screen, while the rest is of the screen is taken up by text messages sent in by viewers - which scoll by like credits to a movie.

These premium SMS finance the TV programs. Every day, the channel receives thousands of messages, as teenage couch potatoes text-in and wait around for their message to (finally) appear on their TV screen.

Monolith is a portable system for public spaces, and events that allows everyone --even those who have never approached a computer in their life-- to interact with digital media applications, games, videos.

The hand acts exactly like a mouse, just pointing at buttons and spots of interest on a large screen... no additional device needed.

Monolith integrates a computer, a projector, a 2.1 audio subsystem, and real-time stereo computer vision sensing technology.



Download the video.

ICANN, the U.S. body managing global Website allocation has announced a powerful new technology which makes it possible for every human being to have an Internet address. The new Internet protocol is called IPv6, and it provides trillions more addresses than the IPv4 system that is in use today. This announcement bears watching. On the surface, it seems great. It'll help with Internet security, but there's also that sticky privacy issue, because it'll certainly make it harder for people to "hide" online.

MediaPost reports, "An online poll conducted in June by FIND/SVP found that the features most valued by consumers interested in interactive TV are those that put them squarely in control. The survey, "ITV Makes a Comeback," found that 57 percent of respondents said they would be interested in movies on-demand, while 55 percent said creating program schedules was a feature they'd like to have on their TVs."

The free SMS2email service looks like an easy and useful tool to add to the box. via The Red Ferret Journal.

"sms2email relays SMS text messages as emails. Send an SMS to our memorable gateway number 07766 40 41 42 with the first word of the SMS the recipients email address. The SMS will then be relayed to the recipient via email almost instantaneously with only the standard charges from your network operator for sending out the SMS!'"

nVidia is supplying its GoForce 2100 media processor to Samsung for use in the handset manufacturers SCH- M500 cellular phone that's expected to be available this month in South Korea, nVidia says.

nVidia says, "The SCH-M500 with GoForce 2100 will feature a host of advanced features including support for VGA image capture, accelerated graphics for gaming, and motion JPEG capture and playback. The GoForce 2100 also supports screen resolutions up to 320x240 pixels along with NVIDIA’Äôs advanced imaging technology and JPEG compression for increased application performance."

Cingular Wireless is sponsoring college and graduate school journalists to report on the U.S. elections through articles, photos and videos uploaded to a weblog/moblog site hosted by textamerica.



The student elections site will be available on July 26, the first day of the Democratic National Convention, according to the Cingular press release. Cingular is working with several colleges and universities on the project, including University of South Carolina, University of California - Berkeley, Emerson College, Northeastern University and Columbia University.

(Continued at Reiter's Camera Phone Report)

Wired has a good article about the Northwest Voice, the print/online experiment in community journalism being conducted by the Bakersfield Californian. We've blogged about it before on E-Media Tidbits -- here and here. What's really cool about the project is that the Californian is committed to sharing what it learns on its opensourcejournalism.org site. I believe this is going to be a very influential project. Newspapers that have struggled for years to reach people at the town or neighborhood level now have a promising model for success.

(Missed the opensourcejournalism link the first time around. Nice! -kc.)

Stu Feldman interviews Brewster Kahle in the June issue of the ACM's Queue. Excerpt: "Imagine --all the world's information at your service with just a few clicks of the mouse. It's a dream that Brewster Kahle has held onto for the past 20 years and is now seeing through to reality in his role at the Internet Archive, where he serves as chairman of the board. The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an 'Internet library' that will offer permanent access for researchers and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Kahle is the force behind that effort." Quoting Kahle: "There are four questions: Should we do this [create free universal access to all knowledge]? Can we do this? May we do this? And will we do this? The first question of should we do this, I'm going to take as almost a postulate of yes."

BBC plans to digitize its entire production process by 2010 and expects to cut costs by more than 10 per cent as result.

Meanwhile, BBC has also started a trial to test the viability of a commercial broadband TV service called interactive Media Player (iMP).

More than 1,000 people will trial the iMP service over the next three months, allowing downloads of encrypted BBC programmes, such as EastEnders and Holby City, which can be viewed on a PC via a specialist application.

Daniel W. Drezner, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago, has written a paper on the role of weblogs in politics (PDF) called "The Power and Politics of Blogs." It will be presented at the 2004 American Political Science Association.

