unmediated

Father of MP3 Format says DRM is killing the Digital Music Industry

News.com reports the comments of a founder of the MP3 standard, saying what we've all known all along: the number one roadblock to growth in the online music biz is not piracy, but DRM.

"It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing the same for the gadget makers," said Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of electronic media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute in Ilemenau, Germany.

Consumers nowadays can store thousands of songs in a pocket-size device, play music and videos on their mobile phones, and buy albums at the click of a button.

But to their chagrin, a bewildering number of competing playback compression technologies and antipiracy software options determine which songs play on which devices.

Apple Computer, RealNetworks and Sony each have developed proprietary playback and DRM (digital rights management) antipiracy technologies. Songs bought on Apple's iTunes music store can play only on Apple iPods. Ditto for Sony.

The alphabet soup of technologies is meant to prevent fans from rampantly duplicating and transferring songs to others.

ResFest in San Francisco this week

The amazing RESFEST Digital Film Festival comes to the Bay Area starting tonight with an opening program of shorts and a reception featuring a performance by the group Midnight Movies. (Click the image for a better view.)

"RESFEST 2004 kicks off with a survey of state-of-the-art storytelling that mixes animation, live action and graphics-oriented work, giving viewers a taste of the festival's unique blend of filmmaking techniques. See the retelling of the tragic fate of Oedipus in luxurious cinematic splendor redolent of '50s era epics--with a case of vegetables. See what happens when the inexorable thrust of time slows, then stops, allowing three characters to transcend their destinies in Daniel Askill's visually stunning philosophical mindbender WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE."

P2P usage stats you can rely on

Cachelogic has posted
a very good, in-depth study of network traffic using data gathered from a variety of large ISPs. They conclude that P2P use has not dwindled; that P2P systems are the main use of bandwidth today ("the killer app for broadband")l that P2P is used to move lots of kinds of files, including ones that are noninfringing (strong market-demand for symmetrical connectivity); and that P2P's impact on ISP bandwidth charges are largely the result of anti-detection design choices that make it hard for P2P systems to efficiently use bandwidth. So much for the salutory effect of extreme copyright laws, lawsuits and "eduction" campaigns.

Sousveillance: call for submissions

A Gathering of the Tribes (tribes.org) magazine seeks submissions for a special issue focused on the evolving Sousveillance art movement. We are looking for contributions reflective of how the arts are affected by monitoring and surveillance (socially pervasive computing) that are affecting human liberties.

More info here. Submissions are due: Feb 1, 2005

Reality Video Gameshows

Ponderance links to Artemis Software's new reality video gameshow, Sim-ply Reality, a reality dating game where 7 women vie for a date with a guy. I believe voting takes place by fellow Sims. Episodes will be available for download (since The Sims 2 let's you export gameplay as an AVI file). Fun!

Sifting out the gold from user-generated content

Derrick Oien writes up a great post describing his successful data mining experiences at MP3.com (800,000 unique visitors, 4 million downloads, and 4 mil page views a day). His findings included spotting local bands that were as searched for locally as the major acts.

1. These bands were generally pre-Soundscan (they didnít show up on local retail sales figures because they only sold their CDs at shows.)

2. They were organized online using a combination of IM, blogs, and street team tools to get the word out.

3. A majority of them were playing all ages venues which didnít normally pop up on the radar of club goers. (Who wants to hang out with 15 year olds ;-) )

4. The genres of music were genres that werenít typically represented by MTV, radio and retail and were clustered around emo/pop punk and grindcore.

5. These bands generally played around 50-100 shows a year.

Penn State and Internet2(r) release source code for LionShare.

LionShare - an academic project that will "create legitimate file-sharing among individuals and educational institutions" has announced the release of its source code in an open format. The announcement was made formally at the Internet2 fall members meeting in Austin, TX.

This week's LionShare source code release will provide all interested programmers and developers with the opportunity to contribute valuable feedback and suggestions. At the same time, Lionshare partners including: Internet2, Simon Fraser University of Canada; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will continue to fine-tune the project software which is slated for official beta release for universities and institutions this upcoming January.

Broadband Dreams and Multicast 'Beams'

: Vint Cerf says that the Internet is not ready to be a true entertainment medium. It cannot provide the instant gratification and quality consumers have come to expect from DVDs...

But then he says that something like Disney's Moviebeam would be a better alternative..Today's Internet simply cannot compete with MovieBeam's efficiencies, he writes. But then, Disney itself is not that sure and has stalled the expansion of the project...

Vint goes on to say that there is another solution: multicasting (which is being tested in UK by the BBC..)...Unfortunately, ISPs are slow to embrace multicast, and there is no plan for them to work together to deliver multicast yet.

(Continued at PaidContnet.org)

Heading to Youth Media Fest on Thursday

On Thursday I'll be driving into San Francisco to attend the 2nd International Youth Media Festival at the Herbst Theatre. Young people will be showing off their movies, music, digital artwork and Web sites. The event is "created, produced and edited by teens across the globe."

Yet Another Super Disc: The Terabyte DVD

Running out of digital storage space? It looks like the latest breakthroughs are going to make sure that storage space isn't a huge problem for many going forward. The latest in optical disc technology is a disc the size of a DVD, but which holds a terabyte of data -- which means your entire movie collection could probably sit on one disc. The article notes this should hold 472 hours worth of "broadcast quality" video -- or "all 350 episodes of The Simpsons or each of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 178 episodes with room to spare." Of course, some are saying that the age of content on plastic discs is ending, as smaller rewritable USB drives will take over (assuming of course, everyone doesn't overreact and ban all USB drives following today's story about the potential security threats they present).

Nokia LifeBlog Turns 1.0

Lifeblog 1.0 is Alive and available for purchase from Nokia's Lifeblog website. It plays well with Nokia's megapixel 7610 camphone.

Lifeblog is described as an Automatic Multimedia Diary

What do we mean by that?

• Automatic = there's not much for you to do
  
• Multimedia = pictures, text, video
  
• Diary = a daily record
  

In short, we mean that there's not much for you to do to get the best out of it; just go about your normal day taking photos and videos with your phone, sending and receiving messages. Then, just press 'synch' and all the multimedia items are laid out in a diary format. Then, enjoy!

You can download the software as a free trial version or full commercial version (EUR $29.95).

It also works with Six Apart blogging software.

EFF p2p copyright guide

The EFF's Fred von Lohmann has written a copyright guide no p2p developer - or anyone who's seriously interested in the p2p wars, for that matter - should be without. [PDF link]

It's solid gold and includes 10 general steps to ponder if you want to, "reduce the chance that your project will be an easy, inviting target for copyright owners; and (2) minimize the chances that your case will become the next legal precedent that content owners can use to threaten future innovators".

1. Make and store no copies.
2. Your two options: total control or total anarchy.
3. Better to sell stand-alone software products than on-going services.
4. What are your substantial noninfringing uses?
5. Don't promote infringing uses.
6. Disaggregate functions.
7. Don't make your money from the infringing activities of your users.
8. Give up the EULA.
9. No direct customer support.
10. Be open source.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

Comcast arms for TV revolution

Comcast is a driving force for changing TV as we know it. Just read this interview with CEO Brian Roberts and COO Stephen Burke. Says Roberts:

Today, we have about 2,000 hours of [video-on-demand] programming, and most of that is no additional cost.... The goal is that five years from now it's virtually unlimited, using the great progress of Moore's law, where the servers get cheaper and capacity gets greater. You'll have 30,000 to 40,000 hours someday.... You just say, "John Wayne movies," and we have a demo of this where up comes every John Wayne movie that's on now or in the future.

It's the E2E argument

Why is it a bad idea for the RSS enclosure tag to have an attribute for the mime type of an enclosed object? Partly for efficiency, but more importantly for accuracy. The mime type in the attribute can never improve on the value reported by the host of the enclosed object. It adds nothing by reiterating the value reported by the host. It can, however, make things worse by getting the value reported by the host wrong.

This is an instance of the end to end argument. The ultimate client has to check the mime type, and the ultimate host has to get the mime type right. The RSS enclosure generator can't do anything to improve on the relationship between the endpoints, it can only get in their way.

(Continued at the weblog of Lucas Gonze)

MP3 Download of Phoned-in Audioblogs

Eric Rice: Audioblog.com now allows access to MP3 files of audioblogs. Awesome!

Access the MP3 files from audioblogs you've recorded by phone in your Audioblog.com file manager.

(via the weblog of Lucas Gonze)

Semantic Web is a Program

Semantic Web is a Program.

Slashdot pointed to a new Tim Berners-Lee interview about the Semantic Web. While on face value it's YASWI by Sir Tim (Yet Another Semantic Web Interview), there are some great quotes in this one. e.g.

When asked if the Semantic Web is just a way to automate things that a human would do, Sir Tim replied:

"This is more like giving you a program which can do all the things which your MIS department could write programs to do but doesn't have time to. But it is still a program. Just as the World Wide Web is still a document."

That's an important point - just as Amazon can be said to be more a virtual agent than a website nowadays, the Semantic Web is a dynamic program not a static document. The generation of the Web we're in now is almost a living one - it's about movement and application of information. If not quite living, certainly information on the Web is much more social than it was 5 or 10 years ago. It's being used by people to connect with each other on a grander scale than even Ted Nelson ever dreamed.

POD Pong

This is an auspicious day. Not only had Dave announced the release of Frontier (the tech behind this blog, among many other things) as open source (GPL, no less... are you listening, RMS?), but there's this great back and forth between Adam and Dave on various PODcasts. More links, and fresh commentary, in DIY radio with PODcasting, over at IT Garage. (Including an explanation of why I capitalize POD. See if you agree.)

I'll also be talking about the subject on the PODcast we call The Linux Show, tonight.

How Media Reacts To New Media

Brilliant post by Audible CEO Don Katz: "Invariably - ironic though it always seems in retrospect -- each newly minted format or distribution mechanism that arises to propel the culture's best intellectual output into peoples' lives with new efficiency - creating powerful new revenue streams in the process - has been fought or ignored by the creators and content businesses of the moment."

Here comes P2P Radio

A few weeks ago, I got a chance to chat with Srivats Sampat, the former chief executive of McAfee.com. These days he is running Mercora, which is an interesting twist on P2P music revolution. One of Mercora's co-founders is Michael Stokes, who developed the Gnutella 2 platform. Mercora is a small little application, which you download and install on your computer. It scans your hard drive, looks for all sorts of music files - Mp3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA - and builds a tiny database. Then you send invites to your pals, inviting them to join your buddy list. Once they join your buddy list, they can listen and control a special playlist that you create for them. Think of it as a nano-radio station that webcasts music to anyone musically using a peer to peer technology.

The Mac ITunes users, thanks to the Rendezvous technology, can share music on their local networks but not over the Internet. Mercora, has taken that concept and globalized by connecting it over the Internet. I-Mesh and ShoutCast are doing similar stuff, but their architecture is client-to-client P2P. The architecture of Mercora network mimics Napster's server centric architecture. The music streams through a Mercora proxy which maintains the bit rate, and the sound quality is surprisingly clear. Mercora application is as easy to use and intuitive as Napster, minus the downloading, and it can webcast music at 48 kilobits per second. "It is an optimal quality and bandwidth trade off. We use direct X codec for transmission and playback of music. On a typical DSL connection you can do this quite well," says Sampat. "We use the DirectX to compress the bits and send it out as WMA."

