unmediated

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

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

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

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

[mp3]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[zip]

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

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

The first project she presented yesterday was the MyoPhone.

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

...[snip]...

The application is called the MyoPhone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Continued at PJNet Today)

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

unmediated quickcast: [mp3]

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

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

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

Gotham Chopra of INdTV says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments and assistance on future development is appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spends time on the mashup and the online activism aspects

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

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

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

(Analysis via Foe Romero)

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

More details later, but the short version is this:

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

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

Stay tuned for more...

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

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

(via Dienstraum)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, 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...

Applet Signing using Test Certificate

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."

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.

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.

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.

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 :-]

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.

The handset giant has announced an operator-brandable end-to-end content distribution system in an effort to satisfy the needs of developers, carriers and end users.

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.

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.

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 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.

An analysis of how people go about generating PhotoShops, and some thoughts on what commonly wins.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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."

HBO, for one, is very straightforward in its FAQ that the goal is to take away your time/space shifting rights in order to sell them back to you. In one section, HBO says that it has sole discretion to "decide what copying privileges [we] wish to extend to consumers." In another, it tells you its "On-Demand" service means you no longer need to "time shift" programming. But if you would like to own the programming you've just paid to watch, you are certainly welcome to pay for it again. "[The] entire series of HBO's Original Programming (such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc.)...[is available] in attractive box sets with special features such as out-takes and directors' notes."

So perhaps this battle isn't so much about "competing with free" as it is about competing with our expectation that we can, as we did with analog media, pay once to enjoy our purchase anytime and anywhere.

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.

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)

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.

Wireless meshing firmware for Linksys WRT54G.

HericomMesh is a linux distribution for the Linksys WRT54G. This is a replacement firmware for this low cost router. The Hericom Mesh uses a public networking standard AODV, to build the mesh.

The handshake is an age-old custom. Some say that by showing your empty right hand, you were demonstrating that you did not have a weapon and that your intentions were friendly.

There's a new handshake coming in a year two from the nice people at Nokia, Sony, Philips and Texas Instruments. They are working on a new connectivity standard called, Near Field Communication (NFC). The promise of this new technology is truly cool they want to turn your mobile device (cell phone) into a touch-based transmitter. The idea is simple, so you know it's going to be good. Instead of trying to figure what network you're on (or near) you simply touch your cell phones together and they start to transfer information automatically like Vcards, or small bits of data. It could be a financial transaction or the transfer of a photograph between friends. The technology could be touch activated or, as the name suggests, just near field. Near, as in eight inches or so.

How cool would it be to walk up to a friend and touch cell phones to transfer an .mp3 file, new ring tone or wallpaper? Print a photo to a printer by putting your camera close to it? How much cooler would it be to walk out of the local 7/11 and check out by touching your cellphone to the cash-register, entering your pin and paying by your choice of debit, credit or phone bill? That's the promise of NFC, and a bunch of smart people are working on it right now. One pundit I spoke with envisions 50% of all handsets will be NFC enabled by 2009. For right now, a hearty handshake will have to do.

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.

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)

: 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)

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.

Jeff Jarvis continues to analyze all the implications of Internet frenzy about the Jon Stewart CNN segment. Many interesting questions there, but I will focus on one:

... But in the future, if I wanted to distribute something via BitTorrent, what is the current ability to track views? ...

Seems like BitTorrent incorporation into RSS feed might be the answer to that question. Namely, it is relatively straightforward to include torrent links into the ENCLOSURE tag for the RSS feed. Introduction to the method is available here. Examples: DV Guide, Torrentocracy, Suprnova ... and probably much more. The method is very convenient: one subscribes to the RSS feed and then checks and downloads clips accordingly. It could be automatized even more - some BitTorrent clients are RSS aware and can automatically download files linked via ENCLOSURE tags.

When most of the BitTorrent repositories start using RSS feed - and they will do so by convenience of the method - it would be easy to track all links to the original torrent and calculate the number of downloads. Moreover, blogs aggregators like Tecnorati or Feedster (and more that are to come) will be able to offer valuable marketing and advertising data about the profile of downloaders.

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.

