unmediated

An Audioblogging Manifesto

Idle Words -> An Audioblogging Manifesto -> "I demand four minutes and twenty seconds of your life [mp3]."

Intel details 65 nanometer plans

Intel is apparently feeling confident that its problems with the 90nm transition are behind it and will not affect the next process shrink to 65nm. The world's largest CPU maker announced plans to begin volume production of 65nm CPUs in late 2005. Using an enhanced version of its strained silicon process, Intel claims that its 65nm CPUs will be able to cut down on current leakage by a factor of four, improve performance by 30% over chips made without strained silicon, or both.

The biggest architectural change in the 65nm chips will be the addition of sleep transistors in the cache array and the use of a low-k dielectric insulator, both of which should cut down on SRAM leakage. Such power-saving features will be important for Intel as they move down from 90nm ó the shrink from 130nm to 90nm meant an increase in power draw from 82 watts for Northwood at its peak to 90W for the first round of Prescotts. Aside from that, the 65nm chips will be quite similar to the 90nm. Intel is betting that with the transition being a mostly "pure" process shrink ó as opposed to the move to 90nm from 130nm which involved a number of changes ó things should go much more smoothly this time.

Participate in the RNC from Anywhere tonight and tomorrow night

We're at NYU assembling our interactive cameras and wearable computers for tonights Konscious Convention broadcast. We'll have four crews in the field, one in Madison Square Garden. Also, three of us from Unmediated will be at Manhattan Neighborhood Networks monitoring the four cameras in the field, and chatting with participants that want to ask convention attendees and protesters questions. You can watch and participate tonight at 7PM EST by going to www.Konscious.tv. You can watch a stream of the live broadcast over at MNN from 7 PM to 7:30 PM EST. If you live in the New York City Area, you can tune into MNN and watch the live broadcast on Time Warner channel 34 or 78, RCN Channel 110 and digital cable channel 107. For more info on the system we're using, developed by Shawn Van Every, click here
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IBM Open Sources Voice Code

IBM Donates Voice Code to Apache. Very nice... Looks as though you use it via standard JSP tags....

videoblog pinging

In blog land a ping is the signal that one blog sends to another blog, or to another server, to indicate that a post has been made. A blog may ping a central service to indicate that an update has been posted, or it may ping an individual blog to indicate that one blog post has made a comment about another blog post. So pings have proved extremely useful to help build connections between blogs. Well, Andreas Haugstrup and Jay Dedman via http://www.videoblogging.info, have established a site where you can ping when your videoblog is updated. When you post, ping:

http://www.videoblogging.info/ping

and your videoblog will be recognised within www.videoblogging.info

If you need help working out how to ping from your blog, visit http://www.videoblogging.info for help.

Blog Torrent: Downhill Battle Interview

In this GrepLaw interview, Downhill Battle's Nicholas Reville describes the success (and takedown) of SP2Torrent.com, alternative ways to buy music, what indie musicians think about filesharing, and real ways to counter threats to creativity and an open culture. Those excited about the possibilities of Bittorrent will especially appreciate Downhill Battle's Blog Torrent, an easy-to-install program that will dramatically simplify the creation, posting, and seeding of new torrents."

Olympics 2004 on Usenet

A couple weeks back I predicted that Bittorrent would be a big way to share coverage of the Olympic games when fans felt their local TV coverage fell short, and I admit I don't see much in the way of bittorrent sites listing olympics videos at this time. But I did notice some action on Usenet, especially the newly formed alt.binaries.olympics. Just a couple days into this year's games, a rip of the BBC's opening ceremonies was floating around along with a few basketball games.

(Continued at PVRblog)

Digital Ethics

Ben Casnocha wrote a post on the ethics and transparency of linking to people/posts that link back to you favorably. In other words, what appears to be reciprocal appreciation. He mentions the example of Jeff Jarvis' referral to Doc Searls' article on the fate of radio, where Jeff enthusiastically point to Doc.

Ben then quotes Doc's comment on his blog about how we figure out the ethics of linking, and pointing others to pieces we are positively mention in, and how others will see this, in a transparent online world where links can be looked up and people note the exchanges. The idea is that pointing or referring to others, is both directing attention, and letting readers know where the ideas originated from, while the writer iterates further.

(Continued at Napsterization)

Talking Head Videoblogs are here

Someone just sent me a message about a new service called USERPLANE.

It lets you record video messages and atttach them to your blog. they're in beta version now and they want people to test it. i love this kind of openness.

Steve Garfield, our videoblog scientist tests it out for us HERE or HERE. Its a small video..plays fast..

This shit is jumping off. But I dont want to make a talking head videoblog. Im waiting for someone to create a simple videoblogging tool that lets me edit, compress, and post. Who will make it?

RSS = R$$

Is it really that simple? RSS is now R$$, according to Wired News. The space is attracting lots of venture capital interest.

Towards a clear definition of micro-content

Arnaud takes it further - going into all sorts of variations on exactly what micro-content means.
I left a comment on this post simpy saying:

A) permalinks

B) subscribeable to.....

It's actually a well written, thoughout out post. I agree that getting the semantics right - is important.

World's First Treo 650 Pictures

And there you have it - the first pictures of the upcoming Treo 650. More pics to come. Can you say Bluetooth and new backlit keyboard? (Thanks, Michael!)

(Okay, maybe this doesn't count as unmediated-worthy but I've been waiting sooooo loooooong for a single handheld I can both text blog and video blog from. That makes it count, right? -kc.)

Kevin Smith Casts Web For Next Great Shorts

"With the challenge ìWeíve shown you ours. Now show us yours,î filmmaker Kevin Smith is launching an online community, showcase and DVD series for aspiring filmmakers. The Web site is scheduled to be unveiled Sept. 10.

Submissions must be 30 minutes or less, and an internal review panel will select five for streaming on the site each month. Visitors will vote on the five to select the monthly best, and the winning 12 will be compiled into a commercially released MoviesAskew DVD.