CNNfn to air 'voter reaction meter'

While CNN is covering the first Bush-Kerry debate, CNNfn will feature live reaction from a group of undecided voters -- including a real-time meter gauging their impressions. Meanwhile on CNN, a research team will fact-check the candidates' statements during the debate. And on CNN.com, Paul Begala and Robert Novak will follow the action in "rapidly-updated" weblogs.

Toshiba Meta Brain Television

You know a new television is starting out on the right foot when its manufacturer shows a picture of its mainboard on its product page. The Toshiba Meta Brain is an 37-inch LCD television that bridges the space between dumb display device and home media PC, with dual Ethernet, FireWire, and USB ports that allow you to connect to your home network to stream video from PCs and Network Attached Storage devices, or record video back to the PC or NAS hard drives, TiVo-like. You can write video out to SD cards via its integrated slot to watch them on video-enabled cell phones. And since the Meta Brain is connected to the internet through your PC, not only can you browse the web via a browser, but you can send emails to the television when you're away from home to schedule recordings.

Vara Software : Wirecast

Wirecast makes it easy to create dynamic webcasts. Build detailed multimedia broadcasts with many web cameras, images, titles and movies etc.

Wirecast uses the QuickTime Streaming architecture for its broadcasting. You can "unicast" over the public internet or your LAN. When you want to scale your webcast up, you simply send your broadcast to a QuickTime Streaming Server. Your viewers can then watch your webcast through QuickTime Player or embedded directly into a webpage.

Audioblogging setup for Windows

Mark VandeWettering writes up his Windows-based audioblogging setup. Sweet.

Iíve used two different machines to do my audio recording: the first is my rather generic HP laptop (2 Ghz processor, 512M of memory, 30gb disk space), and the other is my HP multimedia PC (2.8ghz processor, 512M memory, 160gb disk). In both cases I use a cheap stereo headset with microphone such as you might use for audio conferencing via Skype. The other day I also purchased a $25 Plantronics headset: I have yet to use that for recording, so it remains to be seen whether it will result in better sound quality. Occasionally I do notice breath noises on the cheaper one, so there is room for improvement, but generally the audio quality is acceptable.

Al Gore's new cable network hiring vloggers and untrained, would-be digital reporters

INdTV, the media company founded by President former Vice President Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, is hiring talent. It looks like they're specifically trying to recruit "young adults" with or without any experience -- but with an affinity for low-budget digital production, and a desire to learn. Video-bloggers or would-be correspondents comfortable with the idea of indie soup-to-nuts newsmaking will write, shoot, and edit their own segments.

Last May we acquired an existing television network that is currently available in almost 20 million U.S. homes. In 2005, we will debut a new network, a network featuring programming created by and for young adults INdTV is seeking emerging creative, journalistic, and production talent to join the network as Digital Correspondents (DCs). DCs will think, write, shoot, edit and potentially appear on-air. They will work in a fast-paced, competitive environment, alone and in teams, out in the field and traveling the world. They will work with some of the best programmers, producers and editors in the business. And some of the content they produce will become a part of our network programming.

Akimbo appears to be legit

Via TMCnet.com, Akimbo strikes VOD Deal with TBS, and is going to have programming from CNN, CNNfn, Cartoon Network, TCM, Boomerang. I have to say, Akimbo has done a great job of securing content for their service. With a few 100,000 subscribers, they'll be the same size as a small cable network with a fraction of the overhead. Take a look at their content.

About Akimbo: To receive the Akimbo Service, consumers must have an Akimbo Player, a home network and a broadband-Internet connection in their homes. The Akimbo Service won't tie up the computer and it won't tie up bandwidth. The Akimbo Player is an elegant set-top box that fits well in any home entertainment environment and can store 200 hours of video. It is simple and intuitive to use via an on-screen guide and a customized remote control. Using the Akimbo Guide, viewers choose their programming, which automatically downloads to the Akimbo Player, ready for watching whenever the viewer chooses...The Akimbo Service is $9.99 per month (and) will begin in just weeks.

Bridging the gap between digital camera & cameraphone

Via LinuxElectrons, Sharp Develops 2-Megapixel CCD Camera Module:

As phones with embedded cameras have increasingly provided pixel counts beyond one megapixel, industry demands for greater functionality and higher image quality on par with ordinary digital cameras has increased. At the same time, the industry demands more compact and thinner camera modules to provide this greater functionality and higher image quality without altering the form factor of mobile phone handsets.
This 2-megapixel CCD camera module for mobile phones is equipped with an optical inner zoom function that is easily switched between normal and 2x zoom, an industry first. This optical zoom does not protrude from the module body, making it ideal for folding 'clamshell' style mobile phones. In addition, an auto-focus function makes it possible to capture images with the subject in perfect focus. The auto-focus advantage benefits all photographs, from close-ups to portraits and landscapes.

Game Culture: A Glimpse into the Present

A look at the gaming landscape and how it is influencing all media. "In an average day, I perform numerous activities which have nothing to do with gaming explicitly, but which feel somehow game-like. These include blogging, creating a playlist for my iPod, programming my TiVo, and learning the hacks behind Yahoo Internet Messenger. If there's one point from all these examples, it's that "gaming" might become so pervasive as to become invisible."

Digital Negative (DNG)

The public, archival format for digital camera raw data
Raw file formats are becoming extremely popular in digital photography workflows because they offer creative professionals greater creative control. However, cameras can use many different raw formats — the specifications for which are not publicly available — which means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications. As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk, and sharing these files across complex workflows is even more challenging.

The solution to this growing problem? The Digital Negative (DNG), a new, publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras. By addressing the lack of an open standard for the raw files created by individual camera models, DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future.

Google your company on TV

Using speech recognition and closed captioning, a company called Multivision Inc. scans 1,000 TV channels for certain keywords, such as the name of a company. Clients can buy "buzz reports" to determine how much media they received. "The goal is to watch every television station in the country," said CEO Babak Farahi. Multivision has been around for 8 years, but the company has doubled in size over the last year. (Free reg. req. via TVPredictions)

Fable Tops Sky Captain

Need a specific example of how the video game industry now nets more then the film industry? Look no further than the release of the new X-box game, Fable which netted $18.7 million in its first week, surpassing this week's top grossing film, Sky Captain. 1up via waxy.

(I'm not sure I buy it --pun.forgive-- @ $50 a pop, Fable sold 375,000 units while Sky Captain brought in $16mil @ roughly $10 each, for an audience of 1.6 million viewers. You can argue that each copy of Fable will be exposed to so many users, blah blah, but either way, it doesn't seem so watershed. I believe we're on our way -- as we talked about on the Weekly Show -- but we're not there yet. -kc.)

Intel invests in the 'Digital Home'

From eHomeUpgrade, Intel Digital Home Fund Adds Five New Companies to Portfolio, by Alexander Grundner:

Intel has announced its latest round of funding in ìDigital Homeî technologies. Among the five lucky companies to receive investment capital from Intel's $200 million Digital Home Fund are Cablematrix Inc., a broadband network services software company, Mediabolic Inc., a developer of embedded software for consumer electronics devices, and Pure Networks Inc., a provider of consumer software and services for the digital home. BridgeCo AG, a digital entertainment networking solutions provider, and Envivio Inc., a broadcast and streaming media tools and systems company, received follow-on financing.

Coastsider, a new community blog

I get jazzed about local community sites, where both amateur and trained journalists are practicing a labor of love. The latest is Coastsider.com, a news and community site for coastal California around the Santa Cruz area. Coastsider uses a blogging format.

I bumped into its publisher-editor, longtime blogger Barry Parr, at the Online News Association function Tuesday night, and he said to check it out. I did, and it's impressive. Take a look.

Vidget 3

This is the latest version of my interactive networked video project. Click on the image to load Vidget 3 in Quicktime Player. (It is quite small but very processor intensive - especially as it first loads)

This version is a mix between the my first vidget which featured a text based interface for mixing up to three video clips on top of eachother, and my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer which let you search for and view images based on a search word.

The interface has been redesigned and now features a grid of 25 draggable images which represent video clips. These may be dragged and dropped onto three coloured 'layers'. The blue layer is the uppermost with green below and red at the bottom....

(Continued at dpwolf/blog)

OpenP2P.com: The Power of Metadata

Metadata applied at a fundamental level, early in the game, will provide rich semantics upon which innovators can build peer-to-peer applications that will amaze us with their flexibility....

Whether or not peer-to-peer fares any better than the Web, it certainly presents a new challenge for people concerned with describing and classifying information resources. Peer-to-peer provides a rich environment and a promising early stage for putting in place all we've learned about metadata over the past decade.

TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

TiddlyWiki is "an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by JeremyRuston. It's written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, or sent by email."

location aware fiction

Hypertext's limit exceeded -

The emergence of location aware or physically located narrative works is the subject of Data and Narrative: Location Aware Fiction, a Trace article by Canadian writer and new media artist Kate Armstrong.

Earlier Turbulence blogs have described one of the works Armstrong addresses, 34 North 118 West by Los Angeles artists Naomi Spellman, Jeremy Hight and Jeff Knowlton. Its focus is on "narrative archaeology" and "the investigation of liminal city areas such as abandoned industrial zones, in which layers of time and story are unveiled to the wandering reader/user. As they move through the area, a GPS reading triggers audio fragments in the headphones, resulting in a dynamic fictional experience that follows the user's unique path." (Armstrong)

Armstrong references a second work as well--[Murmur]--by the Toronto-based collective of the same name. [Murmur], she writes, is an "archival audio project"; it "establishes links between narrative fragments and specific points in city neighbourhoods...When a user calls in using a cellular telephone, points in the city scape marked by encoded street signs trigger stories collected from other users and residents."

Demand For Media Dips Except For Online

MediaPost's ongoing survey of media demand indicates demand for all media is down 7 points in September over September 2003. However, in that sea of apparent discontent, online stands out as the shining star with demand increasing 12 points during the same time period. The biggest losers are network TV and newspapers.

The Weekly Show, live today at 2 PM EDT

We're back again today, Monday, with the Weekly Show. Webcast and chat will be open at 2PM EDT here. We're still working on the system and the structure for the show, so log on and tell us what you want the show to be. Email suggestions for the show to theweeklyshow @t unmediated.org.

As soon as we get into a weekly rhythm, we'll start bringing the guests you want to talk to onto the show. Also, audio and video archives will be posted soon up at DV Guide.

you've been replaced by a very small playlist.

Hugo Schotman has a number of posts detailing his setup for audioblogging. In particular, check out how he uses audio chat software for doing interviews and remote reports and soundflower for passing audio from one app to another.

His system seems to be close kin to Shawn Van Every's ITJ project. Since it's audio only, Hugo's probably having a better time with the transcoding and latency issues that plague a lot of IP-video to newscast systems (although I've heard rumblings that someone out there has figured out a solution.) Originally, I had thought Hugo was using IM to distribute his audioblog (i call it microstreaming.)

Is there a case to be made for distributing audio and video clips, live, via the IM networks? This is an idea that has intrigued me ever since the IM systems added audio and video chat to the mix.

Either way, people are getting a little closer to replacing both the production studio and the broadcast schedule with an IM app and a very small playlist, and that makes me giddy.

