unmediated

Monday's Weekly Show is on! Also: Introducing the unmediated quickcast.

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]

Videophone dating

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."

CTIA announces U.S. Multimedis Messaging interoperability pact

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.

The MyoPhone

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)

Ubicomp experience guidelines

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?

Teaching Street to Street, Person to Person Journalism

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)

Nokia Digital TV?

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.)

Objectivity is a false pretense

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.

Campaigners Take Messages to Streaming AIM Video

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.

Next gen Codec

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).

Kids Constructing With Technology

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)

OJR Has Roundup of Hyperlocal Journalism Sites

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....

MSNBC's Participatory Journalism Experiment

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.

Feds Pay Blogger a Visit

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.

For sale: 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.'"

Wearable Computing Fashion Show

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?

The Limits of SpongeBob SquarePants

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: October 26 to 30, 2004

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)

mimicking insect vision

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."

Weaned on video games

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.

Number of digital cinema in China ranks second in world

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.

New Media for a New Milliennium (NM2)

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"

Joe Trippi on decentralization

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)

First Monday on Grey Tuesday

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.

Update from the Digital World

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…."

Flickr architecture and more

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.

Nintendo DS as Flash Mob Tool

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...

Indymedia server seizure: Now it's a story

In early October, a story came out that two Rackspace servers that contained Indymedia websites had been seized in the UK, and many bloggers and Indymedia writers wondered why there was no pickup on this story by traditional media sources. After a few days, the discussion grew to a few Internet-focused publications, but that was about it.

Today, the Associated Press' Ellen Simon writes about the situation, including Indymedia's claim that this seizure amounted to "censorship." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a lot of people failed to pick up on this story based on their opinions of what Indymedia has to say in its content - but they're missing the point. If we're all trending towards an online environment for news sources, what's going to happen when you're getting a lot of your news from an "alternative" source that doesn't have the backing of a New York Times or Tribune Company? Those companies aren't about to have materials seized from the Internet, but that doesn't mean that your favorite blogger or alt-site couldn't be shut down just like that.

Akimbo Debuts IP Video Service On Amazon

Akimbo, the IP VOD service (through a set-top box) has launched its service through Amazon.com...Amazon will be the exclusive retailer of the player through December...Customers ordering from Amazon.com will receive three months of free Akimbo Service (normally $9.99) or $30 off a lifetime subscription.

The player should begin shipping next week...

Mike Salmi: Console vs PC vs TV

Mike Salmi, CEO of AtomShockwave, in ContentNext Series: "I believe that everything will be on-demand in the near future except for live events and certain interactive/community broadcasts. On-demand has been our lifeblood the past 6 years so we know what it means from many perspectives."

WordNet::Similarity

A Perl package that implements a number of measures of semantic relatedness. These measures use WordNet along with other resources such as corpus statistics, and attempt to imitate the human perception of relatedness of words and concepts.

The future of audio

Howard Finberg in Poynter's Convergence Chaser on Internet radio. Howard cites the Chicago Trib's Eric Gwinn, who reports:

It started with the migration of people from dial-up modems to broadband connections for their home computers. Broadband permits audio and video streaming that modems can't handle. With home broadband connections becoming increasingly common, more than 40 million people a month now stream in everything from Hawaiian music to Wagner on their computers. That's something like 25 percent of the online population, yet you don't hear much about Internet radio.

He also points to a recent News.com piece about Building a 21st century radio. Important reading about the future of audio.

Skype releases API proving that every successful web app becomes a platform

Very cool. Congrats!

From forum.skype.com :: View topic - Version 1.0.0.94 released, Skype API made public via the voip weblog:

I'm glad to announce that the Skype API is finally mature enough to be included in a public build. So as of now we have the API included in the main Skype for Windows.

We just released version 1.0.0.94, you can get it from http://www.skype.com/go/getskype

This is just the beginning of the API show, quick intro about what's coming up and going on:
* API forum to be made public in the coming days, API info to be posted on the www.skype.com website
* We will be introducing software developer programs (days to weeks from now)
* We will be introducing certification programs (days to weeks from now)
* Licencing - no licence is required to use or develop with the Skype API
* New features for the API - conferencing support and other things that you've been asking for. Support for upcomgin Skype features.

provide access to the google desktop search service from remote machines

I've been moving all my media, back ups, docs and music to one server that i can access from any anywhere in the house. it's coming along slowly, but i wanted to have some fast searching on it-and with the new google desktop search it's almost possible, but it can only search the local machine. well, here's the google desktop proxy which will allow you do search a machine with the google desktop search app from another computer.

Be careful with this one, someone could potentially search your machine get your info, also be nice and don't do anything bad with this :-]

Guerilla News Network 2.0

GNNTV has recently relaunched itself as a full-on citizen's media site, kind of a like indymedia's younger, hipper brother. ;)

Welcome to the beta launch of GNN 2.0, the new citizen news network. In the coming days, we will be turning over the site to you, our loyal users. The new site will allow you to create your own home page, publish a blog, write full-length articles, publish your own photo essays, and participate in collaborative, ongoing investigations. You'll also be able to create networks of like-minded "friends" to blast your news to. Most importantly, the media revolution will now be in your hands. Guerrillas will decide what is news, and what isn't - with the emphasis on producing original, thought-provoking content. The more you contribute, the more of a voice you will have on GNN 2.0.

While most of the site seems to still be under construction (they're in beta stage) they were successful in scoring the kind of sugar pill that's going to help attract people to their participatory media project...

They scored directing credits for pop-star Eminem's latest music video, a get-out-the-vote anti-Bush tirade.

when soldiers share the news

USATODAY.com has an article on the ramification of unmediated soldier to family/friend communications. From prison camps to the front lines, pocket cameras and cellphones — many capable of whizzing uncensored digital images home — are nearly as standard among soldiers' gear as rifles, dog tags and ammunition.

The latest example of how this is changing the dynamics of war came last week, when 18 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company in Iraq refused to carry out a supply mission they thought would be too dangerous. One member of the unit called her mother to tell her of the decision and how she and others “are now prisoners.” Other soldiers who were friends of the 18 made similar calls.

Those calls resulted in widespread publicity, in turn triggering calls by a congressman to investigate the incident. The military has launched a review of the incident.

Billboard 2004 Digital Entertainment Awards Finalists

Take a look at the Billboard 2004 Digital Entertainment Awards Finalists for some odd pairing like Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) vs. Apple (and others) for Innovator of the Year, as well as some can-you-believe-their-mainstream-already categories like Advergame of the Year. I liked the selection of 'Live Phish' (which I believe was their live simulcast of their last live show to participating movie theaters) for Best Use of Technology by an Artist. It's also kind of neat to see that AOL's deal with WB and Warner Bros. TV to provide an online preview/version of "Jack & Bobby" (some new TV show) prior to its network debut was called Most Innovative Use of Technology for Advertising. I'm pretty sure AOL sent out a DVD (to NY Time Warner broadband customers?) of the Jack & Bobby preview before the show aired too. Hey, if Outfoxed can get theatrical distribution and DVD distribution AFTER giving away the film online and having people throw Outfoxed watching parties, TV shows better do something different.

F-Spot

This project looks like an attempt to bridge the gap between re-usable metadata creation and practical photo management. F-Spot is an application designed to provide personal photo management to the GNOME desktop. Plans include import, export, printing and advanced sorting of digital images.

F-Spot looks like a solid desktop client for Flickr. Via captsolo weblog, where there is a wiki, use cases, and more info.

wikinews

Wikinews is a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view (via boingboing via Joi):

We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.

While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

We seek to promote the idea of the citizen journalist, because we believe that everyone can make a useful contribution to painting the big picture of what is happening in the world around us. The time has come to create a free news source, by the people and for the people. We invite you to join us in this effort which has the potential to change the world forever.

Deconstructing Fark PhotoShop Contests

I'm a big fan of Fark PhotoShop contests. For the uninitiated, a couple of times each day, the editors of Fark post an image and challenge to modify it. So, for example, a recent one was 'Photoshop a caretaker dusting stag heads mounted in a room at Invercauld Castle'. Farkers get busy, and (more or less) 24 hours later, the images are posted. Users vote on their favourite, and that PhotoShopper wins, well, fleeting fame.

Generally, I think, the most creative and comedic images win. While PhotoShop skill may help, if doesn't seem to be an important factor. After following the contests for a while, I've noticed trends in the kinds of images people make, and how they make them. The following is my analysis of how people go about generating PhotoShops, and some thoughts on what commonly wins.

There are two aspects of a PhotoShopped image to examine: its subject matter and the technique. The subject matter refers to the type of material that the PhotoShopper has added to the images. Technique refers to how the image is modified for comic effect.

SMS voting for which encore at concert

Fans of 70s rock band Wishbone Ash will be given the chance to vote for the song that they wish to hear in the encore at this years AshCon concert via SMS. [via 160characters.org]

"AshCon goers will be invited to vote for one of five songs by sending WISHBONE followed the song title to 83248. The song receiving the most votes will be played as the show finale".

Local news ventures will get $1 million in seed money

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism today announced it will launch a pioneering program to seed community news ventures around the country with a new $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Over the next two years, the New Voices project will help fund the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects; support them with an educational Web site, in collaboration with the Poynter Institute's News University; and help foster their sustainability through small second-year grants.

More info here. Great news for niche, local independent news sites — even one- or two-person operations, presumably. I spoke with Jan Schaffer, the J-Lab's exec director, about this last week, and we'll be exploring ways for the New Voices project to work hand in hand with ourmedia.

Bang Bang Maxwell's Silver Ecomonic Model of Copyright Comes Down on First Monday

Terrence Maxwell has a new article in First Monday (Is Copyright Necessary?) attempting to model the effects of different copyright policies historically and into the future (e.g. authors wanting high-protection copyright vs. the public wanting low-protection copyright). His models are fairly abstract and complex (see image below), but his results are interesting:

As indicated in the table, the desired policies of authors, publishers and public domain advocates produce very different outcomes in a 100 year simulation, some of which run counter to the protagonists stated goals. For instance, while the authors position led to the largest number of authors, it also generated the lowest sales figures, and the fewest number of volumes published. This indicates that the demand for new volumes from authors was the lowest among the three options, and points to a greater level of competition among authors seeking publication. Similarly, while the reader position generated the highest level of sales, the greatest number of different volumes, and the lowest cost for books, it also severely constrained the number of authors. This means that while a greater number of volumes would be available, diversity in authorship would be curtailed. This, in turn, would tend to diminish the likelihood of variety in information products.

The Real Threat: Me2Me

Jason proposes an interesting theory below: he argues that the recording industry's war on P2P may be a distraction from an even more mission-critical battle -- gaining control of "me2me."

It looks like David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix would agree with Jason; in a recent piece on the RIAA's strategies, Bernstein writes:

"[The] labels are missing the fact that store-bought CDs, while probably retaining a place in the consumer's world, cannot provide what today's users want: total portability of their music. If users can connect electronically to every song or album they have ever paid for, wherever they may roam, well, the CD just can't match that."

Wikinews in the Works

The Wikipedia community is debating whether to create Wikinews, a journalism project in which the audience does literally everything.

The project strikes me as naive in parts -- including the legal dangers that need much more discussion -- but it's also well-meaning and thoughtful. Citizen-journalism is on the rise, and if the Wikipedians proceed, I'll be watching with extreme interest.

AVI TRICKS (free): Non-linear, non-destructive AVI video editor with real-time preview

AviTricks is a non-linear, non-destructive AVI video editor with real-time preview. It makes cutting and joining footage easy and includes a wide range of built-in adjustable effects that can be used separately or in combination. (Effects include dissolves, mirror image, sepia, iris effects, fades, TV-shop and many more.) Besides the preview screen, the video you are working on is also represented clearly and graphically on a timeline and a tree-structure. Both of these fields are active and easy to work.....(free)

It can't be that cool if it's closed

Steven Levy at Newsweek thinks Sony's portable system is going to rock socks and augur complete digital dominance.

Now, I have to admit, a system that can a) play games over a wireless network and b) play video and music is prima facie awesome.

But. But, but, but: It's stuck with Sony's ghetto memory stick format! And some new thing called the "Universal Media Disk." No hard drive, either. So how does this thing plug into all the other stuff I've got? Does it even have a Firewire or USB 2.0 port? Whazzup, Sony?

So yeah, I'm skeptical. But we'll wait and see.

Creative Commons Metadata embedding

Creative Commons licenses are attached to Web pages. But we also want our licenses to be useful for materials distributed in file formats around the Net.

The first format we've learned to tag is MP3, the popular audio compression format. Other common formats — image, video, text, other audio formats — will follow soon. This is an ongoing process, and we welcome your feedback. (You can also read a more detailed technical explanation of what follows.)

If you just want to get started, try the ccTag app, available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

LAMP and Regulatory Arbitrage

Today, MIT's LAMP system goes back on line, with a new design. LAMP ("Library Access to Music Project") streams music to the MIT campus via the campus cable TV system. Any student can connect to LAMP's website and choose a sequence of songs. The chosen songs are then scheduled for playing on one of sixteen campus TV channels.

According to MIT, transmission of music via LAMP is legal because it is covered by music licenses that MIT has purchased in connection with the campus radio station. In other words, LAMP is just like another set of sixteen campus radio stations that happen to be controllable by MIT students across the Web. I don't know whether this legal argument is correct, but it sounds plausible and MIT appears to stand behind it.

You may recall that LAMP launched last year but was shut down a few days later when copyright owners argued that LoudEye, which had sold MIT digital files to use in that incarnation of LAMP, did not have the legal right to sell those files for such uses.

