unmediated

What Are You Looking At?

"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, The First Cell Phone Drama That is not for your Mama!

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.

Attention fragmentation

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.

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.

Curated Consumption

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...

SMS/MMS and more (NATAS meeting)

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 Street Stories

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.

Mesh wireless conference call for papers

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.

How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

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

JibJabapalooza

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...)

What You Share Makes Us Care

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:

danah boyd on The New Blogocracy

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.

Using Copyrighted material in a videoblog

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.

[videoblogging] V-Span

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."

Credentials Then vs. Now

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

ABCNews.com Says Blogs are a Form of Media

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.

Big Cable Companies See Next Challenge Around the Corner

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

Writer's Guild publishes free TV writing manual

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]

Reality TV + Video Games = Media Games

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

Fakes blogs as marketing tricks

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.

Broadcatching Roundup - 28 July 2004

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...)

Acacia Builds Streaming Patent Licensees

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.

A videoblogging tool???

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."

Why teens are drawn to blogs

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."

Bandwidth & TV Phones

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.

MSNBC.com launches Newsbot beta

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.

EU Commission: Free up radio spectrum for wireless

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.

Mobroadcasting breaking news

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.

Demeaning bloggers: the NYTimes is running scared

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)

Nexcopy USB Flash Drive Duplicator

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!

Apple to Release iTunes for Motorola Phones

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.

Shelly Palmer's Advanced Media Blog

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

Thirteen Ways of Looking at...Digital Preservation

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.

The art of the single-camera shoot

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]

Hard disk recorders for live video shoots

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]

Digital Lifestyle Expo: DV, audio, web, HDTV - Long Beach, CA. Aug. 14-15

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]

Turn your iPod into a universal remote

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.

microphone or yourcrophone?

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 videoblogs the DNC

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 to Debut WB TV Show Over Broadband

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...

Future of IM Part II

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.

NYT: 2004 is the Year of the Blog

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

7 Things RSS Is Good For

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.

On Fair Use and Politics

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.)

Musicians large and small on internet downloading

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.

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.

30,000 anti-Induce Act letters sent to Congress

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 on OhmyNews

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.)

"Anybody can be TV"

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

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?

Readership Institute Urges Newspapers to Launch Blogs

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)

Readers gravitating to open media model

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)

SMS TV

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.

Finger click

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.

An internet address for everybody

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.

55% of TV viewers want to create their own schedules

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."

SMS2Email

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 supplies multimedia processor to Samsung

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 sponsors student journalists to cover national elections with textamerica web/moblogs

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)

The Voice Has People Talking

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.)

Interview with Brewster Kahle

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 to Be Purely Digital By 2010

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.

New Paper on the Power of Blogs in Politics

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.

FBI cites threat to News Vehicles at DNC

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.)

The New Musical Functionality

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.

LPFM Bill Passes Senate Commerce Committee

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.

All Your Audio Are Belong To Us!

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?

Mobile data demand to surge

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 Qosmio WiFi Streaming TV Laptops

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.)

Culture MashUps

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

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 offers "moblogging"

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

Interactive TV. This Time We Mean It. Probably

"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]

Hollywood (Finally) Turns on TiVo

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.

Vlogging (not flogging) the convention

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

Ted Turner on media consolidation

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

Slipperycat Playlisting

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.

Social Media Article

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!

'Everybody now is a member of the media'

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.

'Outfoxed': the first convergence movie

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.

Bottle Cap Tripod

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.)

'We the Media' Blog in Beta

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...

Funding and alternative methods of distribution

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 details FTTP offering, geeks rejoice

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.

Bottomless channels

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.

TV explodes, cont.: Disney & Comcast

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

Daylight Magazine Documents Community Life

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.

Feed Integration in your Browser

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.

Will Weblogs Overcome Chain Ownership?

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.

RSS Growing Pains

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 launches video, TV toting PH-S5000V and PH-K1000V

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)

Downloading for Democracy

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.

Rip, Mix, and Burn anything on earth

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?

BBC may launch low-cost broadband, search engine

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.)

Man with the Mobile Camera

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)

Breaking Down Language Barriers

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)

U.S. Clings to "Britney" Business Model, Japan Asks Why We're Not Interested

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.

The transfer of authority

In the presentation I made this week and the one I'll make this morning, I said that citizens' media questions the authority of big media and establishes the authority of the audience.

Tonight, I read Fred Wilson -- who left Aspen as I arrived -- reporting on a session at Fortune's confab here about the future of advertising:

The most interesting part of the panel though was the heated debate that developed between the big agency guys and the Internet entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs were arguing that we are experiencing a major transition in the world away from big brands and big media. They argued that individuals no longer trust the establishment and that credibility, authority, and connections among individuals is what matters most. It was fun to watch the fireworks.

Interactive tele-journalism

Shawn Van Every, a researcher at New York University, is reporting with a video rig which includes a video screen connected to an Internet chat where the audience can make suggestions, including questions to ask and where he might point his video camera. [Dan Gillmor]

(Nice action shot, Shawn. :) -kc.)

Reputation systems academic paper

The current issue of First Monday has a thorough academic article on reputation systems.

The sharing of observations and opinions builds up a picture in each person's mind of the reputation's subject, which we might call the "Invisible Eye" - the distributed formation of reputations, and consequent increased ability to distinguish better from worse. To the degree that you have access to and trust the experience of others, it is almost as if you yourself had been there watching that previous situation, thus increasing your base of experience from which to judge future reliability - and increasing pressure on the subject in question to behave responsibly. The analogy to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is not accidental; just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner.

The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" - instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other's experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.

Audioblogging community - plan B

Even though I'm seeing the amount of audio posts in the Blogosphere growing every day/week I don't believe and can't convince myself that anybody else that follows the blogging space is seeing the growth I'm seeing (unless of course they been following this blog this week). That's a pretty strong and bold statement, but the reason I feel this way is because I'm not seeing any of the text bloggers (A or Z list), blogging or quoting any of the many audio posts I'm finding. Despite that fact, the amount of audio posts in the BlogAudSphere continues to grow each day.

Not to long ago, I wrote that it was time to bootstrap a community around audio posts and audioblogs. Discovery and a way to increase the awareness of the growing audioblogging community was on my mind when I made this statement. Unfortunately, since I made that statement I don't believe we witnessed any real progress in moving the audioblogging community forward that is needed to move to the next level, a growing community of listeners and audio blogging routers. Yet again, despite that fact, the amount of audio posts in the BlogAudSphere continues to grow each day.

(Continued at Audio/Mobile Blogging News)

Personal TV Network, part 2

One thing I learned after posting about the personal tv network on Thursday is that there are pages like this elsewhere on the net. Check out Webjay TV and demandmedia.net, for example.

So a page full of contributed video links isn't a new idea. What made this all really interesting to me is the advent of these inexpensive little boxes that sit in the living room and make it easy to select and watch the content with a remote control, so that the experience doesn't involve typing, close viewing or other computer-like modes of interaction. I built the ptv page to optimize for these folks, owners of e.g. Gateway and GoVideo connected DVD players.

Since it's hard to fully convey this in words, here's a short video that shows what's going on.

Flickr and Feedburner collaborate on photo streaming standard for webfeeds

Flickr visioneer Stewart Butterfield writes (in the Feed Thickens) that a proposed standard based on RSS will enable photos and photo sequences "spliced" into the in-line context of a weblog. Sites such as Upcoming.org and Tribe.net are proving out a first round of web services that increasingly show up on weblogs (such as Ross Mayfield's tribe feeds in his sidebar, or my upcoming feed on this weblog's home page).

(Continued at The Power of Many)

Judiciary's Hearing On Web Streaming

A recap of the testimony in yesterday's hearing on Capitol Hill on broadcast Internet streaming.

Broadcasters and webcasters alike attacked the DMCA, saying it made
their businesses unreasonably expensive and difficult. The music
industry, however, said that new technologies that put copyright owners
at risk calls for more regulation, not less.

Airplane 3G mobile phone test successful

American Airlines and Qualcomm have completed a test flight of a new system to allow airplane passengers to use their mobile phones while in the air. The 3G "picocell" network used on the 2 hour proof-of-concept flight out of Dallas allowed passengers to place calls, send text messages, and access the Internet from their phones without difficulty and without interfering with sensitive airplane equipment. A small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station on the plane, that uses standard CDMA communications, was connected to the worldwide terrestrial phone network by an air-to-ground Globalstar satellite link.... Although the flight was successful, American Airlines expects commercial availability of in-cabin mobile phone service to be at least 24 months away.

