unmediated

Today we would like to introduce a new way to get.info from the unmediated blog: the unmediated quickcast. Quickcasts are short, 1-5 minute "mini-podcast" (audio) versions of original, non-reblogged posts in the voice of the original author. They provides you with an alternative way of reading posts when you're not in a position to read.

They also provide us with a way to practice and test some of the media blogging tools and processes we're working on. Unmediated quickcasts will show up as enclosures in both the unmediated full RSS 2.0 feed and the unmediated Weekly Show feed.

We hope you find these quickcasts as informative as we find them useful.

The Weekly Show resumes production, Monday afternoon at 2.00pm EST. We are working on a way to "open source" The Weekly Show, by putting together a basic program structure and technical infrastructure for allowing you to host the show on weeks that we aren't available. We're still in the planning stages, so we would love to hear your ideas on this. So please speak up and drop your thoughts in the comments section.

[mp3]

Over the past few years courtship has changed with bewildering speed, mainly because of new technology, reports The Telelgraph in an article on videophone dating and how it's going to be the next big thing.

The 3G Dating Agency, launched as a trial this year, offers members the chance to send in clips they have recorded on their mobiles and browse other members clips. It then arranges video dates for those who express interest in each other.

Edward Brewster, of 3, says: "3G video technology will revolutionise the dating game. Not only do you get to see whether a potential date takes your fancy, you also get to check out their personality.

"The response to our trial has been phenomenal. It has been so good that we are planning to launch a commercial dating service on 3 in the near future."

The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association has announced that cellular operators have signed a Multimedia Messaging Service interoperability pact.

The release says, "the Inter-Carrier MMS Working Group established a set of guidelines that will allow wireless carriers to phase-in photo and video messaging services over time....The MMS Industry Working Group began meeting in May with the objective of identifying a common feature set that could be supported by all participating carriers."

Not much information, is there? And there aren't any details about when the U.S. industry will offer widespread MMS interoperability.

It good that the industry has at least gotten together to make an annoucement. As I've written previously, there won't be any significant camera phone interopability in the U.S. until some time in 2005.

Script 1 takes a set of images and a GPS track, and spits out an RDF description of the images, annotated with time and place stamps and the creator's details. Script 2 takes the RDF and another file describing a map, and overlays the photos on the map.

Little demo of how to control IN and OUT points in Flash video. Source file contains many variations including proximity based and random cut ups as well as dragging.

[zip]

A new mailing list for practical conversations about syndication of audio and video. A place for publishers and consumers to coordinate. RSS 2.0 enclosures are central. RSS and Atom are directly relevant. Playlists may be relevant.

Rebecca Allen group at MIT lab is called "Liminal devices", it studies the frontiers between the virtual and the real world.

The first project she presented yesterday was the MyoPhone.

While we are used to displays like those of PC, PDA or mobile phone, the MIT group is working on new displays that would leave our hands totally free, displays embeded into eye glasses, not the kind that make you look like astronauts, but normal eyeglasses. Displays are located both right on the lens and in the frame to give periferal vision.

...[snip]...

The application is called the MyoPhone.

How does it work? When you receive phone call, you'll know it because a LED ligth will brighten on the len, you can go on talking with the person in front of you and by contracting muscles, you will also be able to send a message to say "call me later". Thanks to the chips placed on your muscles, all you'll have to do to select data or scroll a page like a mouse is to tighten these muscles.
The interaction is subtle and intimate, the technology does not disrupt your physical environment.

(Continued at we-make-money-not-art)

All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings
by Adam Greenfield

There is much more detail in the original piece, and I have concerns about some of Adam's assumptions about what constitutes ubiquitous systems - including who researches, designs, develops and uses them - that I will discuss later, but for now these ethical guidelines seem a good place to start.

The one thing I would like to ask Adam at this point is if he believes that his intended audience of information architects, usability specialists and user-experience designers actually have the power and the means to make this happen?

Blogging tools and enclosures. "We've been trying to get aggregator developers to support RSS 2.0 enclosures, but I've never written a piece explaining how I think developers of blogging tools should support enclosures."

Temple University has started a new urban journalism lab that's taking its students out into the streets of Philadelphia. Thomas Petner, a long time TV journalist, who in 1999 joined the dot.com revolution, now as an associate professor at Temple directs the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab. Join us as we learn more about street to street, point to point micro journalism in this Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust IM Interview.

Leonard Witt: Hi Thomas, let's start by talking about Temple University's Multimedia Urban News Room Lab (MURL). What is it and why did Temple decide to go this route?