Now LAMP is back, with the original design's efficient digital back end replaced by a new setup in which an array of low-end CD jukeboxes are controlled by special computers. This allows LAMP to get its music from ordinary CDs, as many radio stations do.

(Continued at Freedom To Tinker)

Exploding porn

: In the discussion of exploding TV at Fred and Brad's lunch the other day (my report here), I said that this was the one case in new media where I could not see how porn was leading the way.

But I kept thinking there had to be a way. I kept thinking and thinking until finally I came . . . to the conclusion that, yes, porn is again leading the way.

Over coffee yesterday, London VC, pal, and smart guy Rikki Tahta told me about a BBC series of wacky news reports he saw with a fascinating segment on the business of porn. The show said that as the cost of production has gone down -- thanks to inexpensive video equipment and software (sound familiar?) and no end of, ahem, citizen talent ... plus, no doubt, the advent of Viagra as a boost to worker productivity -- the video industry has been able to make more and more product for less and less money and distribute it directly to consumers via online at a lower and lower cost.

The result: The nichefication of porn....

...As the cost of production and distribution decreases, the inevitable result in media is nichefication. It is another expression of the need for the people once known as consumers to control their own media.

Which leads me to a new law of media:

Jarvis' First Law: Give the people control of media, they will use it.
The corollary: Don't give the people control of media, and you will lose.
Jarvis' Second Law: Lower cost of production and distribution in media inevitably leads to nichefication.
The corollary: Lower the cost of media enough, and there will be an unlimited supply of people making it.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

Carriers Banking on Mobile Television

Ben Chamy at CNet has a nice write-up of what we can expect from this week's CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show - CeBit for cellphones, basically—with a focus on mobile TV device and how carriers hope they will "save the cell phone industry." We've been sort of lukewarm on the whole mobile video bit, simply because the current offering is somewhat lackluster and it suffers from the same issue that portable video players do: not enough opportunity to watch them. That being said, while it might not be a compelling feature to revolutionize the industry, mobile TV would be a pretty nice 'value add.' Sprint's service already has 150k subscribers, so obviously some people are interested.

I would expect to see a lot more about mobile TV throughout the week as different carriers promote their mobile media plans at CTIA.

But save the mobile industry? I think the reason wireless content downloads aren't blowing up for carriers is because most people don't want to pay extra money for data. You don't have to pay your ISP a dollar every time you download a new wallpaper for your PC. Perhaps TV will be compelling enough to warrant a subscription fee—despite many replacing their TiVo with Bit Torrent, cable and satellite are still the dominant television services.

Amazon Jumps Into Consumer Generated Media

Amazon.com has started to enable consumers to share their photos right alongside product descriptions. Here's the FAQ. If you're logged into an Amazon account you can read more here.

Snippets of Shows as Feeds?

Hmm, I might be able to get behind the idea of publishing a few minute sneak-peek show of what's coming on my show to address Matt's thoughts on podcasting. via: A Whole Lotta Nothing

FlashPoint USB Drive with PC-Less Copying

The FlashPoint USB flash drive has such a simple trick it's surprising nobody else has gotten to it first. In addition to being a Mass Storage Device, it also has a female USB port on its backside that accepts other flash drives. Just push the nondescript button on the top and the FlashPoint uses its internal battery to power a file transfer—whatever you've put inside a special directory called 'Share' gets copied over to the mated flash drive (as long as it has enough space, one would think).

How to Videoblog with Blogger

Together with Svein Hier I've written a tutorial which explains in detail how you can use Blogger as a tool for easy videoblogging. Topics covered are:

• Editing the template
  • 1. Unique poster frames, playing video within the webbrowser
  • 2. General poster frames, playing video in the Quicktime player
• Workflow
• How to compress the video with QT Pro
• General tips about compression
• How to make a general poster frame with QT Pro
• How to make a unique poster movie with QT Pro
• How to upload the files and create a posting in the videoblog
• How to use some PHP and Javascript to launch a dynamic popup window

Happy videoblogging!

Verizon Television

Verizon Communications has plans to extend a powerful new fiber-optic network capable of delivering cable television to 1 million US homes and businesses by year's end, including more than 100,000 in the Boston suburbs. The upgraded network will allow Verizon to sell ultrafast Internet access and packages of interactive television programming. Essex and Middlesex counties north and west of Boston could see services launched sometime this winter, Verizon declined to positively identify which cities and towns it will target first. Eight additional states will see similar networks built this year.

SMS Summit

Several groups of activist technologists who develop and deploy political tools joined in a nonpartisan gathering September 30 - October 2 to discuss the political use and relevance of SMS. The SmsSummit Wiki is loaded with information accumulated before, during, and after the meeting, including a Proceedings section and a set of use cases.

Blogumentary

Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary, a documentary about blogs and bloggers, has its world premiere November 5 in Minneapolis, at the Get Real Documentary Film Festival. Chuck's blog is blogumentary, natch.

A message to Michael

Just got off the phone with a friend who's also a friend of Michael Powell, who I insulted in today's first post (below). Our mutual friend would like us to talk.

I've met Michael, and still have his business card here. We had a nice conversation at the time (a few years back, at a PC Forum), and he's clearly a good guy. So, with those grounds for conversation established, let's proceed.

Michael, it's about language. The vocabularies we use to describe a subject are essentially metaphorical: borrowed from other subjects. This is unavoidable, and actually a Good Thing (as cognitive linguists will tell you). But, just as everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a transport system when all you use is a transport vocabulary: when you have "media" for the "transport" and "delivery" of "content" to "consumers" who need "access" to it; and when we're used to regulating systems with "carriers"; and "transmitters" and "receivers" and "coverage areas" and so on.

As I said here, the way we've always (and rightly) conceptualized "communications" doesn't fit the Net, because the Net was not conceived by its makers as a delivery system for "content."

The Net's architecture is end-to-end, on purpose. It has been described as a World of Ends. In ways as deep and essential as the core of the Earth, it's something nobody can own and everybody can use. Plus one more thing: it's a place everybody can improve as well. Which is why it keeps improving.

The people improving it aren't just the big companies you're used to wrestling with at the FCC. They're independent developers. Look at blogging, now with 4 million producers of free speech. Or podcasting, which just got started and is already exploding at a nuclear rate.

The way we describe the Net (and the Web) is primarily in place terms. We have "sites" that we also call "locations" with "addresses." We often talk about the Net as an "environment" or a "habitat." For regulatory purposes, the best description we use is "commons." All of those terms derive from conceiving the Net as a place, rather than as a transport system.

(Continued at The Doc Searls Weblog)

(Also check out Doc's earlier piece on the subject. -kc.)

XM Radio's wearable device rumor

What do you get when you cross a satellite, walkman, ipod, and tivo? Now if this could upload and spot beam back to peers... A radio industry executive said the device was believed to be a satellite-radio receiver with headphones that also had a hard drive enabling users to download XM content. link (Via Drudge)

Vidversation

Vidversation conducted via Pingback client.

What's developing there is a tool to wrap a series of related videoblog entries into a single playlist, so you can watch them in a bundle. I think you could use it for audioblogs just as well.

RIAA p2p application

"At a panel held Wednesday by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, at least one record industry representative predicted that such sanctioned P2P services will start to proliferate in the next several months," says Wired News, going on to quote RIAA senior vp of government relations and legislative counsel as saying:

"We are going to see three or four of these in the very, very near future."

Glazier said the new services will be "consumer-friendly and enable the portability that digital music consumers demand, all without running afoul of copyright law," says Wired.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

(They put "consumer-friendly" and "copyright law" in the same sentence. That was fun. -kc.)

FeedMesh

FeedMesh is a group working to establish a "peering network" for decentralized web update notifications and content distribution.

FeedFragments is a related proposal for handling RSS/Atom content in a fragmented way, allowing aggregators to retrieve only the information they do not already have using standard HTTP features.

Transparency and sponsorship in the blogosphere

So I've been working on a new program - which I've been shopping around to a few peeps - which will pay bloggers to blog. I've gotten lots of great feedback and we're about to announce the program, so I've noticed a few posts recently which surround this topic.

(Continued at Marc's Voice.)

Merholz on Metadata for the Masses

Great Peter Merholz piece, Metadata for the Masses, continuing the folksonomy/ethnoclassification thread

We're beginning to see ethnoclassification in action on the social bookmarks site Del.icio.us, and the photo sharing site Flickr.

The primary benefit of free tagging is that we know the classification makes sense to users. It can also reveal terms that "experts" might have overlooked. "Cameraphone" and "moblog" are newborn words that are already among Flickr's most popular; such adoption speed is unheard of in typical classifications. For a content creator who is uploading information into such a system, being able to freely list subjects, instead of choosing from a pre-approved "pick list," makes tagging content much easier. This, in turn, makes it more likely that users will take time to classify their contributions.

Sprint Tests Fixed Wireless Device

Sprint is testing a fixed wireless device that will let customers use the PCS wireless network to replace land-lines from their local telco. The plain-looking box Phonecell SX5T essentially serves as another mobile phone on your plan, but drops a regular dial tone to devices plugged into it, so that units like TiVos or fax machines or any other less-than-modern device that can't get its data exchanged via Ethernet or Wi-Fi.

It's only in five cities right now, but it sounds like a good intermediate step to ditching POTS service entirely.

Video Google

Jeff Jarvis predicts mad crazy changes in the way TV is created and delivered. Notable:

There will need to be a Google of video -- a means of helping people find what they want. And, no, that&'s not just about creating a search engine. It's about capturing the metadata we create when we watch and share things and making sense of it. It's not trivial but it's vital for without a great guide, we’ll never find the programming we want and this new medium won't work. This video Google thing will be the next Google and TV Guide and it will be big. And I doubt that either Google or TV Guide will be the one to create it.

Presence technology

The AP has a note on Microsoft’s new collaboration software, code-named "Istanbul" it's going to be "e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, traditional phone service and Internet-based calling" all in one.

First reaction: Sheez, I don't want any one app to do all those things! That's scary!

But then there's this, which sounds awfully nice:

Using Istanbul, users can choose to immediately respond to an e-mail via instant messenger or, say, Voice over Internet telephony without switching back and forth between different applications.

The product also includes capabilities to initiate impromptu, real-time, remote "meetings" without having to arrange Web or phone conferences using passwords and other codes.

It's Filtering, Not Targeting

Dave Morgan has some good advice on targeting ads: "It's not enough to say, 'Ads are the cost of doing business,' if consumers want free content...Ad targeting can't just be about making money unless it's first about delivering consumer value."

"Publishers, advertisers, and agencies must shift their approach to targeting. We need less "targeting" and more "filtering." Less about what someone wants to push to segmented groups, more about what those groups likely want to pull (or, conversely, want to block)."

Sounds a bit like RSS ad models and other such models being discussed in the blogosphere over the last few months...

Presentation on the Impact of Blogs on PR

Recently, ClickZ editor Pamela Parker and I participated in a webinar on the impact of blogs and participatory journalism on PR. The event, attended by over 300 professionals, was organized by the technology chapter of the PRSA and graciously sponsored by Microsoft Live Meeting.

Since then I have received several requests for copies of my presentation, so I thought it would easier if I just made it available online here with the full narration. Pamela's presentation is also online here. Be sure to download it to gain a journalist's perspective on how blogs help them do their jobs. The full Webinar with audio is archived here.



(Continued at MicroPersuasion)

Chibi Vision, the billboard in a backpack

The Chibi Vision -- a "US-patented brand new advertisement method", no less -- is a backpack-mounted TFT screen and some unspecified innards that will play back "DVD, CD, SVCD, MP3, CDDA, JPEG, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, and DVD-RW", has stereo speakers, a battery, and so forth. The idea is that you're going to pay its inventors, a shady-looking outfit called Universal Planners, ¥70,000 (or about $640 US dollas) to buy ad-space on one of these for the day, and have someone walk around with it on their back playing your video; in reality, you're just going to laugh at them and spend the money on beer.

(Patented? Haven't we seen this in t-shirts already? No one's put an LCD in a hat. If I put it in a hat, does that mean I can patent it? -kc.)

tanaka-04c.pdf (application/pdf Object)

A system for collaborative musical creation on mobile wireless networks.

VIDEO: "Get your videoblogs on TV"

Today's video is about a different take on using videoblogs. In the videoblogging group, we're discussing what a videoblog should be. Different camps are forming. Short or long? "like TV" or completely "not like TV". Really, it's all correct depending on how people watch the videos.

We will someday (soon?) have a choice to make as videobloggers. When i make a videoblog specifcally for the web, it's got to be short because of my limitations in storage and monthly bandwidth. When I watch a videoblog on the internet...sure, I want a short video I can scan in under a couple minutes. Adrian says under 30 seconds.

But what if we can get these videoblogs on the TV? What if the blog is just a delivery method for torrent files...that can be subscribed to, downloaded, and watched on TV? Then, videobloggers can create almost any length videos for people to watch. How will this happen?

This video shows a box that Dan Melinger has built so he can connect his internet to his TV. Anything(video/music) he downloads he can watch/listen on his TV using a remote control. Right now, he cant really watch our videoblogs becasue we do not publish our videos as enclosures/torrents on RSS 2.0 feeds....so he ends up downloading pirated movies and TV shows. But let's not get too technical right now.

Check out what could be. This video is a long one. 7 minutes. Part II will come tomorrow where Dan explains the philosophy. Stay Tuned.

Annodex

The Annodex technology extends the World Wide Web's hyperlinking, searching, and compositing infrastructure to time-continuous data, enabling e.g. video surfing, searching for clips of audio and video files using ordinary Web search engines, or on-the-fly composition of a video on a Web server from previously annodexed clips.