On the path to IT-based camcorders w/ all the right bells & whistles

Speaking of the need for video analysis functions to be built into camcorders so personal media (and video blogging) can succeed, today, Texas Instuments and Object Video announced the launch of a TI processor embedded with intelligent video algorithms.

Porting ObjectVideo's video surveillance algorithms to TI's high-performance, DM64x digital media processor will enable analytical capabilities to reside directly on devices, such as video cameras, digital video recorders, network encoders or other video management platforms... ObjectVideo's intelligent video surveillance algorithms, based on artificial intelligence called "computer vision," run all objects in a camera's view against threat-specific pre-programmed rules. When an object violates a rule, for example, a small boat loiters next to a ship, a bag is left unattended in an airport terminal or a shopper displays characteristics of shoplifting, the software alerts security personnel by phone, pager, email or an alert console.

New Network Offers 'Minor League' for Student Videos

Via 2-pop:

Students hoping to make a living in the industry need a place where their work can be seen. Toward that end, The U Network (TUN) will make its debut this month on more than150 college campuses throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, providing students a venue to showcase their work for professionals before they graduate...Programming on TUN is entirely student generated. Half of the programs are completed student projects, while the other half are original shows produced by TUN...In addition, TUN has 13 original programs, all pitched by students, that it's currently producing. The crews for these original scripts are students, with a few professionals (including a DP, line producer, and executive producer) on hand to help stay the course..Students do not have be members of TUN to submit work or pitch story ideas. And once work is accepted, they retain all rights to their creations. Students sign a non-exclusive agreement giving TUN the right to air their pieces for one year. In addition, students must have all rights, including music rights, to the piece secured before it can be aired...TUN is following a PBS model to raises revenue through corporation or foundation sponsorship of its original programming.

Jeff Jarvis on the death of broadcast TV

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on his realization that he doesn't watch broadcast TV anymore. He writes, 'I don't consume media anymore; I live it.'

Plazes: location-aware participatory mapquest

Via del.icio.us, plazes.beta: Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life.

Plaze is a physical location with a local network - private or public, wired or unwired... A Plaze constitutes of the information about the actual location like pictures, comments and mapping information, as well as the people currently online at that Plaze...

Plazes is a huge collaborative effort for annotating locations. Plazes does not incorporate any kind of centralised editorial staff. All the information is contributed by you, the user. We try to keep the mandatory information for a newly discovered Plaze as little as possible, to advocate the easy discovery of new Plazes and keep hurdles low. Anyone physically present at a location can incrementally complement or alter the information for this plaze. Therefore the quality of data will increase with the number of users and frequency of usage. The most frequented Plazes will therefore have the best quality of information, because it is being reviewed most often...

Why should you contribute? Plazes incorporates a system called 'Discoverer'. On every Plaze's description Plaze there is a box called 'Discoverer'. If you discovered a Plaze first, this box is yours. In contrast to the other information on that page, this space can only be edited by you and yourself. You can point to your own weblog or use this space to promote your own business. Solely up to you and your imagination. Neat, isn't it?

Also, check out the Plazes blog.

Money Flows into Video Surveillance

The funny thing is that the same technology for surveillance will end up in IT-based camcorders and be used by personal media management services to help us easily search and retrieve what we want from our videos. From facial recognition to pattern recognition, the emerging generation of media producing citizens will expect this kind of functionality from their media service providers.

Today, Vidient raised $6 million in an initial round of funding. From their site: Today there are over seven (7) million CCTV cameras in the United States, but who is actually watching all these cameras? Busy security guards are often too distracted to keep careful track of every action on every camera. And many cameras are not monitored at all. The SmartCatch software offers an accurate and effective solution to monitor, identify and track objects for security policy violations via your existing CCTV infrastructure...

(Our) algorithms are capable of performing complex behavioral analysis, tracking numerous objects and simultaneously identifying security threats in even the most complex environments, inside or outside, regardless of weather conditions.

AP plans local blogging

Via PaidContent.org: Associated Press, one of the oldest and biggest news organizations in the country, is looking into using blogging on local community level...The company has been looking at blogging for almost a year now, and is still working on which way to go and how to implement this.

Click through to listen to PaidContent's Rafat Ali speak with Jim Kennedy, head of strategic planning at AP, about the AP's vision.

PhotoCop

PhotoCop is a private, non-commercial web site providing research, management, and technical information about the photographic enforcement of traffic laws. From the site, on 'Who delivers this technology?'

Most photo-enforcement equipment in use around the world is manufactured by American Traffic Systems (ATS), Driver Safety Systems, Ltd. (DSS), Econolite, Gatsometer, Multinova, Peek, TraffiPax, or Truvelo. Usually, however, jurisdictions buy from distributors such as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) who resell the equipment and provide processing services as well,  and SAIC-Syntonic also distribute photo-enforcement systems. Only Redflex provides complete manufacture, distribution, and processing services in the United States... Only a few manufacturers like American Traffic Systems (ATS), Redflex, and Poltech seem committed to rapidly improving the technology. Many European manufactures are slower to change since the time and expense to get a new system certified in the EC is great.

Streaming Surgical Education

In case you like this sort of thing, or happen to need to perform a little emergency surgery, take a look at Streamor.com: A Digital Window to the OR for Physicians, Trainees, and Patients. Featuring Cutting Edge Open and Endoscopic Surgery From the World's Leading Medical Centers

Swallow the Camera Pill

From The Honolulu Advertiser, Camera pill being used in Hawai'i: Watching the camera's images conjures up the 1966 science fiction movie "Fantastic Voyage." In that film, scientists shrink themselves to miniature size to journey into the body of a man whose life they are trying to save...

The technology works like this: the patient fasts for 12 hours before the test, arrives at about 7 a.m., then nine round sensors are attached to the chest and abdomen. The sensors connect to a belt that looks like an industrial fanny pack.

The belt, which weighs about 8 pounds, contains a battery pack and recorder for the pill-sized camera. The patient swallows the pill ó the size of a big vitamin ó with a drink of water and then can leave the hospital. After about eight hours, the patient returns so the doctor can remove the equipment, download the data from the recorder and then burn it onto a CD for viewing.

The tiny pill capsule contains a transmitter, video camera, and lights to illuminate the intestinal tract.

Comcast's focus on local video

Via I Want Media, Comcast opening new front in fight for local content, advertisers: Somewhere between community access television and the big network news shows is a market that Comcast Cable Co. is planning to exploit in an attempt to fend off satellite television and build viewer loyalty... The immediate goal is to develop this disparate group of mostly independent producers and on-air hosts into a coherent network that can broadcast region-wide events when needed while providing "zoned" shows targeted for smaller areas such as Silicon Valley, South Bay or even San Jose.

Flickr photo annotation usage

Bertrand uses photo annotation to outline his Lemon Pie recipe. (via del.icio.us)

21st Century Truckers

Bradenton Herald article on 21st centruy trucker Tom Wiles (check out his site at TruckerPhoto): Wiles and thousands of other cross-country truckers are increasingly dropping their CB 10-4's for the 802.11's - wireless "Wi-Fi" Internet connections right to their truck cabs... Wiles carries a Toshiba laptop computer equipped with a Wi-Fi card and subscriptions for access points at Flying J truck stops across the country. Flying Js currently blanket 180 of their North American locations with Wi-Fi signals. Hooking up costs from $1.95 for an hour to $200 for a yearlong subscription... For phone calls, Wiles has jettisoned his home-land line and now uses his cell phone for voice communication. For on-the-road entertainment, he can burn disks on his home entertainment system's DVD recorder, then pack them up for viewing in the cab on his laptop. For music, Wiles has subscribed to XM satellite radio ($9.95 per month) and purchased a portable Delphi SkyFi receiver that works in his home system as well as the truck cab. And for a hobby, Wiles has begun taking still digital pictures with his 3.2-megapixel Toshiba PDR-M71 and bursts of video with a digital camcorder.

AP article on U.S. soldier blogs

Overview of U.S. soldier blogs via Yahoo: For the folks back home, soldier blogs offer details of war that don't make it into most news dispatches: The smell of rotten milk lingering in a poor neighborhood. The shepherd boys standing at the foot of a guard tower yelling requests for toothbrushes and sweets. The giant camel spiders. The tedium of long walks to get anything from a shower to a meal. A burning oil refinery a hundred miles away blocking the sun. A terrifying night raid surprised by armed enemies dressed in black.

Article includes links to the following blogs:

Buzzell, an infantryman in an Army Stryker brigade @ http://cbftw.blogspot.com/
Sean Dustman, a 32-year-old Navy corpsman from Prescott, Arizona @ http://docinthebox.blogspot.com/

Flickr snaps up investrs

Esther Dyson and Joi Ito have made the great decision to invest in Flickr. Check the Flickr blog this week for more info.

Proxim's Loss May be Industry Loss

Proxim lost a legal battle with Symbol and the result may be that Wi-Fi vendors will be required to pay license royalties to Symbol: Proxim had to pony up $23 million in damages and must pay two percent royalties, though every other vendor is on the hook for six percent. The question will be whether Symbol decides to chase down everyone else. Symbol claims that some vendors are already paying the royalties but it wouldn't name which.

As Peter Judge points out in an email to Wi-Fi Networking News, it will be interesting to watch if Symbol approaches Cisco and how that interaction plays out. Cisco, with its deep pockets, could afford to fight a legal battle that argues against the recent ruling in Symbol’s favor. Proxim basically said it gave in because it would have had to post a bond for a large part of the $26 million if it continued the fight and the company didn’t want that hanging over its head.

Microsoft Promotes Easy Robot Programming Kit

Berlin University of Technology and Microsoft Research Cambridge demonstrated the Visual Robot Development Kit (VRDK), "a graphical programming language that makes the development of robotic applications easy enough to teach in school" at the Microsoft Research and Innovation Fair in Brussels, Belgium. The VRDK is optimized for creating software that enables you to control your robot using your smart phone.

Mobile Phone Dev Nirvana

Benhui.net the harmony of mobile development Great information on Bluetooth, J2ME, MIDP 2 and more.

Digital Media Shakes Up Traditional Cable Programmer Market Dynamics

The chart in this Yankee viewpoint says it all....IP-delivered media is all pervasive...for cable programmers, new channels create new business models and incremental revenue streams. In addition, advertising deals crossing platforms would aggregate audiences and support creative advertising approaches, says Yankee.

New archiving software under development

Lindsay Greene, NYU to make archive software, Washington Square News, September 22, 2004. Excerpt: "NYU's library system has announced plans to develop software for an intercollegiate database that will make archival processing more efficient, a library official said. The system, called 'The Archivists' Toolkit,' will allow universities and other research institutions to compile their archives into a online database, making the scholarship available worldwide....NYU, which is developing the project with assistance from the University of California at San Diego, decided to pursue the project after several researchers expressed an interest in a more accessible archive, Dean of Libraries Carol Mandel said. 'Our archivists were frustrated with the lack of software available, so they got together and kind of said "let's do this,"' she said. The archivists went to the Andrew W. Mellon foundation where they were paired up with the University of California. Both universities received a collaborative, two-year grant for $847,000. The project is expected to last from two to four years, and NYU hopes to renew the grant, Mandel said." (PS: The article doesn't say so, but the toolkit web site makes clear that the software will be both OAI-compliant and open-source. However, I'm still curious about what the project leaders found deficient in the nine existing systems of OAI-compliant, open-source archiving software.)