Thomas Petner: The MURL program is based out of our Center City campus. It's a newsroom environment where students have an opportunity to get a "hands on" experience. We work across platforms from broadcast to print to online. They learn journalism is this converged environment, which hopefully prepares them for the brave new media world. The why of this program is pretty simple. The media landscape is changing quickly -- perhaps too quickly -- and students need to be prepared to deal with all the pressures

(Continued at PJNet Today)

Delivering the keynote speech at the Broadband Britain Summit, BBC director of new media and technology Ashley Highfield predicted a new era of content delivery by the end of the decade...
He suggested that the recent uptake in broadband could be accelerated even further if hardware manufacturers, broadband service providers and the BBC were to join forces. He posited a compelling free content and access package, similar to Freeview or the proposed Freesat proposition, but for broadband, suggesting the name Freeband. He said that the BBC would "make a major contribution to providing compelling content for such an initiative".

Manuals for those wishing to learn how to stream audio under Linux or Windows. Intended to accompany a hands-on self-learning or workshop based approach. No previous knowledge of Linux is assumed.

Recently PBS's Robert Cringley explored a makeshift TV broadcasting outfit that operated out of an attic and used largely open-source software. This week he zeroes in on TV2ME, a system designed to send live television via the internet from one location to another; done in this case by a Moscow man living in New York who wanted Russian programming. And all for only $6,500!

Here is a survey portraying the top three functions used most frequently on a portable device.



[Source: Jupiter Research/Ipsos-Insight Consumer Survey]

Hm, I most definitely use text messaging the most, then voice, then games. I barely ever use the camera feature, listen to music, or use the internet. How about you guys?

Portless Networks' linux distribution for the Linksys WRT54G wireless router
The other day I put this hacked firmware on a spare router. It was fun to look at the additional capabilities that are offered (such as SSH) but what I would really like to do is be able to modify one of these and put a very light weight streaming server on it. Unfortunately, you need a solid Linux box setup (I have to get to work on that one) to build a new firmware image.

Oh yeah, what is MORE interesting (to me at least) is that Linksys has made available the firmware for their wireless cameras as well (also Linux based). Looking through the firmware image for the WVC11B I was able to confirm my suspicion that in fact they do not offer a true MPEG-4 solution, rather it appears as though they *may* be using an MPEG-4 codec but wrapping it in an ASF file (hence the reason you need the stoooopid active x control to view the stream).

In any case, it is one of my missions to hack a true MPEG-4 solution onto one of these. How cool would that be!

unmediated quickcast: [mp3]

FlashAssist PRO is makes it quick and easy for Flash designers and developers to convert SWF files into standalone, installable Pocket PC applications - with advanced features not available when using Pocket IE to view Flash content.

Ash sent me this link about Nokia Digital TV line-up. It looks like a pretty comprehensive line up of satellite set-top boxes, including three models with hard disk drives and bluetooth. Seems like pretty cutting edge stuff to me, though doesn't seem like that these are available in the US market. Asia and Europe are target markets for these set-top boxes. I wonder when they will show up in the US? Is this a new product line or an old one? Anyone got more skinny? Fill me in!

(What are the chances that DRM could one day run all of the good tools out of North America? -kc.)

Gotham Chopra of INdTV says:

More impoartant to me is that we peel back some of the veneer that traditionally lurks in the media: i.e. the pretend objectivity that we proclaim so loudly. To me objectivity is a false pretense. It's a false promise on a false premise. Everything we see, feel, hear, know, happens within a certain context - social, economic, political, spiritual, etc...

I say - come out of the closet. Let us know who you support, why, and what for. Let it be part of the public discourse and debate. It's the only meaningful way of trading ideas and feeling sincerely inolved in this process.

AOL Instant Messenger users in battleground states and in the Washington, D.C., metro area are receiving a new kind of campaign advertisement designed specifically for broadband users with always-on connections.

The November Fund, a 527 group largely funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that claims to be "dedicated to telling America the truth about trial lawyers and their efforts to stop legal reform," has begun delivering a 30-second video commercial to AIM users by pushing it out while they're connected. This is the first time analysts have seen this technique, which AOL calls "Buddy Video" in a national campaign.

The AIM streaming videos are part of a larger buy covering all of AOL, according to Craig Karnes, vice president of Internet campaigns at Democracy Data & Communications, the Alexandria, Va., agency handling the AOL media buy for The November Fund.

The Washington Post has a run-down of the various internet television options now on the market, spearheaded by the recent launch of the Akimbo service. DaveTV, RipeTV and TimeshifTV are also in competition to take advantage of the millions of new broadband customers looking to put their bandwidth to use.