(Link via Wes.)

Media Tech Emmy Awards Nominees Announced

A good list to look out for...

SIM Cards with memory, brilliant!

SIM cards have been shipping with miniscule amount of memory, enough to hold a few hundred contacts, calendar and couple of games. Israel-based M-Systems wants to change all that and is introducing something called, the M-Systems MegaSIM. The new card, a first for the cellular industry will combine high capacity flash-based storage, with densities reaching 256 MB, and advanced security features.  The technology will make it possible for the next wave of cellular phones to include a variety of advanced mobile services such as MMS, MP3 and video downloading, full PIM functionality, and high-resolution picture storage – along with advanced security features ensuring data integrity and security, the company claims. MegaSIM acts like any standard SIM card and can be integrated without the need for redesigns or complicated hardware integration.  It can be used by all 2G and 3G GSM service providers for user identification and authentication and to store phone settings and numbers.  it is one of those ideas, which makes you wonder why didn't someone think of it earlier. Every phone has a SIM card slot, and the combined card is smaller and perhaps more cost affective than adding separate memory cards. M-Systems will start-off with 16-256MB with higher capacities to follow. User data can easily be moved to a new cellular phone in a standardized way in the event of an upgrade or other phone substitution. Good one!

Off-broadway, for TV

David Emberton sez on actionscript.com:

My contacts in advertising have all recently been talking about immersive full-video experiences which they intend to implement with Flash. The idea is to ditch key elements of the text web interface (namely text and traditional forms), and create something that's a hyper-real blend of video and animation.

But that can easily be palmed off as advertising directors abusing the web. If you've spent much time stripping your work back to bare basics for the sake of standards compliance, you d probably think so. However, you'd be missing the real insight here, which is that the development of broadband as a distinct space is finally starting to happen.

Allow me to paint a (somewhat inadequate) word picture:

It's off-broadway, for TV.

In the same way that off-broadway plays are the poor/weird cousins of premium theater, some things are appropriate for regular TV broadcast, and some aren t. Whether it be short, cheaply made, or interactive, there s just a certain class of content that lends itself to being browsed on a computer rather than watched on TV. The point is that broadband is definitely not just text websites delivered faster, or even text websites with a few bells and whistles added. It s TV-on-demand, but also on-a-budget.

I realize that was a fairly epic blockquote, but interesting, yeah? Broadband internet as a medium distinct from dial-up and one that is just now coming into its own.

Link once again via Om Malik, who is clearly in it to win it.

Cinema Minima podcast audio Tuesday edition: Rights, Sound, Tools

Cinema Minima's Tuesday edition is available as an audio podcast file (26 minutes: 24 megabytes). Tuesday's edition covers intellectual property rights; sound and music in movies; and movie-making tools, including hardware and software.

 iPodder software application will automatically retrieve podcast files from RSS news feeds.

Could we have social video editing?

Mark Cuban has some ideas for improving TiVos. However, only one of them is slightly social.
Last week I did a little experiment - I took David Weinberger's presidential debate irc chat heckling and combined it with an mp3, giving a recorded social interaction.

This reminded me of an idea I had while watching the Olympics on TiVo. TiVo collects data on which programs have been watched, which bits were fast-forwarded, and which were played more than once or in slow motion.
Imagine if it took the Olympics, or a baseball or football game, or presidential debate, and collated everyone's replay speeds, and then offered up various highlights packages- the most viewed 5 minutes; most viewed hour and so on. This would naturally edit out all commercials, and the commentators padding, and show which parts people as a whole found interesting.

Vipodder.002

The whole world is a-flutter over Podcasting. But Videoblogging isn't far behind on the "next big thing" horizon. When TiVo and PVR's reach the tipping point in pop-culture that iPods and MP3 players have, I'm sure that videoblogging will explode.

Vipodder is licensed under GNU GPL, so please download and make it better. Any assistance with further development would be much appreciated.

Check http://www.vipodder.org for more info. I promise to have a better website soon.

decentralized cinema: Voices of Iraq

Voices of Iraq looks to be a major attempt at decentralized video production, and will be in theaters by the end of the month. About the film: Voices of Iraq was filmed and directed by more than 2,000 Iraqis from all walks of life. The producers distributed 150 digital video cameras across the country and received over 450 hours of footage from teachers, doctors, policemen, children and even insurgents. The film offers a unique opportunity to hear the diverse perspective of Iraqis on issues at the forefront of a global debate over war, terror and the prospects for democratic reform.

The film will be distributed by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's Magnolia Pictures (press release here).

Voice of Iraq is a starting point for a truly decentralized media (and cinema). 450 hours of footage and 2,000 participants yet the end result is a traditional linear documentary and a website with only a few video clips? Why not create a highly annotated database and archive of all the footage and let us link and comment and interact around and with the film and filmmakers? It's the difference between "here are the voices of Iraq" and "use your voice how you wish Iraq". In addition to editing and reducing things into linear media products enable conversations around events, opinions, and stories. Sure, it's nice to have a film too, but the film should only be one of many products of a decentralized media production process. Yeah, a DVD that stuffs even more footage into a digital media product will be sold at some point. But even then, the ability to use the web to talk to each other and say 'here's a clip that I think you should see' or 'this is what I'm talking about' or 'what happened after you turned the camera off' is what we're really looking for. But it's a great step forward for citizens hungry for decentralized media production and distribution and I'm looking forward to seeing the film.

Alternate Reality Games

From Wired: I Love Bees is the latest and perhaps most ambitious of the growing genre known as alternate-reality games. In it, widely dispersed players coordinate to find and answer thousands of ringing pay phones all across the United States and provide correct answers to recorded questions...

For those who obsessively play I Love Bees, the point is to take part in the creation and distribution of the radio drama. To do so, players log onto the game's website each week to find the latest clues and a list of the pay phones that will be called."

Mitsubishi to ship four megapixel CCD modules in November

Mitsubishi Electronic in early November will begin shipping four megapixel, auto-focus CCD camera phone modules, according to an article in Telecoms Korea.

The module can accommodate 30 frames per second for video.

It's quite amazing how quickly the technology of camera phones is improving.

Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark

Tired of blaring TV sets at shops, bars and waiting rooms? A new universal remote called the TV-B-Gone lets users turn off virtually any set. A trial run in the streets of San Francisco shows the device to be quite effective. By Steven Bodzin.

(Eh. Call me when the "Pocket EMP" version comes out. -kc.)

HBO freezes fair use; plugs analog hole

Going on a trip and want to take the latest episode of The Sopranos with you? Forgetaboutit. Coming this June to a cable or satellite set top box near you, HBO will be locking down all fair use rights on their content -- whether analog or digital. You can make one copy of regular HBO content and no copies of On-Demand content:

Commencing in June, HBO will include a technology in its program services that provides copyright protection information to consumer electronic equipment connected to analog outputs of cable and satellite set-top boxes. The technology (CGMS-A -- Content Generation Management System for Analog) enables compliant digital recording devices to abide by federal digital encoding rules.

In accordance with the federal encoding rules, HBO and Cinemax subscribers will still be able to make a single copy of HBO and Cinemax linear programming, but will not be able to make any copies of HBO-On-Demand or Cinemax-On-Demand programming.

The new newspaper

International Herald Tribune’s Doreen Carvajal on Metro newspapers:

Its papers are calculated to be savored as long as it takes for a cup of coffee to cool. A morning scan of its pages of local and international news and health briefs is expected to last 15 to 20 minutes (or 16.7 minutes by one company measure). A snapshot of Metro readers worldwide shows that more than two-thirds are under 45 and half are women.

This part is particularly interesting:

"The Metro newsroom is based on versatile journalists who can do interviews, take pictures and lay out the pages and do the copy editing," said Didier Pourquery, editor in chief of Metro France, which publishes six editions, including ones in Paris and Toulouse. "That's why we have productivity among the highest in the French press, with only 33 people in all Metro France."

Read the whole thing. Reaaad it.

future of the newsroom

A blogger's take on the future of the newsroom: speech given to managing editors of major papers that subscribe to the AP [via InstaPundit].

Franklin starts a podcasting service company

Carl Franklin co-authored the first Web site about Visual Basic. And, now, he's started a Web site and company about podcasting. They'll be providing services and other things for podcasters. He knows a bit about it. He also was the founder of .NET Rocks, an audio show about .NET.

sos

found this funny.

cnn article: An Oregon man discovered earlier this month that his year-old Toshiba Corporation flat-screen TV was emitting an international distress signal picked up by a satellite, leading a search and rescue operation to his apartment in Corvallis, Oregon, 70 miles south of Portland.

The signal from Chris van Rossmann's TV was routed by satellite to the Air Force Rescue Center at Langley Air Base in Virginia.

On October 2, the 20 year-old college student was visited at his apartment in the small university town by a contingent of local police, civil air patrol and search and rescue personnel.

"They'd never seen signal come that strong from a home appliance," said van Rossmann. "They were quite surprised. I think we all were."

Authorities had expected to find a boat or small plane with a malfunctioning transponder, the usual culprit in such incidents, emitting the 121.5 MHz frequency of the distress signal used internationally.

Van Rossmann said he was told to keep his TV off to avoid paying a $10,000 fine for "willingly broadcasting a false distress signal."

Toshiba contacted Rossmann and offered to provide him with a replacement set for free, he said.

TV explodes (Jon Stewart & Crossfire)

What's fascinating about the Jon Stewart takedown of Crossfire is not just what he said but how his message got distributed.

Terry Heaton reports that there have been almost 400,000 downloads of the segment at iFilm (which is how I saw it) ... in addition to countless (literally, countless) BitTorrent downloads. This was a flood of viral distribution that came from viral promotion.

Welcome to the future of TV!

In old TV, a moment like this came and if you missed it, you missed it. Tough luck. In new TV, you don't need to worry about watching it live -- live is so yesterday -- because thousands of peers will be keeping an eye out for you to let you know what you should watch (we call that metadata now) and they'll record it and distribute it.

The really stupid thing is that CNN didn't do this themselves: Hey, we had a red-hot segment with tsunami star Jon Stewart strangling our guys with a bow tie; you should watch; here, please, look at this free download because it will promote our bow-tie boy and our brand and our show and give us a little of that Stewart hip heat. That's what CNN should have done. Instead, they'll charge you to deliver a videotape (what's that?) the next day.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

(Also check out:The Future of Television: Crossfire Downloads Exceed Broadcast Audience for more stats. thx revgeorge!)

Mobile TV: Never say never

Mobile TV: Watching TV at work!
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

While at the BBC, and for that matter, consulting for 3; I was a "Doubting-Thomas" when it came to mobile video/TV.

However smooth the picture, or compelling the content, other than a few niches, I didn't think it was a flyer in the same way as we know that mobile music is, just because of the very human limitations of attention in a mobile context that would prevent you from being engrossed in mobile video in the same way you can be in mobile music.

Today I picked up internal trial hardware (the s90-powered 7700 that won't be getting a commercial release, but Nokia uses as an experimental platform for new services) for mobile DVB-H digital TV broadcast, and it has immediately made me doubt my doubts.

It's certainly got immediate wow factor (in a non-scientific survey of me and Chris, and the picture is smooth, a decentish-size (book of postage stamps, rather than postage stamp) and sound crisp over the headset.

Luckily there's also a fair bit of english-language TV available on Finnish TV for me to understand. I have the handset for a month, so it will be interesting to see how mobile TV fits into my life over that time.

While I can't go into too many details, the guys at the trial program have said it's fine to blog general observations, so I will try to do so here.

OhMyNews International starts training citizen-reporters

OhMyNews International reports on their efforts to export their We Media model, which has proved to be so successful in Korea.

Eight budding citizen reporters came to OhmyNews' Gwanghwamun office in downtown Seoul for a seminar on participatory journalism, Saturday afternoon.

Hailing from Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States, the group heard two one-hour lectures on OhmyNews International (OMNI), citizen journalism and the basics of journalistic writing.

The topics discussed included how the OhmyNews model of reporting complements "professional" journalism, how to tailor a reporting style to a particular story and the kinds of common pitfalls new reporters should avoid.

The group attending Saturday's seminar is the first wave of foreign citizen reporters in Korea writing English-language news stories and features. The next seminar is planned for early November.

OMNI went online Feb. 22 with the aim of duplicating on a global scale the success of the Korean edition, which started with 727 citizen reporters nearly five years ago. OhmyNews now has 36,000 reporters submitting about 200 stories a day.

Wheelchair Video Production

Laird Telemedia just released their VGO wheelchair mountable video camera system. This thing looks like a great bicycle mount too. The broadcast video wheelchair system comes equipped with a steel swing out arm and a camera tripod head mounted on it for safe and steady camera movement. The arm can easily swing out of the way when the user needs to enter or exit their wheelchair. The entire system can be removed simply from the wheelchair by releasing the two locking knobs.

Artificial Vision for the Blind

Article in Santa Cruz Sentinal about UCSC professor Wentai Liu helping blind people see: A miniature disc with an electrode array is implanted in the back of the eye, replacing the damaged retina. A small video camera in the patient’s eyeglasses captures visual signals, which are transmitted to the electrodes. That stimulates the optical nerves to carry a signal to the brain.

Liu said researchers are working on a "second generation" of the implant, increasing the number of pixels from 16 to 60 to sharpen the images the patient sees. The goal is to accommodate 1,024 pixels by 2011, further improving the focus.