DivX Codec updated to 5.2

"DivXNetworks Inc. released version 5.2 of their popular codec on Thursday, with substantial improvements in video quality and a bitrate calculator to help manage file sizes. As usual, the software codec was released in two versions: a "professional version" and a free download for Windows 98 through Windows XP (No Mac version yet. -kc.). DivX has evolved a cult following among the enthusiast community, which has used the codec to rip and record various video files."

Location-based SMS on Norvegian TV

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) broadcasts an interactive map as part of its debate program Standpunkt, in which viewers express their opinions via SMS messages. The SMS are broadcast while the location of the viewer is highlighted simultaneously on a map of the country.

In Norway, the location of the viewer is significant, since opinions there are often regionalized.

According to Geodata, the Norwegian company who helped develop the system, "The LBS solution consists of many connectors to the mobile operators, an administrative interface, a database, and a reverse geocoding module." ESRI's ArcSDE, a spatial data server, is used for the reverse geocoding process to facilitate the conversion of coordinates to place names and administrative units.

(I now officially declare today "TV Is Better In Europe Even If It Weren't For PAL" Day. -kc.)

U.K. TV program solicits camera phone photos from viewers

A new U.K. television program, "Passport to Paradise" on BBC1, is asking viewers to send in camera phone photos every week. The program's Web site section (see below) asks viewers to submit photos on funny topics.



This week the "Phone Photo challenge" is: "Bought a bad jumper? Stuck with shoes? Ornaments in the attic? Send in pics of your embarrassing purchases!"

Winners get their photos on the TV program and can win "great mystery prizes."

(Continued at Reiter's Camera Phone Report.)

A glimpse into TiVo's future

ITVT interviews TiVo's director of product marketing, Ted Malone, about home networking, "TiVo to Go" and Internet recording services. "We're looking at ways to integrate locally stored content with broadband content," Malone said. "We're still exploring what we can do, seeing what consumers want and testing a lot of things." (Via PaidContent)

eye cam

Ko Nishino and Shree K. Nayar at Columbia U developed this corneal imaging system that reveals the whole image that lands on our cornea, whether we "see" it or not - what is in our peripheral vision. they can take any photograph of someone and know how the photo was taken, where, by whom, and what else was going on in the scene at the time. [via]

iProvo: 100 Mbps Homes

Video Internet Broadcasting of Ephrata, Wash., announced its plans to buy Provo Cable by the end of this month and begin "triple play" IP television, internet access and voice over the fiber lines.

The $40 million "iProvo" project involves construction of a fiber-optic network to deliver high-speed Internet, phone and cable television access. The local system serves more than 2,400 residents.

BitTorrent search engine

Bitoogle is a front-end for Google that finds BitTorrent files.

Link

(via Red Ferret Journal)

Personal TV Networks

The video aggregator writeup, mentioned yesterday, is embedded in a new page that lets you add video file URLs to a public enclosure feed. It's meant to be an example of the personal TV network idea that was the subject of this BloggerCon session.

This network is mostly a bootstrap because I'm inviting you to help with the content programming and expect to rely heavily on content created by others, such as can be found at the Internet Archive.

The design may be unintuitive to the blog savvy. I built in a throttle that lets at most N new items appear in the feed per day. The rest build up in a queue. This is to prevent runaway disk and bandwidth use in the event of a multitude of motivated content programmers or clever robot scripts. N is currently set to 1 but can be easily adjusted if the content flow is painfully slow.

If you have a moment and the URL for an interesting video clip, try adding to the schedule! Murphy willing, a new item will appear in the feed each night. When the item goes live on the feed, also Murphy willing, the item will appear, with details, on this weblog and be open for comment.

California Newspaper Starts Citizens¥ Publication

Looking for a new model for citizen produced news, see the open source newspaper that Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism conference on Aug. 3 in Toronto.

This from Fulton:

The Northwest Voice is a new community publication in which nearly all the content is contributed by people in the community through our Web site.

Our policy is to accept all content contributions, provided they are local and legal. We publish everything on the Web and include as many items as possible in our biweekly print edition delivered free to 22,000 households in Northwest Bakersfield, the fastest growing area of the city. The Voice is owned by a division of The Bakersfield Californian, but we operate independently of the daily and are distributed separately.

(Continued at PJNet Today)

BitTorrent usurps Kazaa

BitTorrent is now the most popular p2p protocol worldwide, says a new study from Britain's CacheLogic.

"BitTorrent now also replaces KaZaA as the most popular P2P protocol on both a per-continent and worldwide basis," it says here.

BitTorrent's traffic has doubled from 26 to 53% of the overall traffic surveyed between January and June of this year, states LightReading here, going on that FastTrack traffic, used by the Kazaa, has "shrunk from 46 to 19 percent over the same time period".

eDonkey is in the # 2 spot, with Gnutella in 4th place.

AOL, Yahoo and MSN to Tie IMs Together

Hooray, finally! From the WaPo...

America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are teaming up to link their separate instant messaging services for use in the workplace, the first major step by the industry leaders to enable computer users to communicate with one another no matter which of the three systems they use.

Gahhh! (fewer folks watching the news.)

Yeah, so, on the topic of revolutions not being televised:

The evening-news demo has not only continued to get older--he median age across NBC, CBS and ABC reached 60 this year, up from 58.8 last year--but viewership also has been declining since 9/11, falling by 1.3 million viewers a night this past season. Ratings in the 25-54 demographic were down a cumulative 7 percent.

The networks total only about 627,000 viewers 18-24.

Dialogue Flybook Reviewed

If an ultra-portable laptop/tablet with a SIM card slot -- yes, like those found normally in GSM mobile phones -- makes your gadget dork fluff up a bit, you might want to ">check out this review of the Dialogue Flybook -- the first English review I've seen. Besides being tiny, the best thing about the Flybook is its extra connectivity. Not only does it have the standard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but it also has GSM/GPRS capabilities (hence the SIM card) so that you can, in lieu of any other, faster connection, hop on your cellular carrier's GSM network and get internet wherever you are.

The Flybook technically isn't a handtop, but it's not too hefty, either, as you can see in the picture. It does look bigger than a DVD case, though -- no matter what Handtops.com says.

Media companies to allow consumers to make DVD back-up copies

A group of media and technology firms comprising Microsoft, Disney, Warner Bros., Intel, Matsushita and IBM have agreed to let consumers make back-up copies of DVDs they have purchased. The move will accompany the release of the next generation of DVDs, which are expected to deliver superior audio and video.

DVDs currently use a copy-protection technology called the content scrambling system. The group said it should not have any new technology available for licence before the end of the year, according to a report from Reuters, but that it already has termed the expected technology the advanced access content system.

Lou Reed loves remixes

Lou Reed is another artist that should check out the Recombo license. Here's a great quote from him about his most recent recordings being remixed in this story:

"I've been getting all these great mixes sent to me out of the U.K. for years and years," he told Attitude magazine, "and I just started saying to the record company, 'Look, I really, really love what they are doing.' I think that my record company was a little taken aback but, genuinely, if I could make that type of music then I would. If I could master the equipment then I would love to.

Radio in 2010

Radio in 2010 - "The new emerging consumer devices, (iPod, Treo, cellphone, Gameboy, etc) are going to have radios in them. I'd create a consumer electronics group to go make deals with all these manufacturers to insure that there are stored preset buttons on all of these devices and I'd make sure that they come preconfigured with my stations on them when they are sold in my local markets.

There's a lot more that I'd do, but I think you all get the point. I'd reinvent the radio business as an audio programming delivery company and organize it to be relevant on as many digital devices and over as many forms of audio delivery as one can imagine. It's not as simple a business, but it could be a lot more valuable over time than a radio station is today."

Google plans audio + video search

The New York Post says that Google is planning to launch a new feature to allow users to scour the Internet for audio and video clips.

" In the past, Google and other search engines have expressed some trepidation about listing audio and video files because of legal concerns that some of the content may have been illegally copied and downloaded.

Google may decide to take its search function one step further by tapping into the growing popularity of legal music downloading. For instance, it could strike partnerships with record companies, which would sponsor links to legitimate song files available for downloading.

Another route would be for Google to host music files on its own site, allowing it to establish an online music business similar to Apple's iTunes service."

Who wants a presentation on citizens' media?

If you're an ad agency or marketer in New York and you want a presentation on citizens' media (weblogs, forums, video) and what it means to marketing... I [Jeff Jarvis] have it and I'm ready to take it on the road. I'm selling nothing, only spreading the message of this cult of ours. Gave the presentation to Daimler Chrysler, BBDO, and Organic today; been asked to present to another agency soon; if you want to hear the sermon, lemme know via email.