The 12 monthly winners also will be screened at the First Annual MoviesAskew Film Festival, which will be held either in the Los Angeles suburb of Westwood or in Smithís hometown of Red Bank, N.J. Smith and actor Jason Mewes will select five of those 12, which will then be rescreened and subjected to an audience vote for overall best.

(Continued at Hollywood Liberation Army)

Homebrew GameDev on SourceForge

Working to finish an article today, I made the mistake of clicking through to SourceForce's list of Turn-Based Strategy projects. Homebrew, freeware cross-platform game projects in progress. Fabulous! Fascinating. Fun!

I tried Tyrant which added some pretty little graphics on top of NetHack-type play.

I looked at MegaMek, an old-school BattleTech hex-gaming clone. But it wasn't as drop-in-and-play friendly as Tyrant, so I could put that off.

Mostly, I'm just delighted to see that there's 814 projects in development there. A lot to check out! And that's just turn-based strategy.

Distort your media

Aristarkh Chernyshev s project Shining TV proposes to manipulate the TV-signal, transforming the signal into a range of new TV types. One of the physical interfaces is the the real-virtuality-helmet (a joint project with Alexei Shulgin), that allows the spectator to see the world in ASCII mode. Another interesting one is the attachment Shine Box which allows the user to watch regular TV programmes in a range of distorted modes (12 different ones).

Kino - Linux Digital Video

A non-linear digital video editor for GNU/Linux.

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in RawDV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.

You can load multiple video clips, cut and paste portions of video/audio, and save it to an edit decision list (SMIL XML format). Most edit and navigation commands are mapped to equivalent vi key commands. Also, Kino can load movies and export the composite movie in a number of formats: DV over IEEE 1394, Raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX. Still frame export uses Imlib1, which has built-in support for PPM, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and whatever your ImageMagick installation supports. MP3 requires lame. Ogg Vorbis requires oggenc. MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX require mjpegtools 1.6.0. RPM and Debian packages as well as tarballs are available.

UWB - Over Cable TV

802 Planet reports that at the annual CableLabs Summer Conference earlier this month in Keystone, Colorado, ultrawideband (UWB) chipset developer Pulse~LINK showcased its technology for cable operators.

Pulse~LINK transmits high definition television content over cable and powerline. "It transmits across the entire cable bandwidth -- not wirelessly -- showing that it coexists with the television signals that are already there," said PulseLINK representatives.

The demonstration consisted of industry standard off-the-shelf CATV equipment beginning at the ìCable Operatorís head-endî where the UWB signal was injected into a standard RF combiner, then modulated onto a fiber optic cable for transmission to a ìfiber field nodeî where the
RF content was demodulated for transmission through more than 1000 feet of coax cable and two ìfield amplifiers.î

The signal was then sent through multiple RF splitters and into a ìdigital living roomî where both the UWB HDTV broadcasts and standard cable broadcasts were displayed simultaneously.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

Canon XL2 and Panasonic AG-DVX100 Comparison

There are now two prosumer camcorder models that feature variable frame rate recording: the Panasonic AG-DVX100A and Canon's XL2. There are a multitude of differences between these camcorders, as well as some very distinct similarities. But, at the end of the day, three features set the XL2 apart from the AG-DVX100A and any other prosumer camcorder on the market: the interchangable lens system, the 16:9 aspect ratio mode, and the number of effective pixels per CCD. We've laid out the differences in a spec table.

Bollywood titles fill Video-on-Demand niche

Seasonal and topically-themed collections aren't anything new to Video-on-Demand (VOD), but New York-based 212 Media and Schramm Sports & Entertainment have upped the ante with 'Bollywood on Demand.' Their special collection features Bollywood movies, series and other special events on... [The Movie Marketing Blog]

Video Games Threaten Television Viewership, Console Gaming Ripe For Marketers

Not that we didn't see this coming but another study citing the growth of gaming is giving network execs serious ulcers. A Ziff-Davis study claims 54.5 million U.S. households play console video games (overtaking the 52.3 million PC gamers), 26 percent say their television viewing has decreased and 20 percent say they expect their television viewing to decrease further. Additionally, mobile (cell phone) gaming has increased to 16.3 million households up from 8.1 million a year ago.

While growth continues, Starcom Play VP Director PJ MacGregor, whom we contacted for this story, thinks the focus of gaming marketers is in the wrong area, "The reality is that most of the people that are paying attention to the gaming space are thinking about it in a very limited manner. Just as there is more to internet marketing than "banners" and keywords, there is more to gaming related marketing than "advergaming" and "product placement". Those two terms should be removed from the vernacular."

ipodder 4 windows

Dave Slusher is on fire. He's developed a windows script that runs like iPodder... on windows!


He's also posted a full 20 minutes of audio about the iPod Platform we've been discussing and ways to monetize on it.

What iTunes means for movie distribution

As the music business goes, so goes the movie business. The music business is beating a path for the business of online movie distribution. Drunkenblog tells the things about iTunes which are significant to the future of movie distribution. The only real differences between music online and movies online are the amount of data involved, and the fact that the a movie is much longer in duration than a music track. Apple has already worked out payment; they've got a big lead on the Digital Rights Management (DRM), and its new compression scheme (H.264/AVC) brings the transmission of data into line for what you'd need over a broadband connection. This isn't to trivialize the work that it'd take, just that we're talking an evolutionary leap here; much of the hard stuff has been worked out. All the pieces are here for this now, and you're going to be seeing it very, very soon. You'll probably see it first with Satellite companies, but what they're doing in places like China and South Korea right now are absolutely amazing ... and Apple wants to be the GateKeeper here. [DrunkenBlog]

Superhighspeed broadband wet dreams

Drool. Swedish high-speed broadband provider Bredbandsbolaget sells 100-megabit-per-second service for 595 Swedish crowns ($79.49) a month in areas where the state of wiring infrastructure permits. Over 1,500 households have already signed up. In the US, $79 might buy you, say, a 3.0 Mbps DSL connection. Higher-speed forms of connectivity are available in many parts of the US, but that's a common speed-per-buck equation. And it compared to Sweden, it blows.