Similar work is being done at the Dobelle Institute, as summarized here.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencdn/

SourceForge.net: Project Info - OpenCDN
The SourceForge description:
OpenCDN aims to hierarchically chain a set of Streaming Servers, for deliver of Live Streaming contents to millions of viewers. Development is based on the Apple Darwin Streaming Server (DSS) and Linux, but porting to (Helix, WM) is possible.

Spimed

If spam simply isn't annoying enough to suit your needs, or you're the kind of person who's disappointed by the disarming ease you encounter when upgrading your laptop's operating system to a new version, then boy does Bruce Sterling ever have a vision of the future for you.

Refining the message of his much-linked speech from this year's SIGGRAPH conference in a new piece for Wired, Sterling draws us a picture of a coming time when intelligent, deeply internetworked and self-authenticating objects dominate the physical world: an "expensive, fussy, fragile, hopelessly complex" world, where entirely new forms of "theft, fraud [and] vandalism" await us.

I preface my comments the way I do because Sterling isn't warning us about this world. He's enthusing about it.

(Continued at v-2)

You are the media -- now what?

Over at the excellent WorldChanging, Dawn Denby has an interesting post about the new ish of Adbusters, the anarchic anti-consumerism mag. But it was this comment from Brendon Wilson that really struck me:

One thing I've noticed recently: [the Adbusters folks] were always fighting against Big Media to get access to an audience for its messages. In the wake of the mass-pileon of Rathergate, it's becoming apparent to even regular (i.e. non-geek) people that the web and blogs are the new media. Why bother continuing to fight for space on CNN and others, when you can just take your message directly to the people?

Which begs the question: why doesn't Adbusters have a blog? Maybe because there's no money in it? I don't know - and when I asked them via email, I never received a response, so I can only guess they don't know either.

And so it begins

The trend over and over again - is to let the startup innovate and then the big boys come in, copy them and try to take over.

NetFlix has known this hammer was coming - for years. They've built up their customer base to 2M+ based upon a $22 a month subscription price. That's $44M a month. Every month.

So not only has Blockbuster and Wal Mart decided to chew on some of that - but now it looks like Amazon will - as well.

...[snip]...

Shares of Netflix dropped to $11.05 after ending the regular session at $17.43.

OOOps - that's a 37% drop in share prices.

I hope my friends in France are paying attention. Hi Mihai!

And I hope all you entrepreneurs are learning a lesson.

NO MATTER WHAT - the big guys will steal your idea.

NO MATTER WHAT!

Bake that into your DNA. Write it on your forhead.

(Continued at Marc's Voice)

(I'm baked as I speak. (j/k.) ;) -kc.)

FTC P2P Workshop - 2004 Dec 15-16

The Federal Trade Commission will host a public workshop, "Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Technology: Consumer Protection and Competition Issues," to explore consumer protection and competition issues associated with the distribution and use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. The workshop will be held December 15 and 16, 2004. It is free and open to the public.

A Federal Register Notice to be published shortly says the workshop is intended to provide an opportunity to learn how P2P file-sharing works and to discuss current and future applications of the technology.

dirCaster v0.1: Podcasting php script

dirCaster v0.1 is a php script that allows one to very easily start Podcasting mp3 files from their web host. This allows original content creators to easily provide a feed for iPodder, jPodder, etc.

Drop the dircaster.php script into a directory and it will generate an RSS feed suitable for iPodder, etc based off the MP3 files in that directory. To 'cast a new file, simply upload it to the directory containing the script.

Check out Brad’s remix feed to see an example of dirCaster in operation.

I'm sure there are far better ways to do what this script does, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Download it here.

Total Recall: a Personal Information Management System

The aim for the Total Recall project is to design and develop a personal information management system which will securely collect, store, and disseminate data from a variety of personal sensors. It will also allow customizable searching, analysis, and querying of this data, in a secure manner. Numerous applications of such systems will play an important role in improving people's quality of life.

Podcasting, timeshifting, the iPod experience

This panel at Gnomedex spent some time talking about podcasting. At one point the question of bandwidth came up. Someone mentioned user experience problems for people with 14.4k modems. There's an important point here, something that no one on the panel brought up, and something that a lot of people---smart people---seem to miss about podcasting. Wait...wait...okay, I'm happy now. Scott Johnson did. Thank you Scott!!!

Here's what Scott said: podcasting is built on RSS enclosures. RSS enclosures are built on the idea of timeshifting. A well-designed news aggregator, if it runs every hour, won't immediately download an enclosure the first time it sees it in a feed. A well-designed news aggregator will wait until the middle of the night or some other time when the machine isn't in use. Alternatively, the aggregator will be scheduled to only run at off hours. The point isn't for the user to sit staring at it like a pot of water working its way up to a boil. Just the opposite. Connection speed can still be an issue, but it only becomes an issue when the product of file size times connection speed is greater than the length of time available.

(Continued at Andrew Grumet's Weblog)

Independent media tribes

Reason Online managing editor Jesse Walker in Chronicles magazine: Independent Media Tribes.

The Independent Media Center, as Indymedia is officially known, is one of the most successful publishing projects online, a sprawling network of radical amateur journalists that is open to virtually anyone with a keyboard. There are at least 135 local Independent Media Centers in over 40 countries; most are in the United States and Europe, but they have also appeared everywhere from Beirut to Bolivia, Nigeria to Jakarta, Chiapas to Thunder Bay. (As I write, the lead story on the IMC's main

site announces that its African affiliates just met in Senegal.) Its admirers often ignore its faults, while its enemies love to tar the whole network with the most galling activities on its fringes; whether you are an admirer or an enemy usually depends on whether you share the network's leftist politics.

It is useful, however, to strip away the ideological baggage and set aside what you might think of the IMC's content. Indymedia offers a radically different model for producing and distributing journalism,

with a very different hierarchy of standards from what you find at CBS or the New York Times. It has changed the face of the alternative press; and, just as important, it is rapidly being superseded by newer, more promising models. Its successes and failures should interest anyone who wants a more pluralistic media landscape. ...

Light beam communicating with computers

Yoel Fink and his team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology are studying how fabrics woven from light-sensitive fibres could be embedded in computer and projector screens, and control computers by tracking the position of laser pointers, or other light sources, on the screen.

The fibres respond to light because photons hitting the semiconductor core dislodge electric charges, affecting the voltage in the fibre s metal wires. Current changes in a grid of such fibres can then pinpoint exactly where a light source is striking the surface.

Embedding these grids in computer screens would allow us to just take light beam and communicate with the computer because the screen would know where it was being hit. No more mechanical mouse requested!

Via New Scientist.

IceRocket Launches Moblog Search

If you want to, you can now look deeply into people's lives thanks to Ice Rocket. They debuted a phone pic search tab that enables users to search TextAmerica moblogs. It also looks like they are adding in some personalized search features as well.

JazzMutant Lemur

The JazzMutant LEMUR is a "MultiTouch Control Surface"—a touch-sensitive tablet, in demarketroided terms—that is designed to act as an interface for a variety of OpenSoundControl-capable software, including Reaktor. It's not the hardware that makes it unique, exactly, but the library of modular control interfaces that can be put together to control music software in real-time. It can also be used to control video and light hardware, as well, which is very futuristic of it.

The pad has a native 800 x 600 pixel resolution, and uses a simple Ethernet connection to connect to other hardware. Pricing and purchase information will be available in Q1 2005.

Wearable display for the masses

More about the Mitsubushi scopo wearable display presented earlier this month at the CEATEC exhibition in Japan.

It will become the first mass market wearable display for augmented reality at a relatively low cost (US$400, but don't hold your breath, it will be launched next year. In Japan only) and can be worn without interfering with your daily activities.

A tiny LCD screen hangs over your eye and gives the illusion of a ten inch screen from a miniature surface. The headset has optional headphones and a small belt carried unit that contains the silicon that creates the images on the screen.

When plugged into a mobile phone, PDA or laptop with video functionality, you can stream directly to your field of vision or record footage on the fly. .

Via Gizmo.

RSS feeds of BBC News Audio & Video

Ben Metcalfe has generated RSS feeds of all the AV content that the BBC News site uploads by category.

Very nice!

The History of Social Software

WorldChanging Ally Christopher Allen (of Life With Alacrity) has written a fascinating piece entitled Tracing the Evolution of Social Software. Starting with Vannevar Bush's prophetic 1945 essay "As We May Think" and ending up with musings about the potential future of the concept, in many respects it's a capsule history of how people and computers have co-evolved. Go give it a read.

OQO Model 01 Reviewed: The Heavies Weigh In

The OQO Model 01, finally having moved from the realm of vapor into the waiting hands of eager dweebs, is still the smallest 'full PC' yet (despite having been announced some 2390 years ago), complete with hard drive, FireWire, USB, QWERTY keyboard, and Windows XP Pro or Home—no CE here. But that doesn't mean it's worth the almost $2,000 you have to drop to own it. Tom Mainelli from PCWorld gives her an underwhelmed whirl and it seems that, while pretty cool, the OQO may not live up to the company's hype (surprise!). Pogue and Mossberg don't seem blown away, either.

OQO Handheld PC Fails to Excite [PCWorld]
A Windows PC That Fits in Your Hand [Mossberg]
Putting Your PC in a Pocket [NYTimes]

(I have a dream that one day I will be able to carry around a computer capable of real time video encoding and not have to lop off the display half of a powerbook to do it. ;) -kc.)

Today's internet is a one way internet optimized for consumers not content producters

This just points out that the current internet is not really suitable for true two way web where people blog everything including video and audio in addition to text. Our current internet is really optimized for the one-way web i.e. consumers not content creators. In the future, everybody will be a content creator sharing text, audio and video and a good chunk of it will be private as well as public. Today's network despite bogus claims of bandwidth glut has too little bandwidth to the home and can't handle a world where everybody is uploading and downloading terabytes per month which is the future.

From NI3: The Net Result of Imagination, Innovation, and Investment - Adam Curry's Bandwidth Consumption: 30Gb Per Day!:

"He mentioned his badwidth consumption in yesterday's Trade Secrets. This is amazing. It also illustrates the price of Podcasting. Podcasting and other forms of non-text blogging are going to stress the infrastructure of blogging service providers and virtual web hosts very quickly. It will be interesting to see host these infrastructure providers react. I'd love to see Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) offer a personal version of the products to address the need of individuals publishing audio and video content."

CNET's $70M Experiment in Participatory Journalism

Why did CNET pay $70M back in July to acquire Webshots, an online photo sharing/wallaper site? The answer may lie in participatory journalism. CNET News.com has started integrating user-uploaded photos from Webshots right into its news stories. Case in point - this story on Dell's new MP3 player includes links to this photo gallery of iPod Mini Users. Note the photo credits.

Parallel text commentary to audio tracks using .movs

Dave Winer put up an mp3 of the debate; David Weinberger organised an irc chat to heckle it.
I combined the two:

You can call this audioblogging with comments or maybe it is something else.Note that if you open it in QuickTime Player, you can search the text for keywords like 'flu' or 'bin Laden'.

GML: GUI Markup Language

GML is a development tool that allows you to create graphical user interfaces in a simple and fast way, writing XML documents that define the content, structure and behaviour of those interfaces.

FCC Prepared To Say Cu == SiO2

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to approve today a proposal to give the major telephone companies more leeway in the design of new fiber-optic networks, sparing them from the regulation that governs traditional phone lines.

Under current rules, fiber networks are not subject to the same regulations as existing copper phone lines if they are used to connect homes in new neighborhoods, a policy pushed by the FCC to spur investment in the high-speed lines.

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to approve today a proposal to give the major telephone companies more leeway in the design of new fiber-optic networks, sparing them from the regulation that governs traditional phone lines.

Under current rules, fiber networks are not subject to the same regulations as existing copper phone lines if they are used to connect homes in new neighborhoods, a policy pushed by the FCC to spur investment in the high-speed lines.

The Indymedia Mystery Deepens

Wired News: IndyMedia Gets Its Servers Back. Less than a week after the U.S.-directed London seizure of two of its servers, the collective news organization IndyMedia said Wednesday that the devices have been returned to its service provider, Rackspace. However, the 20 or so sites that these servers host will remain closed to the public until the organization can inspect the disks and ensure their contents have not been altered.

Artists support Creative Commons with CD

If you don’t know much about Creative Commons, you really should learn. As Wikipedia says:

The Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share. ... The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others, through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, which may include dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems which current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

I love Creative Commons; in fact, all of the presentations on my web site are available under Creative Commons (scroll down to see ‘em), so I try to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Newsweek is reporting that CC is releasing a CD containing tunes by artists who want you to remix the hell out of their music and create cool new things:

The Beastie Boys, David Byrne and Brazilian pop legend Gilberto Gil will appear on a new CD along with 13 other artists next month—not exactly earth-shattering news. But what’s unique about the disc is that diehard fans are not only likely to end up copying, remixing and swapping it online; they’re actively encouraged to do so. The compilation, due out at month’s end, is both a legal experiment and the opening salvo in a war against the music industry’s zero-tolerance policy on file sharing. And if the folks behind it have it their way, both the artists and their fans will come out winners.

So very cool. The CDs will come with the November issue of Wired, available through the mail or on newsstands. I’ll get mine, and I’m going to play with it, but even if you don’t get Wired, those songs will appear on P2P networks within hours … and that’s exactly what the artists want.

Gad, but I love Creative Commons.

The Weekly Show #4

The Weekly Show #4, streamed on 10/11/2004 and featured Drazen Pantic from Location One and Dan Melinger. We discussed Location One's election night citizens' media project, The Waiting Room. We also took a look back at some of the unmediated news that stood out this past week.

Unfortunately, The Weekly Show has taken a short hiatus and will not be streaming live this week. We are working on ways to distribute the production of the show to everyone who is interested (YOU) when we aren't available and would love to hear ideas on ways to do this. Please speak up!