Weblogs occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Their influence presents a puzzle: given the disparity in resources and organization vis-ˆ -vis other actors, how can a collection of decentralized, nonprofit, contrarian, and discordant websites exercise any influence over political and policy outputs? This paper answers that question by focusing on two important aspects of the 'blogosphere': the distribution of readers across the array of blogs, and the interactions between significant blogs and traditional media outlets. Under specific circumstances ’Äì when key weblogs focus on a new or neglected issue ’Äì blogs can socially construct an agenda or interpretive frame that acts as a focal point for mainstream media, shaping and constraining the larger political debate.

LOST REMOTE EXCLUSIVE The FBI is investigating information that "members of a domestic group" plan to disrupt the Democratic National Convention by attacking media vehicles. Boston Police and the Department of Public Safety have been informed of the investigation. The feds may release more details about this on Friday, so keep an eye on your wires and newsroom faxes.

(Okay, repeat after me: powerbook, PD-150, firewire, isight, wifi, backpack, scan converter. Plus, videophone-style 12-15fps coming from Boston will make everything look a lot more interesting than it really is. :) -kc.)

Tom Coates has the first of what looks like a fantastic series of posts on the new musical functionality, an extended musing on the distribution of production, reproduction, and filtering of music, covering especially the newly social context.

Over the next few days I'm going to write about some of the core trends that I'm seeing in people's use of digital music, attempting to extrapolate from some current behaviours that we're all observing around us - concentrating on how people wish to interact and use their music. I'm not going to spend too much time on the way some people may wish to legislate against these desires or build around them - because I believe for the most part that any attempt to do so will inevitably fail. Competing models that more adequately fulfil those needs will rise to take over in their place.

I'll be talking about four major areas that seem to me to be indicative of the unevenly-distributed musical functionality of the future - (1) portability and access, (2) navigation, (3) self-presentation and social uses of music and (4) data use and privacy.

(Continued at Many-to-Many)

Early reports say that the Senate Commerce Committe passed the bill to restore low-power FM by voice vote [on Thursday].

Strangely, the Committee also passed an amendment excepting the state of New Jersey, submitted by Sen. Lautenberg, apparently because the Senator believes Jersey is more susceptible to interference problems because it is the most densely populated state in the country. As a former Jersey-boy, let me tell you that there are many little towns and isolated exurbs around the state that could use a true non-profit community station squeezed in between the mammoth commercial blowtorches blasting in from New York City and Philadelphia. Thus, I doubt the need for such an exception, and the validity of Lautenberg's interference fears. Seems to me that the NJ broadcasters were probably leaning on him for some protectionism, especially since they suffer from competing with the bigger NYC and Philly stations.

Now the bill is off to the Senate floor for further deliberation and vote. A passage in the Senate seems more likely than a vote and passage in the House, the leadership of which has been much more hostile to any sort of media reform effort.

WireTap is a free application for Mac OSX that allows you to record and save any audio that plays through your speakers -- streaming audio, iChatAV sessions, game sound f/x, iTunes, DVD player, Quicktime, RealPlayer, whatever. You never know when this might come in handy.

Now, if only SnapzProX (made by the same company) were as good at saving streaming video. Unfortunately it still has too much lag -- or maybe its my computer. Anyone out there had success with this?

According to a new study by A.T. Kearney and Cambridge University, 41% of mobile device users expect to be using mobile data services by this time next year. That's a four-fold increase over current trends, which the study claims is due to mobile data services reaching critical mass in terms of interest and acceptance levels. Cost and slow network access topped the list of reasons why users do not use mobile data services today, but the percentage of users worried about security and privacy climbed to 22%, more than twice the number citing that as a major concern last year.

Toshiba's new laptops have a neat trick: each Qosmio Centrino-based notebook comes with a WiFi TV Router (either in a bundle or as an option) that will stream TV wireless to the laptop (and still provide wireless internet, natch). As a singular feature, it's maybe not so mind-boggling, but I'm much more down for a laptop that doubles as a wireless TV than a standalone wireless TV. Japan-only for the moment, but with the serious US presence that Toshiba has in the laptop market, I'd expect to see a similar offering here before too long.

(I get really excited about these things before I remember that -- according to some folks -- most media only goes one way :) -kc.)

I got an e-mail from David Goldschmidt of mediatrips.com (where "sampling popculture is not a crime"), who is conducting competitions in media arts, with entries composed of audio and video mashups according to specified themes

In late 1999, I joined Rhizome.org (an online community of net.artists) and discovered a real affinity for their work. Specifically, I love it when artists rip (and remix) images and icons from American popculture. Itís fascinating to see how people react to the modern media environment. Scriptwriters, and filmmakers in general, follow the industry format for creating movies and television programs. The Mediatrip ñ howeverñ is a critique/reaction to what one sees on TV.