For Rainer Kinnunen, life has been a bit of a blur since he signed up for a superhigh-speed Internet service three years ago. The 31-year-old Swedish student's computer has supplanted the television as the most vital link between his home and the outside world. He watches television shows and movies, makes phone calls, surfs the Web and plays multiplayer shoot-'em-up games through his high-speed connection -- often doing one or more activities at once.

His 10-megabit-per-second service from telecommunications company Bredbandsbolaget is up to 20 times faster than conventional cable modems, enabling a user to download a two-hour movie in a matter of minutes rather than hours. For Kinnunen, the result has been a lifestyle change that, though not revolutionary, is certainly noticeable. "If my child wants a movie, I can download it instantly," he said. "And I haven't been to the neighborhood music store in years."

Since going superhigh-speed, Kinnunen has set up two computer servers in his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Eskilstuna. One supplies his digital photos to friends and family. On the other, he duels it out for hours a day with other players of the "Half-Life: Day of Defeat" online war game. And he has enough bandwidth and server space left over to broadcast his DVDs from his apartment to his friends' computers in case they want to watch along from across town.

Toyota reports a silicon carbide breakthrough

Researchers at Toyota have created near perfect crystals of silicon carbide. The new matrial may eventually replace traditional silicon in semiconductors.

Takatori grows the silicon carbide crystals in several different stages. At each stage, further growth is only allowed on the cleanest face of the crystal. Hot silicon carbide vapour condenses on the crystal's flat face and defects are gradually eliminated as the crystals grow up to seven centimetres across. Takatori's crystals contain less than 1% of the number of defects found in a crystal produced by conventional methods.

AD-ID to Incorporate EDI

Association of National Advertisers President and CEO Bob Liodice writes on his blog about the upcoming integration of the redently announce AD-ID and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) which, accoring to Bob, will solve all our tracking, billing, reporting, and make good headaches.

Just think of the enormous productivity that will be generated by the media ordering and invoicing system. Just think about the end of incorrect advertising placements and screw-ups in the billing process. Just think of having the ability to verify what commercial truly ran. Just think about the opportunity to take your media asset and target it more directly to a particular audience segment or geography ñ and being able to measure its impact. Those dreams are becoming reality.

Personal Hover Cams

Thanks to Dan I've started reading Rudy Rucker's Saucer Wisdom just as Rucker started guest blogging at BoingBoing. So the whole thing has felt quite serendipitous. But now it's getting silly. Rucker's Dragonflies, little personal hovering cameras of the future, are now available for $1000 from a company called... Zenon Draganfly! From Canada.com:

"Down the show room floor there was a device that could climb walls, scale buildings and, in fact, hover anywhere within about 100 metres from an operator running its joystick-like controller.

Dubbed the DraganFly for the combination of its flying ability and its maker's name, Zenon Dragan, the toy-sized helicopter carries a digital video camera to deliver real time video images of everything it sees.

"It's excellent for checking roofs and looking in windows," said Mr. Dragan. "It's extremely practical... (and) will pay for itself immediately, plus they'll have fun flying it."

Human Cop Cams at RNC

Helmet cams will eye GOP confab

"During the Republican National Convention, hundreds of cameras will be eyeing city streets as officials monitor people's movements from a handheld computer the size of a palm pilot...As they move their head, the camera is recording whatever they see and sending the image to a control room...The signal from the cameras goes directly into the mobile and control units via satellite, and from there, it is fed into the Internet in encrypted form"

Sounds like a lite-version of this helmet system for soldiers.

Jane magazine, Mobit offer prizes for snapping photos of magazine ads

Jane, a women's magazine catering to 18 to 34 year olds, and Mobot, a new company offering photo recognition software, have partnered to create a contest based upon reader snapping camera phone photos of advertisements in Jane

Here's whatJane says about the contest on its Web site, "You won't want to flip through the September issue of JANE without your camera phone. There's a ton of freebies, sweepstakes, MP3s and cool stuff in it for you. Grab your September issue and register below.

The promotion, called Jane Talks Back, offers a variety of discounts and chances to win gifts if readers snap photos of specific ads. The New York Times reports, "Advertisers who are participating in Jane Talks Back include Kmart, which will give users $5 gift cards; Calvin Klein Jeans, which will give away 25 jean jackets; and Guess, which is offering 10 percent discounts to readers who snap and send pictures of its ad.

(Continued at Reiter's Camera Phone Report)

TheKnot Makes It To TV With Comcast VOD

The weddings portal The Knot has tied up with Comcast Cable to launch the all-weddings, all-the-time video-on-demand service, "The Knot Weddings."

In addition, Comcast customers who subscribe to its broadband Internet service will have access to wedding information and planning tools from TheKnot.com on Comcast.net portal.

Video from the Community Wireless Summit

We've got the opening and closing plenary videos on-line from last weekend's National Summit on Community Wireless Networks.

Both plenaries were great. In particular, Harold Feld, associate director of the Media Access Project, gave a call to the audience to spend 5 minutes a day to protect and enlarge wireless networking spectrum, during the opening. In the closing plenary, Mark Cooper, Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America, gave a rousing talk putting the fight for free wireless spectrum rights in historical perspective.

Right now the videos are in streaming Real Video, which is accessible from 56k modems up to broadband, but is best experienced on a 150kbps connection or better. Coming soon will be MPEG-4 downloadable videos and audio in mp3 and ogg vorbis.

I'm trying to balance the need for convenient streaming videos with making them maximally accessible and open, which is why we're releasing audio and video in multiple formats. I'm considering putting video in the Ogg-related open-source video format Theora, which was just frozen in alpha. Any comments on this approach are welcome -- drop me an e-mail.