Wikipedia & Collective Memory

Kim H. Vetman has written an interesting paper that illustrates how distributed resources are changing not only the nature of knowledge, but the ways of knowing. Vetman points out that knowledge may be more than something dynamic that changes over time:

"A deeper implication of this revolution is a new kind of digital bridge whereby even illiterate persons can be included within the knowledge loop of collective memory institutions."

I think the most interesting feature of a knowledge pool like the Wikipedia is the rapid post editing process, which may prove more efficient than the peer-review techniques that have been used so far by scientific journals. In terms of Cybernetics, "feedback" is the only error-correction and navigation system we have in nature, and even space vehicles rely on that for accuracy. Then why not history?

(Continued at WorldChanging)

Radio journalism due for a renaissance?

Good article by Mark Glaser just went up at the Online Journalism Review: Will Satellite, 'Podcasting' Bring a Renaissance to Radio Journalism? The piece looks at the changing shape of radio, focusing on satellite radio, "podcasting" and the promise of more original journalism.

"It's a ripe moment for radio. Several trends are converging: digital audio production tools are cheap and accessible; new distribution paths like streaming, satellite radio, digital broadcast radio, wireless and 'podcasting' are emerging. And concerns over broader media consolidation underline the importance of independent voices and non-commercial journalism." -- Jake Shapiro, executive director of PRX.org, an innovative online exchange of public radio shows

Portable Firefox 0.9.3 & 1.0PR (USB Drive-Friendly)

Firefox supports running from removable drives with minimal reconfiguration. To make life even easier, I've repackaged Firefox as a complete, removable drive-friendly browser. This grew out of a mozillaZine forum topic back in June of 2004. Any comments or questions can be directed there...More

Qualcomm pushes multicast CDMA

The company behind most CDMA technology is now planning to go multicast in order to allow faster and more stable streaming content.

Qualcomm has announced two new extensions to the CDMA specification designed to improve multicast capability in 1xEV-DO and WCDMA devices. Both tie into previously announced systems to offer cheaper content distribution to wide audiences.

The two new systems, 1xEV-DO Platinum Multicast and Forward Link Only (FLO), complement existing CDMA technologies. 1xEV-DO Platinum Multicast is an evolution of the 1xEV-DO network designed to allow a cell tower to transmit a data packet to several handsets in its range simultaneously rather than one at a time, essentially by synchronizing all of the handsets and the tower to the same code frequency and time slot so that all are "listening" at the same time. Multiple cells can also send out the same packet, which listening devices then blend together thus reducing packet loss due to interference. 1xEV-DO Platinum Multicast uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) for these multicast signals in order to make recombining the signals on the phone easier.

(Continued at InfoSync World)

DoJ Endorses PDEA, Induce Act

As most of you are no doubt aware, the Department of Justice yesterday issued a lengthy report (PDF) outlining its plans for taking the war against intellectual property "theft" to the next level. So what is John Ashcroft's answer to our copyright infringement problems? As Declan McCullagh writes, "more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors." Meaning, of course, H.R. 4077/PDEA, which among other things threatens to make automatically skipping commercials illegal, and the widely reviled Induce Act, which would put technological innovation into a deep chill and/or send it overseas.

Ah, but that's not all. The plan also includes:

• Wiretaps for some IP crimes;
  
• "Updating" the law so we can charge intellectual property criminals under US law anywhere in the world, no matter what the local regulations say; and
  
• Education programs to teach children "respect" for copyright law, so they can "Just Say No to Copyright Infringement."
  

Finding Licensed Content

If you can't be bothered to open up your web browser and head over to our search engine, but still have a hankering for licensed content, there's good news. Well, good news if you run Mac OS X. We now have a Creative Commons Search channel for Sherlock

You can connect to the channel at sherlock://drop.creativecommons.org/sherlock/ccsearch.xml. It still has some rough edges, and there's definitely room for improvement. If you're interested in helping, the code is available at the CC Tools SourceForge project. Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

BBC Launches VOD Trials

In UK, BCC is conducting tests on a service allowing licence holders to download or store the BBC schedule on a weekly basis so they can choose what to watch, where and when.

The trials for on-demand TV are part of a drive to develop new technology and distribution platforms for the publicly funded broadcaster.

The trials could offer personalised programming, automatically storing the five top programmes that matched the most-watched shows.

Satellite Radio Could Become 'People's Medium'

Writing in MediaPost's Online Spin, Tom Hespos posits satellite radio, with its seemingly limitless bandwidth, could become the new Internet allowing anyone, through satellite company lease, to broadcast their own radio show. Internet publishing and recently, weblogs, have provided a global voice to individual inclined to shout loud enough. Satellite could do the same for wannabe radio personalities.

(Let them eat Satellite? -kc.)

You are silly.

eWeek columnist David Coursey says podcasting is cool for commercial content, and silly when used by "egomaniacal" bloggers.

Another J-School Tries 'Open Source Journalism'

The University of Missouri School of Journalism has launched My Missourian, the latest effort to enlist citizens in publishing community news to the Web. Inspired by NorthwestVoice.com (from the Bakersfield Californian) and South Korea's OhMyNews, the site has the motto: "News for mid-Missourians by mid-Missourians." The site is staffed by students, who are responsible not just for editing content, but also soliciting it, says Professor Clyde Bentley.

The Missouri project follows on the heels of GoSkokie.com, launched this past spring by a team of master's students in one of my classes at the Medill School of Journalism. (...)

(Continued at Poynter E-Media Tidbits.)

XP Media Center ver. 3.0

The New York Times goes into some detail, Microsoft s Latest Plan for TV [nytimes.com], concerning the newest version, (3.0) of Microsoft's XP Media Center, which Redmond hopes will gain traction in the living room. Price points are dropping down to $1000 per unit, and new accessories from Cisco, Linksys and H-P include Media Center Extender, which uses wireless technology to send TV signals to additional TVs in your house.

The choice quote of the article is:

Still, it is an open question whether people want to watch television on their computers. "Convergence solves a problem consumers don't have," said Sean Baenen, a managing director of Odyssey, a consumer research firm. He said that simpler, single-purpose machines are easier to use.

But research by both Microsoft and computer makers found that most of the initial users of the machines were using them on their computer monitors, presumably on their desks. Only a small minority use the highly promoted ability of the computers to link to TV sets and sound systems for use in family rooms. (The machines come with remote controls and software with very large type so that they can be used by people sitting on the couch across the room from a big TV set.)

One reason, perhaps, is that video-recording functions and picture quality have not been as good as on a device like TiVo. A survey by Forrester Research found that people who recorded video on their computers were less satisfied than users of specialized recorders.

(Continued at PVRBlog)

Research on Robust Peer-to-Peer Search Methods and Query Routing Algorithms

This research paper provides a detailed overview of current research in robust peer-to-peer search methods and query routing algorithms.

Survey of research towards robust peer-to-peer networks: search methods* Technical Report UNSW-EE-P2P-1-1, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (September 2004).

In addition to covering well known techniques in detail, including distributed hash tables and flooding broadcasts, newer techniques are also covered. The in depth technical analysis of various search and discovery methods is a useful resource for anyone involved in building large scale decentralized networks.

End of the Private Networks

The private networks might be on their last legs. Latest data from TeleGeography's Global Internet Geography research service, shows that the Internet backbones now account for over 85% of the world's cross-border capacity used in fiber-optic networks. The balance of used capacity is dedicated to private corporate networks and international telephone traffic. Among other highlights of the recent report, the rate of Internet backbone growth varies dramatically by region. Mature Internet markets in the U.S. and Europe have seen relatively slow growth, just 30 to 40 percent over the last year. Asian backbones have upgraded much more rapidly—over 70 percent last year—and show no signs of slowing down. Technology Futurist offers a brilliant explanation for the trend. As a sobering though, our friends at Telegeography remind us that despite the super growth, a huge portion of international fiber-optic bandwidth still goes unused. On trans-Atlantic routes, for example, only about a quarter of currently lit capacity is actively deployed to carry voice, Internet, and corporate traffic. The remainder lies idle, either unsold or unused by service providers. This mismatch of supply and demand could persist for several more years due to the still untapped "upgradeable" capacity of current submarine networks.

a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture

I just crafted a long essay on feeds and youth culture over at apophenia. I'm interested in how youth are consuming feeds very differently than adults and how the differences seem to be connected to the IM/email division. Feed madness rang through the halls of Web2.0 and i wanted to reflect on how different consumption cultures are going to take this up and what the implications are for design. I don't have any answers, but this is my first pass at thinking through this issue.

I chose not to re-post it here since it's long and i would like to keep the comments connected. That said, if you're interested in feeds as an emerging trend, please take a look at this entry and challenge me on what i'm missing.

Community of photos

Tim Bishop's got a fascinating post about how the Iraq metatag at Flickr might affect politics and communities:

What happens when Iraqis start posting pictures on a popular photo portal where it is easy for Americans to find them? What happens when pro- and anti-occupation Iraqis start posting graphic pictures to make their points? What happens when we have an unmediated, high emotional impact, people-to-people conversation with video and pictures?

What indeed? As Tim suggests, if you want to know, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the Iraq tag at Flickr.

Desktop video survey

PaidContent notes a survey by Maven Networks:

According to the survey, 71 percent of consumers would download a branded video channel to their desktop…70 percent of broadband users claim that they would use the service at least once a week, with 25 to 34 year olds being the most likely to use it that often.

Student Journalist Dismissed for Blog Post

The Daily Kent Stater editors dismissed student politics reporter Beth Rankin because of inappropriate opinion posted on her personal blog.

Microsoft Sets Aside $20 Billion For Media

Microsoft has allocated more than $20 billion to spend over the next six years in a drive to grab a share of the film and music entertainment market, the Times reports...this amounts to half the company\'s entire R&D budget until 2010.

It already has 270 patents pending on recent innovations that will allow customers to watch television streamed through the internet.

Another Analog to Digital Transition Coming

And one that is likely only to continue to engeder controversy about what constitutes copying (not to mention a host of spectrum issues): Building a 21st century radio.

Digital technology is coming slowly but surely to radio, promising to rock the industry with enhancements such as improved reception, as well as on-demand programming and time-shifting that have begun to tantalize TV viewers even as they terrorize Hollywood.

Digital radio growth has been slow in the United States, but adoption is ramping up quickly overseas, where memory radios that allow listeners to pause, rewind and record live broadcasts are already being sold

[ ] Such developments are making the recording industry nervous. Record labels are already worried that digital radio will allow people to record and keep pristine copies of music, and they ve lobbied federal regulators to include some kind of anticopying mechanism in the digital radio standards.

I am Generation C

Score on finding the Big Articles, lately. (via Scoble)

So what is it all about? The GENERATION C phenomenon captures the tsunami of consumer generated 'content' that is building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis.

The two main drivers fuelling this trend? (1) The creative urges each consumer undeniably possesses. We're all artists, but until now we neither had the guts nor the means to go all out. (2) The manufacturers of content-creating tools, who relentlessly push us to unleash that creativity, using -- of course -- their ever cheaper, ever more powerful gadgets and gizmos. Instead of asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, to passively consume, the race is on to get them to create, to produce, and to participate.

Can I Get A Witness! Amen!

This is what its all about. Its DVCam filmmakers or shows filmed on DV like 28 Days later. Its the Mashup creators. Its the hundreds of thousands of bands on sites like Pure Volume. Its the same ethic that started punk rock. Hell, I can play three cords, etc. Its DIY. We technology people look to the blogs and podcasting, etc. but whets really going to be fascinating is when the creative production tools go mainstream. I think that although some of the best stuff I have read in years comes from techno-centric bloggers, the real power is with the 15 year olds at Live Journal and Myspace. This is IM with narrative. IM with history. IM with context.

I communicate in different modes depending on what I want to communicate, or more importantly, how I want to be communicated with.

My communication becomes my media. My information, my persona is a multi modal form of dialogue which is tailored to the delivery mechanism and audience. Our discourse is our narrative to the creation which is our life. Entertainment is active now, not passive, and I am the star of my own show.

Enclosures and oral tradition

Jay
Fienberg's insight on standards as oral traditions:

The "oral tradition" to which I refer is not, as you may think, that of bloggers posting audio. Rather, it is the process by which RSS 2 enclosures are coming into wider use.

People are just building software that does stuff with enclosures, and telling each other about it. And, somewhere in there, through word of mouth, some kind of agreement about what enclosures mean is getting worked out.

I "enclose" an m3u file, which is a mp3 playlist. ... The major reason I enclose m3u is that I consider my m3u URLs permalinks, but not my mp3 URLs ... But, the other good reason to use m3u is to reference a playlist, which is a nice / common way to reference a list of mp3s. ... Is RSS a playlist format? Can a single RSS item (a blog post) contain multiple enclosures in effect, acting itself as a playlist?

FBI seizes independent media webservers, shutting down sites across Europe

US authorities have seized the UK-based servers of the British branch of Indymedia.org, an alternative newswire and global network of independent news websites.

On Thursday morning of last week, a US federal court order was delivered to Rackspace, an American webhosting service provider with a UK unit in Uxbridge, Middlesex, demanding they hand over Indymedia web servers.

Rackspace, which provides hosting services for some 20 European Independent Media Centres, or Indymedia websites, at its London facility, complied and turned over the requested servers, in effect removing those sites from the internet.

It is not clear why the servers have been seized, and Rackspace will not comment on the actions.

"How and why [is it that] a server that is outside the US jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities?" asked an Indymedia spokesperson.