: Just to clarify.... I can't really send the PowerPoint simply because most of the presentation was what I said, not what I showed on the screen. I'm not one of those who reads the words on PowerPoint screens (don't you just hate that?). So the offer above is to meet with ad/marketing folks in New York.

But I also hear the need to present what the hell this citizens' media thing is anyway in some form that can be passed around. Lemme see what I can do.

Webcast: Stanford Innovation Summit

Complimentary webcast of AO2004: The Innovation Summit, taking place July 13th-15th at Stanford University.

OSme good panels at the conference including "Battle for the E-Home"; "Finder's Keepers"; and "Radical New Business Models in Media", among others. So tune in...

Feedster to Launch New Way to View Blogs

One of the the new features Feedster plans to unveil this week is the ability to view all of a blog's posts by date in a monthly calendar view and who links to each post. Check out this sweet screen grab.

Silly, silly cable TV

Why can't we pick which channels we want? This will be up for debate by the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet today, reports Wired.

Industries to Form Yet Another DRM Consortium

A group of large movie and technology companies is about to form yet another consortium to solve the digital copyright problem, according to a John Borland story at news.com. This looks like one more entry in the alphabet soup (SDMI, CPTWG, ARDG) of fruitless efforts to standardize on an effective anti-copying technology.

The new entity will fail just as badly as the old ones, and for the same reason: there is no effective anti-copying technology on which to standardize. You can get together as many company representatives as you like, and you can issue as many joint reports and declarations as you like, but you cannot change the fact that the group's goal is infeasible. This just isn't the sort of problem that can be solved by negotiation.

(Continued at Freedom to Tinker.)

Nokia LifeBlog Beta Released

Nokia has released a free beta version of its LifeBlog software for download, new software designed for quickly adding pictures, text, and movies to your own personal blog. While they say it "works best with the Nokia 7610 phone" (sadly, not yet available in the US), there is an outside change it might work with another phone -- they list the Nokia 6630, specifically. If any of our European readers have already gotten a hold of a 7610 or 6630 and want to write up their a quick review/preview of the LifeBlog software, we certainly would be happy to read it.

Mark Pesce: Open Source Television

"Mark Pesce has given a riveting talk to Australia's Smart Internet CRC on Open Source Television. Rights for reuse granted under the Creative Commons Attribution License."

A High Definition uncompressed editing system for a tight budget

Mike Curtis of the 'HD for Indies' blog makes a recommendation for the tightly-budgeted 720p editor wanting uncompressed capabilities. [HD For Indies] Although rife with acronyms and argot, this site is full of useful information and detailed observations from a working moviemaker.

IP as "Property": Point/Counterpoint

Larry Lessig today brings us a little variety in perspective: a Hollywood publication -- Variety, no less -- explaining clearly the difference between stealing copyrighted material and making fair use of it:

If Greenwald's use of Fox's content is "fair use" -- as we believe it plainly is -- then it is no more "stealing" than walking across a sidewalk in front of a neighbor's home is trespassing on the neighbor's property.

Copyright is property, but like all property, the rights it grants are limited. "Fair use" is one such limit, constitutionally compelled, giving critics such as Greenwald the right to use a limited amount of copyrighted material without asking permission first.

Democracy depends upon such criticism -- especially as the owners of our culture become fewer in number, and the power they exercise, because of media concentration, increases.

"Property rights are as important as the right to free speech," Berman told AVNOnline.com July 6. "For example, if someone broke into your garage and stole your SUV, and put a speaker on the top, and was driving around the neighborhood making some political statement, trying to get your SUV back wouldn't be trying to stifle free speech, it would be you trying to get your property back. If somebody is using your property, you have a right to stop them or receive a license or receive royalties."

That, said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz, is "possibly the most twisted and contorted analogy I have ever heard," saying it shows Acacia and similar companies -- other EFF frivolous patent candidates include Clear Channel, Nintendo, Ideaflood, Firepond, and Acceris -- conflate physical property with dreams of intellectual property.

"There's no question now that an SUV in your garage is something you own. But here there's a real question as to whether Acacia actually invented anything new or simply is claiming monopoly on technology that millions of people use every day to express themselves," Schultz told AVNOnline.com. ..."[Acacia] doesn't want to own just the SUV, [they] want to own every single automobile and stereo system in the world, to use [their] contorted analogy."

aggregator space

Lots of brain straining today. I've been thinking about rss alot lately. Last night it dawned on me that the space I want to operate in is the aggregation side of rss. Not that I'm looking to develop yet another aggregator, plenty of smart folks working on that already. I feel that there is a lot of unexplored territory when it comes to the rendering, or playout systems that rss feeds into. Surely grabbing xml from rss feeds and redering them into one or three pane aggregators can't be the final stop. All the aggregators I've tried out have unique qualities and features, most lack the ones I yearn for most, like delayed downloads of enclosures and display controls (filtering, prioritizing).

Crunching on some ideas today...

azureus

Azureus is a BitTorrent client that solves the rss enclosure of torrent files from the other direction. It offers a plugin that will periodically scan rss feeds with bittorrent enclosures and auto download the big media files. You can set filters with regular expressions and configure all sorts of bandwidth options. Pretty nice. Try it out with my Torrent Feed

koan on video blogging

I'm preparing material for a videoblogging workshop @ Eyebeam tonight. This is the koan I'm stuck on:

Text blogging is citizens' media for browsers.
Audio blogging is blogging for your ipod. (d/l mp3s for on the go.)
Video blogging is blogging for _________. (your personal media player?)

British tabloid outs bogus MPAA "study"

As I wrote over the weekend, media outlets everywhere quickly jumped on the bandwagon created by a Hollywood lobbying group last week in order to get favorable publicity prior to the Senate examining the copyright INDUCE ACT. The press release ó built around a "study" ó made the case that movie makers were losing a fortune due to illegal downloads on the Internet. Now comes the clever folks at The Register with one of their patented investigations.

"About one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie," begins a recent, much-publicized report on online file-trading. Thing is, the statement is not even almost true.

After Spin: Interview with Steve Rubel for Global PR Blog Week 1.0

"Public relations should first understand that to the extent that its art is a form of 'spin'--whether it's reasonable spin, accepted spin, good spin, bad spin, terrible spin--it is selling a service for which there is less and less value, and less mind is paid to it. Spin was possible in the era of few-to-many media, and a small number of gatekeepers who could be spun...."

Two on moderation: Yay Hooray and Kuro5hin

Yay Hooray is one of many community sites designed to give the community power to self moderate. After following the traditional slashdot progression of increasing individual power over moderation, they've now added "filter content by buddy list" as a feature.

Started back in 2001, YH was built by the skinnyCorp team as an experiment in online community. Originally, YH was built to manage itself through a level system that allowed users to earn administration responsibilities. Then it evolved into a point system. With JBA [the new release], rather than administering the actual content of the website, the aim is to allow the filtering of content through an advanced buddy filtering system.

Trying to put it together...

I just got back from a conference of media activists from around the US.

These were people, like me, who work at community TV stations where the TV channels are open to the public.

And you know, these channels are being threatened by media conglomeration and it's serious business.

The one thing I took away from the meeting was: we sure are a hokey bunch of people.

Talking about freeing the media, developing better tools, educating people, affecting government policy...is this what we do for fun?

Then I think, who are these people?

I'm just a guy who wants to take pictures.

I never wanted to get into techie stuff, fighting for social justice, and building communities.

I was raised not to give a fuck.

But you see, I also was raised to love TV and I got bored of TV and decided it didn't have to be the way it is.

What else am I going to do?

Then, things happen.

Canon Announces XL2

"Canon's new XL2 camcorder offers an evolutionary design and new professional features - including a choice of 60i, 24p or 30p frame rates, 4:3 or high resolution 16:9 aspect ratio, new 680,000 pixel progressive scan CCDs, and a full line of customizable controls for cine-looking results. Along with its new 20x interchangeable lens, this new Mini-DV camcorder empowers cinematographers and videographers with a completely customizable broadcast and feature film quality acquisition tool.The professional series XL2 camcorder replaces one of the most successful and iconic products in Canonís history ñ the XL1S ñ as the companyís new digital video camcorder flagship. Canonís new XL2 camcorder evolves the "open architecture" concept of its XL1 and XL1S predecessors beyond body design to include a wide range of customisable cine-like looks and enhanced image controls previously unavailable in the Mini-DV format."

(I guess they did this at DV Expo? I seemed to have missed the XL2 announcement here in the States, but there it is on the Canon USA website. -kc.)

(N'vr mind. Just found similar announcements on Camcorderinfo and Gizmodo Carry on, then. -kc.)