The fog of cable

Alessandra Stanley in today's NY Times:

There is the fog of war and then there is the fog of cable.

Over the last few weeks, 24-hour news networks have done little to find out what John Kerry did in Vietnam, but they have provided a different kind of public service: their examination of his war record in Vietnam illustrates once again just how perfunctory and confusing cable news coverage can be. Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together on screen like laundry in an industrial dryer - without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection....

StreamRipper Primer

Hmmm - any "INDUCE"ing going on here? Three easy apps to record Internet radio:

I have a lot of CDs, and Iíve ripped most of them to MP3 so that I can make my own mix CDs. I always want more music, though, and CDs are expensive. Legal issues surrounding file sharing and the music industry have pushed me to find a new source for music. Iíll spare you my opinions on the subject, but suffice it to say Iíd rather find other ways to get new music rather than roll the dice on paying a big fine.

Thatís why I use stream rippers , which record the currently playing stream and save it in MP3 format. Fortunately, recording Internet radio still remains in legal limbo, and thereís some precedent for it being legal, since you can record regular broadcast radio. There are plenty of good Internet radio stations if you do a little searching, and you can even find some that cover the exact genre of music you like.

Whenever I find a really good station, I use a stream ripper to save the music on my hard drive. That way, I always have some good music on hand to push me through the rest of my workday. Here are my three favoritesñand theyíre all free.

Microsoft Tests Broadband TV

"Microsoft has turned to a Swiss telecommunication operator for the first commercial trial of its system that delivers television signals to consumers over a broadband telecommunications network, it announced this week. Beginning in September, Swisscom's Internet service provider subsidiary Bluewin will deliver 25 TV channels to set top boxes in 600 homes. During the four-month trial, testers will have access to five pay-TV channels and a video-on-demand service through the set top boxes, which also function as a digital video recorder with a live pause function, Microsoft says. Testers will have to pay for the service: $12 per month for 12 channels, or $19 for all 25, with pay-per-view films costing from $2 to $8 each. Microsoft expects the trial to result in the launch of a Bluewin TV service over ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) in 2005, it says."

montylingua

MontyLingua is a free*, commonsense-enriched, end-to-end natural language understander for English. Feed raw English text into MontyLingua, and the output will be a semantic interpretation of that text. Perfect for information retrieval and extraction, request processing, and question answering. From English sentences, it extracts subject/verb/object tuples, extracts adjectives, noun phrases and verb phrases, and extracts people's names, places, events, dates and times, and other semantic information.

UWB Civil War

USA Today has a good overview of the Ultra Wide Band war. As UWB Insider explains, it pits the Motorola backed Direct Sequence standard against the MultiBand OFDM Alliance. Consumers who are looking for "wireless USB" may find incompatibility between vendors.

"It's a civil war," says Yoram Solomon, head of consumer networking for Texas Instruments. "You have friends in the other camp, and you're willing to kill them."

While standards battles are not new, the UWB shootout has taken on the aura of a backroom political brawl, with charges of vote-buying, of bias by IEEE officials and of violations of non-disclosure deals.

This fracas also is unusual in that it pits about 170 companies, many high-tech heavyweights such as Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Panasonic, Mitsubishi and Hewlett-Packard, against Motorola and about 60 start-ups.

Dan Bricklin's Thoughts on On-Demand Audio

Following up on his Memory Lane interview with Halley Suitt, Dan considers the reality and usability of "talk radio" on the Internet. Most interesting is his analysis that narrow-interest content has a place in this medium. It doesn't, as Dan points out, compete for timeslots with more popular material. The delivery costs scale linearly with the demand, and even if the demand is low, the storage costs aren't a prohibiting factor. Unlike streaming audio, success in on-demand comes over time. In that sense, it's more like downloadable music and CDs than like traditional radio, but devices like TiVo and iPod (and even the venerable VHS recorder) have made broacasting more of an on-demand experience...

IT Conversations (with enclosures) -> Dan Bricklin's Thoughts on On-Demand Audio

ipod platform II

Speaking of the "Ipod platform", a lot could be done along lines of linking text/audio/psychogeography - like say an ipod based walking tour of public bathrooms. A good example of this can be seen/downloaded in the London based ppod:

"pPod combines text, spoken word audio, and music to deliver a guide to Londonís public loos ñ truly a convenience for iPod users on the move! Entertaining audio reviews and even accompanying sound tracks such as Handelís ëWater Musicí and ëCosmic Windsí will help users to locate their nearest (and loveliest!) loos." More here.

We're building a web OS

Whether you're spieling on about Atom APIs, Laszlo BlogBox objects or a fancy media asset management systems with sexy RIA interface - it's clear that lots of folks are figuring out where we're all going.

The ants are united in their intentions.

That's why I'm so gung ho about new kinds of micro-content. It's exactly the sort of standard that everyone can interpret their own way, add their own value added onto it - while still having the sort of infrastructure that Doc and Tom O'Reilly talk about.

It's the combinatoon of a Web OS, lots of micro-content standards and this decentralzied, mesh world at the 'edge' of the network - that will not only keep us all honest and happy - but also wealthy and wise.

Video collage: a storytelling breakthrough?

I hadn't heard of "revogging" until today. If vogs, or vlogs, are video blogs, revogging is the art of using other people's videoblogs and making something new.

Shannon Noble, a "Flame artist" from LA, has created a few. His best one, which went up just last week, borrowed unrelated video snippets from three video bloggers -- Mica, Charlene, and Jay -- to create a new narrative story. Here's the movie page directly.

(Continued at JD's New Media Musings)

(What excites me about this is that someone's made the leap from monologue to dialog in videoblogging. Now if we could only get the auto annotated metadata to a place where they can trackback without an extra step. Eli: how's it coming? ;) -kc.)