(Continued at Digital Media Europe)

a blog devoted to remix

Here’s a blog devoted to popculture remix. CC licensed. But needs a RSS/Atom feed.

The screwed up economics of the free broadcast spectrum

In the late nineties, Washington policymakers took up a noble cause. There was a new technology, digital television, that almost everyone agreed would eventually revolutionize TV, but quelle horreur almost no one was adopting it. Among other things, local TV stations couldn t transmit digital signals on their existing analog channels. They needed digital spectrum. (If you think of the electromagnetic spectrum as a highway, digital and analog signals travel in different lanes.) So Congress decided to give the stations a leg up or, rather, a handout. Instead of auctioning off the digital spectrum (which might have brought in new competitors, not to mention money), or simply asking broadcasters to pay for it (it was worth, conservatively, tens of billions of dollars), Congress offered it to them free. It was, as Reed Hundt, who was the F.C.C. chairman, said at the time, the largest single grant of public property to . . . the private sector in this century. Senator John McCain was a little more blunt. He called it one of the great rip-offs in American history.

The Weekly Show, 10/11/2004

On today's Unmediated Weekly Show, Dan Melinger and Shawn Van Every invites Drazen Pantic down for a chat and a pint.

This week, the crew will discuss Location One's election night citizens' media project, The Waiting Room. They'll also take a look back at some of the unmediated news that stood out this past week.

ViPodder, a videoblog aggregator

I whipped up a script this week based on Adam Curry's iPodder for aggregating videoblogs from RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosure tags. It should download the videos (or any files, really), and organize them into a ViPodder directory on your desktop. It will then import the videos to playlists in Cellulo , much like iPodder does for iTunes.

ViPodder is written in Applescript, and sure to be rather buggy. It requires Mac OSX, Cellulo 2.0.0 Beta, and XML Tools 2.

ViPodder is licensed under GNU GPL, so please take it, modify, and build better things.

Download at http://www.vipodder.org

suggestions and assistance on future development is much appreciated.

Minniapple's Mini Radio Stations

The Walker Art Center wants to put the 'public' back in the public airwaves. It's distributing tiny radio-transmitter kits so people can broadcast from their own personal radio stations. Michelle Delio reports from Minneapolis.

Battles from within Big Radio

This huge article takes a look at a David-vs-Goliath battle in San Francisco's urban/hip-hop radio scene, which didn't end well.

Anyone who is involved with micro-content, open-media, blogcasting or podcasting should take a look. It's not just about corporate radio. There's something deeper and this article gives so many hints and signals, that I urge my colleagues to step outside the echo chamber.

Upstart rap station Power 92.7 had its eyes on big, bad KMEL, but didn't watch its back.

via East Bay Express

Symbiotic Media

I can imagine a decentralized amateur news service, but I think that it will be slow coming... Big media will feel pressure to do what they do best: reporting actual news from around the world. Amateurs will provide the analysis and criticism.

Configuring technologies and users

User-Centered Design and the Normative Politics of Technology (pdf)
by Karin Garrety and Richard Badham

Reflecting on the application of UCD methods to particular design projects, the authors describe the advantages and limitations of such modernist and normative tools. While their very abstraction and formality allows them to be applied in a variety of contexts, the associated conflation of knowledge and certitude is considered to be ill-conceived. The discrete categories of UCD methods work not because they are "true" but because they are actively reshaped by designers and users in pre-existing social, political and technical contexts to create new ones.

Configuring the User as Everybody: Gender and Design Cultures in Information and Communication Technologies (pdf)
by Nelly Oudshoorn, Els Rommes, and Marcelle Stienstra

Working with the knowledge that technologies have a life history that goes beyond the design trajectory of any specific product, the authors demonstrate that this broader context shapes not only the technology but also the user. Following social-democratic ideals, the mandate to design something that could be accessible and useful to everyone resulted in simultaneously configuring a generic user that represented - and worked for - no one in particular. On the other hand, design practices were seen to reflect predominantly masculine values and further discourage the representation of multiple perspectives needed to disrupt the user-as-everyone model.

The Domestication of New Technologies as a Set of Trials (pdf)
by Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen

Rather than understanding technological adoption in terms of technological innovation invading pre-existing cultural habits and practices, where individual decision makers simply choose to accept or reject new technologies, the author looks at the successive trials or phases of adoption which mobilise - bringing together and pulling apart - a variety of actors, things and people, systems and relationships.

(PDF links are valid only until October 31, 2004)

Call for Public , Citizen Journalism Panels, Papers

This from the Civic Journalism Interest Group in the AEJMC Call for Paper Abstracts and Panel Proposals

This conference will be happening here at Kennesaw State University, and I will be helping to run it. Watch this site for more information in the future. Here is the information you need to know now:

AEJMC Midwinter Conference Feb. 11-12, 2005 Kennesaw State University Kennesaw, GA (20 miles north of Atlanta)

Submission requirements: Authors are invited to submit research paper abstracts or panel proposals to be considered for presentation at the 2005 AEJMC mid-winter conference. Submissions can address any aspect of civic, or public, journalism, which now extends into citizen and participatory journalism. Proposals may include work in progress. We encourage you to propose ideas that address civic journalism and issues of interest to other participating co-sponsors is encouraged. Graduate student submissions are strongly encouraged. Here are some specific guidelines for submission...
(Continued at PJNet Today)

Nano-ITX Motherboards Spotted

Impress Watch has pictures of a new Nano-ITX board from VIA and it's pretty amazing. When almost your whole motherboard can be cooled by a single spanning heatsink, I'd say you've just opened up a whole new world for case modders and home theater nuts. The Nano-ITX board on display, the Epia-N, uses an 800MHz Nehemiah processor-certainly enough to play back movies and browse the web.

make an ipod in to a pirate radio station

i thought it was clever to boost the itrip mini with my lame little hack, and change what's playing on cars next to me at stop lights, and then this project blows that out of the broadcasting waters. be sure to check with your local laws and all that before broadcasting with this "proof of concept" itrip amp.

Best of the Best in Online Journalism

Finalists were announced today in the 2004 Online Journalism Awards competition, with sites ranging in size from BBC News to Jay Rosen's Pressthink weblog making the shortlists in 16 categories.

The ONA's announcement includes a complete list with links to all of the finalists. They were selected from some 500 entries by a team of 70 first-round screeners and 13 final judges.

The winners will be announced at the ONA's annual conference, November 12-13 in Los Angeles.

Jarvis meets Indtv

I had the good luck to go to the brand new headquarters of Indtv, the network aimed at young Americans started by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.

This week, they moved into an old coffee-roasting factory across from the city's new baseball park. This was to be eTrade's HQ and they spent a fortune making it gorgeous and cool -- but we know what happened to companies that spent lots of money showing off; it sat vacant for years. Now, there are just a few people scattered in a sea of sleek cubes. The first floor is a cafe and they plan to expose it and the control room to the street to draw in people from the now-sleek neighborhood.

I had lunch next door with Hyatt and Indtv's vp for online, Joanna Drake Earl, and I came away impressed and eager to see what they come up with. They have not invented the network yet. They truly believe that the people will invent it. And that's what will make this so much fun to watch.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

BBC Wants Help With Dirac Codec

"According to The Register the BBC wants help to develop their open source video codec Dirac. '[Lead developer Dr. Thomas] Davies said the codec could live on anything from mobile phones to high-definition TVs but not before a lot of further work is completed. For one thing, Dirac doesn't currently work in real-time. Davies also reckons that the compression offered by the technology could be further optimised. The BBC is working on integrating the technology with its other systems, but the corporation would welcome more help in developing Dirac.' Sounds like something worth helping with."

Verizon To Launch Content Service Next Year

An excellent chat with Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon Communications, at the Goldman Sachs conference. He talks about the telco's broadband initiatives, both on the wireless and fiber side, and the future for Verizon. "Verizon would be focused much more on broadband, and much less on regulators. We'll participate in explosion of broadband."

The company is planning to launch its not-too-secret content service sometime next year, according to Seidenberg. "But I want to be clear: We are not in the studio business..we are not generating content..we are in the business of distributing it, packaging it and formating it."

"With out capabilities in the wireless and wireline businesses, we present a great opportunity to content businesses...my own view is that over the next five years, all of the analog content business is going to change."

The company's actively acquiring content, and the only area where they might have problems is sports, due to rights issues, Seidenberg alluded. To stop Verizon from acquiring content would be a losing game for media and other companies...

Listen to the relevant clip of the chat below (RSS readers would have to click through to the site)..the quality is poor, but that's how the original recording is. For the full 25 minute interview, you can go here...

Flooding on p2p networks

Fakes, or spoofs, as the major studios and record labels like to call phony files posted on p2p networks to overpower them, have been around for a while but recently, they've started to appear in increasing numbers.

That's because one of the entertainment industry's current pet theories is: flood p2p networks with fake files and users won't be able to tell the difference. So they'll give up trying to download and/or share.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

WorldWide Media eXchange & Wallop

The head of Microsoft's Research just showed two coolio apps.

I blogged about Wallop before. I TOTALLY wanna invite to that and apparently Microsoft has been working on sclaing it up. Joi gets an invite - but not me. So it's clear who's more important.

Wallop appears fairly stable now and has LOTS of great stuff going on.

The Microsoft guy then showed a site called the Worldwide Media eXchange which allows folks to upload images wioth geo info and then drill down to teh local level - showing maps, people and activites along the way.

Again - totally coolio. This conference is stirring the creativity cells in me.

TV gadget heaven in Japan

CNET maps out some of the coolest new TV gadgets that made their debut at CEATEC, an electronics show in Japan: A kitchen table with four embedded touch-screen TVs; a headset with a small, eye-level LCD screen (don't wear while driving); and a DVD player with built-in GPS for your car.

Web 2.0: Media

Martin Nisenholtz, head of NYTimes Digital, recalls coming to the company and facing business plans that would have charged fees for use of the Times and he suggested opening it up for free and they accomplished that.

Battelle to Mike Ramsey of TiVo on its impact: "Television's just a data base that can be searched."

Ramsey says TiVo has a big interest in broadband as a means of distribution. That is the wedge against cable. Cable companies will probably hate it, he understates; but then cable has broadband and cable is distributing its versions of TiVo. Battelle talks about a world of getting whatever you want via broadband. "The good news is, nobody can stop us." Are you sure, Battelle asks. Yes, Ramsey says.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

Reuters takes news video direct to homes

The exact details are sketchy, but Reuters will be the first video news service featured on Microsoft's new edition of Media Center software (see post below). Up until now, Reuters has been content sellings its video to media outlets and offering a broadband channel on Reuters.com. But the company is shifting its strategy -- by going direct to news consumers -- to build a news brand that's known outside media circles. Smart thinking, but a long ways to go to equal CNN. (Via PaidContent)

Avatars Anchor Your RSS Evening News

File this under str_ange. WebNews.TV is a RSS news aggregator software application that pronounces both your feeds and comments on them with funny animation movies featuring avatars (virtual reality characters). It downloads the latest news from your feeds and then shows them in TV like screen with funny characters. Each news character (world news, sports, technology, entertainment, etc.) is delivered by a different emotion of a single penguin (Hmm, is he related to Linux?) character.

Universal Multimedia Access

For those of you reading norwegian: Check out Svein Høiers paper ”Universal Multimedia Access. Quite a lot of interesting information when it comes to the use of video over IP.

GapiDraw

Supports the creation of high-performance cross-platform graphical applications across a variety of handheld hardware configurations, including Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian mobile phones.

Howard Stern, Satellite Radio and Freedom

Reuters: Howard Stern to broadcast on Sirius Radio in 2006. Howard Stern, one of the most popular U.S. radio personalities, on Wednesday said he will broadcast his show on Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. beginning in 2006, after being dropped earlier this year from several stations that objected to his often off-color humor.

'Net usage takes away from TV time

It also whitens your teeth and improves your social life according to a study done by the University of Southern California's Digital Future Project. Ok, maybe it do either of those two things, but the report (PDF) does reveal some interesting trends in Internet usage and peoples' opinions about the 'Net as a whole.

iPodder 1.0

The windows/mac iPodder development team announces their first public release, which is kick ass!

"We're proud to mention that iPodder version 1.0 is released. It's released both for Windows as for Macintosh. We placed some notes on the projectsite, check it at: http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/"

iPodder version 1.0 in a nutshell: ------------------------------------- # iPodder for the Mac and Windows platform (soon linux) # Graphical user interface and tray icon # Scheduler inside to setup recursive and timed downloads # Progress bar inside # BitTorrent support # iTunes/Mediaplayer integration # Downloads are automatically divided by folders # Playlists ordered by Feed # Application memorizes the history to prevend double downloads # Half downloads will be restarted in new session # Automatic placing of content on your iPod (mac only) # Standalone application (no extra applications needed) # Easy to use

2024 - A Media Odyssey

A long story in latest Media Week magazine in UK, about the future of, what else, media...a great read...

Dr Patrick Dixon, the futurist behind the website globalchange.com, said: "We'll have become totally interactive, the age of mass consumption will be dead and the digital audiences will be one, the individual...Companies that are successful will be providing information rather than advertising, sent at the precise point of greatest interest."

New Wiki Case Studies

We just posted a new case-study on using wikis as a People's Portal at Informative.

Also of interest, is how not just wikis are being used at Disney, but how to introduce the cutting edge to regular business folks and how Socialtext participates in an ecosystem of tools with Moveable Type and Newsgator.

We have also outlined our vision and progress for Wiki 2.0 that stays true to social software principles.