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

The hearing impaired and journalists would benefit from a smart microphone system that can extract specific sounds from noisy environments such as parties and board rooms. The system was among 11 inventions rewarded at University of Queensland's Trailblazer 2004, on Thursday, October 14.The system uses special mathematical formula that extracts specific sounds using conventional microphones, which do not have to be placed directly near the sound source.

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).

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 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.

here's some cool info about manilla and automatic torrent creation....
from Dave Winer....

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:02:52 -0400
Subject: Interesting news from the Manilla folk


http://archive.scripting.com/2004/10/21#When:3:49:38AM
Excerpt:
Yesterday, talking with Marcus Mauller, we figured out how to integrate BitTorrent with Manila. The key is to do it through Gems. In a special Manila site on a server running the BitTorrent software, when you upload a Gem to that site, it automatically generates a meta file, and links to it in the Gems table listing. It's the perfect user interface. The content creator needs to know nothing about the difficult process of Torrent-izing a media file, the URL is handled the same way the non-Torrent URL is handled.

IAwiki is a collaborative knowledge base for the topic of InformationArchitecture.

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.

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.

Wraps up Macromedia's MXML XML UI language in PHP that lets you build Flash UIs/movies.

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.)

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 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.

This document specifies a syntax for addressing time intervals within time-based Web resources through URI queries and fragments. It suggests a Best Current Practice (BCP) for any time-based Web resource for which temporal subparts may be requested.

"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 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.

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.)

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 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.

The Computing Technology Industry Association has posted an IT survey both presidential candidates (or at least their campaigns) have responded to. The answers, designed to give the group's 20,000 members a political "cheat-sheet", give slightly more detailed information on both candidate's broadband plans, but also explore their positions on spam, VoIP, privacy, and cyber-security. Again however, the biggest impact this election will have on the tech sector is the potential leadership shift at the FCC.

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.

(Hey, Eli. At least someone's listening to you. j/k ;) -kc.)

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.

My prediction: Watch for Istanbul-like apps from Apple, Google, and other, scrappier companies like Convoq. I think this is going to be a cool kind of software.

Texas Instruments is prepping a new single-chip solution designed to bring live broadcast television to mobile phones and other portable devices. Dubbed "Hollywood", the chip is designed to receive signals broadcast on the recently established digital TV broadcast standards for wireless devices. Although there are multiple competing specifications, TI anticipates that the two open specifications of Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld (DVB-H) in North America and Europe and Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting - Terrestrial (ISDB-T) in Japan will be the dominant players and supports both.

The new networks are expected to offer 24 frames per second (fps) video streams with full audio support. Content will presumably be the same as conventional television broadcasts, simply on another frequency. Later additions may include pay-per-view and other on-demand and metered services. Eventually TI hopes that "mobile phone TV will do for mobile phones what HDTV did for home TVs".

The chip is still a ways off, however. TI expects samples of the chip to be available in 2006, with commercial deployment in 2007. Field trials with early test equipment are already in progress, however.

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...

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)

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.)

WiMP or any other directshow application (ie BSPlayer) will be able to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora and Ogg FLAC.

A system for collaborative musical creation on mobile wireless networks.

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.

Saw this on a couple of blogs the other day and this was much better than copying someone else's XML and uploading it to a server. If you install dircaster.php into a directory, any subsequent uploads of MP3 files will update the XML when the php file is hit by ipodder or whatever else you are using. Very cool.

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.)

A good list to look out for...

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!

D-BUS is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another: the only required dependency is an XML parser, and it includes GLib, Qt, Python and .NET APIs.

Transvector releases BlogFlix, an online service that creates and delivers videos for blog entries. BlogFlix users can convert their online photo galleries into movies, displaying them along with regular digital video clips within a small frame in a blog....

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'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.

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.

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.

That being said... I released a new version of Vipodder today. Version 0.002 is based on Dave Slusher's get_enclosures.pl. Its a perl script that downloads video and audio files from RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures. It adds the audio files to iTunes playlists, and video files to Cellulo playlists. Requires Mac OSX, Cellulo, and a few perl modules as outlined in the INSTALL instructions.

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.