Nurturing Innovation

Tim Wu, near the end of his stint as guest-blogger at Larry Lessig's site, offered a typically thoughful entry, entitled "Who Cares About Innovation?". The gist was that although "innovation" is the mantra of anti-regulation technologists, it may not be clear to the average person what good innovation does. Here's a sample

Consider a question that professor Brett Fischman asks his class about the internet, the central monument for innovationists: ìWhat actually makes the Internet valuable to society?î

This question stopped me for awhile. Measured in social value, surely some of the oldest applications, like email, relatively untouched by innovation, produce most of the network's present social value. Sure, I think VoIP over powerlines would be pretty cool (thanks Adam Thierer). But compared to finding old friends, staying in touch, and everything else that email does, there is no serious comparison. Logic like this suggests that faith in innovation is a faith out of touch with human ends. Perhaps making what is obviously useful ñ like email ñ reach more people is more important than constantly reinventing, redestroying, or finally writing the perfect debugger.

A Radio Challenge to Arbitron

A new service will measure radio audiences in cars, combining global positioning technology and tracking of the radio dial to challenge Arbitron, the dominant radio ratings provider.

Cognitive Radio: Next Big Thing?

Is cognitive radio the "next big thing"? EE Times seems to think so. Their In Focus section this week features Cognitive Radio articles on Creating a New Wireless World, W-LANs Jumpstarting Congitive Radio, Clearing interference for cognitive radio, FPGA use in software-defined radios and Lost Opportunity? (identifing unoccupied TV channels).

Cognitive Radio can sense whether a band is being used. If the band is unoccupied it uses it. CR can switch to another band when the primary user recommences transmissions. It can also stay on the channel, altering its power and modulation to avoid interference.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

The Pixies ride the New Wave of Internet Distribution

Digital Media Europe carries a story today wherein the Pixies denounce traditional record labels in favor of live CD sales from concerts, product licensing, and Internet distribution:

"Record companies, schmecord companies ñ who needs ëem? Thatís not where the money is. The business is with the real customers ñ the fans. Thatís who weíre trying to connect with," band member Frank Black, AKA Black Francis, told the Associated Press this week.

"I never really was much of a believer in the album anyway," Black said. "Singles are what people relate to."

Apparently, the band doesn''t feel it needs a record label any more and, while their plans are still unformed at the moment, the idea generally is to combine selling live CDs made and then sold at concerts, producing music for movies and commercials and distributing singles via the internet.

ipod platform

I copied the title of this post from something Steve Gillmor said on the latest installment of IT Conversations' 'Gillmor Gang'. I gather from his show that Steve also believes in a 'download market'. And with millions of iPods (a general name for the Apple mp3 player and similar devices) there's real fun to be found in creating some common methods of distributing mp3 encoded audio.

This isn't just about music, copyrighted or not. iPod content includes other audio 'programming' like IT Conversations, Morning Coffee Notes, my own Source Code or any number of audio blog posts.

The creators of these audio programs are finding good use of RSS Enclosures for syndication, subscription and ultimately for distribution of their work.

(Continued at Adam Curry's Weblog)

RSS-enabled real time VJ performance: RNC-Redux

RNC-Redux is a real time performance project that takes material from RNC-related blog feeds and mixes it into a narrative of events each night of the RNC.

There are going to be thousands of people textblogging, audioblogging, videoblogging, photoblogging the RNC, most with RSS feeds and most with open content licensing.

With this wealth of material in mind, screensaversgroup will use keyworx, a multi-user cross media synthesizer, to generate, synthesize and process images, sounds and text within a shared realtime environment.

Grassroot journalism at RNC

To cover the voices of people on the street during the Republican National Convention, and let you directly plug in, the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition and the Indymedia Network have build their own newsroom: everyday, they produce a newspaper, a television show, a radio webstream and a website with up-to-the-minute reports, videos and photographs about the RNC.



To help showcase this work, the Gigantic Art Space has offered these independent journalists their gallery. From August 19 through RNC, the Independent Media Infoshop at GAS/gigantic artspace will serve as an Independent Media Infoshop for a public hungry for truth.

Another organization, the August Sound Coalition, lets you record your "straight up grassroots communication" during the RNC. They want to be a welcoming and supportive structure that sound artists, radio groups, and activists of all skill levels can plug into during the RNC.

If you have photos or text, become a moporter with MOPORT, a free service to make and share mobile phone reports.

For more news and links to other local initiatives, see Newsgrist's imvoting blog.

Women's Game Conference, September 9-10, Austin, TX

The Women's Game Conference focuses on women in the computer and video game industry. The conference program includes career paths for women in the industry, gender inclusive game design and women and girls as consumers of games.

The Women's Game Conference runs concurrently with the Austin Game Conference September 9-10, 2004 at the Austin Convention Center and is open to anyone interested in the game industry and game development.

Micro-Broadcasting in Italy

Pirate TV in Italy. A video report about the Italian micro-broadcasting movement produced by a video collective from Milan. Pirate TV has been growing throughout the country in response to Silvio Berlisconi's, the country's richest man who controls half of Italy's TV market, ascended to the prime ministership. [demandmedia] [Cinema Minima]

HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future

Mark Cuban, owner of HDnet, the Dallas Mavericks, and the guy behind The Benefactor reality show, has a great post over at his site about HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future. Mark brings up a lot of good points about how hard drive space is constantly moving up while price per byte falls, while upcoming DVD formats will be limited in storage capacity and technological improvement over the years. He mentions recent experiments with various video formats and storage devices:

On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.

Videoblog on TV-- Pt 5

Lucas Gonze of Webjay explains the vision of video from the computer seen on TV. I can't talk about this vision enough.

"Question: how exactly is it going to happen that we'll be watching TV over PC, or PC over TV, or whatever the hell it means to go sit on the couch and watch the internet?