USAToday.com gets into video

The newspaper site has launched a broadband video section powered by The FeedRoom -- the same company that got its start by launching video on TV websites. "It's strategically critical that newspaper websites figure out how to incorporate video for the broadband audience, so we're pleased to have provided a solution for USATODAY.com," said Jon Klein, CEO of The FeedRoom.

Microsoft Announces the New MSN TV 2 Internet & Media Player

Broadband-Home-Network-Enabled Living-Room Device Offers Exciting New Entertainment, Information and Communications Options for the Television

REDMOND, WA -- The MSN®TV unit of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - News), a group that has pioneered delivery of interactive services to the TV, has announced the debut of the new MSN TV 2 Internet & Media Player, shipping now and due to arrive at major consumer electronic retailers across the country by mid-October. MSN TV 2 is the only product that brings premium MSN content, PC-stored digital media and e-mail to TV for a truly integrated Internet and media experience. MSN TV 2 is a broadband-home-network-enabled device manufactured by Thomson under the RCA brand. It includes a wireless keyboard and remote control and has an MSRP of $199.95 plus a subscription fee.

Is this going to "the" device that finally bridges the gap ... the convergence device ... the black box we've all be waiting for? It sure looks and feels like a crippled Windows XP Meda Center Edition PC without the PC part. Lots of learning went into making this box. I'm looking forward to seeing how consumers react to it.

Jon Udell: Prime-Time Hypermedia

"I [am]... frustrated by the opaqueness and intractability of existing hypermedia content. I want to be able to repurpose that stuff on my blog. And I'd like to see all of our blogs enriched with original A/V content..."

Editrol from the USA

Several companies have come with MP-3 or MPEG-2 recorders designed for radio journalists. They are all based on the use of flash memory. This is the latest from a US company called EditRol debuted at a Photo fair in Cologne in September. Price in the UK is under 400 pounds as from November. That makes it a lot cheaper than some of the competition.

The US$440 unit (street price in the US) includes two electret mics, a 64MB Compact Flash card, an optical-output jack, and 9 recording modes from 64kbps MP3 to 24-bit linear WAV. It can transfer a max-resolution 60 minute recording (908MB) to a PC over USB-2 in around 3 minutes.

It does seem crazy that with all the radio reporters out there, many have to resort to Mini Disc which is notoriously unreliable.

New Tiny Camera Lens Technology stolen from Insects

The Japanese Nikkei.Net Site reports about a new super thin camera lens technology developed by Osaka University and Konica Minolta Technology Center.

Basically a set of very small lenses take individual pictures that then are put together to a single one, like the facet eyes on insects. With that technology digital cameras that are only 2mm thin could be built.

The Unmediated Weekly Show now available as bittorrent video d/l and audio-only mp3.

An archive of The Unmediated Weekly Show is now available via BitTorrent at DV Guide. The shows have also been encoded as audio-only mp3s for the ipodder crowd. ;)

If you're reading us via our RSS feed, you should switch to our RSS 2.0 feed or our Weekly Show-only feed in order to take advantage of the enclosure tags.

The Weekly Show #3 originally streamed on 10/4/2004. It featured interviews with Jay Dedman from Momentshowing and Jeff Galusha from Konscious Media.

[bittorrent] [mp3]

Laptop HDTV Encoding Chips

ViXS Systems today announced the availability of XCode II-N, a new silicon video processor designed specifically for giving high quality video capabilities to laptop computers.

XCode II-N gives laptop PCs the same multimedia power of desktop PCs, claims ViXS. "It integrates all the functionality of a broadcast head-end unit,î said Sally Daub, CEO and president of ViXS Systems. Limitations with video processing, battery consumption and storage capacity have thus far been show stoppers.

XCode II-N leverages many key features of ViXSí recently announced XCode II-L video processor and integrates them into a smaller, notebook friendly chip that consumes less power and produces less heat. These features include:

• High quality dual encoding at low bit rates
• High-speed transrating and transcoding
• Mini-PCI or PCI interface
• Multistream MPEG reprocessing, format conversion and bit rate reduction at 8x-to-24x real time
• Support for multiple analog and digital (including HDTV) video streams
• Programmable Audio encoding into MP3, MPEG2 L2, AC3, AAC formats

ViXSí XCode II-N is the first chip to offer hardware transcoding for MPEG streams. Multiple feature-length videos can fit on a single DVD-R disk. It allows users to copy MPEG streams while maintaining the integrity of the original video clip so that an ultra-low bit rate, low-resolution MPEG stream can be sent via the Internet or to a memory card.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

Web 2.0 Conference

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where Jeff Jarvis is blogging the show with his typical thoroughness.

The conference is keeping track of other coverage here -- and there's a ton.

PBJ Slate Touchpanel PCs

Japan's "PBJ Corporation" has announced the "Slate" series of touchpanel PCs. PBJ has apparently built these PCs based on the "PaceBook" series from back in 2002. These seem to be competition towards NEC's new VersaPro tablet - as the Slate series not only function as tablet PC, but touchscreen PC, and "conservative-space PC."
On the inside of the 24mm thick (less than 1") case, you'll fine at best a Pentium M 1.3GHz processor (your peanuts), 40GB hard drive (butter), 802.11b/g wireless LAN, 256MB of memory (jelly), and two USB ports. Interestingly enough, these tablets/touchscreens/notebooks/whatevers run not Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, but plain old Windows XP Professional. Going out on a limb here, but I will assume that this means you don't get the "revolutionary" handwriting recognition technology included with Tablet PC edition.
And as for the all-important battery life, expect about four and a half hours from your sandwich.

Roll Your Own Television Network Using Bittorrent

"Mark Pesce, lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) writes here and here about using p2p networks, specifically bittorrent, to create a grassroots television network. He cites as an example the BBC's "Flexible TV" internet broadcasting model using that as the core of a "new sort of television network, one which could harness the power of P2P distribution to create a global television network." Producers of video entertainment and news would provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and the p2p network peers distribute the content themselves. Thus, a virtual 'newswiki' where the content is distributed bittorrent using some sort of 'trusted peer' or moderator mechanisms as a filtering/evaluation mechanism. So what is stopping anyone from doing this now? Awareness of the concept, perhaps? Lack of broadband connections? Lack of business models for content producers?"

Start-Up Delivers Movie Downloads

A Boston startup called NetCableTV is trying to use P2P to legally deliver movies onto consumers' hard drives...NetCableTV adds two layers of DRM to prevent piracy, the company said.

TiVO To Go, Any Day Now

Looks like TiVO-to-Go is going to be available any day soon. One astute reader sent me a link to Good Guys advertisement, which is pushing T2Go on its promotional literature. Tarune D Dillon writes, "I noticed goodguys advertised it as soon," in its Saturday big 28 page flyers. Here is a link to the scan of the flyer. In related PVR developments, The Register reports that Silicon Image, a chip maker is working on a new processor that makes dumb drives smarter.

The company is using the fabled system-on-a-chip concept for its new SteelVine design. This basically lets a chip handle storage functions such as RAID, disk striping and making many disks look like one. Consumer device makers could plug the chip into their storage systems - media appliances or PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) - and give customers a bit more data protection. "We took all of the software and management stuff that is quite complicated and crunched it down onto a chip," Tirado said. "To a Windows or Linux box, we look like a disk drive."

Anchors Fight Back at Bloggers

Tom Brokaw on citizen journalists: "What I think is highly inappropriate is what's going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad...It is certainly an attempt to demonize CBS News, and it goes well beyond any factual information a lot of them has, the kind of demagoguery that is unleashed out there."

Wired On New Music Business Models "The Long Tail"

The Long Tail [pdf]

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

JuJu - the citizen eye

(From the fine folks who brought you the ID Sniper Rifle ;) -kc.)

MIT Location Conference (Roundup)

Panelists at the MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference described a future where nothing ever gets lost and your SUV always knows the coordinates of the gas station with the cheapest prices on super unleaded.

All new cell phones sold in the United States must carry geographical positioning technology accurate to about 300 feet. Companies at the panel called "The Revolution in Location Aware Computing" hope to bring location accuracy down to within three inches.

Location-based services typically use location information derived from triangulating cellular phone antennas, which is not very precise. Other services use GPS (global positioning satellite) information, which is more precise, but its weak signals make location detection unworkable inside buildings, even in a dense forest.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

[Research] Gapidraw: a cross platform tool for mobile game development

Gapidraw is a cross platform tool for mobile game development (on various devices like Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile). It's done by Develant Technologies AB in Sweden. It is actually a joint venture between the IT University of G teborg and other persons. Evaluation version could be downloaded here.

Podcasting and the future of everything

Adam Curry and others have been doing great work pioneering Podcasting -- creating content intended to be heard on our schedule and on the move, on our iPods or equivalents, distributed in some cases with the help of RSS (read: subscription radio).

But it was Doc Searls who really put his finger on the cosmic significance of this on his own podcast, an online radio show that Adam, in turn, quoted on his online radio show (that's where I heard it, listening in my car, on my iPod).

Doc said that the transistor as an enabler and the transitor radio as a platform really created the medium of radio we know today. Similarly, he said, the iPod is the prototype for the next platform and the next medium.

Right. The iPod is just a prototype. It can be replaced, in time (not much of it), by spectrum: Rather than downloading a show while connected to hear while unconnected, we will always be connected and will get what we want when we want it. But it's still the iPod that shows the potential and changes habits.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

bring iTunes playlists into Final Cut Pro

Ahh, the power of extensible video editing systems. Spherico has releases Playlist2FCP, which allows for the automated XML transfer of iTunes playlist's into Final Cut Pro:

Spherico completely automates the transfer of non AAC audio tracks from iTunes to FCP.

By leveraging the power of the FCP XML format, Playlist2FCP allows FCP to seamlessly import iTunes Playlists, complete with Track Name and Number, Artist and Album information into FCP.

Playlist2FCP is a simple to use utility. It can be either used either as an droplet or with manual operation. The user is able to select the name for the Bin that is later on used in FCP, or have Playlist2FCP sort all tracks into Album or Artist Bins. The user also has the option to reference the current media files in the iTunes Music directory, or copy or move these files to a new location. Finally all these processes can be performed by simply dropping an iTunes playlist file onto the Playlist2XML icon or window. The resulting XML file will automatically open in FCP.
An Avid version will be available soon.

October @ Location One: LECTURE SCHEDULE:

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 - 7 p.m. Jim Dempsey CDT

We resume our program Open House Wednesdays, a weekly series of talks by critical thinkers, with a discussion of the Patriot Act by Jim Dempsey, entitled, "The Patriot Act, Civil Liberties and the War on Terrorism".

Can the U.S. fight terrorism without surrendering privacy, free speech and other civil liberties? Have the PATRIOT Act and other counter-terrorism measures gone too far? These questions and others will be addressed by Jim Dempsey, xecutive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

October 13th, 2004 Chris Csikszentmihalyi MIT

Speaking about his current installations at Location One, "Skin" and "Control"

October 20th, 2004 John Perry Barlow Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

October 27th, 2004 Media Spin and Politics in the U.S.

FCC Announces DTV Consumer Education Initiative - Forgets to Mention Broadcast Flag

Today, the FCC announced a new initiative to inform the public about digital television (DTV). Read the press release: Chairman Powell Announces Major DTV Consumer Education Initiative - ìDTV ñ Get It!î [PDF].

The FCC has also set up a website for the "education" campaign: http://www.dtv.gov/. Warning, the website renders fine on IE, but does not render well on the latest version of Firefox. Geez, they must actively work on being clueless.

Unsurprisingly, the website and announcement fail to mention the broadcast flag. There are some links to info about the broadcast flag if you click on "regulatory info" which takes you to a different FCC page, but you have to scroll down on the secondary page.

I guess the broadcast flag isn't something the FCC wants to educate people about.

Profits, shmofits

The American Journalism Review's Carl Sessions Stepp writes an excellent piece describing the ins and outs of not-for-profit newsgathering and reporting groups, including PBS' "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," NPR and the St. Petersburg Times. The major theme I got out of it was that staffers don't seem to be worried about covering certain stories, companies, or individuals because of corporate interests or beliefs. While these organizations may not be breaking story after story, they appeal to a segment of the population that is looking for solid reporting and quality journalism. And from the reactions of various members of the "NewsHour" program, they feel that the manner in which they are able to gather information and present a story is much more real than what they had done while working at their for-profit previous employers....

(Continued at The Media Drop)

(Wait - is this article about PBS or blogs? ;) -kc.)

RSS feeds and instant blog conversations

Last week, InfoWorld quietly rolled out a new feature that I think has huge potential for media organizations: a section devoted to outside weblog entries, powered by Feedster. It's a new kind of community page that allows readers to see at a glance what conversations are taking place about products and articles in the blogosphere.
This page, for example, begins with a standard product review, then goes into related articles and press releases. But next comes a new feature, "Weblogs and Feeds."

The discussions occur on the writersí own blogs, so InfoWorld maintains no control over the content. The bloggers are commenting on a review or article or product featured on InfoWorld.com.

Gmail Adds Atom Feeds

Gmail has added Atom web feeds, a format that's akin to RSS. The feeds include a summary of each new message in your Google email. See screen grabs. In addition, the service rolled out a more robust contact interface that nicely lists all your contacts the related messages that live in your archive as well as the ability to forward your messages to any other email account.

ourmedia: a call for entries

We're about a month away from the beta launch of ourmedia.org. (See the item below.) The goal is to create a global repository of shared grassroots media.

We have a number of media items or collections in hand, but we need more to fill out the site.