5 scenarios for digital media in a post-Napster world

"A foundational whitepaper, Five Scenarios for Digital Media in a Post-Napster World, released by the Berkman Center in November 2003, identifies several trajectories that could guide the future of music and movies online. Based on this analysis and subsequent meetings, research on the Digital Media Project is currently exploring five scenarios as the different models vying to shape the development of digital media."

Yahoo Launches Photo Upload for Camera Phones according to Reuters Press agency.

"Interactive TV" is one of those topics that people love to trot out every few years as the next big thing, and then quickly trot back in after each trial fails. Technology keeps improving, and part of the problem has been a television industry that seems to think "interactive TV" is really just enhanced TV where you click the big red button to get "more info" on something. Instead, audiences have gravitated to things like TiVo and the Internet, and have moved away from live TV. However, here it comes again. [Techdirt]

For a while there, it looked like TiVo could avoid the copyright battles that felled the competition by playing nicely with the content industries. But as this MSNBC Washington Post article shows, sometimes even asking for permission to innovate isn't enough:

Hollywood studios and the National Football League are seeking to block the maker of the popular TiVo television recorder from expanding its service so that users could watch copies of shows and movies on devices outside their homes.

(Continue reading this post at Copyfight)

Lost Remote's Steve Safran will be video-blogging the Democratic convention.

mod_bt is a BitTorrent tracker for the Apache webserver. It is written in C and runs as an Apache 2.x module. It is possible for mod_perl or PHP to directly access the tracker's information; no need to download and bdecode scrape URLs. The tracker is fully configured from within Apache's own configuration file. (Thx, Tyler!)

The current issue of the Washington Monthly has a great article by Ted Turner on the evils of media consolidation.

We are pleased to announce the inaugural issue of PlaNetwork Journal, a quarterly online publication for in-depth articles by those engaged in applying new technology to benefit the public interest.

The influence of information technology on fields as diverse as environmental science, biology, ecological design, alternative economics, distributed democracy, social network theory, and interactive forms of art is transforming the landscape of the possible. Over the past four years, PlaNetwork conferences have been a meeting place for researchers, software designers, entrepreneurs, independent scholars, artists, and activists working at the intersection between technology and societal transformation. PlaNetwork Journal is a place where practitioners can present their work and ideas to those outside their own field who share their concern about the challenges facing the ecosystem and democracy.

Ken Jordan (editor) and Elizabeth Thompson (publisher)

Playlisting: slipperycat. Brutally and beautifully minimal. Very inspired by del.icio.us and webjay. Actually, I've also been inspired by delicious and have been wanting to do something with webjay that looks about like what he did. It freaks me out a little to have such direct competition, but it also makes me feel like there's communication going on. ...at first the concept of Webjay was completely alien to most people; a lot of the
early users did things with it that made no sense, and a lot of visitors still don't grok the playlists-as-hypertext concept.

Rachel Barron/East Bay Business Times did an article on social media and the BlogOn Conference. The print edition featured a box on BlogOn that is not online. But the article frames my thoughts on social media, as well as Jerry Michalski's, and features many examples of kinds of social media, companies using it as well as difficulties that have come up from not understanding it.

I really appreciate Rachel's work on this, and her featuring me so much, but more importantly, it is one of the first articles I've seen that tries to define social media as a media issue, a technology, and an interaction between people across the web. We need more of that!

The Business Times (Singapore): 'Everybody now is a member of the media.' There's a whole proliferation of this, according to Mr Gowing:

pictures being sent down telephone lines, people calling up radio and TV stations on their mobiles, people e-mailing stories of what they've seen, people challenging the views put out by governments and backing it up with evidence. Just ordinary people, not professional journalists.

Put your politics (and copyright concerns) aside for a moment: "Outfoxed" house parties are all the rage, and the flick is playing in many homes before it will ever see a theater. It premiered at 3,000 house parties, is building buzz, and will go to theaters next, assuming a lawsuit doesn't stop it in its tracks. LR has been calling for years for movies to be released in theaters, on DVD, VOD and web download all on the same day. It will take a small film like "Outfoxed" to prove there is money in that model: Made for $600,000, the makers hope to sell 100,000 DVDs at $10 each.

Just the other day I was commenting to a friend how infrequently the tripod mounts on most low-end consumer cameras are ever used, because who ever packs a tripod when they're running around with their tiny camera? This Bottle Cap Tripod is a great solution, then, making it easy to throw together a jerry-rigged tripod whenever you need one. And if you live in New York, you can probably just pick up a bottle off the street. Not perfect, but not bad for 10 bucks.