Answer: you hook up a cheapo flat screen monitor, a pair of cheapo computer speakers, a remote control mouse (so you don't have to get up to fix the volume), and a computer capable of rendering a series of web videos one after the other, then click on a link to a playlist and sit back. To change the channel, surf over to another playlist and click the link. To see what's on, check your RSS feeds. This whole approach is simple and cheap, with no TV at all, unless you want to use it as a monitor. TV is just a dead block of electronics -- you'll spend less and have more to watch by hooking up a PC in your living room."

He has an interesting twist on it. The TV really isnt even a TV anymore...it's just a big screen for your computer so you can watch with other people. Videos on the computer don't have to be little matchbox videos. It really seems like it's about to happen. I can share my computer experience with other people.

Talk about a socializing tool. Boom.

(A buncha years ago I started calling Television "just another peripheral." It wasn't clever then and it's not clever now, but I'll keep on saying it anyway. ;) -kc.)

Sanyo Xacti C4

Sanyo has updated its Xacti flash camcorder line from the C1 model to these new C4s, which appear to have a few nice improvements for those who go tapeless, including a video stabilizer, an upgraded four-megapixel CCD for still images, and a slightly larger LCD screen (1.8-inch instead of 1.5-inch). There are some other slight changes, as well, but it doesn't look like the video quality is any better; we're still talking VGA (640 by 480 pixels at 30 frames per second). Not bad, but not an upgrade, either.

The new colors are nice, too, and I do love this form factor. It's much more usable than I had first thought, and the docking stations make them really handy.

BBC reports record interactive viewership for Olympics

A record-breaking 6m-plus viewers have pressed the red button on their remote controls to use the BBC's interactive Olympic services.

The figures, which have yet to be consolidated, show that 6.13m people have used the service for more than one minute since the Opening Ceremony on Friday 13 August.

The previous highest figure was during this year's Wimbledon, when 4.1m people went interactive for one minute or more.

Free radio

Doc Searls writes an amazing piece on the possibly doomed fate of radio -- and more than radio -- at the hands of so many competing forces who have it in their crossfire, including Congress, the FCC, the music industry, and more. I can't summarize it and do it justice -- so go read it -- but I will quote this

To Congress and the FCC, broadcasting isn't speech. It's transport: a delivery system for "material" and "content".....

Think of a metaphor as a box of words. We all think and talk inside the shipping box when we speak about "moving" or "delivering" goods we call "content" to "end users" or "consumers". This is what Powell does when he describes broadcasting as a "medium" through which we "receive" stuff he calls "material".

Broadcasting isn't the only business in the shipping box. In fact, business itself lives there. Ever since the industrial revolution created an enormous system in which the few produce for the many, most business finds itself somewhere amongst the distribution chains that run between producers and consumers. That's why we have so many more people "adding value" than creating it.....
All the talk about "content" reveals a conceptualization of broadcasting as a delivery system, primarily for visual goods: stuff you see. Not stuff you hear or read as you would with speech--the freedom protected by the First Amendment....

audio blog publishing script

I just wrote a script to cut down on publishing time on the daily Source Code shows. Now when I'm done recording I drop the finished file into a special folder on my desktop, this triggers an applescript that does the following:

Change name to dailySourceCode+today's date. Add id3 tags. Upload to server. Create a blog post via metaWeblog api to Radio UserLand. Delete desktop file. Tell me if it worked.

Amazing all the steps I used to make to publish the show! This script will work with OSX and any weblog software that understands the metaWeblog api

Archival browsing to increase serendipity

Anne Eisenberg, How can a Web browser become more like a bookshelf browser? International Herald Tribune, August 19, 2004. Excerpt:

"At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, a professor and her students have created a search program called Flamenco that lets users browse a digitized collection in ways that are similar to a stroll among the shelves of a library. 'It's for when you are not quite sure what you want,' said Marti Hearst, an associate professor at the School of Information Management and Systems, who led the research. 'It's meant to help people find things, in part, by serendipity.' To create Flamenco, Hearst started with one archived collection of art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 35,000 images that were identified by written descriptions. She used the descriptions to classify the items in a variety of ways, including the medium, the date, the artist and the content of the image. The categories were cross-linked so that when people clicked on one, they saw not only the images within it - say, of landscapes - but those in related categories, like other artists working on landscapes at the same time. The effect, Hearst said, is like walking down a library aisle and finding related books on a subject."

How-to: iMovie to mpeg4

Im going to make all videos into mpeg4. Supposedly, this is a good standard that most people can play. Plus it helps Lucas Gonze and his playlists. So how do I do it?

Adrian Miles made a super cool video: iMovie to mpeg4 I can learn anything if I can see it.

The Influence of Consumer Generated Media

MediaPost has a good story today on an Intelliseek Webinar on how consumer-generated media, such as blogs, are influencing public opinion and even creep into the mainstream press.

A call for designers (OpenMedia.org)

The Open Media project is off to an amazing start. Since we publicly unveiled the initiative 10 days ago, we've been deluged with offers of support and cooperation from advocates of open standards and open source software, from videographers, amateur bands, grassroots film producers, and others in the tech, creative and library communities....

(Go to JD's New Media Musings for more and contact info.)

Sling Media SlingBox: Television Place Shifting

Forbes has a short write-up about an interesting upcoming product from startup Sling Media, called the "SlingBox Personal Broadcaster." If it works as advertised, we'll probably be hearing a lot about it.

The idea is simple: hook up the little $200 box to your TiVo or your cable box and connect it to your home internet. Then, when you're out and about, just pull up the client software on your PDA or laptop. SlingBox's software will detect the quality and throughput of your connection and shoot you our a recompressed, digital stream of whatever analog signal you could be watching at home. It would even work on cellphones, they say, if the bandwidth were there (and it will be Real Soon Now).

The company plans to avoid a copyright-infringement suplex from the entertainment industry by limiting the remote viewing to a single stream at a time. We'll definitely keep an eye on this one - the term "place shifting" could become as widespread as "time shifting."

The Grokster Decision - Where It's At

Ernie Miller has a comprehensive round-up on the decision, plus additional analysis of its possible impact on --you guessed it -- the push for the Induce Act.