I created a MovableType plugin that generates RSS 2.0 enclosures when you add the rel="enclosure" attribute to your links. So, once installed this would create an enclosure:

[a href="http://www.hello.com/path/to/file.mov" rel="enclosure"]Download[/a]

This is my first MT plugin. It is derived from Brandon Fuller's MT-Enclosures plugin. I have not yet created a webpage for it with documentation, but I will soon. You can download it here: http://www.vipodder.org/MT-RelEnclosures.zip

Comments and assistance on future development is appreciated.

This is a piece from a few months ago on CNET about the development of H.264 and Microsoft's VC-9 codec. It does an excellent job of discussing the implications and significance of all this, of why this discussion matters and what the differences are. I know that H.264 has been accepted as the codec for next gen. DVD, and since it is an open standard I reckon that's a good thing. I don't know if and when a decision will be made about other forms of delivery (cable, satellite, etc).

From the T+L2 Weblog today...this IS what ed tech is all about:

A team comprised of the elementary, middle, and highschool MovieFest winners ran around the convention center with three digital video cameras, interviewing some who's who of ed. tech. Then, it was back to the hotel for an into-the-night editing session. Today they are putting on the finishing touches of the short video, which includes original music via Garage Band, to be shown at Friday's General Session.

These kids, who had never met before, worked exceptionally well as team, especially considering the age range from elementary to highschool. I think they were amazed to see throngs of educators so enthusiasticallly advocating ed.Tech. (Todd Mattox, Bear Valley Middle School, Escondido, CA)

I mean, how cool is that? And they're blogging too! This is my new mantra: Collaborate, Communicate, Construct. We're going to be amazed by the changes these technologies are going to demand in education...

Mark Glaser at the Online Journalism Review has an excellent overview of what's happening in citizen media on the hyperlocal level. A must read for those interested in citizen journalism....

ActiveX components that can be easily linked into your application program, providing audio waveform display, still graphic display, timeline management and playback, video encoding control, and video playback.

...Dell is also eyeing a movie download service. The company has been exploring partnerships that would offer its customers access to movie downloads, similar to how it provides music downloads through a partnership with MusicMatch, George said.

"We're talking to a bunch of folks, watching how that market evolves, and we'll have something midterm to longer term," he said...

Ben McConnell writes that MSNBC and MSNBC.com will experiment with open-source journalism during the Nov. 2 election. Calling the effort "citizen journalism," the news service is asking readers and viewers to report on activity at polling places by contributing written reports and digital photos. MSNBC will funnel the open-source journalism reports to its election-special blogs and, conceivably, its news site and cable channel.

The Network World blog says the Secret Service recently paid a blogger a visit for a recent "satirical" post about George W. She details her experience here and gives bloggers some rules of thumb on posting political criticism.

A PR company is selling services "to take action against bloggers!"

"(PR client) is a market intelligence and media analysis services firm. (PR client) is working with F1000 companies who are using our services to Manage and Monitor Digital Influencers (such as blogs, message boards, user groups, complaint sites, etc.) as an intelligence and threat awareness tool. (Person's name), CEO could talk to you about 'What F1000 Companies are doing to take action against bloggers' and 'How companies are taking steps to protect their corporate reputations from bloggers/digital influencers.'"

Wow, I guess PR really is the opposite of blogging.

(I thought this was more of a "how funny" post than a "how dare they" post. -kc.)

We've added some functionality to Audioblog.com, including ID3 tags on phone posts and the ability to send the link to the audio moblog MP3 file along with the player to your weblog. Why is this important? If you run MovableType 3 with the MTEnclosures plugin, that link is treated as an RSS enclosure and can be automatically downloaded by various podcasting programs. Listen to the announcement and feel free to contact me with any questions.

The Korean Ministry of Information and Communication had a wearable computer fashion show yesterday in Seoul, with lots of the typical arm-keyboards and heads-up displays and techno-nipples and the like. These pics on WMMNA are the first I've seen, but surely there are more. Send them in if you find some more, would you?

Here's an article, by Robert X. Cringely, on a wireless neighborhood initiative in Canada, from the point-of-view of Andrew Greig (who has a pretty sick media library going) of Starnix, an international Open Source software and services consultancy in Toronto, Canada.