(Of course, I'm thinking "who the hell needs a 7-inch poorly weighted unleveled tripod" but maybe i'm missing the point. -kc.)

Oops, we forgot to turn off the pinging of weblog-alert sites when we put up what amounts to a beta version of the "We the Media" website. Joi Ito spotted it and blogged it.

As Joi just noted in an IM, it seemed "very appropriate for the book." How true...

Netribution.co.uk is a web site devoted to funding and alternative methods of distribution. Like the NY Times Guerrilla Doc article, this site focuses on how to get your work out there. [Cyndi Greening]

Verizon has announced details on its FTTP DSL service (dubbed Fios). Verizon will be offering the service in the Huntington Beach, California and Tampa areas, hoping to make it available to 1 million residences by year end. Plans for other areas are unknown at this time. The base US$34.95 package is for Verizon local and long-distance customers, offering speeds of 5Mbps down and 2Mbps up. An additional ten bucks will get you 15Mbps/2Mbps, and a 30Mbps/5Mbps package will also be offered, with pricing undetermined as of yet.

Seth Godin talks to a TV guy about a world with ever-more channels:

What happens, I asked, when Tivo has Java and TCP/IP and there's a million channels?

The people in the TV business can't imagine this. They can't imagine a world where there might be 20 A&E networks, or where there might be a channel just for shows on how to build a model airplane.

XM radio and the Net just increased the number of radio stations by a factor of 100.
And today the NY Times reports that 175,000 books are published every year. And rising.

And we just hit 3,000,000 blogs, up from 100 five years ago.

The number of channels for just about anything keeps going up. The number of GOOD channels, where good means a built in high traffic audience that is non-discerning, keeps going down. The number of good newspaper PR outlets is down to a handful. The number of retailers with shelf space that really matters is tiny. Yes, you can get your thing out there. No, you can't expect that distribution (or carriage, as they say in TV) is going to make you successful.

In other words, owning a printing press is not such a big deal. Knowing the buyer at Bed Beth & Beyond isn't much better.

In Detroit last week, I called blogs the scarcity killer.

Disney sells content to Comcast to put on its broadband Internet service.

Daylight Magazine, which just launched its second issue, is the quarterly journal of the non-profit organization, Daylight Community Arts Foundation (DCAF), which "seeks to enable individuals and communities to document themselves by providing photographic materials and workshops."

The latest issue presents Iraq from a number of different perspectives. It features the work of Susan Meiselas, Sean Hemmerle and Bruno Stevens in addition to a selection of photographs made by Iraqi civilians. The images made by the Iraqis are powerful in their normalcy, they present a very human picture of the war torn people; a visual response to the torture photos of Abu Ghreib.

RSS in Firefox:
Livemarks allow you to bookmark an RSS feed and these appear as bookmark folders, with individual items in the feed appearing as bookmarks. Just click on the "bookmark" and you will be taken to the page the item in the RSS feed is pointing to. More here and here.

RSS in Safari 2:
And then there is Safari 2. You can a href to it on your own.

Paul Rule, one of my favorite observers of the media scene, writes in his column this month about independent ownership of newspapers, and talks about Roy Johnson, the long-time publisher of the Daily Roanoke-Chowan News in Murfreesboro, N.C.: "the embodiment of the 'the shirt-tail full of type' grass-roots publisher." In his column, he laments the loss of the Roy Johnsons of the world, but notes: "Perhaps it is only through weblogs that the current generation of Roy Johnsons can flourish." Worth reading.

A warning about RSS's bandwidth issues: "Our hourly RSS surge has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack, and although the requests are legitimate and small, the sheer number of requests in that short time period creates some aggravating scaling issues...If RSS is going to go from fairly big to absolutely huge, we’re all going to need to do a little more work on the plumbing."

Curiel Communications has released two new CDMA phones, utilizing a docking design to offer two key features; a 3.1 megapixel video camera and a TV tuner.

The PH-S5000V and PH-K1000V are largely similar. Both use what Curiel terms a "mini docking complex" (MDC), which allows specialized accessories to be clipped to the back of the phone sideways. The phones' key feature, of course, is the 3.1 megapixel digital camera.