Later: Fred von Lohmann has more @ Deep Links:

The Ninth Circuit's ruling in MGM v. Grokster today clarified four points of incredible importance to innovators of all stripes, including peer-to-peer developers:

• The Court made clear that, for purposes of the "Betamax defense" announced by the Supreme Court in 1984, the important question is whether a technology is merely capable of a substantial noninfringing use, not the proportion of noninfringing to infringing uses. The opposite rule, urged by the entertainment industry, would kill off new technologies prematurely, as infringing uses tend to be common until the incumbent entertainment industries adjust their business models to take advantage of the new opportunities created by the new technology. (When there were no pre-recorded videocassettes, the VCR was doubtless used for more infringement than it was after there were Blockbusters on every corner.)


• The Court also explained that, in order to trump the Betamax defense, a copyright owner must show that the technology developer had (1) knowledge of specific infringments (2) at a time when it could do something about those infringements. The entertainment industry, in contrast, had argued that it should be enough to simply deliver a pile of "infringement notices" to the technology developer after the fact. Such a rule would have imperilled all kinds of companies. (Imagine Xerox receiving a pile of infringement notices about photocopiers that it had sold the year before -- should it be liable for infringing activities at every Kinkos in America?)

Call For Entries: Cellular Phone Cinema Festival

A film festival for the cellular screen to showcase the video content and technology which will be on the next generation of mobile phones. Cellular video and flash entertainment is an exploding market worldwide. Zoie Films partners with Tin Can Mobile and Nokia to present this unique festival. [Filmmaker.Com]

Quoting In Audioblogs

Adam illustrates by example how quoting works in the audioblogosphere in yesterday's souce code.

1142 Leeches

I was wondering when I read the NY Times article about Phish's last show this past weekend in Coventry Vermont, if the subsequent Bittorent wave would be a record breaker. Well, over at bt.etree.org there is one seed that currently has 1142 leeches. Not sure if that is big or not, but it is definitely smoking.

And so, I am wondering if anyone, maybe some information science wonk, has come up with a Torrent world record list? I am sure Linux releases get up there, but just the same, the last concert from Phish, arguably the most networked band ever (rec.music.phish started in 1992), has got to be a contender.

Advertisers to Track Commercials Digitally

The top four U.S. broadcast networks ó Viacom Inc.-owned CBS, Walt Disney Co.'s ABC, General Electric Co.-owned NBC and News Corp.'s Fox ó are about to use a new 12-character code for tracking all advertising.

Ad-ID (Advertising Digital Identification) assigns a unique system-generated identification code to any advertising asset from television, online, print or radio. As over 100 major advertisers and trade groups have endorsed the system, the move of the broadcasters paves the way for making it a standard.

In the immediate term, Ad-ID will cut out costly code replications that have led to the wrong commercials being aired....

For example, a diaper manufacturer could select households with babies while a dental adhesive maker would pinpoint their denture-wearing neighbors, based on information that consumers provided.


Advertisers would see more accurately how their spending affected sales, especially as retailers adopt RFID.

(Continued at we make money not art)

OA images and videos for classicists

The Stoa Consortium, an OA portal for the field of classics, has launched the Stoa Image Gallery, a collection of OA images and videos related to classics, classical archaeology, and the classical tradition. The organizers urge submitters to distributed their images and videos under Creative Commons licenses.

Videoblogs on TV

lately I've been obsessing about where videoblogging is going.

Then, Peter sent this little piece of insight:

"So I just realized this: once videoblogging becomes couchable, politics will follow. Drazen said politics happens on the couch. Lucas says videoblogging should happen on the couch."

"Lucas' blog post has the general idea. Imagine a Tivo that can download videos from RSS feeds. MythTV is an open source Tivo clone that with the add on Torrentocracy can automatically download files from BitTorrent, I'm working on a similar project for Freevo. You might want to check out Andrew Grumet's video blog posting about how he uses his ethernet connected DVD player, entitled "Andrew Grumet's RSS-Powered Personal TV Network".

RSS feeds for newsgroups

There's now an RSS feed for every Usenet newsgroup. See the Social Media blog....

MCE Updates QuickStream DV

So MCE Technologies has released a new version of its QuickStream DV, an external. ruggedized FireWire hard drive with a few tricks up its sleeve that makes it a useful companion to any DV camcorder. In fact, it pretty much removes the need for DV tape entirely by connecting directly to your camera's FireWire port and capturing video as you shoot it. The QuickStream DV also has built-in flash memory buffers which it uses for something called "SureCapture," which can save up to six seconds of DV video even when the QuickStream is in standby mode, giving it enough time to spin up its hard drive and start going. Then when you're done, remove the rechargable hard drive and hook it up to your PC or Mac and get all non-linear on it right then and there.

At prices starting around $600 for a 1.5-hour model and going up from there, the QuickStream DV isn't necessarily a solution for the average Sunday shooter quite yet. But for pros and semi-pros looking to remove tape from their rigs entirely, it looks like a really excellent way to go about it.

(I remember feeling the soft breeze of a collective shrug from the community media geeks when this first came out. I wonder if this version will be any different. -kc.)

A Pro-DMCA Perspective

Prof. Solum points to First Amendment Speech and The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: A Proper Marriage by Raymond Nimmer. The paper is quite a demonstration of how far one can get if one can manage to define the problem in entirely legal terms, ignoring the fundamental issue of access. The abstract is certainly striking, but this paragraph from the conclusion is sufficient to suggest the tortuous path that is traveled:

The creation and dissemination of copyrighted works is typically speech activity. Thus, the core purpose of the DMCA is pro-speech. As content-neutral regulation, the constitutional test of validity for DMCA is whether substantially more speech is regulated than is necessary to achieve the governmental purpose. In fact, as we have seen, most of the conduct affected by DMCA is not speech.