Novel Designed for Text Messaging Service

BEIJING - A Chinese author has written a novel meant to be read in 70-word chapters transmitted by cell phone text message.

"Outside the Fortress Besieged," the story of an extramarital affair, consists of 60 such chapters totaling about 4,000 words, the Xinhua News Agency said.

The potential market is huge: China has the world's biggest mobile phone market, with more than 300 million users. They are avid buyers of services that send news, sports, horoscopes and other material by mobile phone message.

IEEE: Cat Fight on TV

At yesterday's IEEE Plenary Session in Portland, Oregon, a turf battle broke out over television broadband. Utilizing the unused television frequencies for broadband access is a concept near and dear to the FCC which last month released a Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) FCC-04-113 for Unlicensed Operation in the TV Broadcast Band.

The Radio Regulatory TAG 802.18, whose purpose is to provide the 802 Wireless Working Groups with a source of regulatory expertise, was assigned to develop a standard for the unique characteristics of utilizing unused television frequencies for broadband.

Licensed and unlicensed devices using VHF and UHF television frequencies could penetrate foliage and walls better. Maximum output power for fixed devices would be 1 watt peak and for portable devices it would be 100 milliwatts peak (plus a +6db antennas).

The 802.22 group would develop a standard incorporating "cognitive radios" that would listen before transmitting and incorporate a location-awareness funtion. 802.18 Chairman Carl Stevenson announced at the opening session (above) that work would continue through the week in Portland on the 802.22 TV-Band specification.

Not so fast, said Roger Marks, Chairman of 802.16 where an estimated 500, 802.16 attendees overflowed the ballroom in a early afternoon session.

(Continue reading this entry at Daily Wireless)

Exploding TV

MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco speculates that Yahoo will (or should) start online reality TV or sports channels.

Didn't they spend a fortune on Broadcast.com and then kill it?

But Francisco's not wrong. Times have changed. Yahoo would be positioned to start original programming. It is thick with entertainment execs -- Terry Semel, Jim Moloshok (who was just shifted full-time to the business of entertainment). And, as I've been blathering here for sometime, the cost of production is plummeting at the same time that traditional networks are starting venture into starting online networks. Lines blur. Opportunities emerge.

Want to start a reality show? Do it on your own. Then get distribution on Yahoo. The same goes for radio shows. Even blogs....

Tuning out

Fred Wilson talks on a panel at Infinity Radio (as in Viacom and Howard Stern) about what radio will be like in 2010, for like all big media companies, they're worried about where this is headed. He shares his prognostications here.

The interesting flipside to the discussion he takes part in is what new disruptive opportunities there are for us citizens.

Internet radio hasn't taken over the world yet but I think it will grow: Any of us can start a live radio station (but if you play music, you'll need to pay fees for it). The problem today is distribution: The audience doesn't expect to be tethered to a wire to the Internet to listen to radio. Radio is supposed to be everywhere. Once high-speed wireless connectivity is ubiquitous, online radio will be everywhere. But I don't know when that will happen.

So I've been thinking that the first thing we should be doing -- if we want to make radio -- is to produce for iPods (and other MP3 players) so that our listeners can take our programming anywhere. I liked it when Chris Lydon interviewed people in the worlds of blogs and politics and I could take his interviews with me (sadly, he has all but stopped as he works on radio). I keep looking at Audible to find other nonfiction audio to hear but I don't find much.

So what could you produce with a PC and a microphone that would be worth hearing on an iPod? Interviews? Jokes? Audio posts (what if 10 bloggers got one minute each to speak on a topic each day)? Arguments (our version of talk radio)? Reviews? Man-on-the-street reviews (ask people what they think of a movie or restaurant as they leave)? None of the above?

Digital movieblog includes short films from Chernobyl and Ethiopia

Luuk Bowman's collaborative movieblog Tropisms is starting to move again, after a long silence.

Tropisms started in 2002 as a personal videolog or "vlog," a weblog that integrated streaming video-files with a travel diary. The site has grown into a collective movieblog with a small group of participating filmmakers. Peter Boonstra and Marcel van Brakel (NL) are currently in Chernobyl, where they upload movies in an internet cafe. Josh Koury (VS) traces his aunt and uncle that have been stationed to a small section of backwoods Tennessee by the military. Earlier this year, Luuk Bouwman (NL) went to Ethiopia to find out about computer love in a place usually associated with famine. Tropisms is a heavy site, it uses flash and quicktime streams, so a broadband connection is needed. On Macs, Mozilla is preferable.

Competing video formats

CNET on competing video formats: "The fight has put Microsoft on unfamiliar ground, forcing it to compete outside of the computer industry it dominates due to its Windows operating systems. But the software giant has responded with remarkable flexibility, abandoning many of the tactics it perfected in the PC world to adjust to an arena bound by consensus and open standards."

Playing an entire directory with m3udo

If there's a song on the web with a URL, let it be itself. Don't download and rename the song, because the minute you do that you break the single most useful thing about it: the URL. Download it, sure, but put the download where it belongs: in your web cache.

Don't waste hacking time on code to download and rename. Your time will be much better spent by figuring out how programs can share the web cache.

1. cd to the directory


2. ls | m3udo mpg123 -
   

1. cd to the directory


2. ls -tr | m3udo mpg123 -

Toward a Public Radio commons

PublicRadioFan.com is a cool discovery. It tells you what's playing, right now, on a hundred or more public radio stations, along with what format they're using and other helpful information. Way too few use MP3 (the only popular format that doesn't require its owner's proprietary player), but among them are a still-impressive list: WFUV, KKJZ, WEMU, KRVS, WUNC, KCRW, KPUB, WNYC-AM and FM, KUOW, KUSC (to which I'm listening right now), KXPR, KRWG and NRK. The majority of stations and networks (CBC, BBC and NPR itself) require a Real or a Windows Media player.

Even among the MP3 streamers, the situation is far from perfect. For example, neither of WNYC's MP3 streams is working right now.

(Read the rest of this post at The Doc Searls Weblog)

Japan Trials The Future Of Live Sport

The future of live sport is on trial in Japan where large scale wi-fi networks are delivering live video and data to large audiences at motor sport events. The concept: blanket the race course with Wi-Fi signals. Fans can bring along the wifi device of their choice, (be it a laptop, PDA or telephone), and watch the race live from a variety of video feeds, with a choice of language commentary and complete access to the circuit's time-keeping features.

The service is called "Pit Live TV" and is sponsored by Intel...

Some great pics of the Pit Live service are here and here (both Japanese, but some great full screen pics...)

Broadband video set to challenge traditional video distribution

Video, transmitted to consumers via broadband networks is starting to offer real competition to pay TV, redrawing the map of supply and demand for delivery of visual content, according to a new report from market analysts ABI Research.

According to ABI Research''s Vamsi Sistla, several factors drive the change. Film studios and record labels are losing their fear of digital distribution, partly due to the commercial success of music download services such as Apple''s iTunes. The telcos have realised that there are great opportunities for additional revenue if they offer their customers video over copper wire and fibre in future. This depends on broadband penetration: at the end of 2003, there were over 85m broadband subscribers worldwide, of whom 53m were DSL subscribers, ideal candidates for video on demand over broadband.

These consumers are seeing a proliferation of digital devices in stores: PCTV cards, media adapters, IP STBs and media centres. NetFlix has already taken a small bite out of Blockbuster''s revenue; now watch out for broadband video, which is right around the corner and could pose a bigger threat to the prevailing video distribution landscape, according to the analyst.

SMIL

For those interested in the use of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) :

• Apple's documentation on Quicktime SMIL implementation


• RealNetworks Production Guide


• Creating Multimedia with SMIL - Boston University


• W3C Audio / Video


• Synchronized Multimedia On The Web


• Learn SMIL with a SMIL

Antenna Gain - Cheap

Psst! Wanna double your Wi-Fi range?

Oh, sure, you could spend 60 bucks for a single Linksys TNC Connector Antenna (HGA7T). The Linksys omni-directional screw-on will get you 7dBi for the WRT-54G. The D-Link competition includes a D-Link's 4dBi omni or 6dBi directional screw-on for $30-$40.

But why spend a fortune?

Tritium has a cheaper solution, says The Register.

Their parabolic reflector can be punched out of a cardboard template. The Flatennaor costs less than £10 ($15). The foil-backed cardboard cut-out acts as a parabolic reflector. Tritium claims it can double the range. Add a second reflector and you could "achieve five times the [usual] range under the right conditions", Tritium says.

For Inexpensive Last Mile Alternatives it's hard to top the Deep Dish Cylindrical Parabolic Template -- it's free. That should get you 10db.