The other main feature of the PH-S5000V and PH-K1000V is the included MDC module that offers TV receiver, video recorder, and FM radio functionality. The module includes FM radio support and both VHF and UHF broadcast television support, including both NTSC and PAL encoding standards, and is capable of recording up to 90 minutes of video from either TV broadcast or through the built-in camera, courtesy of the 1 gigabyte of internal memory. The phones also function as an MP3 player.

(Continue reading at InfoSync World. update: Reiter's Camera Phone Report also has details on the Curiel phones)

Peer-to-peer networks aren't just for trading music and movies. A law student, frustrated by government secrecy and possible conflicts of interest, launches a website that uses P2P networks to distribute telling government documents.

Today while I was at a web conference, a speaker used an incredible MIT Media Lab project as a demo during a talk. Check out the I/O brush project. The project appears to be a camera that can take a photo still or video of anything you point it at, then that captured images is recreated on an active canvas. It's essentially one giant derivative work creator.

Watch this Real Video demo of the I/O Brush in action.

After you see it, you can see how incredible this technology is. I can't imagine when something like this would be a cheap, easily available tool, but I can imagine that parts of the technology may eventually show up in something. It takes the concept of rip, mix, and burn to whole new levels, creating new art works from anything else (including copyrighted art, text, and trademarked logos) and I can't imagine what the legal landscape will be like when this technology is readily available. Can you imagine the scorn this product will get from publishing companies, movie studios, and the like?

Just days after the BBC came in for criticism for its online activities - alleged undermining of the private sector, the public broadcaster has said it is looking into the possibility of launching a low-cost PC terminal bundled with cheap broadband internet access and launching a standalone UK-oriented search engine.

In an interview with the Guardian, the corporationís new media director, Ashley Highfield, said that he is committed to using the BBC to overcome the countryís digital divide, and a BBC low-cost broadband service would advance this, similar to the success of the BBCís DTT project, Freeview.
The offering is still in the planning stages. ìA few people have come together to see if we could put a low-end connected PC into the market. Could we do it? I don't know, but we would have to be clear about why," Mr Highfield told the UK newspaper.

(Should we be looking at this within the context of their wanting to use P2P to distribute BBC content? -kc.)

Discussing the possible future of videoblogs I find the networked version of the "found footage"-tradition to be really interesting. As soon as video-material are shared (posted with a CC-license) among a large number of videobloggers we might come close to the computer-age's version of Dziga Vertov saying: "free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I've recorded them." Where Vertov was talking about his freedom to use film-material in any order, we might be able to extend this freedom by using the material which others come up with, potentially using material recorded at the same time, but in different parts of the world, freeing recording from the constraints of physical space.

(Continued at Diablog)

One of the big problems in the American presence in Iraq has been a wall of misunderstanding and ignorance brought about by lack of language skills and a lack of information. Machine translation is getting better all the time, and we're seeing some of the results of that improvement here.

The gear in the picture is a piece in the puzzle. From a satellite dish outside this tent at the Strong Angel II exercise, it's capturing and recording the Al-Manar TV station, a Hezbollah outlet in Lebanon. U.S. military and aid workers -- not to mention officials in Washington -- may find abhorrent what this and other Arabic stations are broadcasting, but they need to know what's being said; they need to understand what prominent Arab news outlets are saying about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and other issues.

Audio is extracted from the news broadcasts, and converted to text in a speech-to-text program. Then the Arabic text is translated, also by a machine, into English. The results, twice removed from what the announcers have said, are rough approximations. But they capture the gist of the reports.

(Continued at Dan Gillmor's eJournal)

Henry Jenkins has a nice post over at the must-read MIT Technology Review weblog in which he points to a study (PDF) by MIT's Ian Condry comparing/contrasting the way that the record industries in the U.S. and Japan are handling the digital "piracy" problem:

[While] the American industry has responded by seeking legal actions against its own consumers, no such lawsuits have been filed in Japan, where industry leaders are seeking to understand why music fans think it is ok to share music. ... Industry leaders have suggested that the aggressive commodification of music had led a generation to ignore its status as someone's expressive output. They are seeking ways to rebuild consumer loyalty rather than demand customer obedience. This is consistent with general trends in Japanese industry to study fan groups, subcultures, and other consumption communities as, in effect, "petrie dishes" where experimentation and innovation occur.

It seems to me that there's a bit more to the difference in strategy than simply choosing carrot over stick. It's about putting in the effort necessary to understand why people buy rather than "freeload" music. According to Jenkins, Condry argues that the solution to the music industry crisis is "cultural," not legal or economic, and involves "changing the relations between music producers and consumers to emphasize shared interests rather than economic exploitation." I'll be interested to see how Japan's conversation turns out.