BPL & WiFi May Solve The Problem

We've been spending a good deal of time thinking and speaking about BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) these past few months. AMC member Guy Albanese sent in this article from USAToday.com The author, Andrew Kantor, makes some valid points about the technology and it's interesting reading.

The big idea is to use BPL for the backbone and then, because the big technological BPL hump is post step-down transformer where the signal is hard to control, use a WiFi or WiMax hub/repeater on the pole. This is truly the best of both worlds. Lots of electrons available for the backbone and plenty of coverage for the last half mile that has heretofore been a phone and cable company dominion.

So, how important is a valid BPL/WiFi combo plan to us domestically? Let's see, DSL is only a valid broadband solution if you are less than 18,000 from a switch. Let's just say that there are a bunch of phone customers that are more than three miles from a phone company switch. Cable modems don't have the same kinds of distance limitations, but you do need a cable. However, basically everyone in America has AC power and almost every household is within WiFi or WiMax range of a step-down transformer.

(Continued at EmmyAdvancedMedia)

Good points

I almost missed this. Reading stuff like this makes me think we are near the tipping point of something really big. If I wanted to read into this some, IMHO I would say Eric is thinking how he ties his service, audioblog.com into OpenMedia.org or something like it. I would say he sees changes/opportunities coming. He's just thinking about what makes the most sense for his service/company to capitalize on the opportunity about ready to present itself. Like blogging, he probably sees it as a layer he can offer to his audio producing customers as a feature of his existing service. - Your choice, - Opp In or Opp out. - Smart man!!

Eric Rice is the maker of Audioblog.com, an audioblogging tool which keeps URLs wrapped up in Flash. Here's his position on the visible-URL business:

The right way is your way to succeed in the blogcasting business, we need to support both schools of thought that some content must be open and freely distributed peer-to-peer, while other content must be tightly controlled. [...] Almost all of my phone posts I will probably publish the MP3s. There may be a personal business reason why I don't, requiring visitors to physically stay on my site. Maybe my reasons are because of the MP3's context, maybe it's because of something on the page is eyeball-monetized, but that decision (like choosing to use Creative Commons) is ultimately up to me. [...] When we over at Audioblog.com release the feature for users to access the MP3 URL of their telephone posts, it will be available to a customer only, and at their discretion, they can choose to put their content on the open-source market.

This is a fine conclusion, and I am happy to see it. There are people who want exposure and people who want control. For now, most people would prefer exposure and are getting control by accident. But, in fixing that, there's no reason to harass the few who do prefer control.

That said, I want to point out that exposing URLs is not the same as enabling redistribution. A good-enough compromise between total loss of control and total control is to reserve the right to host a file. It costs you a bit more, but if you don't mind that then you win the ability to remove or modify a file.

The Future of Media, MIT-Style

A peek at the future of media...

Video Streams Up 42 Percent

That's according to AccuStream iMedia Research. Broadband users accessed an average of 15.4 video streams per month during the first half of 2004, up 42.6% over 2003 for sites with 90% broadband usage.

Per unique user consumption of streaming video rose 23% to 3.17 streams on a per month, per site basis.

Subscription video offerings such as Real Networks' SuperPass service, professional sports league content (including NASCAR) averaged anywhere from 30 to 80+ video streams served per month, per subscriber.

$250 WiFi PCTV - with phone

Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, has developed a wireless network personal computer for the four billion people around the world who live on less than $2,000 a year.

Controlled by a TV remote, his PCtvt would come in at around $250, says a report in the New York Times.

Behind the project are Microsoft and South Korean computer maker Trigem and Reddy's partner's are the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Information Technology and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, says the NYT.

The idea must be to bring education and other benefits to people who'd otherwise have to do without. Right?

Well - "I kept asking myself, 'what would the device have to do for someone on the other side of the digital divide to be desirable?" - Reddy is quoted as saying and, "The answer, he decided, was a simple device that would offer entertainment, making it something that even the world's poorest citizens might be willing to pay a sizable share - perhaps more than 5 percent - of their annual income to own."

(All hope lie in the proles. :) -kc.)

Portent of iTV Search Engines

Every once in a while you see something that makes you think that something else is going to happen. AMC member and open source guru, Tim Halle sent in this link to a posting on Jesse Ruderman's blog with a simple question. "How hard would it be to hack this for iTV?"

In case you are not technical or don't know what the link is referring to, Firefox is a next generation web browser from the nice people at Mozilla. It has many excellent features and if you are not a fan of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Firefox is an excellent alternative.

The feature that Tim noticed is the ad bar, but more importantly, the fact that it displays Google ads that are relevant to the search or content that you are browsing. Now, key word searching is not new and neither are "relevant to the content you are browsing ads" - the interesting thing here is the disintermediation of the referring partners financial participation.

Is there a set-top middleware solution here - obviously! It would be smart for cable operators to offer this kind of adlink to their customers. Is this kind of technology a portent to the future of EPG (electronic program guides) and a possible future way you will decide what media to display on your television monitor? No doubt!

MPEG Streamclip

MPEG Streamclip converts MPEG-1/MPEG-2 files and transport streams into QuickTime movies and DV streams, with professional quality and synchronized audio. Video can be scaled, cropped, and even deinterlaced with a motion-adaptive deinterlacer. [Mac OS X Downloads - Video]

Copyright and Cultural Damage

Just before Tim Wu resumed his excellent blogsitting at the Lessig Blog, Rep. Rick Boucher asked a simple question that sparked many a complex response: "In thinking about the future of my information availability in our society, am I right to be concerned about the emergence of pay per use as the norm?"

The question brings to mind a central difficulty with explaining why the copyfight matters the larger sense -- e.g., why society as a whole should care about whether the Internet becomes "pay-per-use." The major problem is that it's tough to quantify cultural damage. The recording industry has plenty of numbers to quantify its guestimated loss. But how do you explain what is lost from our culture when access to "information goods" is determined by whether you can pay the rental fee?

(Continued at Copyfight.)