Wow. "Announcing: Audio.Weblogs.Com. It shows the newest podcasts, in reverse chronologic order, the same way weblogs.com shows the most recently updated weblogs. Now you can sample the work of the podcast community before installing an iPodder app. Podcasters, you can ping via XML-RPC, the same way you ping weblogs.com (all the major weblog apps are compatible) or through a Web form. There's even an RSS feed that contains the most recent 100 podcasts, and if your desktop aggregator is enclosure-aware, you'll even get all the podcasts (but watch out it can add up to quite a bit of disk space). " - Dave Winer.

"Year Four of the Digital Future Project (formerly the UCLA Internet Report) provides a broad year-to-year exploration of the influence of the Internet on Americans. The project examines the behavior and views of a national sample of 2,000 Internet users and non-users, as well as comparisons between new users (less than one year of experience) and very experienced users (in Year Four, seven or more years of experience)."

Gnomoradio is a program that can find, fetch, share, and play music that is freely available for file sharing.

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.

Boing Boing is carrying a story with euphemistic title "Belarus busts American for providing VoIP, being an entrepreneur without permission". Ilya Mafter, the "entrepreneur" from the story, is an officer of Open Society Institute and was most likely not involved in any kind of illegal activities.

Back in 1997 Belarus president Lukashenka has closed Soros Foundation in Belarus and the Institute is closed since. In 1999 I had the opportunity to visit Minsk with a group of media activists in an action of solidarity with an independent Radio 101.2, that was also closed in 1997. I have seen quite a few undemocratic governments and dictatorships, but Lukashenka is by far champion!

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...

"I think it's a new form of interactive entertainment that is still in its infancy," Steve Peters, who runs ARGN, the leading clearinghouse for information and discussion about alternate-reality games, said of I Love Bees. "It's a new way of storytelling. We've had novels and movies, and these things kind of blur the lines of fiction and in some ways invade the real world."

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 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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].

The popular media players are built for an audience of consumers, not producers. They assume that you'll watch and listen, perhaps scanning backward and forward. But if you want to republish and contextualize, it's insanely hard.

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.

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.

A good interview with CEO of Tivo...On IP-delivered TV:"There s no real good technology for delivering that to the most ubiquitous UI there is, which is TV. We see our role as providing that delivery because we have a TV-based platform. It's not a PC, it's not a Web browser, it's a true set-top device. The opportunity we like is the marriage of what TiVo does from a UI standpoint with the availability of content that can be delivered over broadband. Realistically, five years down the road, when you sit down to watch television, a good chunk of it will come over broadband."

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: 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.

This paper describes MediaWeaver -- a distributed media management system: a network-based toolkit that developers can use to organize, describe, and link arbitrary collections of network-based media.

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.

The audio from a panel at Gnomedex, on the future of online content, discussing issues like RSS, blogs, etc...I listened half of it till now, and it is good, if slightly simplistic...

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.

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.

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.

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)

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement.

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.

This client (supposedly) supports SMIL 2.0, and can be used to tinker with SMIL support in the Helix platform.

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.)

Iam is: 24/7 point-of-view video, published to the web as serialized metafictional video blogs, in a layered/drill down UI, exploring narrative possiblities and new types of personal filmmaking.

Pace Micro, a major UK-based settop box company, is working with Seattle-based Equator Technologies and Germany's Dicas, the leading provider of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (AVC) software codecs, to develop a new MPEG-4 AVC-based IP based set top box. The Pace DB680, will provide access to a full range of digital TV services such as pay-per-view, video-on-demand and streaming applications using the latest MPEG-4 standard.

The DB680 is targeted at network operators looking to rollout real AVC services quickly, without paying a large price premium for the programmable approach while maintaining the option of upgrading as the standard evolves. The DB680 is part of Pace's Digital Broadband Media (DBM) range that is already being used by telcos and broadband IP operators to launch advanced television and multimedia services over existing telecommunications networks.

This is from a person who has just traveled with the debate commission for the last 3 weeks... Really interesting first-hand report of how the whole circus works.