Qumana - a microcontent assembly and publishing application

Roland Tanglao and myself have been involved in a little company up in Vancouver named Qumana. They've developed an innovative way of browsing and publishing micro-content - though today it's still just blog posts.

But the drag-and-drop gesturing, the clean design and intuitive approach - serves as a new paradigm in personal publishing that I'd wish that NetNewsWire, NewsGator and ecto would pick up on.

...

Qumana is a microcontent assembly and publishing application that features three integrated capabilities that are extremely useful to all people who create and author content for publication to blogs, web sites, email, and documents.

DIY book publishing takes off

Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle via USA Today: Do-it-Yourself Book Publishing Takes Off on the Web.

... [T]his kind of publishing might just foster a market for book-writing in the same way Kodak first opened up photography to amateur picture takers nearly a century ago, said Frank Cost, a printing professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
"Everyone is starting to realize this works, and it's fantastic," Cost said.

automatic quicktime smil playlist

I've implemented an automatic SMIL playlist for quicktime (and mp4) that
people submit to demandmedia. This is in addition to the Real SMIL
playlists that were already there. There's a playlist for each section,
so probably of interest to this group is the videoblogging section:

http://demandmedia.net/playlist?vtype=quicktime§ion=personal

or you might be interested in a random sampling from of whole site:

http://demandmedia.net/playlist?vtype=quicktime

Its kinda beta so feedback is appreciated. In particular I haven't
tested in on a Mac yet.

TV channel subs videogame-hockey for the real thing

With the hockey labor dispute leaving an on-air void where televised hockey used to sit, G4TechTV is broadcasting virtual hockey games played using video-game engines

All 1,230 regular season games originally slated for the 2004-2005 NHL season will be played, with results of each video game match-up available to fans who tune-in daily to "Sweat." Up-to-the-minute scores, stats, teams and player profiles will be online at www.g4techtv.com.

MLB launches video download store

Think of it as iTunes for baseball video. Fans can download "Minivision clips" for their cell phones or PDAs for 99 cents a pop. "Minivision also presents a great way to enjoy one of those new Portable Media Centers," suggests MLB. If you ask me, paying for baseball highlights just seems a little over the top, but we'll see if the new service gains some traction. (Via PaidContent)

Terabeam At 4.9 GHz

Tom's Networkingt
points out that Terabeam Wireless has a new Marquee Series wireless broadband product line.

The OFDM-based products are said to achieve as high as 36 Mbps over-the-air data rate, range of more than 30 miles and and "near-line-of-sight" communication and available in both licensed and license-free bands (4.9 GHz and 5.8 GHz available now; 2.4 GHz to be introduced later in the year). Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations will be available.

Other features of the series include adaptive dynamic polling, packet aggregation, client-side bandwidth management and enhanced security with two-way authentication between the client and base plus AES, DES, Blowfish and WEP+ encryption, reports Tim Higgins.

unmediatedtv - every Monday @ 2:00p EST

Join us online every Monday at 2:00pm EDT for UnmediatedTV, a look at some of what's going on in the development of decentralized media, live from NYC. We'll be using Shawn Van Every's Interactive Tele-Journalism system, developed at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, (the same system used for the Konscious.TV during the RNC) to allow folks to chat and participate.

Conversations as the New Medium

Blake Irving, corporate vice president at MSN Communication Services, stopped in Amsterdam this week to have a look at the stunning success of the Dutch MSN branch. The Netherlands knows one of the world's most active IM communities, with 4 million registered identities (on a population of 15 million), and 25 million "conversations" per day.

While here, Irving announced (reported by Emerce) Microsoft's plans to launch a social network service that would make Orkut look pale, including the introduction of Microsoft's new music service into IM (see what your friends are listening to), and the addition of e-commerce (...)

Entry continued...

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

No, not the book by Joe Trippi, but a panel on P2P video file sharing at Columbia U, as narrated by James Enck of Daiwa Securities (I've been recently turned on to his blog by a friend in hedge fund business and it is a good one...). Great overview of the market, discusses the economics of P2P video distribution, and pitfalls and possibilities for media and entertainment companies...

"P2P is yet another bottom-up revolution, possibly the biggest in history, with very broad implications and unforeseen outcomes for every industry which touches it."

No way I can summarize it, so read it yourself...

Could the Feds Stymie Citizen Journalism?

Picturephoning.com notes that the US House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a measure to to make it a crime to secretly photograph or videotape people, often for lascivious purposes.

AP reports:

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the issue of surreptitious videotaping has become "a huge privacy concern" with the miniaturization of technology and the proliferation of cell phone cameras.

On the surface, this, as Martha says, appears to be "a good thing," right? Everyone has a right to privacy. We should have the freedom to use a health club locker room without worrying if someone will come in and secretly shoot a less than flattering image and post it on the Internet. However, on the other hand, I wonder how broad this measure is. Could it slow citizen/participatory journalism? If the measure is strict, some might be afraid to shoot and moblog any image that might be possibly deemed "questionable" for fear they'll get busted. There's often a fine line between free speech and privacy. Hopefully this bill defines this very clearly.

Madden NFL 2005 comes to Palm OS, PPC

EA Sports, the division of gaming company EA Games known for its large PC and console sports game library, has revealed that its latest American football game Madden NFL 2005 will soon be available in mobile form for both Palm OS and Windows Mobile handhelds. The 3D game includes multiple game perspectives as well as colors and logos from actual National Football League teams. The official launch is slated for October.

(Is this the first major game title release for mobiles?. -kc.)

Nokia Remote Camera

Nokia announced an interesting new home security camera that uses any GSM network to send images back to your phone or email if someone trips its motion sensor or if its in-built thermometer exceeds a pre-set threshold. It's a lot like a 1-megapixel cameraphone without the phone part, although it can even take pictures at night with an infrared sensor. For now, though, it looks as if the Nokia Remote Camera will be Europe only, as its dual-band (and priced only in Euros, at around €450). You can also use an existing Series 60 phone to remotely control the camera via SMS. It's great idea - a smart way to utilize the existing networks.

Sony Shifts Strategy to Support MP3 Files (AP)

Yahoo! News - Technology -> Sony Shifts Strategy to Support MP3 Files (AP). AP - In a major strategic reversal, Sony Corp. said Wednesday it plans to add support for MP3 music files to some of its portable music players.

ManiaTV!

ManiaTV! "delivers Internet addicts the best mix of music, short films, action sports, video games, cartoons and news with a four-legged twist. All hosted by our wannabe CyberJockeys""What happens when you take the medium of traditional Television Broadcasting and combine it with the much less traditional medium of the Internet? Well, you'll probably end up with a television set for the new millennium, you'll definitely end up with something new and edgy, and you're going to end up here at ManiaTV! We've taken Windows Media Video, a host of talented Internet producers, all of the top new music videos, our own ManiaTV! Original Programming, and we're streaming it all out to you broadband wookies for free!"

(Looks totally browsable. ;) -kc.)

IM: The Next Arena for Sharing and Distribution

Sharing live playlists in chat is technically doable. The problems are mainly political and legal: content owners do not want to see IM's many millions of users sharing music streams effortlessly.

Wireless Data Currently About Ubiquity, Not Speed

We've already joked about how all wireless data services, no matter how fast, start their pricing at $80/month, in the hopes that business users with expense accounts will sign up while the network provider works out all their network and capacity problems. The prices eventually drop as the provider feels better about the network and (much more importantly) competitors have launched their own, faster, networks also at the $80 price point. Still, in an interview about wireless data offerings, the co-CEO of wireless data company Seven, provides an interesting rationale for the $80 pricing.

He basically admits that it's too expensive for the power user, but just fine for the casual user. Seems a bit counter-intuitive, doesn't it? The power user, of course, is also a bandwidth hog -- and the carriers don't want bandwidth hogs clogging up these networks, so no matter what the price, the speeds of most wireless data service offerings aren't enough. However, for the more casual user, bandwidth isn't nearly as big an issue. For the casual user signing up for wireless data plans, the issue is ubiquitous connectivity -- and that's the target audience for these users. So, the question being asked is the wrong one. The interviewer is basically asking how they can justify charging $80/month for "what amounts to a very slow DSL connection." The answer (though, not this directly) is basically that users are buying the ubiquity and the mobility -- not the speed.

Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad

In New York during the Republican convention, independent journalists and activists used text messaging "to coordinate an impressive, groundbreaking campaign of direct action and comprehensive news reporting," according to this piece at the Democracy Now! web site. Much of the text messaging was organized through TXTmob.com. According to the article, the most complete reporing was via NYC Indymedia, which was monitored by police, who were also being monitored by the activists via a police scanner. (Thanks, Jordan!)

Kazaa Loses P2P Crown To Edonkey

According to the network population stats at slyck, FastTrack (home of Kazaa) is no longer the most populous filesharing network. Top honors now belong to edonkey, a network of German origins. (Most edonkey users connect with emule, a gpl client for Windows).

Weblogs: The Print Controversy

The relationship between print and online media is still all but relaxed. It can even get really ugly, if the blogging community feels exploited by the print media.

In Germany we have a hot discussion about this issue, fueled by the launch of a new low-cost regional tabloid paper in the city of Frankfurt. News launched last week and claims to serve the information needs of "the generation iPod." In order to do so, it publishes daily excerpts from weblogs on up-to-date topics on a page called "Interactive."

Unfortunately, the paper started doing so without asking the owners of the weblogs (...)

(Continued at Poynter E-Media Tidbits)

$1.5 million Grant to Anniston Star, University Experiment

It is official, the Knight Foundation is helping underwrite the new Master's Degree in community journalism program at the Anniston Star in Alabama.

Nice part is that students who get accepted when the program begins in 2006 get a free ride.

The story is below, unfortunately, it costs $4 a month to get into the Star's online newspaper, but I have permission to copy the story here, probably because I am included in it:

VoIP goes the TV

Greg Scoblete, a senior editor at TWICE Magazine has written a great piece over at Tech Central Station. VoIP In Your Hands is a great read especially if you want to think outside the box of VoIP as a cheap replacement for PSTN connection.

TV Caller ID: Since voice data can travel on the same cable that also delivers your television (if you're a cable TV subscriber) and Internet access, it's not terribly difficult to route incoming phone info to your television. Cable providers that offer VoIP, such as New York-based Cablevision, are already testing TV caller ID and voicemail retrieval and could roll out the service in early 2005. This can work in a number of ways: the caller ID info could pop up on the TV screen immediately when the phone rings. If you're immersed in the latest Sopranos and don't want to be disturbed you could hide all but emergency calls and review your caller ID log from the couch via remote control when the show's done (sorry Tommy Thomson, most VoIP trends are distinctly sedentary).

Ourmedia.org is coming......

ive posted before here and here about a huge door that is about to open.
It was called open-media.org, now its called Ourmedia.org.

In just a few months, this project has moved very quickly thanks to JD Lasica and Marc Canter.

What is it? Well, check the official FAQ to educate yourself if you care about free storage and bandwidth for your videos FOREVER. (or for as long as people keep caring)

Q. What's the big idea here?

A. The idea is pretty simple: People who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff for free on ourmedia's servers forever, as long as they're willing to share their works with a global audience.
Backed by the Internet Archive, ourmedia's goal is to expose, advance and preserve digital creativity at the grassroots level.
The site will serve as a central gathering spot where professionals and amateurs come together to share works, offer tips and tutorials, interact in a combination community space and repository that will preserve these works for future generations.

and more importantly for us.......