Or try Flat Panels, A Hot Spot on a Dongle, Primestar Dish or The Dish. Just for fun.

Realistic WiMax Range/Speed Projections?

What kind of range and speed will 802.16d fixed wireless deliver? Loose figures have been bandied about, like 30 mile range at 75Mbps. But that's misleading -- it's either/or.

A multi-point, 802.16 fixed antenna with 10 Mhz bandwidth, might have specs similar to Wi-LAN's LIBRA multi-point broadband gear with a throughput of 25Mbps, shared by a few hundred users. Most would never get close to that speed.

According to Unstrung's monthly paid research report, Unstrung Insider, the answer is still a moving target, but performance may in fact lag behind the proprietary systems currently offered by vendors.

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

Fair Use It or Lose It, Part II

Larry Lessig has a must-read post that touches upon on a topic many of us been discussing of late: strategies for preserving fair use.

The story so far: film maker Robert Greenwald has been making a political documentary about Fox News -- you know, the news organization that brought us that especially ill-advised trademark lawsuit against Al Franken. Greenwald, who uses numerous clips from Fox News in order to criticize its reporting, was more than a little concerned that the company would take a similar stance toward his film. Larry and the good folks at Stanford's Center for Internet & Society joined Fenwick & West in offering him pro bono legal advice in order to ensure that the film would be completed. Now, Robert Boynton -- the gentleman who brought us the excellent NYT Magazine article, The Tyranny of Copyright -- has published the equally excellent How to Make a Guerilla Documentary, detailing precisely how hard that row has been to hoe.

Where will the story go next? Despite early indications to the contrary, there's a possibility that Fox will still sue.

(Read the rest of this post at Copyfight.)

Paper-Thin Compound-Eye Camera

The focal length of a lens means that a camera has to have a certain thickness - or so we might think. Insect eyes show that this need not be the case: A camera chip based on the compound-eye principle can be used for person recognition and is as thin as paper.

"This development is targeted at all the applications where the advantages of the stick-on sensors really come to the fore. They are already being produced on wafers like microchips, which is a key requirement if they are one day to be manufactured cost-effectively, on an industrial scale. The next stage of the project is to install the camera in series-production units suitable for use in industry."

Guerilla News Network

NY Times: How to Make a Guerilla Documentary. ''Outfoxed'' was made in an unusually collaborative fashion. In January, Greenwald rigged up a dozen DVD recorders and programmed them to record Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for about six months. After scrutinizing the initial footage, Greenwald and a team of researchers compiled a list of what they saw as Fox's telltale themes and techniques: stories questioning the patriotism of liberals; relentlessly upbeat reports on Iraq; belligerent hosts who scream at noncompliant guests. Greenwald planned for the list's categories eventually to become organizing sections of the film. As he envisioned it, the film clips grouped by theme, together with voice-overs and commentary, would lay bare Fox's tactics, frame by frame.

Second, there are copyright issues. Using snippets from Fox broadcasts clearly qualifies as fair use, yet being right isn't the same as having the money to spend years in court. But if Fox sends its copyright attack dogs after these folks, the network will be facing a high-powered legal team.

(Read the rest of this post at Dan Gillmor's eJournal)

Personal Media Technology Metrics

If the media is truly decentralizing, then the people are going to have the power to spend their time and money on content and services provided by each other- as well as those produced and distributed by the traditional mass media industry. Many of us are working hard to understand the size and scope of this peer media marketplace because we are investing money and time into the development of tools and services for the early adopters in this emerging industry. Solid metrics will help us value our work and direct our efforts. Here are some voices on the subject:

Jeff Jarvis asks, "how do we measure the authority and influence of this medium?"

Tim Oren says, "we're in need of both metrics and mechanisms to transplant some of this value and cash flow into new media. Doing so in a way that maintains usability and respects the privacy of viewers is a worthy design and business challenge."

Fred Wilson wants "to know what media outlet (new, old, or whatever) has the most authority on a particular subject. "

Dave Sifry, glowing after Technorati tracked its 3 millionth weblog, reflects on the shift from broadcast/mass media to personal/peer media: "We're connecting with each other, we're talking to each other, finding people of similar interests, and we're having conversations."

And Ronny Ko from Bityard points out that- when it comes to digital imaging and video- there is much hype behind this new media industry of conversations and personal choice and control. In an excellent article on the state of the digital home entertainment system movement, he reports that if you relied on the industry voices at the "Intel Developers Forum (IDF) sessions youíd swear that by the end of the year weíre all going to have a beautiful home system that holds your photos, video and music and wirelessly sends the stuff to every room in the house, to your friends/family and your office."

And much more in the weeks to come.

Uploading...

Swimming Upstream with Uploads. From P2P to VoIP, demand for upload capacity is surging--but broadband providers have skimped on bandwidth. Will they finally get the message? By Eric S. Brown. [Technology Review Feed v2.1]

iTube

This looks like an interesting software product. "iTube! is the largest resource available for viewing Internet Television, with over 1500 channels of TV, Live Video Channels and Webcams, plus an Internet Video Search, with over 2 million videos.

You can watch UNCENSORED news, music videos, education and entertainment channels from around the world. iTube! is ideal for people interested in alternative programming, learning languages, foreign cultures, entertainment or news!"

Film Industry "Needs An iMovies"

(Read the story below first): Legitimate movie download services could be an effective way of cutting down on internet piracy, according to UK's Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

Graham Walsh, internet investigations manager at FACT, believes that legal film download services- in the mould of online music stores such iTunes or Napster- could be introduced to counter the growing problem.

"I've heard very skeletal details on the issue, but I know studios are working round the clock on this." Walsh said. "They are still looking for a suitably encrypted system to make it work effectively."

Wireless Mesh Routing Improvements with Multiple Radios

A recent Microsoft Research paper introduces a number of enhancements for wireless mesh routing protocols when multiple radio devices are used in each node. "Routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks" by Richard Draves, Jitendra Padhye and Brian Zill discusses a new protocol, Multi-Radio Link-Quality Source Routing (MR-LQSR) based on Dynamic Source Routing, which can take advantage of these capabilities.

Free Academic Videos

MIT World has free videos for your viewing enjoyment.

Watch these soon to be favorites:

Nuclear Cloning and Cell Therapy: Fact and Fiction.

Progress in the Study of the X-Ray Background.

New Frontiers with Ultracold Gases.

(Steve calls them boring. I call them perfect background projection fodder. -kc.)

FeedBurner Launches Cool Blog PR Tool

FeedBurner has launched a nifty tool that lets you publicize your latest blog headlines in your email signature or anywhere else you can post HTML.

Michael Powell starts a blog

FCC Chairman Michael Powell is the newest regular blogger on AlwaysOn.

(Someone needs to remind Mr. Powell that blogs don't necessarily have to read like major policy announcements. :) -kc.)

Blogger burnout?

Bloggers are suffering burnout, Wired News claims. But what the story really says is that blogging is really demanding and a time drain. Didn't we already know that?.

Video Headstones

A Burlingame, California, entrepreneur has filed a patent for hollow headstones fitted with flat LCD touch panels that will allow the deceased to play messages to visitors from beyond the grave (Reader Bradley Davidson, who submitted this story, dubbed it the 'DIEpod.') Before death -- which makes you look ten pounds lighter on camera, at least -- clients would record messages for their family, then load them into tombstones that would be powered from cemetery lighting systems. It's not a bad idea, exactly, but I wonder about the maintenance issues. Carved marble stone lasts, what, a couple of hundred years, at best? How long would a flat-screen television, recorded media, and a set of wireless headphones stay operable? Would you like to go to your loved one's grave and spend ten minutes trying to reboot the headstone? What about hackers

i-Bead 1000 1.5GB Hard Disk Player

South Korean firm i-Bead is releasing a new 1.5 gigabyte hard disk player with a built-in 65k-color screen. Although there's no word on price yet, the feature set looks nice, with a built-in FM tuner and recorder, line-in recording, text viewing (something that is missing from way too many players), and USB 2.0, as well as a variety of major audio formats. And the best news? It looks like the i-Bead 1000 will be making it to Europe and the US; previous i-Bead players have been Asia-only.

New website rents unreleased indie films on DVD

First Look Rentals is a new website that rents and sells unreleased independent films on DVD. The website uses internet rental-by-mail technology to distribute independent films directly to audiences. DVDs rent for $3.99 to $4.99, depending on length, and arrive in two-way postpaid envelopes. Viewers can keep the discs for up to a week. DVDs can also be purchased.

Filmmakers earn a generous percentage of each rental and sale made through the site. They are also allowed to opt out of the agreement at any time, leaving the door open for major distribution deals. "We're trying to offer terms that are as filmmaker-friendly as possible," says Lawrence.