Yeah, but what about that wireless TV? How does that work? Andrew's server runs Myth TV, an Open Source digital video recorder application, storing on disk in MPEG-4 format (1.5-2 megabits-per-second) more than 30,000 TV episodes, movies and MP3 music files. "As each new user comes online, I add another TV card to the system so they can watch live TV," says Andrew, "but since there are only so many episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, nearly everything that isn't news or sports is typically served from disk with full ability to jump forward or back at will. We've reached the point now where the PVR has so much in storage already that it is set to simply record anything that isn't already on disk."

Think about it. These folks up in Canada can not only watch everything we can watch on TV, on a whim they can watch every episode of the original Star Trek in the order they were broadcast ALL ON ONE WEEKEND. I wouldn't do that, true, but I also CAN'T do that.

At this point, intellectual property lawyers are supposed to start reaching for their telephones to call Canada, but it won't do any good because all this content is perfectly legal and here's how. With the exception of local channels, which come from an antenna, all of Andrew's video content comes from a C-band (big dish) satellite receiver (receivers, actually), and is fully paid for. "I buy the channels just like a cable system does or a motel that wants to offer HBO, from the National Programming Service," says Andrew. "And as a result I pay wholesale prices. People don't realize how much of a markup there in is the cable business. The Discovery Networks, for example, cost me $0.26 per customer per month. The IP laws in both the U.S. and Canada say that if I have legal access to this content I can store and use it. And the over-the-air channels, of course, are free."

ArtFutura's theme this year is Augmented Reality. It's taking place now in Barcelona [October 28th-31st]. The programme includes Howard "Smartmobs" Rheingold, Blast Theory who will perform Can You See Me Now?, the SimpleTEXT performance, Dublin s MediaLab Europe and Montreal s SAT will be showcasing installations and developing experimental projects, Richard Marks, creator of EYETOY, Greyworld, Fiona Raby, etc. (via we-make-money-not-art)

"It makes easier to add annotations to QuickTime compatible movies, set loop, none movie controller & enable autoplay. You can also import existing settings from QuickTime movies & save them as individual files."

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends posts about Gimli, A Robot with Insect-like Vision:

A team of researchers at the University of Arizona wants to change all this by mixing biology and electronics to create robotic vision. The team has designed a visual navigation system by mimicking insect vision and demonstrated the concept by building a robot named Gimli. Instead of using standard microprocessors, the team devised electronic vision circuits based on a bunch of slower analog processors working in parallel. The next step will be to develop a microchip-based vision system able to do specific tasks, such as following "a moving object like a soccer ball without getting confused by similarly shaped or colored objects."

With kids playing video games as early in life as they possibly can, the future holds some exciting possibilities as games are forced to become more physically demanding (i.e., relying less on a handheld controller), more social, and simply more participatory. Not that it's the end-all be-all by any means, but look at the success of Eyetoy (the game where a camera on your TV captures your movements and superimposes you and your actions into games where you jump around reacting to and shaping what's on screen). Here's an excerpt from an article talking about the games young children are playing from the point-of-view of the game publishers anxious to cash in (article at GoUpstate.com):

It is unclear whether video games teach preschool children more about phonics and problem solving than about simply how to tool around in a virtual playground. But everyone seems to agree that the ranks of young video gamers are substantial.

A report last fall by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research organization, found that half of all 4- to 6-year-old children have played video games - on hand-held devices, computers or consoles - and one in four played several times a week. Of children 3 or younger, 14 percent have played video games. (backup link)

What's amazing is that kids are going to end up watching less and less television- unless TV can become a heck of lot more participatory.

From People's Daily Online: Of the 200 digital cinemas round the world China's mainland boasted 57, ranking the second next only to the United States. According to the statistics released by the Digital Film Company of China Digital Film Group, the newly started China's Digital Theatre developed by leaps and bounds. The total number is expected to reach 166 by the end of 2004 and 1000 several years later, hopefully to exceed that of the United States.

Why are there so many more interesting and potentially important media technology R&D projects happening in Europe than in the U.S.A? We're missing the projects that bridge the gap between current media technology startups, University/academic research projects, and emerging media production/distribution problems. Meanwhile, we're about to be leap-frogged by the EU. Take a look at the New Media for a New Milliennium (NM2) project, a consortium with 13 partners from 8 European countries:

NM2 (New Media for a New Millennium) will create prototype production tools for the media industry that will allow the easy production of non-linear media genres based on moving audio visual images suitable for transmission over broadband networks. The new media genres will be engaging and potentially profitable. They will be characterised by the fact that the narrative presentation of the moving image media is personalised to suit the preferences of the engager. NM2 will use a practice based research methodology and will deliver seven new media productions based on the same media tools exploring a range of non-linear narrative forms for different content genres as diverse as documentary, drama and news reporting. These productions, developed in film schools, media labs and innovative production companies, will all be mentored by major broadcasters who will assess the new media genres and consider whether the concepts they embody are suitable for mainstream adoption by national broadcasters and distributors. This methodology, the strong focus on narrativity and machine based understanding of content will lead to the creation of prototype systems that are easy to use, relevant to the industry and optimised to the creation of media with good narrative structure and high production values, all of which are essential in the creation of compelling media. NM2 will develop strong commercial understanding of the opportunities for production based on assessments of both user reception and of the potential market. The core media handling capability developed as part of media presentation capability is likely to have more generic uses in other media forms apart from cinematic media including games and music.

For more on NM2, here's a recent BBC article- "Viewers able to shape TV"

Dean's former campaign manager Joe Trippi posts to MSNBC.com: We live in a top-down society, where information is power, and where those at the top have most of the information and hold most of the power. This is true within the institutions of government, political parties, the media, corporations, and the military.

But something dramatic is happening: A giant wave of change is gathering more force each day. Power is shifting to the bottom, spawned by advances in technology and the decentralized bottom-up nature of the Internet. (via The Pomo Blog)

Spends time on the mashup and the online activism aspects

Grey Tuesday, as the day of action was known, marks a potentially new site for a blend of online political and cultural activism in the highly charged realm of intellectual property expansionism. This paper examines emergent examples of musical and Internet activism including a detailed look at Grey Tuesday itself; considers the cultural significance of the mash up genre and the value of the musical "amateur;" and concludes with a brief consideration of "semiotic democracy" and the new mix or, if you will, mash up of culture and politics that has emerged as a consequence of the rise of digital networks.

Even more interestingly, the study found that 17% of young people have sent pictures or stories to a website and "online creativity can be encouraged through the very experience of using the internet." That is, the more time kids spend online, the more likely they are to produce their own content. And interaction breeds interaction. Does that mean we can safely assume that as internet usage increases its media timeshare, more and more people will become creative producers as well as consumers?

And does online game play in particular have any connection to this increased propensity to create? Nathan Combs recently suggested in his Socially Charged Software post that multiplayer games have a "MODder dimension", where "content is more than just accumulated and integrated, it is the product of collaboration and a shared value system of production: from inspiration through validation." (See Habbo Hotel's fan sites, for example.)

(Analysis via Foe Romero)

If you use any of the great podcast software programs to subscribe to my podcast, you may have noticed a short, two-minute bit that arrived on your desktop and perhaps, in iTunes.

More details later, but the short version is this:

I called into Audioblog.com; recorded, published, and subsequently, podcasted straight to your desktop.

It's a small feature with big effects for certain folks. I'm proud and quite excited about it.

Stay tuned for more...

Morgan Stanley's latest report covers Weblogs, RSS and Yahoo:

"In our experience, if there is value in something that is also easy / friendly to use, people will use it. /../ The simplification of blogging tools, such as those offered by Blogger.com, has allowed anyone with an opinion and an Internet connection to become a publisher, journalist, and editor (our humble definition of a blogger). /../ Despite all the noise and random content in blogs, many bloggers have become sources for breaking news, fresh ideas, and expert commentary…."

(via Dienstraum)

See also John Battelle’s Searchblog: Meeker on Digital World: Blogs, Yahoo Are Winners

Let's look inside Flickr! First off, take a look inside one of their new servers. Next, check out the presentation Ludicorp's Cal Henderson gave to the Vancouver PHP Association on September 9 about Flickr's general architecture and the use of PHP (presentation links: (ZIP or PDF, via Niall Kennedy and Kottke). For more discussion, this post compares Flickr's architecture to Yahoo, and check out Kottke's 'Normalized data is for sissies' thread.

The sports site is experimenting with several wireless providers to automatically preload video onto wireless devices -- much like ESPN Motion on the web. The end result would be faster, higher quality video.

A peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term. Beside tackling theoretical issues, it is a platform for reviews of real life examples.

This java library provides a MPEG-7 audio encoder to describe an audio content (in this case: an audio file) with some descriptors of the MPEG-7 standard.

Sean Savage, flash mob connoisseur and proprieter of cheesebikini.com, posits the possible use of the soon to be released (November 21) Nintendo DS as social hardware. He makes the point that the devices will have built in Wi-Fi and the ability to operate in both ad-hoc and infrastructure mode. This means that they can communicate with each other and with Internet access points. This would be perfect for organizing a flash mob, but there's one problem...