Q. I'm a video blogger. I shoot video, create mini-movies, and place them on my weblog. Can I use ourmedia instead?

A. Yes, as long as you're willing to share your work with the world.

Webby Awards to Honor Blogs

The Webby Awards have added 35 new categories this year including one for weblogs. You can read more here and in today's press release. What took so long?

America's youth: Internet is better than TV

If you work in media, this study (full PDF or press release) is required reading. Conducting by Magid for the Online Publishers Association, the study takes a hard look at how young Americans perceive the Internet. A few nuggets: More than 50% of people ages 18-24 picked the internet as their top media choice (28.5% picked TV). The same group says the internet (43%) is the most important source of news over TV (39%). And my favorite: 69% say watching a short clip of video online is the same or better experience as watching it on TV. Wow!

(I'm going to repeat that last bit three times over because i can...
69% say watching a short clip of video online is the same or better experience as watching it on TV.
69% say watching a short clip of video online is the same or better experience as watching it on TV.
69% say watching a short clip of video online is the same or better experience as watching it on TV.
-kc.)

CA gov looking to limit P2P

California To Set P2P Policy Governor Schwarzenegger signed executive order S-16-04 last week charging the state CIO, Clark Kelso, with setting up a policy on statewide use of P2P technologies. While the order mentions legitimate uses of P2P, it looks to me like the RIAA and MPAA have his ear. P2P is already being used for legitimate purposes across the UCs and the state. LOCKSS relies on P2P as do many other projects. IT departments everywhere rely on bit torrent to download critical patches and updates to webservers and OS's. Concerned? Write early and often to the Governor and CIO Kelso. Kelso mentions in the article that he'd like to have a policy in place by the end of the year. They need to hear how the technology is already being used and that any limitation on legitimate use would adversely (and economically!) affect organizations across the state.

A New Kind Of Blogging?

A new blogging website was launched yesterday which includes one or two interesting features that might catch on elsewhere.

JoeUser.com, launched by Stardock Corp, is basically a free blog service. But it also:

• Automatically posts the newests articles on any JoeUser.com site on every other JoeUser.com page;
• Has a 'SlashDot-style' Peer review function. Readers can give particularly well written article bonus points by rating it as "insightful". High scoring articles automatically receive additional coverage and syndication on the site;
• Has a band of editors cross-posting some of the best postings onto the site's home page: This allows "the home page itself to act as an on-line magazine complete with multiple categories of stories on virtually any topic";
• Audience Control. Bloggers have control over who can see their articles (just themselves, everyone, or selected users and groups such as friend and family only).
• Blog Groups. Users can band together and form blog groups in which the combined articles of individual members form the content of a new blog site within JoeUser.com.
• Popular blog site and article tracking. The top blog sites, top articles and top bloggers are automatically listed on every page so that as users gain popularity through their articles, they continually gain additional coverage.

Some of this is quite interesting, and almost sounds like an OhmyNews approach, whereby postings compete for attention through quality and timeliness. But while I can see their intention is to leverage the power of individual blogs to build up, and draw traffic from, other blogs on the JoeUser.com network, its success will rest on critical mass. If you don't get the quantity and quality, everything will end up looking a little dank.

NewArch Project: Future-Generation Internet Architecture

Under DARPA funding, USC/ISI, MIT LCS, and ICSI collaborated on a DARPA-funded research project to reconsider the Internet architecture in the light of present realities and future requirements.

Introductory Paper: {Postscript, PDF}.

City Clouds: Yes & No

Can a large city provide blanket wi-fi with reasonable costs, asks Broadband Reports?

Technology Review suggests realistic ongoing costs of a city-wide wi-fi network is generally not represented in the proposals, suggesting tax-payers will end up holding that bag. On the same day as this article, Philadelphia gets a proposal from a company to make the entire city a hot spot for 5 million dollars, half of the costs of the current project plan.

Video Game Design and Development Resources. 01play.net

Fresh news from selected sources on Game Design, Game Studies, Game Research, Game Industry, Game Biz.

toxi: generative interactive objects, art, demos, games, source code

An overview of selected shockwave, flash and proce55ing works since 2000.

History of blogging video

Chuck sez, "I thought I'd let you know about a little quicktime I just posted fast-forwarding through the history of blogs. It starts in 1999, spins around and flies back to 1660 and 1776, kareens through the 20th century and lands back in current blog-time."

Weinberger: "free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world"

David Weinberger, author of the brilliant and seminal Small Pieces Loosely Joined, has posted a draft of a great speech on copyright that he's giving at the World Economic Forum in NYC tomorrow:

[F]or one moment, I'd like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration ’Äî even though they're fair and important considerations ’Äî and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!

...We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren't passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist's hands and enters our lives. And that's not a betrayal of the work. That's its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That's artistic success, although it's a branding failure.

Link

(via isen.blog)

Netflix and Warner Bros. to test video-on-demand

Netflix will be getting an assist from Warner Bros., as the movie studio will license some of its movies for a test run of the DVD-rental company's movie-download service. Households with broadband would be able to rent and download films via Netflix and store them on a TiVo until they are viewed. Earlier this month, we reported that Netflix and TiVo were planning to partner in a video-on-demand service, and the decision by Warner Bros. to support a trial run means that an official announcement is likely imminent.

The success of Netflix and TiVo's movies-on-demand service hinges on a couple of factors. First, they have to convince the studios to play along. It's a no-brainer that the eyes of the studios will be on Warner Bros. They want to ensure that any broadband movie download service has adequate security measures to prevent unauthorized copies from being made. This includes closing the "analog hole," where videos could be copied onto an analog device such as a VCR and then back into digital form for distribution. TiVo plans to use a solution from Macrovision (known also for their music DRM products) that would prevent analog copying while keeping the downloaded film from being viewed after a preset time period.

Even if Netflix and TiVo solve the DRM problem to the satisfaction of the studios, there is still the question of access. The movie download service would compete with the same cable companies that provide the broadband pipe needed to deliver the films, so there exists the possibility that they could choose to block it altogether. Also, how will the downloaded movies stack up in terms of quality? Will Netflix subscribers accustomed to DVD quality see a big difference with the downloaded films?

Feedster Enclosure Feeds

Feedster now has an MP3 enclosure feed for all you ipodders out there! More detail at Scott Johnson's weblog.

AV blogs

Userplane: AV Mail is a web site that uses Flash to let account holders record audio and video and to then post that video into their sites. It has an elegant Flash interface, and is a brilliant example of the things that Flash facilitates. For the average punter with a camera hooked up to their 'puter this is very useful, but for those of us with FireWire and QTBroadcaster or any other simple app (iMovie works flawlessly), it is probably a complicated way to do something simple. It's in beta testing, though the email I received inviting me to participate doesn't say that it is closed or otherwise.

Interview With BBC Dirac Developer Thomas Davis

"The subject of the BBC video codec Dirac has been here before, but we've managed to get an interview with Thomas Davies, Senior R&D Engineer at the BBC who devised the Dirac algorithm. Interesting to note that the codec should be with Mplayer soon; "As far as players go, we'll be submitting a patch to Mplayer to allow it to play Dirac pretty soon." And info about the tech developments in Dirac; "I used tried and techniques, like wavelets, which weren't in standards at the time, and tried to develop them. And that's what we'll continue to do as the algorithm develops. So we've tried to build on some pretty well-understood technology, and also tried to do some new things with it. We're patenting the new stuff, quite a bit of which hasn't got into the software yet. The license means that these patents are licensed for free within the Dirac software.""

Martin Tobias: Investing in Digital & Mobile Media

Next in ContentNext Series: I asked Martin Tobias, VC and founder of Loudeye, to write up some thoughts related to digital media. His VC firm Ignition Partners has been actively investing in the mobile content and social networking space...besides, he is a very prolific blogger himself..

When a VC writes: "I don't want DRM", you have to sit up and listen. He riffs on everything from investing in mobile media; merging social networks and content; China's digital market; potential of digital music; Sony's ATRAC3 jihad...great read.

(Kudos to PaidContent for putting together this series! -kc.)

Lessig on the BBC Creative Archive

The Guardian interviewed Lawrence Lessig on the BBC Creative Archive yesterday (free but annoyingly extensive registration required). Excerpt: "The project exploits the BBC's position as a publicly funded broadcaster in a very clever way. Whereas most media organisations depend on controlling distribution of their products for their bread and butter income, the BBC has a charter obligation to make its products as free and accessible as possible. So while the majority of media companies continue to fret over internet piracy, the corporation can concentrate on getting involved in the broadband revolution....Lessig helped the corporation meet its legal challenge. It is his Creative Commons licence that the BBC has refashioned to get the archive off the ground....The quasi-perpetual copyright terms lately secured in the US, and heading swiftly for the EU, are steering us towards a new feudalism that will stunt the growth of the knowledge economy. Lessig explains this idea: 'The fight against feudalism was the fight against property regimes that had become so expansive and cumbersome that they choked off innovation and competitive growth. Much of the progress of the common law in England was the process of limiting the burdens of property law, so that property could become something you could transfer - use, reuse, and the competitive market could take off. Now we've recreated feudalism in the context of intellectual property.' "

eXist XML Database

eXist is an Open Source native XML database featuring efficient, index-based XQuery processing, automatic indexing, extensions for full-text search, XUpdate support and tight integration with existing XML development tools.

Become a guineau pig for Pingbacks

Andreas has created a new way to do Video comments using Pingbacks, but we need some volunteers to test it out.
VOLUNTEER HERE
You got to know little techie stuff to follow along, but it'll be worth it. We're talking about a tool that'll allow collective video making online.

Media EmergenC in San Diego, Oct 6-9, 2004

Now this is a reason to go to San Diego in early October -- The National Association of Broadcasters is holding its annual Radio Show convention in San Diego on Oct. 6 - 9. The San Diego IMC along with Free Radio San Diego and other local organizations is hosting Media EmergenC, an independent media conference and convergence.

Media EmergenC looks a lot like the Reclaim the Media conference which I attended in Seattle back in 2002. Reclaim the Media was also held in response to the NAB Radio Show.

Given the involvement of Free Radio San Diego, I expect there will be some free radio action coincident with Media EmergenC. What would be great would be a mosquito fleet of micropower stations like what happened at Reclaim the Media.

Reclaim the Media was a ton of fun, and EmergenC looks like it will be similar. The car trip out to Seattle in 2002 with DIYmedia.net's John was long, but also a blast, but a car trip to San Diego from Champaign, IL would be even longer. I wish I had the time and cash to make the trip to EmergenC, but I think I'll just have to suffice it to enjoy the web stream.

Chronicling Blogs' Political Impact

David Sifry from Technorati has started a wiki-enabled timeline that chronicles real, concrete events where blogging had a significant effect on political events. For now it includes Trent Lott (December, 2003), Ed Schrock (August, 2004) and Dan Rather (September, 2004).

Nuggets from the IBC

Broadcasting & Cable breaks down some of the new technology that debuted at the International Broadcasting Convention. Kinda techy, but interesting...

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)

The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.

Hey! There's going to be a PAL version of the Sony HDR-FX1...