(Continued at Hollywood Liberation Army)

Nokia, STMicroelectronics push to standardize camera phones

Nokia and STMicroelectronics (ST) have announced that they are releasing a comprehensive specification for camera modules, aimed at standardizing this increasingly common component in mobile devices.

The specification, dubbed Standard Mobile Imaging Architecture (SMIA), covers all aspects of the modules, including their electrical, mechanical, and functional interfaces, and also address other key areas such as characterization, optical performance, and reliability. The intent is to help standardize the components that go into a camera phone's camera, resulting in more uniform quality for customers as well as more standard parts for manufacturers, which in turn leads to greater competition for camera components, which leads to lower prices.

Content publishing and sharing

A recent review of BBC Online includes Future market trends. Trying to look five years ahead the report foresee a range of new tools and applications are allowing consumers to publish and share their content with others:

- Weblogging.

- Dedicated content sharing sites, such as "Sony Screenblast".

- File sharing networks and viral email distribution.

- Amateur content creators can use free online registries to license their content.

kowari

An open source, massively scalable, transaction-safe, purpose-built database for the storage and retrieval of metadata.

sonic city

A project exploring mobile interaction and wearable technology for everyday music creation.

NY Times on DVD DRM

Yesterday's NY Times' Circuits section had a great article about the impediments of DRM and the DMCA for those who legitimately own DVDs (Whose DVD? A Debate Over Copies). One example used is of a couple who take copies of their large (expensive - lots of money sent to Hollywood already) DVD collection when they travel on their boat. The ability to copy saves hauling the DVDs back and forth and the consequent risk of loss, damage or theft. Well, we may not all own boats in Bermuda, but we can all sympathesize with the couple who have no intention of harming Hollywood.

The story publishes the counter arguments:

The Federal District Court judge in one case, Susan Illston of San Francisco, was unswayed by arguments that users of the company's products did not routinely engage in piracy or otherwise damage the market for DVD movies. "It is the technology itself at issue, not the uses to which the copyrighted material may be put," she wrote in her opinion.

Cars + WiFi + Digital Music = Induce Bait

Larry Lessig yesterday called the IICA/Induce Act a "lawyer employment act," arguing that it will "force technologists into court before they get to enter the marketplace and "shift responsibility for striking the balance in copyright law from Congress to unelected federal judges."

Ford has a new product that would give Induce Act-wielding lawyers plenty to do: the 2004 Lincoln Aviator SUV -- a car with built-in WiFi technology. This article from the Detroit Free Press reads as pure inducement:

One of the great frustrations with the vast amount of digital music many of us now have stored on our computers is not being able to take it with us easily when we're on the road.

What we do today is burn CDs -- endless numbers of them. It's time consuming, and we never seem to have that one new song we really want.

But now I've seen the solution: a WiFi vehicle.

EFF's Top Ten Patents That Shouldn't Be Granted

1. Streaming video
2. Voice over IP
3. Automatically-assigned domain names (e.g. yournamehere.livejournal.com)
4. Online tests
5. Intelligent email autoresponders
6. Live concert recording
7. Network gaming
8. Barcode lookup
9. Nintendo emulation
10. Storing music

The All Seeing Eye

"In the opening article, "Sensors and Sensibility," Senior Associate Editors Jean Kumagai and Steven Cherry trace the assault to several connected technology developments. One is the percolation throughout our world of new or hugely improved sensors, such as radio-frequency ID tags, tiny digital cameras, cellphone-locator technologies, and minute Global Positioning System receivers. Another is the emergence of enormous databases of personal information, along with software that rapidly combs through those databases, finding connections and making inferences about people. The third is the availability of a cheap, easy way to instantly spread personal information and data gathered by sensors to every corner of the planet: it's called the Internet."

Personal Media versus Mass Media

Omar posts regarding discrepancies between what he and other Iraqi bloggers are experiencing first-hand and what's reported in mainstream media (via Buzzmachine):

It seems that some people in the major media still think theyíre the only ones who have eyes and ears and cameras and that ordinary people cannot have access to the information except from the major media outlets. They underestimated the prevalence and the effect of the internet in connecting people to each other and making the readers in direct contact with real eyewitnesses at the scene of events.

FCC to Require Broadcasters to Retain Copies of Broadcasts for 60-90 Days

Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced (through a notice of proposed rulemaking) that it will likely be requiring all broadcasters to retain copies of their broadcasts for 60 - 90 days in order to better combat indecent broadcasts.

OpenTV, Disney settle patent dispute

The settlement paves the way for a multi-year deal to develop enhanced TV....

OpenTV and Walt Disney Co. said Wednesday that they've settled a patent dispute, paving the way to negotiations for a multiyear agreement to develop and market enhanced television programming.

The suit, brought by OpenTV subsidiary ACTV against Disney's ABC and ESPN networks, was related to certain systems that synchronized Internet content with TV programming.

Disney now has a non-exclusive license to use and exploit the patents involved in the suit.

Resources on institutional repositories

ARL has posted a very useful page of resources about institutional repositories. Originally designed to accompany the SPARC-CARL webcast on IR's, the resources stand on their own.

Association of National Advertisers to Test Enchanced TV

MediaNews Daily reports, "The first cycle will include the launching of the project, testing the different enhanced television advertising propositions (video on demand, TiVo, etc.) and analyzing consumer interaction," wrote Association of National Advertisers President-CEO Bob Liodice.

Intel spread WiMAX FUD

A week after I penciled my column, WiMAX Isn't the next WiFi, Intel is out spreading more WiMAX FUD. The Feature's Carlo Longino, today points out that Intel's vision has more holes than all the cheese in Switzerland.

As a part of the biggest hype blitz since trying to replace Wi-Fi with the Centrino brand, the company is saying the new big thing will make its way into laptops by 2006. An Intel product manager told reporters the company expects the take-up of WiMAX to grow more quickly than Wi-Fi. While it's made for some good headlines, it's a hollow statement, as well as one that's unlikely to prove true.

Discussing VoD, VoIP and Digital Migration

A roundtable on the future of cable industry with Adelphia Communications CTO Marwan Fawaz; Cablevision Systems Executive VP of Engineering and Technology Wilt Hildenbrand; Charter Communications Senior VP of Engineering Wayne Davis; Comcast Cable CTO David Fellows; Cox Communications CTO and Senior VP of Engineering Chris Bowick; and Time Warner Cable CTO Mike LaJoie.

Hildenbrand on HDVOD: "The tricky part is really getting content. We're getting some, and what's on there is reasonably good, but getting good, high-definition content in this day and age of copy protection, or fear of lack of copy protection as the case may be, has been one of the challenges." (via PaidContent)

It's Final! Blogs Are a Form of Social Media

Mary Hodder writes the Blogging vs. Journalism debate has been pretty much been put to rest over the past two years. Blogs are a form of social media. I give Mary an "Amen." Let's end this debate once and for all.

am3 Sets Up Anime Vending Machines for Game Boy Advance

Japanese company am3 has set up anime vending machines in 20 locations around the country in test program to sell content for its moderately succesful 'Advance Movie' peripheral for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. Different from the Game Boy Advance Video cartridges available here, the Advance Movie uses a rewriteable Smart Media card, which consumers can fill up with movies that cost between 100 (~$1) and 400 yen(~$4), depending on their content (and presumably length). So far all the titles are anime, but there's nothing stopping other types of programs to be sold. In fact, am3 is already planning to sell data for four other peripherals it sells; Advance Comic, for manga viewing; Advance Picture, for images; Advance Music, for durrrrr; and Advance Navi, for maps.

Why they can't just have one peripheral that does all those things, I don't know. Oh, and if any of our Japanese readers can snap a pic of the vending machines and send it to us, that'd be dandy.

geocoder.us: a free US address geocoder

with a perl module!

The World's Smallest Handheld Rechargeable TFT LCD TV

America Action Inc. (AXION) a member of the Action Electronics' Group, announced a new Handheld Rechargeable TFT LCD TV - the ''Minnie'' series.The AXION branded ACN-5327 (MSRP $149) is a 2.5'' TFT LCD handheld TV features built-in rechargeable circuitry, and includes four Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries with an AC adaptor/charger. Axion`s new line of ''truly portable'' handheld TVs focus on delivering convenience for consumers to bring along their favorite TV programs everywhere they go.

Camera/Iraq

Started by John Schott, a teacher and a filmmaker at Carleton College, Camera/Iraq is a project to aggregate, contextualize and discuss "news sources and commentary about public and personal photographic image practices associated with the War in Iraq."