Here's our first pass at material that have been suggested for the first iteration of ourmedia:

Digital stories, Original music, Photo galleries, Video diaries, Music videos, Digital books, Home-made video, Remixes, Independent films, Student works, Instructional video, Documentaries, Political ads, Animation, Editorial cartoons, News footage, Parodies, Artwork, Fiction, Non-fiction, Children's tales, Interviews (audio), Book reading (audio), Oral history (audio)

Please contact me if you have created any digital works that fall into any of the above categories (or similar topic areas) and would be willing to show them off to a global audiences. Creative Commons licenses are preferred, but fully copyrighted works accepted as well.

We especially need multimedia works: digital stories, original music, digital photo galleries/collections, video diary entries, home-made video, etc. You'll see how it looks (including title, credit, links back to your site) before it goes live.

Here's more information for content creators interested in ourmedia. And if you'd like to join our wiki, let me know.

The "pro-am revolution"

Over at Fast Company, Charles Leadbetter pushes an interesting idea: The increasing scientific, political, and cultural importance of "pro-ams" -- amateurs who hold themselves to professional standards. One good example is in astronomy: Many astronomical discoveries these days are coming from amateurs with backyard telescopes, because technology has made those telescopes increasingly powerful. Or consider Linux, an operating system that was created by volunteers, yet which now rivals Microsoft's top products. In the world of music, cut-and-paste apps like Apple's Garage Band are making amateur performers increasingly polished.

The interesting thing, as Leadbetter points out, is that this completely reverses the trends of the last few hundred years:

The 20th century was marked by the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organizations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. Now that historic shift seems to be reversing. Even as large corporations extend their reach, we're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organization.

Interestingly, an example he doesn't mention is blogging. "Amateur" authors -- I hesitate to call them "amateurs" because some bloggers are more fun to read than many paid professionals -- are getting so much audience these days that the pros are freaking out, as the New York Times Magazine documented last week in its excellent story on political bloggers.

Anyway, Leadbetter is set to release a book-length version of his argument in November, and I'll be intrigued to read it.

mp3 bookmarks in itunes

From the iPodder-dev list a script that sets bookmarks in mp3's, assuming you're using iTunes and a Mac.

Massive victory at WIPO!

For years now, progressive elements and copyfighters have been trying to get the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization to start thinking about ways of promoting creativity and development instead of just IP -- to get the organization to see that its raison d'etre is a better world, and that stronger IP laws is just one way of accomplishing that -- and that IP only works sometimes.

We've been foiled at every turn by the maximalists, the movies studios and the trademark offices, the patent-cops and the recording industry lobbyists and the IP lawyers' associations.

Which is why this is such good news: at the general session of the WIPO in Geneva this weekend, the Assembly has adoped a decision to put development and the promotion of creativity front-and-center in its goals. That means that from now on, WIPO isn't an organization that blindly supports more IP no matter what, but rather one that seeeks to improve the world by whatever tool is best suited to the job.

Jamie Love and the Consumer Project on Technology gets the credit for this: they were the ones who started this fight, and they've been the ones who led it all along.

(Continued at Boing Boing Blog)

Applescript collection for Quicktime

Some of you may be aware of this, but I found this FREE collection of Applescripts for Quicktime pretty useful.

Includes scripts for creating SMIL movies, adding text tracks, embedding HTML links, etc...

Plus could provide insight into how to better automate such things.

Rip, Mix and Learn

Alan's has been writing a lot lately about employing all of these wonderful new technologies to teach students how to "Rip, Mix and Learn" and this presentation he gave a couple of weeks ago has me thinking a lot about that concept. It was at I-Law that I first heard the concept from Lawrence Lessig who talked about "Rip, Mix and Burn" in the context of copyright. It intrigued me then, and now that Alan's making it even more accessible, it's even more intriguing.

I think blogging is a basic form of "Rip, Mix and Learn" (RML). Just like I'm doing right now, I'm ripping and idea from Alan and others, mixing it up with my own experience and reality, and writing about it as a way to clarify and learn. And really, it is the writing part that forces me to organize these thoughts and give some form to them. It's when the learning coalesces.

Today, Alan writes about RML with RSS as he's building combined feeds with Blogdigger. The "rip" is to take feeds from a number of different sources, "mix" them into one feed, and "learn" from the results. The easy example for students is to create a number of search feeds for the same terms from various sources (Bloglines, Feedster, Google News etc.) and then stick them all together at Blogdigger.

Convergence Is Here

Ramesh Jain believes that the convergence of PC-TV is finally here:

Comcast has the pipes both for TV and internet, owns content, and has resources and presence to finally bring this convergence. I hope this happens because the real winner will be the society. …[A]ll the talk is about video content that is produced by professionals. But if this infrastructure gets ready two things will happen ’Äì amateur content will also come to these portals and many exciting new technologies, like Multiple Perspective Interactive Video and its variants, will appear that will change the nature of entertainment.

Keyword Search Audio From First Presidential Debate

C-SPAN and StreamSage (the folks behind CampaignSearch) have made available the ability to keyword search the video of the first presidential debate, find results, and then click to watch the section of the video where your search terms are spoken.

Blog Trumps Trad Media

As of 8:42 this morning, the top headline on Google News was a blog. That’s a first as far as I know.

The algorithms have spoken, and the most relevant source of news on the 2004 Presidental debate isn't a "news organization," it's a guy with a brain and a text editor. Looks like Dave Winer might win his bet.

UK's Media Watchdog Redundant in Net TV Age

Lord Currie, the chairman of UK's media regulator Ofcom has suggested that the watchdog may have to cease regulating programme content as TV starts to be broadcast over the internet. Lord Currie said: "We won't be able to exercise the same regulatory power. Perhaps we have to think about not so much regulating content but helping people navigate. That allows us to get out of content regulation."

He used the analogy of "Sky Plus [Satellite TV combined with DVR service] meets Google" as a future vision for TV and the regulator's role. His suggestion envisages people watching what they want, when they want but with the help of a search engine to help them navigate the plethora of content.

This position is very similar to what Comcast CEO Brian Roberts mentioned in his interview with WSJ earlier this week...

Mitsubishi Double Sided LCD

Mitsubishi has developed an LCD that is capable of displaying images on both sides of a single liquid crystal panel. They will be used for mobile flip phones that use two displays, the main display and one that's viewable without opening the flip for displaying phone numbers or the time. The benefit to the dual-sided LCD is that the phone can be made 30% smaller while reducing production costs.

German Band To Release Album on USB Stick

Interesting this: German punk bank Wizo will release their new album on a USB memory stick...the first I've heard of. (A German language story here) The stick will have 5 songs in MP3 format, a video clip, pics etc..the 64MB stick costs 16 Euros...

Prosilica FB1394B Extends FireWire Up to 500 Meters

Another "you probably don't need it, but it's nice to know somebody makes one," product, the Prosilica FB1394B Fiber Optic Bridge lets you effectively extend the distance of FireWire devices from the standard 4.5 meters to up to 500 meters. It's pretty simple, really-two powered boxes on either end have FireWire ports and play translator. Prosilica also sells cameras that connect directly by fiber-optic, so if you wanted to use the bridge to interface to those via FireWire, that's an option, as well.

Blue Note Records Blew

Here is a very interesting article about social net practices. The story revolves around an established bbs community of Blue Note Record fans which was broken apart by the missteps of the record company.

Sanyo Prototype TV Tuner Phone

Sanyo is on the built-in digital TV tip, it seems, announcing a prototype high-speed [CDMA 2000 1X EV-DO] with a tuner right inside. While I'm presuming it pulls down over-the-air broadcasts, the phone also supports a variety of modern digital video codecs, including H.264. Add in a 2.4-inch 260k-color LCD screen and a 2-megapixel camera and it's all-around hot.

So Long Big Box Retailers, It's Been Good To Know Ya!

Bill Dreher, an analyst with Deutsche Bank, said he believes Wal*Mart could start selling private-label high-definition TVs in select stores as soon as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that traditionally marks the start of the holiday shopping season. Wow!

When the largest retailer on the planet decides it's time to get into a market, no one can compete. As technology gets more complicated to build, it gets easier to use and big screen HDTVs, the last hope of big box guys like Best Buy & Circuit City and the only hope for specialty guys like Tweeter and Ultimate, are about to become commoditized. Not an n-column price war with big manufacturer's rebates at year end, not a marketing war with service and installation as unique selling principles - this is brand new territory. Wal*Mart is going to make these set themselves. Private label. That means, no comparison shopping, no price wars, no nothing - just The Lowest Price, Always.

Obviously, this is great news for consumers. (Not high end consumers, they're screwed because the number of retail outlets that sell high end gear is going to be limited to the last survivors and they won't be doing any deals) Average Joe's who want an HDTV are going to get them at the lowest possible price and Wal*Mart will see to it. Trust me, they're going to work and they will be low priced. But, what does this really mean for the Advanced Television business?

(Continued at EmmyAdvancedMedia)

The Five Digital Disruptions

Digital disruption is happening all around us. Music, Movies, Telephone, -- it all is being digitized, chopped, assembled and reassembled by us.

Between Tivo/PVR functionality (now integrated into one chip), P2P file sharing platforms, Hi-Def. TV, BitTorrent, broadband Internet, falling HDD costs, rising CPU power, we're seeing a confluence where entertainment should continue to be interesting and challenging for both the content providers as well as us the customers. [PVR Blog]

Clusty Performs Blog Meta-Searches

The New York Times reports that Vivisimo today is launching Clusty, a search engine that clusters results into categories to make them easier to sort through. The Clusty site also scours blogs as well by meta-searching several different blog search engines, as this image shows.

More movie download news: Sony Connect

The planned addition of movie downloads to Connect Sony's online music store could possibly enable users to buy the movies, instead of renting.

No doubt there'll be plenty of DRM involved (because Sony ain't gonna stop being Sony), but at least you'll be able to create a video collection that you can transfer to other machines without worrying about expiration dates. There's even a mention that the download service will work with the PlayStation Portable, and we'd be surprised if the PlayStation 3 didn't also figure into the mix somehow.

For neglected video, a Hollywood touch

From Thursday's NY Times Circuits section: A growing cottage industry is taking customers' raw home video and putting it on DVD, in some cases producing short movies with sophisticated cinematic effects and a musical soundtrack.

Wasting Time

My favorite part of "Writing a Social Content Engine with RDF"

At the time I was puzzled by finding ways to categorize knowledge--wanting to build all kinds of complicated virtual file systems and the like... But Del.icio.us tags pretty much demonstrated that this was actually trivia--and that thinking about this too much is basically just a waste of time.

emphasis mine. Words to live by...

New Sony Webcams with Wi-Fi, Two-Way Audio

Sony's new webcams aren't really that cool - I'm still frustrated their max resolution is only 640 x 480 pixels - but they do have a couple of tricks up their sleeves, including native MPEG4 support and built-in Wi-Fi. Well, they do have web servers built-in, too, so you can access them directly from the internet (although that could be a bad scene if they get hacked). Plus they also have built-in microphones that allow two-way audio communication, so that if the person viewing the webcam wants to talk to a person in front of the cam, they can.

So yeah, what I was saying is that these webcams are really pretty cool.

DaveTV users program own program skeds

Evangelists for TiVo and other DVR systems often refer to Me TV, the idea that viewers can tailor their own entertainment to fit their schedule and preferences. Taking that concept a step further is DAVETV, a platform and set-top box from DAVE Networks Inc. that theoretically can remove broadcasters from the equation entirely.

Recorded Music Being Replaced by Other Media

The music industry likes to complain about sales lost to piracy, but figures that show huge sales declines only tell part of the story. Before we blame this trend on infringement, we have to make several assumptions, including that the demand for music (whether purchased or pirated) has remained steady.

Figures available from the US Census bureau suggest otherwise. Data on "Media Usage and Consumer Spending" abstracted from a study by Veronis Suhler Stevenson show the average number of hours spent listening to music by US residents age 12 and older has declined steadily since 1998 (from 283 to a projected 219 in 2003, a 21% decline). Meanwhile, home video, video games, and consumer Internet have seen dramatic gains. This suggests that people are turning to new forms of entertainment (i.e., the Internet, video games, and DVDs) at the expense of recorded music.

Sending video files via MSN

There are several ways to send large files over the Internet. For example:

1) Use file sharing software! That's its 'legitimate' use! For example, try the excellent and open source "eMule" package. You can be pretty sure it's free from any spy ware. And it's free. Here's the link:http://www.emule-project.net/

To be honest, I've never tried sending my own videos over the net using eMule but I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't work. And it should work well - eMule has loads of built-in features designed to allow large files to be sent over the Internet. (although, I'm not sure how to point an eMule client at a particular 'server'. Does anyone else know?)

(Continued at Edibletv Weblog)

MPEG-4 BIFS and XMT Tutorial

These pages aim at providing a base understanding of the MPEG-4 scene description language BIFS (BInary Format for Scenes). The tutorial you will find here explains base principles of the scene manipulation. It is recommended while stepping through this tutorial to keep an eye on the target="_blank">VRML standard to get further explanations, since the MPEG-4 scene graph is based on the VRML one.

FABL

Fabl (pronounced "fable") is a native programming language for the Semantic Web. The Fabl object model is the RDF property graph, and the Fabl type system implements a subset of the OWL web ontology language (RDF is the W3C standard data representation for the current generation of Semantic Web technology, while OWL is a W3C standard for describing classes of RDF objects). However, this manual does not assume prior familiarity with RDF, OWL, or other Semantic Web technologies. Learning Fabl is one way of learning about the Semantic Web.

Citizen Journalist Captures Government Seizure at Radio Station

Sean Gilligan has posted mobile phone pictures of an FCC bust at an unlicensed radio station in Santa Cruz.