I predict that in much the same way that PAL DV has been the smart choice for a few years for those seeking to create a theatrical master, PAL HDV will be the new smart, low cost option, but with much better resolution. This is huge for indie filmmakers. Process would be this: Buy a PAL HDR-FX1; Shoot your footage; Get your footage onto your Mac with Lumiere HD; Process the footage to convert 50 interlaced fields per second into 25 progressive frames per second; Edit the footage, conform it to 24p. Now that you have a 1080p24 master, it's cake to make a world master of this thing. [HD For Indies]

WatchMe before calling

The WatchMe project, imagined by Natalia Marmasse and Chris Schmandt of the MIT Speech Interface Group, is a personal communicator built into a watch that helps its wearer reduce interruptions at inconvenient moments.

By providing awareness of each others' activities, and multiple channels for communication, the watch enables the caller to choose the appropriate modality (synchronous or asynchronous, voice or text communication) based on the inferred situation of the other person. According to the information collected, you could negotiate the availability of your friend (via an sms) and then migrate to a mutually appropriate alternative communication channel (a call).

The display gives information such as whether the person is involved in a conversation (from audio analysis), their mode of locomotion (from wireless accelerometers), GPS technology provides their location, etc.

In the picture, one sees that Joe left home ten minutes ago, he is driving and in a conversation, and he has sent two voice and three text messages.

More evidence of a Google browser

Following up on last month's speculation on Google building their own Web browser:

Last summer, Anil Dash suggested that it would be a good move for Google to develop a Google browser based on Mozilla. Give that kid a gold star because it looks more than plausible. Mozilla Developer Day 2004 was recently held at the Google Campus. Google is investing heavily in JavaScript-powered desktop-like web apps like Gmail and Blogger (the posting inferface is now WYSIWYG). Google could use their JavaScript expertise (in the form of Gmail ubercoder Chris Wetherell) to build Mozilla applications. Built-in blogging tools. Built-in Gmail tools. Built-in search tools. A search pane that watches what you're browsing and suggests related pages and search queries or watches what you're blogging and suggests related pages, news items, or emails you've written. Google Toolbar++. You get the idea.

On April 26, 2004, Google registered gbrowser.com....
(Continued at kottke.org)

A New Approach to Literacy

There's a great article in the new Kairos titled "New Literacies and Old: A Dialogue" which is a back and forth Q & A between Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan of the University of Baltimore. The gist of the discussion centers on the future of writing and the redefinition of literacy, and if you have a spare 20 minutes, the whole thing is definitely worth the read.

I especially find Moulthrop's definition of the new literacy interesting, and it has a great deal of relevance when thinking about the read/write Web:

What's the new literacy like? For one thing, it understands any text or writing practice as at least potentially connected to a hypertextual network: we would always teach "writing in the archive," as the Danish theorist Rune Dalgaard has called it. And while cross-textual relations have certainly been a part of print culture, the new literacy would recognize that, as Pierre Lévy says, the "pragmatics" of communication have fundamentally changed. The Internet is not a system for filing sheets of paper, even if we do still talk about Web "pages." In electronic writing, the technical foundations of the word itself have changed.

Senator tries to spur digital TV adoption

US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is planning legislation that would accelerate the adoption of digital TV in the US over the next five years. The proposed measure would require that broadcasters cease transmitting analog signals by 2009 while allocating US$1 billion as financial aid to lower-income Americans who cannot otherwise afford to upgrade their analog sets or subscribe to digital programming services. The billion dollars would come from the proceeds of auctioning off the spectrum now used by analog signals.

Current plans call for broadcasters to give up their analog spectrum by 2007, or when 85% of the US can get digital TV, whichever comes later. Some analysts predict that might not happen until 2015. The Federal Communication Commission has a competing plan that also calls for the US to be all digital by 2009. However, the FCC plan differs from the current one in that it would include consumers getting digital cable or satellite broadcasts as part of the 85%.

iPodderX

Another fantastic iPodder has just been released for the mac. iPodderX is perfect for newbies and has some great features. It's simplicity is inspiring:


- Graphical User Interface


- A single app -- no install needed. Just download and run


- Editable feed list


- Easily adjustable cron scheduling


- Supports BitTorrent files


- Supports ANY enclosed file, not just audio


- Audio files get moved to iTunes, other files stored in a Download directory

Free Content Still Sells

Even after seven consecutive weeks at the top of the nonfiction bestseller list, publishers are still puzzled about the success of the 9/11 Commission Report.

A word-for-word reprint of a government panel report -- the 516-page paperback -- is not the kind of item that usually tops off the nation's reading list. Moreover, like most government documents, it's available online for free.

Nonetheless, rather than turn solely to the commission's website to download the report, more than 600,000 people have instead paid $10 or so for a printed copy. For the report's official publisher, W.W. Norton & Co., it's been an unexpected windfall.

(Continued at Wired News)

Textbook Publishers Freaking Out Over File Sharing

Upset that students might actually try to learn something without first paying ridiculous sums for textbooks, some textbook publishers are complaining that students are sharing scanned textbooks over file sharing network. Of course, the reporter had trouble finding a single student who was actually doing this -- and most students seemed to think it would be something of a pain to read a textbook that way. Instead, many believe that this is just the textbook publishing industry's way of explaining away the fact that they keep raising prices every year for no clear reason. Next thing you know, the textbook companies will start going after libraries for "sharing" books for free...

Wikipedia Reaches 1 Million Articles

Wikipedia, perhaps the first widely successful online open and collaborative publication, has reached it's 1 millionth article according to this press release:

Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and its fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles.

Wikipedia now ranks as one of the ten most popular reference sites on the Internet, according to Alexa.com. It is increasingly used as a resource by students, journalists, and anyone who needs a starting point for research. Wikipedia's rate of growth has continued to increase in recent months, and at its current pace Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring.

Quite the phenomenon. Congratulations, Wikipedians! [Via Joi Ito's Web.]

Check your users bandwidth

Bandwidthmeter - a speed test script...

Designed for ISPs to put on a local server for speed testing between broadband connections. Optionally saves results into a MySQL database. For viewing by an administrator.

Encode Windows Media on the Mac

Windows Media Format for Mac Doesn't Cleaner do this? This seems to integrate with QuickTime and therefore it's capabilities should be available in any QuickTime app. This would be better than only being able to use Cleaner. Anyone have experience with it?

SMS Novel To Be Made Into MMS movie

From TechCentral:

China’s first novel delivered through SMS (short message service) is being made into a film that will also be delivered to cellphones and on the Internet, state media said Sunday.

The Taiwan-based company Bestis Technologies has bought the film rights to Outside the Fortress Besieged, a 4,200-character, 60-chapter novel that has been sent out to mobile subscribers in short installments, Xinhua news agency said.

Call for Public Journalism Scholarly Papers, Panel Ideas

This from the Civic Journalism Interest Group (CJIG) at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC):

The AEJMC will hold its 2005 convention in San Antonio, Texas, next summer -- and it's time to start rounding up ideas for panels and programs. The deadline for proposals is the end of the day on Oct. 15.

We need you to submit a proposal (or several) for sessions at the San Antonio convention. The topic can be anything that has to do with civic, or public, journalism, which now extends into citizen and participatory journalism and "We Media" as well the new technologies that can make or enhance newsgathering, including everything from weblogs to wikis to cell phones and instant messaging to building e-mail friendly news communities.

Go to the CJIG website for complete information.

Intel Puts More Money In Digital Home

The investments, from Intel Capital's $200 million Digital Home Fund, will go to five software and hardware firms: Cablematrix, Mediabolic, Pure Networks, BridgeCo and Envivio. Intel didn't give specific financial details.

Zurich, Switzerland-based BridgeCo designs chips and software for wirelessly connecting PCs to consumer electronics devices. CableMatrix is based in Atlanta and Jerusalem and is working on an "on-demand service platform" for multimedia content over broadband. San Francisco-based Envivio is working on software compression solutions. Mediabolic, also operating out of San Francisco, provides an embedded software platform for consumer electronics products and computers, Intel said. And Pure Networks, of Seattle, is engaged in making software and services for digital homes.

Some more details here....

A9's UI

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere - so I'll pitch in my own insights into A9.

Not only is it a major step forward in the world of search engines - and sure to give Google and Yahoo a run for it's money - but it's also a major step forward in mainstream UI.

What I see is an adaptable, dynamic interface which is really simple to use and understand. It's sexy, it's functional and most importantly - it's from an innovative mainstream leader.

Until these sorts of interfaces are everywhere - we're still stuck in the quagmire of waiting for pages to load, and too subtle, too limited, too HTML-like experiences to capture the maintream audiences we all think "will be here - real soon now."

Amazon defined eCommerce. Now they're helping to define the new kind of user experiences I've been waiting for - for over 10 yeasr now.

I just love the images, the built in diary and the notion of an accompanying toolbar.

667 MHz mobile processor from Samsung

Samsung has announced the development of a new mobile processor based on an ARM core capable of running at 667 MHz. The fastest processor currently in use is 624 MHz, which first appeared in the Dell Axim X30 Advanced 624 MHz. The new ARM 1020E-based chip sports 64 KB of cache, as well as an embedded vector floating point co-processor. It includes six instruction pipelines and runs a 133 MHz system bus.

Many mobile processors are designed to support only integers (whole numbers), not more complicated floating-point (decimal, fractional) numbers in order to save complexity and development costs. Most business applications are all integral-based, but multimedia applications often make heavy use of floating-point math. While it is possible to mimic floating-point numbers on an integer-based processor, it is not easy and the program suffers a major performance hit. A processor with floating point capabilities built in is much more friendly toward decoding compressed audio and video applications.

Kahle v. Ashcroft Coverage

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and Rick Prelinger, a film collector, want permission to digitize these so-called orphan works to create online libraries for free public access.

In a suit filed in March, the plaintiffs in Kahle v. Ashcroft argue that multiple changes to copyright law have essentially made it impossible for works to return to the public domain. They want to have these changes declared unconstitutional.

The copyright structure has changed so people no longer have to actively register and renew their work, meaning valuable historical resources stay protected by copyright, even though no one is marketing them. In the past, the scope of copyright was much narrower. When copyright expired, those works could then be used and built upon by future creators and were available to the public.

The law ìimposes enormous burdens on speech without any countervailing benefit to anybody,î said Chris Sprigman, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, who is representing the plaintiff. ìIt doesnít benefit the public because it keeps creative works locked up, and it doesnít benefit private rights holders because these works are out of print. These changes to the copyright law make it more difficult for rights holders to get some licensing income because it makes them more difficult to locate.î

SourceForge.net: gmail-mobile

gmail-mobile is a PHP application that will give you access to your GMail account with any WAP phone (WML format). It is built on top of libgmailer. You will be able to read your mail, compose message, reply, access to your labels...etc...more to come.

Dissecting the Media: Trust and Transactions

The legacy media in general are threatened by audience loss to the Internet and citizens' media, and Rathergate is merely the latest example of a credibility apparently sinking by the day,

There's been ample analysis from the perspectives of professional media, journalism, and politics. But from an investor's perspective, there's the possibility that one of the major value chains in modern society - media and advertising - will be rearranged, at least in part. That makes an economic analysis of the issue rather interesting.