Schott links to a Mail & Guardian article (via smartmobs) that says:

Over the past weeks, the world has reeled to the pictures of US troops abusing Iraqi prisoners and the beheading of US contract worker Nicholas Berg.

These events were recorded by participants or bystanders. The images were posted on the internet, making them directly, freely and immediately accessible around the world.

In other words, journalists played no part in recording or interpreting the images. No editors intervened, government censors and spin doctors were impotent.

According to Steve Vines, publisher of a Hong Kong weekly news and political satire magazine, Spike " the main barriers to publishing - cost and geography - have vanished and the result is explosive.

What is clear, Vines said, is that unfiltered, uncensored images are now starting to drive the menu of the mainstream news oulets.

After Web-logging became a news source for conventional media after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the next step, "Vblogging," will enable those with a desire and a little technology the chance to write, shoot, edit and distribute video journalism on their own, even from the field," forbes.com, the website of Forbes magazine, says.

So the challenge to traditional journalism as the determinant of what is news and how news should be filtered will only intensify.

And the debate about whether undigested news is objective, useful and moral is bound to sharpen".

History of the birth of multimedia in HTML

As part of the WaSP asks the W3C project, we consult the W3C about the correct way to include multimedia elements such as sound, animation and video into our humble (X)HTML pages. In the first of a two-part article, the W3C provides some context for this issue and fills us in on the history of the birth of multimedia in HTML.

That conversation focuses on the object tag, which is used to embed a single media object in an HTML document. However, the object tag does not allow the media object to be handed off to an external player in the form of a URL, which is the reason why streamed media is usually packaged in a playlist that contains a single URL.

HTML is not the place for audio and video objects. HTML is a layout in space; audio and video objects exist in time. Playlists are the appropriate type of hypertext for audio and video objects.

Chalk one up for citizens media

While the New York Post was busy getting it wrong during the night, this was posted on a bulletin board of USaviation.com at 9:44pm.

John Kerry's 757 was in hgr 4 pit tonight John Edwards vp decals were being put on engine cowlings and upper fuselage.

This is the kind of stuff that drives crazy those who cling to beliefs in the rightness of traditional media while rejecting the notion that citizens can play an important role too. Of course, the poster could have been lying, but that's possible with any source on a news item.

(Continue reading this post at The Pomo Blog)

The future of streaming

RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser describes the next few years of streaming video: "We are getting to the point where what we deliver over the internet will in some cases replace television and in other cases augment it," he writes in FT.com. (Via PaidContent)

Acacia Signs First Cable TV Patent License

Acacia, the controversial streaming media patent holder, has signed up its first cable TV deal with Central Valley Cable TV, a provider in California.

The license resolves a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Acacia on June 14, 2004 against Central Valley, which was pending in the District Court for the Northern District of California.

Last month, Acacia filed lawsuits against 9 cable and satellite companies...

A DIY record label

The New York Times looks at ArtistShare, a do-it-yourself music company that offers artists a far better deal than they get from the big record labels.

Data Vision Thru-Glass Monitor Provides Windows Through Windows

A company called Data Vision has developed a new 15-inch LCD touchscreen called 'Thru-Glass' for retail stores that works through windows. The touch part works through windows, I mean, not just the light; that wouldn't be that impressive. Beyond that, it's pretty much just a regular screen, but it could be an interesting way to show off some of your products and answer simple questions even after the lights have been dimmed for the evening. For the £2,000 purchase price Data Vision will even install it for you, which is nice of them.

DVR Adaptor in Your Pocket?

"MSI, a Taiwanese electronics manufacture, has started selling a slick, new USB 2.0 TV Tuner adapter the size of a deck of cards for less than $80. The Vox USB 2.0 TV Box appears to have all the power of its larger sized competitors and comes bundled with a re-skinned InterVideo WinDVR called MSI PVS, TV@nywhere for TV program browsing/scheduling, and InterVideo WinDVD for taking the content you've recorded and burning onto VCD, SVCD, mini-DVD & DVD."

BBC Ten O'Clock News goes interactive

BBCi has commissioned interactive TV service provider Two Way TV to build an interactive platform across all digital cable satellite and terrestrial services for the BBC Ten OíClock News. This is one of the first deals that sees BBCi employ an independent interactive production company to create a major eTV application.

Two Way TV will build an interface where viewers can press a red button at any point during the BBC Ten OíClock News and gain access to more in-depth detail on particular news stories carried during the programme. Viewers will be able to gain a secondary video news feed, as well as get more detailed news reports and a greater selection of pictures and graphics.

Wikipedia Video Policy

Discussion of the issue involved in using video on Wikipedia.

Tech Companies Rally Against the Induce Act (Donna Wentworth)

Four quick pointers on the Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act (a.k.a. the Induce Act), which by extending copyright liability to those who "induce" infringement would give copyright holders an incredibly powerful tool to hamper the development of technologies like the iPod:

USA Today: "Internet search giants Google and Yahoo, chipmaker Intel, Internet service provider Verizon, auctioneer eBay, website operator Cnet Networks, and phone company MCI are among 42 companies and groups who signed a letter that will be delivered Tuesday to bill author Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, requesting hearings on the issue.

Two copyright bills were passed by a voice vote in late June without hearings, which is why the tech industry is concerned."

The letter itself (emphasis, mine): "By combining (1) a new and separate cause of action for "intentional inducement," (2) a lower civil, rather than higher criminal, standard of liability, and (3) a circumstantially "reasonable" test, [the Induce Act] would seem to ensure that massive and intrusive discovery proceedings, and a jury trial, would await any innovator or investor who introduces to the market a product that some copyright owner, someplace, believes will 'induce' infringement."

(Continue reading at Copyfight)

iDive digital video shoebox

iDive is a "digital video shoebox", a media-management application aimed at digital video (DV) users that can turn any assortment of disorganised tapes into an instantly accessible... [Final Cut Pro News (Phila FCP Users Group)]

Adam Curry's Video Aggregator

Adam's video aggregator is really coming together!

"My video aggregator 'trapped' Michael Moore on Conan's late night talk show. So cool to have stuff just appear on my desktop, ready to play. This is what I've been dreaming of for the past 5 years."

"I've reposted the torrent file to my Personal TV Network, you can subscribe to the rss feed here."

Intel Says Notebooks to Have WiMax by 2006

We can't quite picture WiMax becoming as ubiquitous and cheap as Wi-Fi in two years, but Intel can: Intel stands by its expectation that WiMax technology will be embedded in its notebook computers by 2006. What will these transceivers pick up? Hard to tell. WiMax isnít poised at the moment to become a mobile or fixed public space replacement for Wi-Fi or for cellular 3G. But Intel must expect itís on track for that. But remember that Intel put 802.11b into its first-generation Centrinos and has only recently added an 802.11g option into Centrinoís successor.

Whitepapers Now Available

[Wireless Unleashed has] posted some whitepapers written by the contributors to this site, providing various perspectives on unlicensed wireless. You can find summaries (and a few older papers) in the articles section.

Clay Shirky, The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good

David Isenberg, Four Scenarios for the Future of the Network

Andrew Odlyzko, Telecom Dogmas and Spectrum Allocations

Kevin Werbach, Beyond Broadcast

Why young people don't watch local news

What follows is a memo written by a young friend of mine to a TV station. The station and the community shall remain anonymous. My friend got rid of her TV five years ago, so this was her first experience watching local news in a half a decade. It's vulgar and sarcastic, so enter at your own risk. It is, however, truthful ó from an intelligent young viewer's perspective, and it reflects many of the concerns expressed in the St. Louis Post Dispatch informal study.

(Continue reading this post at The Pomo Blog)

The INDUCE Act (IICA) and the Notice and Takedown Provisions of the DMCA

Continuing my series on how various aspects of the copyright law may interact with the INDUCE Act (nÈe IICA), this post will address the "notice and takedown" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), codified at 17 USC 512. Now the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA have already had more than their fair share of controversy, including some rather clear cases of abuse. See, EFF's Unsafe Harbors: Abusive DMCA Subpoenas and Takedown Demands and Chilling Effects's DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions. Guess what. If the INDUCE Act passes, things may get a whole lot worse.

(Continue reading at The Importance of...)

Comcast's Predictions

USAToday is reporting "The dream of digital convergence of the TV, PC and telephone is closer than many people think. At least, that's the message that executives at No. 1 cable operator Comcast offered in a presentation Wednesday in which they described services coming soon that they say satellite and phone companies can't match.

"The television industry is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 20," Comcast Cable President Stephen Burke says."