Perhaps I haven't made it sufficiently clear that paradise does, indeed, exist. It is kept in a tent that travels from Miami to Cleveland to St. Louis to Tempe. Inside the tent is a banquet, a moveable feast, as it were. Long tables filled with every imaginable variety of foodstuff. You can fill up a huge plate with melons, cheeses, meats, pastries, vegetables and unknown curly fried objects and then walk a few feet, dump it in the trash and do it again. No one cares. The tables are magic. The piles of food never grow or diminish. That would sully the perfection.
A man stands in one corner of the room and hands out beer.
"Would you like beer sir?"
"Yes I would."
"Thank you for taking a beer."
"You're welcome."
Long legged college girls make sure that you haven't forgotten to stuff your face or take free things from the round table piled with free things. They are persuasive women. They care about me having free things. They wonder if I have enough guacamole and beer. I do not. And then, scattered at the tables are various of the more important and powerful media and political figures in the world. And we are all drinking the free beer, taking the free stuff, and eating guacamole. Dan Rather has some on his chin and Karl Rove has some on his tie. You sit down at big round tables and watch the Yankees game with Charley Gibson and seven giggling fat girls with orange W. hats. I sit down at a different table.
"So" I say "you work for Al-Jazeera."
"Yes," (smiling, smiling a little too much)
"It's great that you guys are here"
"It is a privilege to be here." (relaxing slightly, smiling)
"Well, I don't know if it's a privilege, seems to me you have a right to be here."
"I'm very glad to be here" (vaguely uncomfortable, smiling)
"Have you had problems"
"No, everyone has been wonderful" (smiling, looking around)
"What do you think of the debates?"
"They are very interesting, it is a good thing for democratic debate to happen" (smiling almost to the point of tears)
"Who do you think is winning?"
"They both have made good points" (smiling in a way that reminds one of a grimace)
"But you have to admit Bush is a dangerous moron"
"I'm reporting on the debates" (smiling but in a happier way) "I'm sorry, I have to go now."

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 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.

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.

via Tripp, who has written up some pretty good notes from the CARPE conference: "The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences". wish i were there....

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)

Service that allows you to register PODKEYWORDS for use in your podcasts for linking to other podcasts.

It has phonetic matching so that even if a user spells the name wrong, it will do a best match.

Interspot :: SMS/iTV Applications

So a couple of thoughts here, first, targetted ads on the internet work as I found this site by clicking on an ad. Second, I loathe flash sites. Third, SMS for text commenting on shows is pretty cool but not really that engaging unless there is a reason to do so other than see your name on TV .. How about some participation folks!

Last, I am going to implement this (well not this commercial system, rather my not so commercial system) into ITJ.

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. ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Very nice!

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.

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.)

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."

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.

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'.

Direct link: http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/johodebate.mov

A new Jupiter Research study asked people what activities they would be interested in doing on a computer if it's connected to a TV: Watch DVDs (54%), record TV shows (51%), watch live TV (40%), pause and rewind live TV (38%) and watch HDTV (35%). Perhaps Microsoft is on to something...

Thinlet is a GUI toolkit, a single Java class, parses the hierarchy and properties of the GUI, handles user interaction, and calls business logic. Separates the graphic presentation (described in an XML file) and the application methods (written as Java).

Not 2006, the first deadline tossed around. "We're pushing the digital transition, we'd like to see it happen as soon as possible, but we think 2009 is a more reasonable date to be shooting for," said Rick Chessen, head of the FCC's digital task force. Many expect Congress to nail down the date in the next session.

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.

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.

SVG adapts SMIL to enable video integration: with this new feature you can use SVG as a comprehensive presentation environment for multimedia.

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.

There's much more we don't know about this incident than we do know, and it's time for the mainstream journalism world to do some hard digging into the situation. This seizure is a precedent that should worry anyone who cares about free speech.

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, 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.

[bittorrent] [mp3]

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!

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)

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

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

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)

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."
  

The DoJ is evidently claiming that the new "war" will be as "forceful and aggressive" as the war on drugs. And no doubt just as effective.

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.

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.

Presentations at the 5th International Music Information Retrieval Conference, grouped by topic.

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.)

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

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.)

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.

Later in the article, the point is reinforced that it's clear that new consumer behavior takes time to change, especially in the mass market.

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.

The article touches upon Sony's VAIO line of computers and how many have TV tuners but haven't been XP Media Center. According to Sony, their customers would rather burn recorded media to DVD than play it directly from their machines. Does that seem accurate to you?

(Continued at PVRBlog)

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.

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.