I'll start from the perspective of transaction cost economics as originally invented by Ronald Coase. If you haven't encountered it, go read a bit. Trust me, this is one of the master ideas for understanding the evolution of the Internet.

(Continued at Due Diligence)

py2exe

py2exe: convert python scripts into standalone windows programs

TODAY 2PM EST: live interactive webcast w/ Unmediated

Starting today at 2PM EST, the Unmediated crew is going to be webcasting The Weekly Show live from NYC. We'll be using Shawn Van Every's Interactive Tele-Journalism system, developed at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, (the same system we used for the Konscious.TV during the RNC) to allow you to chat and ask questions with the various thinkers and developers invited to participate. This week, members of Unmediated will be on, so come chat with us about the decentraliziation of media and emerging tools and processes. Dan Melinger just got back from Ubicomp in the UK (where he was presenting Socialight), so he'll be available to chat about what's new on the mobile social scene.

Today's show starts at 2PM EST and will last at least an hour. The show's homepage will only go live at 2PM, but access the show here: The Weekly Show

mt enclosures

Brandon Fuller has released an enclosure's plugin for moveable type. Now you can publish iPodder compatible rss20 feeds!

A Weblog for Every Student

(via David Davies)

The University of Warwick is giving every new student the opportunity to start a weblog hosted on their home-grown BlogBuilder system. It'll be interesting to see what the take-up is once the new university term gets underway. I spoke to Steven Carpenter at the ALT-C conference and he told me that Warwick will probably let the system run for 12 months then they'll tie it in more closely with their PDP e-portfolios. Perhaps Warwick might even decide that the student weblogs will actually be the e-portfolios, a bit like they're doing over at the Maricopa Community Colleges.

Digital Divide Among Kids Is Shrinking

For all the talk about the "digital divide" and how poorer kids weren't getting access to the internet that would be important to their ability to get jobs in the future, it looks like much of the problem is going away. Nearly all children in the US now have some form of internet access, though, there still are differences in how they access it. It shouldn't be much of a surprise to find out that wealthier families are more likely to have internet access at home for their kids. Either way, this is clearly a positive step.

Human skin data transmission technology

Matsushita Electric Works has developed the human skin data transmission technology and started selling it to manufacturers of mesuring apparatuses like Teraoka Seikou.

Teraoka Seikou will be able to build a system for sales agents who will wear a wristband that collects information. When a customer orders, say, ground beef, a sales agent touches a corresponding digitally-enhanced product information card. This data is transmitted through the sales agent's skin and stored in his wristband. When he puts some ground beef on an electronic scale and touches it the data in thewrist band are transmited to the scale.

The technology can be used both for "human-human communication " and "human-machine" communication. Other possible applications include security, digital money, identification, etc.

From Trends < RFID in Japan < ITMedia News, September 13, 2004 (in Japanese; some photos)

The End of Television as We Know It

(reg. req.): Former Academy of Television Arts and Sciences chairman Bryce Zabel wrote this surprisingly strong essay on TV, and some great points too...

-- "For me, it's not a state of convergence that we are entering in this digital age but something a little more metaphysical. All of the information overload is ganging up on our senses and coming together into something else: The Blur."

-- "Will kids who can no longer appreciate the difference between a broadcast network and a cable network, or a pay network and a satellite feed, really appreciate the distinctions we currently draw between all of these delivery systems?"

-- "The best model to replace what's on the way out may be TiVo meets iTunes."

-- "It's one giant, indistinct, amorphous hard drive of blur."

Linking inside of a video post

In a comment posted recently, James Morrison pointed me to some useful info.

HERE'S a good article by Jon Udell.

Written early August of 2003....he discusses the need for us to link within video and audio. He makes some good points. But he also says this: Almost anyone can create and post a snippet of audio or video, but almost no one can do so easily, spontaneously, or routinely.
I think it's funny because in just a couple months it seems this is quickly becoming less true. Maybe it's just my experience, but I think it is getting easier to post audio/video because of our collective work. Examples are the best teachers.
James also mentioned this little tool that Peter built when our videoblogging group first started in June 2004. Obviously Peter was ahead of his time. The tool lets you link to a specific part of a video. We were all still trying to put video on our blogs, so i dont think anyone really tried it.

RIAA Sued for Patent Infringement

From the Department of High Irony: the recording industry heavies have been sued for infringing - and *inducing* the infringement - of a patent on P2P "spoofing."

Wikipedia's single-entry bookkeeping problem

Why do all wikipedia articles sound the same while every blog sounds different?

You can see the answer in the current struggle over the entry on George W. Bush. It’s been frozen because people had been editing it and revising the edits way too often. If you visited the page you never knew if you’d be reading about Bush the Strong or Bush the Demonic.

There’s a discussion here. And here’s a request for mediation, part of wikipedia’s dispute resolution process, which is quite fascinating, sensible and humane.

But the problem is endemic to encyclopedias and ultimately to the structure of knowledge itself. The problem is that there can only be one wikipedia article on Bush but there isn’t only one truth about Bush. Or about anything, for that matter. So, the wikipedia community self-polices itself into a voiceless ground-up objectivism that can reduce complex matters to what can be agreed upon by consensus.

Perhaps multiple truths deserve multiple pages. Isn’t that why the Web itself has succeeded?

W-Fi Interference Chart

This essay examines the most common forms of wi-fi interference.

Wi-Fi finder via SMS

UK company Total Hotspots is now offering a new service to British phone users to track down public Wi-Fi hotspots at cafes and other locations via their phone. Subscribers on Vodafone, Orange, O2, and T-Mobile GSM networks in the UK can now send an SMS message "hotspot" to SMS number 84140. The service will then return a message containing the name, address, and phone number of nearby Wi-Fi locations, based on the phone cell the user is currently using. The service will not come cheap, however. Each request will cost 1 GBP (about $1.79 USD).

More on MS' Webcasting Hijack

From Wired News: Attack of the Radio Clones (See earlier Looking for non-RIAA Music?)

Generic mouthwashes claim to be just as good as Listerine, and store-brand paper towels invite consumers to compare them to Bounty. This kind of marketing doesn’t raise many eyebrows. But what if an online radio station says it’s just “like” New York City’s Z100 or L.A.’s KROQ, and manages to sound pretty much the same?

Good question. Soon, the world’s largest software company, a staunch defender of its own copyrights, may have to answer it in court. Earlier this month, Microsoft began charging users to listen to online clones of 978 U.S. and Canadian radio stations with ‘"fewer ads, no DJ chatter and less repetition.” And no, Bill Gates didn’t ask the stations for permission to copy their playlists.

Innovative use of del.icio.us

David Wolf describes a way of using del.icio.us as a videoblog engine using RSS feeds of tagged bookmarks: ”if rather than giving a text description, I include a reference to a jpeg thumbnail. Now I could theoretically link to any piece of video I find or generate on the web and find it by searching for its tag. I´m looking forward to see an implementation of this.

I guess using del.icio.us this way probably is a litte more complicated than my videoblog using Blogger´s “BlogItemUrl"-feature in order to link to videos and poster-frames in an easy way. What the two have in common is the use of an existing service in a way which was not intended in the first place. I kind of like that approach.

FlashCommand

FlashCommand is a command line compiler for Flash MX 2004 Pro.

OurTV

OurTV is a new digital television station to be trialled in Canberra using the metropolitan high-speed networks present in the region. Its focus differs from existing TV operators in that much of the programme material is sourced from the local community.

About Synergy

Software to allow a single keyboard and mouse to span multiple machines *running different OSes* Will be so crazy if it works...

Moblogging Re(de)fined

Dave Winer (after talking with Robert Scoble) writes a posting that deconstructs moblogging. This helps clarify the genre for me.

This isn't just about pictures. It's about all kinds of media, and includes text, videos and audio. It's definitely about mobility, and on-the-fly posting from whatever location strikes you as useful.

(Continued at Dan Gillmor's eJournal)

Media value chains

Tim Oren has an incredible post looking at the dissipating value of media bundles in this atomic age of media when the essential element of content is (to paraphrase former blog empress, now kitchen empress Meg Hourian) no longer the network or the publication or even the show or the page but the post. Tim looks at how consumers are unbundling media and how attacks on credibility (see: Rather) accelerate the unbundling and the loss of value.

Being a VC, Tim then wants to start the discussion about new ways to create new value. I can name a few. But first, there's more to say about that dissipation of value.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

Backbones Getting Cheaper

U.S. Cities see 55% price drop in 12 months. The price large corporations and ISPs pay for Internet access has been cut in half over the past year, reports Light Reading. According to data from TeleGeography Inc., the average price companies pay for STM-1 (155 Mbps) connectivity fell by 55%

Blogger theses on Big Media's door

Here's a sidebar to the Post op-ed piece [written by Jeff Jarvis]:

: In this age of blogs, says NYU Journalism Prof. Jay Rosen, ìthe writers are readers and the readers are writers.î

Citizensí media upends journalistsí relationship with the public in ways that the Dan Rathers of that world have not begun to grasp.

Theyíre dismissive of it, which means theyíre scared of it. But they shouldnít be.

This isnít a war, itís not even a revolution. Itís a reformation. The bloggers are at the door to the cathedral of journalism, nailing up their theses for a new and better order:

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

Gmail winners

Congrats to Danny, Al, and Gena! A sample link from each of their entries:

Al's Body Electric

Gena's Teenagers reach out via weblogs

Danny's MyLifeBits

A look inside Broadcast Operations and Technology at CBS

Digital Media Net's Charlie White interviews Frank Governale, Vice President, News Technology & Broadcast Operations at CBS (link). Here's an excerpt from Governale on their recent move to disk based cameras and purchase of Sony's XDCam: We've embraced MPEG for network news, from ingest to playout, so we'd like to keep everything on that platform if possible. So over the last couple of years, Sony has been very forthcoming with us in terms of their XDCam product. We've had crews looking at their equipment, feedback in both directions -- by no means am I saying that we co-developed this or designed this with Sony, but definitely we had some input and definitely have been enlightened early in the process. We've taken some product for demonstration and evaluations; we've put it in labs, we've heated it, we've cooled it, we've put it in humid areas, we've put it in helicopters, we've shot overseas as well as domestically here at a few of the bureaus. We feel like we've put it through its paces. We all went in with the obvious skeptical concerns of, how's it going to handle motion? -- some of those things. But we've found no real issues with the product. My workflow requires that we have crews in the field for prolonged periods of time. Whether it be Baghdad or Afghanistan or just shooting, as an example, a 60 Minutes piece with Ed Bradley that may very well take a few hours to record. The relatively inexpensive removable media is essential for us because today's workflow requires it.

The QuickTime Deployment Kit v.2

QuickTiming.org has a utility that checks for QuickTime:

This is a set of free cross platform, cross browser files that include both HTML and QuickTime movies which check for the QuickTime plugin and QuickTime version before loading a target page.

Link structure of the audio/video web

A thing about weblog trackbacks that bothers me is that you can do the same thing using nothing but link structure.

Trackbacks are used to notify the author of a web page A when another web page B has commented on it. The idea is to make the "commented on" relationship explicit. This is done by having the A page point to a form which the author of B can fill out. The net effect is like tapping somebody on the shoulder.

The ability to tap somebody on the shoulder is a good feature, but why this implementation? Users hate up-front work in a deep and enduring way. They will not do it if there's an alternative, and in this case there are two: referrer logs, which take a tiny bit of work for the linkee, and Technorati, which takes no work at all.