Moore on filesharing of F 9/11

Sunday Herald:The activist, author and director told the Sunday Herald that, as long as pirated copies of his film were not being sold, he had no problem with it being downloaded. "I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that," he said. "I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I'm happy this is happening."

Steve Winwood and Access Hollywood Use P2P for Promotion

The odd couple is using free P2P systems like KaZaA and Gnutella to promote Winwood's new project.

TV on Phones: Studies Show It Sort of Sucks

Video on mobile phones: craptacular or just shitty? These are the sort of hard questions we ask around these parts, and it doesn't look like we're alone. This piece from Investor's Business Daily still quotes market research as predicting a multi-billion dollar market from video in the next few years -- and okay, fine, it's possible -- but then goes on to talk about what a drag most of the current offerings are (Sprint, apparently, won't even release subscriber numbers for MobiTV). So that's a wash, then, at least for now, but what about short video clips, or video SMS? I'd much rather see clips from my friends than 45 seconds of Fraiser.

I just won't stop typing after the jump.

Internet TV: Don't Touch That Mouse.

"...over 100 independent television stations streaming over the Internet, covering almost every imaginable interest.

Increased broadband access and enhanced streaming technologies have boosted Internet video from the blocky slide shows of the past to presentations that can begin to rival conventional television. Programming has expanded, too. With the adoption of popular media players like RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, avid video hunters can download and watch movies, sports programs and television news...."

HLA: Independent Internet radio has taken off, and now it looks like Independent Internet tv will follow. Imagine all the streams. Imagine all the need for content.

Diablog @ Blogtalk: "Videoblogs as Collective Documentary"

"I'm going to give a brief introduction to why I believe videoblogs are going to be important, I will describe the current videoblog-genres and how they might be related to documentary filmmaking. Finally I will show you some ideas for a prototype, built on existing technology. This includes collaborative possibilities, which might foster what I call collective documentaries...."

(Continued at Diablog)

New Uses for Camera Phones

Depending on visual tags and Bluetooth Intel study new methodologies for camera phones : "camera phones are being used as pointing devices, authentication devices, and storage devices. Intel researchers have also shown how camera phones can provide user interfaces for systems that, because of cost and/or form factor, aren't able to accommodate a display of their own"

(via Picturephoning)

Flexible screen to display animated graphics on clothing

France TÈlÈcom R&D have developped operational prototypes of flexible color screens that can be integrated into clothing.

Such displays would allow people to communicate their emotions, wishes, opinions, etc. via drawings, logo, animations or SMS either created by themselves or received from other persons.

Video presentation (in French.)

Found on the French GSM Box.

Life Caching An Important Trend For Marketers to Watch

Always ahead of the curve, TrendWatching has dubbed a new trend called Life Caching. Simply put, it's the collection of all things experiential (rather than material) enabled by the proliferation of digital products. From weblogs to Lifeblogs to digital cameras to everything-enabled cell phones, the recording and collection of experiences is fast becoming ubiquitous.

For marketers who provide an experience, figuring out to enable the consumer to make that experience last is the key to riding this trend. With consumer's entire body of experience cataloged, gaining permission from consumers to access this life-store will be the holy grail for marketers.

CBS.com to launch talker

The site will debut an online talk show to accompany Big Brother 5. The show will stream weekdays at 1pm ET and take viewer phone calls and email. Nifty!...

CBS is launching an online talk show to accompany Big Brother 5, which premieres Tuesday, July 6, at 9 p.m.

Viewers will send e-mails and call in to the talker at 323-CBS-1000 to discuss the latest developments on the prime time show, which will air on CBS three times a week from July through September (Tuesday at 9, Thursday at 8 and Saturday at 9).

MediaCollege tutorial on How to Make Streaming Video

"This tutorial covers the different types of video streaming, how to convert video files, how to place streaming video files on your website."

blogging is trapped in a metaphor (danah boyd)

I've been trying to sit with some of my frustrations about sociable technologies lately. I've been trying to work through them in order to understand why Liz’s frustration with blogging research resonates and why i start twitching every time people put together panels that pit blogs against "big" journalism. I wanted to let go of my boiling anger over the fact that YASNS do not look like "real" social networks.

I realized that all of these concerns come from a common root. Sociable technologies are all built on metaphors. They are often an attempt to model a set of practices already known in everyday life. Yet, as models, the technologies are not the same as the metaphors on which they are based. The result is an entirely new form that encourages entirely new practices.

(Continued at Many-to-Many)

EFF Fights Broadcast Flag With ... MythTV?

The EFF has an interesting, if somewhat milquetoast call out to programmers and other geeks to help develop the MythTV project, specifically to make it easier to use by the average consumer. Their fear is that the FCC's broadcast flag (a DRM system that will lock down your ability, unless permitted by broadcasters, to exercise your fair use rights, like copying or timeshifting, on HDTV streams) will pass into law as scheduled about a year from now. There is a loophole, currently, that allows unrestricted HDTV devices to be sold and resold, even after the broadcast flag goes into effect.

The idea is, I think, to try to get as many unrestricted HDTV tuners and PVRs into the hands of people as possible, not only to free themselves from future restriction, but to raise awareness that the government, in the pocket of Hollywood, has already made plans to put the squeeze on your rights.

Open Media Streaming With CC Metadata

The Open Media Streaming Project has added CC metadata support to their streaming audio server and player.



OMSP's NeMeSi player displaying license info for a stream.

They say:

Please note that the CC stuff in the source code is in very alpha stage: no more than IETF's-style "running code" to test a soon-to-be-released specification proposal for streaming Creative Commons licensing meta-data over RTSP/RTP protocols.

video tricks for videoconferencing

dailywireless has a comprehensive rundown of tools that make your videoconferencing a little more face-to-face and a little less like talking to someone with ADD. He talks about fun things like Microsoft's i2i camera system and the Interrotron developed by Errol Morris.

Probably the most intriguing to me is the facetop solution by folks at UNC-Chapel Hill that places the incoming video as a semi-transparent overlay on your screen. Although their intention seems more VNC than ITJ, it still has the making of a useful tool for interactive TV. (found via Clippings and Roland Piquepaille)

Researchers Invent Video Projector for Mobile Phones, PDAs

Researchers at Cambridge and Light Blue Optics have invented a small, battery-powered video projector system small enough for mobile phones and PDAs. The system creates a projection by displaying a hologram on a display and shinging laser light through it.

100 Channels of Push Content Too Many?

MediaPost is reporting, "In a development that appears to defy the laws of television industry physics, the medium's expanding universe may have reached its limit much sooner than anyone would have imagined--and it seems to be one that is considerably less than the apocryphal 500 channels it was ultimately projected to deliver. For the first time since Nielsen Media Research began tracking it, the number of channels receivable by the average U.S. household declined last year, and appears to have stalled out at about 100." (via Future of Television)

Average Number Of TV Channels Receivable

1985 18.8
1990 33.2
1995 41.1
2000 74.6
2001 89.2
2002 102.1
2003 100.4

(Yo, CTG! Look up! -kc.)

Drop-Frame Timecode

dropframetimecode - an open source drop-frame timecode calculation

Rendezvous for Windows

Apple released a developer's preview of Rendezvous Networking for Windows 2000 & XP at wwdc 04.

This preview release includes full link-local support, allowing Windows machines to discover advertised HTTP and FTP servers using Internet Explorer. It also includes a printer setup wizard which allows Windows machines to print to Rendezvous networked printers, including USB shared printers connected to the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express Base Stations. With the included Rendezvous SDK, Windows and Java developers can begin the process of adding Rendezvous service discovery to their applications

RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X (Beta)

Real released RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X:

Available in beta, the newest RealPlayer from RealNetworks enables Mac OS X consumers to enjoy hundreds of hours of audio and video content in many of the major Internet media formats, including RealAudio, RealVideo, AAC, QuickTime and MPEG. Also included in the RealPlayer for Mac OS X beta are an integrated browser window, advanced video controls and graphic equalizer.

Independent TV channels on the Net

The NY Times profiles ToqerTV and other indie TV channels on the Internet.

BBC outlines digital future

The UK state broadcaster, the BBC, yesterday outlined its vision of how it should operate and its role in British society advance of the upcoming review of its Royal Charter.

The charter describes the broadcasterís aims, objectives and functions and is up for government renewal at the end of next year.

As part of the self-described ìradicalî manifesto for the future of the BBC, the corporationís director general, Mark Thompson, and chairman, Michael Grade, unveiled a nine-point plan laying out the priorities for BBC, highlighting in particular its role in Britainís digital development.

Mr Thompson underlined the important role the BBC had to play in the delivery of digital TV, radio and internet services.

(Continued at Digital Media Europe)