In either case the secret sauce is the link structure of hypertext networks. HTML already provides a tool for correlating the source and object of a comment -- links -- so trackback is a solution in search of a problem.

(Continued at the weblog of Lucas Gonze)

Windows Media Center 2005 to support high def TV

Great news: Windows Media Center 2005 to support high def TV. Seems obvious at this point, but good to hear official word on it.

I'm curious how the HD TiVo vs a new media center box would stack up, as Thomas' review highlighted the lack of high def support for media center. In terms of upgradability, I bet a windows media center box would be much easier to dump an extra 250Gb drive into. We'll have to wait until these are released and in the wild before knowing if Microsoft finally has a hit on their hands.

Accupix Virtual Movie Theater Glasses

It looks like soon all your gadgets will be embedded in your glasses. Today marked the debut of the (somewhat unfortunate-looking) Oakley Thump mp3 sunglasses and the Accupix MPG-230M, "virtual movie theater" eyewear that uses the Kopins micro-display to provide an image that's equivalent to watching a 30 inch tv screen from a distance of 6 feet. The MPG-230M includes a built-in tv decoder and can display any NTSC video input. It's powered by 3 AA batteries, which means they're not exactly feather-light, and you'll still need to carry the video source like a dvd player or a tv with a tuner. It's available in Korea right now (but of course) but will be distributed internationally by the end of the year.

Read the Press Release. See more innovative displays from Accupix.

AP building online video library

Associated Press Television News (APTN) hopes to become "the world's largest digital commercial library" with thousands of hours of video available on-demand. The most innovative feature: clients will be able to edit video remotely before they download the finished clip. (Via PaidContent)

How to hustle rich companies with video blogging

Tony Perkins' AlwaysOn Network has come up with a great way to hussle CEOs. It's called "CEO Pitch video blog".

Here are the details.....

"We wanted our members to know first that AlwaysOn is launching an interactive CEO Pitch ’Äúvideo blog."

Based upon the huge success of the live CEO pitch sessions at our Stanford Innovation Summit last July, and the fact that over 20,000 industry insiders from 72 countries watched our show by webcast, we think this new product is a winner.

For CEOs that want to create brand leadership in their market space and attract new customers, strategic partners and investors, the CEO Pitch video blog is a very powerful tool.

In essence, CEOs can leverage their time by making their pitch available at any time of the day from anywhere on the planet.

FCC's Powell pushes for IP TV

FCC chief Michael Powell says broadband-delivered TV is a "major component that's moving fast" among phone companies.

XM to Start Internet Radio Service

XM Radio has announced their intention to market their own internet radio station, rebroadcasting (or simulcasting, I guess) the 200+ channels of music that XM subscribers now receive for $8 a month (or $4 if you already get the satellite service). Their intention to launch their own internet radio station clarifies their highly-antagonistic attitude towards the time-shifting software TimeTrax, as well as their decision to remove the USB-enabled version of their radio from the market.

Activist Video on the Internet

Before blogging (or even the Internet) existed there was an activist video scene. Much of it has moved onto the Internet, some of it has not. Here's a few groups that do have a lot of work on the Internet.

- Freespeech TV - They have a channel on DISH network, there are
hundreds of activist clips in their archive, produced by them or others.
http://freespeech.org/

- Dyke TV
http://dyketv.org/

- Global Justice Video Project
http://globaljustice.ca/

- Working TV - Primarily labor but also environment and general social
justice
http://www.workingtv.com/

- New Global Vision - Italian group
http://ngvision.org/

- Kanal B - German
http://kanalb.de/

- Beyond TV
http://www.beyondtv.org/

(Continued at Videoblogging Yahoo Group)

Face Detection

This site tries to gather all useful information about finding faces. Since much research is going on in this area, the information is grouped into several categories, which are listed on the left side of the page.

LinuxMovies Wiki

Applications, utilities, and other tools for movie-making on Linux.

OpenFTS: Open Source Full Text Search Engine

OpenFTS (Open Source Full Text Search engine) is an advanced PostgreSQL-based search engine that provides online indexing of data and relevance ranking for database searching. Close integration with database allows use of metadata to restrict search results.

iMovie Fest

iMovieFest.com, a new Web site community for Mac users, gives creative outlet to amateur filmmakers around the world. iMovieFest.com makes it easy for anyone with a video camera and a copy of iMovie or other Mac video-editing ... [Final Cut Pro News (Phila FCP Users Group)]

Two Technologies Hope to Personalize Advertising

It is well known that consumers have had it with the incessant delivery of irrelevant ad message. Two new technologies hope to put the consumer in control and offer greater relevance. Really Simple Shopping is based on RSS technology and provides the opportunity to sign up for and receive specific messages from specific marketers to a desktop newsreader program. It's similar to email but, to date, is spam free.

Dotomi lets consumers opt-in to receive specific banner advertising on partner sites. In exchange for providing personal information, the consumer, when visiting a participating website, is delivered a banner based on their personal information rather than the standard banner otherwise delivered.

While both companies are heading in the direction of eliminating ad clutter and providing more value for the consumer, it'll be a while before everyone gets over the "big brother" connotations that go along with this sort of "all knowing" advertising.

P2P search could achieve sublinear efficiency

Will the next Google be a company that uses P2P technology? Some researchers from UCLA have created a search algorithm that uses local rules to find content in ad-hoc networks. They have proved it can find any content in a P2P network of size N in time proportional to O(log^N). We had to dust some of our theoretical Computer Science background to read their paper presented at the IEEE P2P 2004.

While the concepts involved in the design of our search algorithm have deep theoretical underpinnings, any implementation of it is straightforward, and can be easily incorporated into any software system and protocol. Our extensive simulation results using both random PL networks and Gnutella crawl networks show that unstructured P2P networks can indeed be made scalable.

The search algorithm could be used in practical applications, including improving existing peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella, within one to two years, said Roychowdhury. The researchers are working on a software library that will make it easy for developers to include the search algorithm in their systems, he said.

Facial Gestures To Surf The Web

Worried about carpal tunnel? Maybe you should stop using your hands altogether when controlling your computer. A Canadian inventor has developed a system to control a mouse by where your nose is pointed, while letting you click with the blink of an eye (left eye, left click; right eye, right click). The idea, of course, behind this "nouse" system is to use it for people with disabilities. Of course, as someone points out in the article, the fact that using this could make you look quite silly may not go over particularly well. I also wonder how it deals with just regular blinking.

Media Arts Fellowships

The Program for Media Artists offers some very nice Media Arts Fellowships.

Bandwidth Versus Storage Debate

In the ContentNext Series, Jeremy Allaire tackles the "Bandwidth versus Storage" debate which has cropped up again recently, because of two high profiles advocates of storage: James Murdoch and Mark Cuban.

(Continued at PaidContent.org)

SIPShare: P2P SIP-based filesharing from Earthlink

Acronym-laden craziness! Earthlink has released SIPShare, a proof-of-concept P2P filesharing network that uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a tool originally designed for voice and video communications, to set up file sharing networks.

EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler —- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.
The emerging ubiquity of SIP as a general session-initiation enabler provides a rare opportunity to offer users all manner of P2P applications over a common protocol, instead of inventing a new protocol for each new P2P application that comes along.

Written in Java, with a BSD-style license, so it should be extensible in a way that Skype, Grouper, et al are not. Will be interesting to see if anyone uses this as a base for file-sharing + group communications.

synclosure

Synclosure is a RSS aggregator to flexibly download files in enclosures. It supports filter keywords, custom actions and a caching mechanism

Network Neutrality Questions Raised Again

The issue of network neutrality has received a lot of attention in the past year. The worry is that the broadband gatekeepers (the service providers who manage the networks) will somehow mess with and degrade the quality of services offered over those networks to harm competitors offering applications and services on those networks. Those who fear such a thing, want the FCC to mandate "network neutrality," making it illegal for a network provider to ever do such a thing. Network operators quickly respond by noting that, in a competitive market, they would be nuts to do such a thing. As soon as word got out that they were playing unfair, it would simply drive customers to competitors who didn't fiddle with the applications running over their network. Who's right may depend on how competitive the market really is. If, as some people clearly believe, the market for broadband is really a monopoly or duopoly for most users, then the providers' argument is hard to support. In the meantime, competitive providers are really trying to push the FCC forward. The latest is a VoIP provider named Nuvio that is warning the FCC that without a mandate for network neutrality, the local network operators will "have nothing to lose and everything to gain from degrading the connection quality." Again, this is only true in a situation where there really isn't that much competition -- which might just be the case right now in many areas.

Who's taping whom?

The Christian Science Monitor looks into the right of "video activists".

Widespread use of digital cameras at both large demonstrations and small antiwar rallies raises serious questions about intimidation, civil rights, and privacy. Should police be able to record peaceful demonstrators? Are activists using cameras to antagonize police? As the technology becomes more pervasive, its limits are being tested in courts and questioned by civil libertarians.

Growing numbers of "video activists" say cameras protect their rights and help spread their messages. Filming a demonstration, they say, lessens the possibility of police abuse and, if abuse occurs, the tape becomes evidence.

But police, too, are attempting to protect their rights. They use video in the event protests turn violent, to investigate crimes afterward, and to transmit images through wireless cameras to police command centers. They use it for training and, they say, to investigate groups that may have links to terrorist organizations.

[...] The rise in video activism is only one way technology is altering social movements. Cheap and accessible, digital technology - like text messaging through mobile phones - has enabled activists worldwide to organize on the Internet.

Romenesko: Articles on Blogs and Newsgathering

Romenesko lists four stories today dealing with blogs and newsgathering. Blogs and their effects on the news media are highlighted because they are helping drive news stories aimed at CBS and the veracity of the Bush National Guard memos.

One story is from the New York Observer, one from Editor & Publisher, one from the New Hampshire Union Leader and finally one from Dan Gillmor.

Opening Up TV, A New API

Slightly naive, but a very interesting way of looking at TV coverage (a similar concept is driving BBC's online archives effort, at least in theory): "Just like Microsoft (and Google, Amazon and eBay), one day all TV networks will have to digitally restructure their content and publish their APIs so that anyone can reliably and reasonably plug into them. That's the difference between dormant assets and a constantly evolving and extending platform."

Switching On To Interaction: Consumer Insights Into Participation TV

An interesting research white paper prepared by Fathom, a London-based tech/media consultancy (for Broadsystem) on the interactive TV market (from a UK perspective)...

Some main findings:

-- Broadcasters could maximise gross revenue by pricing at 1.00 GBP per interaction. Digital satellite channels are in an ideal position to exploit participation as their viewers are prepared to pay the most per interaction;

-- 18% of people claim to have responded to TV ads, 3% through each of fixed-line, telephone and SMS. Broadcasters can leverage their viewer relationships in this area as those who respond to TV programmes are the most likely to interact with advertising.

See, the vision is growing

Another idea of how videoblogging may become...

Thom says:

> Possible future: The Video Blog Producer Artist?
> A person that combines selections into a daily styled
> program via Webjay playlists?

This is a perfect idea. With Webjay, Lucas Gonze's completely underappreciated playlist tool, I could create little shows using music and videos...that people can pipe through to their TV's. Or as Mica might want...onto little video iPods.

Outfoxed interviews available under CC license via Bit Torrent

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