unmediated

Not only will MSNBC.com track a two-month expedition to New Guinea led by Richard Bangs, Host of Great Escapes, but the site will post digital photographs taken by tribe members. (Call it tribal citizen journalism?) The expedition will hand out "user friendly" HP digital cameras and send the pictures back to MSNBC.com via satellite. More details...

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.



(A week ago we posted a link to the project description. This is a link to the actual Open Video project. -kc.)

tiltowait writes "As reported on LISNews.com, the Internet Archive has lost a copyright lawsuit which challenged the Congressional lengthening of copyright terms and conditions. The ruling has implications for abandonware and other copyright-eligible materials that have no active owner. Brewster Kahle plans to appeal the decision." The decision is available. As we noted in an earlier story, the Eldred case challenged the length of copyright expansion, this one challenged the breadth, and so far, this one is going about as well as the Eldred case did. Stanford has an overview of the case.

"We are pleased to announce the release of Python 2.4, final on November 30, 2004. This is a final, stable release, and we can recommend that Python users upgrade to this version.

"Python 2.4 is the result of almost 18 month's worth of work on top of Python 2.3 and represents another stage in the careful evolution of Python. New language features have been kept to a minimum, many bugs have been fixed and a variety of improvements have been made..."

I'd love to get into this lab and see their stuff in action.

IBM has opened a laboratory to let customers experiment with technology to make computing systems more flexible and efficient, the company announced Monday. The on-demand technology center near Washington, D.C., lets customers simulate their own equipment under the control of IBM's Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator.

The technology addresses a hot area of technological development called "provisioning," which controls the software running on a group of servers to make sure important jobs get the resources they need.

Philadelphia and Verizon are nearing an agreement Tuesday that would allow the city to provide city-wide WiFi as a municipal service for a fee, according to KYW-TV and WNEP-TV. If an agreement is signed, it would relieve pressure on Governor Ed Rendell to veto House Bill 30 that would ban it. November 30th was the final day he could veto it. The bill becomes law without his signature.

Verizon helped draft House Bill 30, which would have essentially killed the plan to build a free wireless "hot zone" in Philadelphia. Both Verizon and the city of Philadelphia have beet discussing a compromise that would allow the city's Wi-Fi plan to go forward, but would still ban other similar efforts in the state.

All Your TV has a great piece running now called Is 'Transitional Fair Use' The Wave Of The Future?. In it, they touch on HBO's recent moves to curtail the consumer rights on recordings, where recorded episodes can't be saved forever, and will have a mandated delete date. I'm guessing HBO thinks a large drive TiVo with a whole season of Six Feet Under would cut into DVD sales of that season, but I tend to view shows on DVD for the extras so I think they're overdoing it if that's the case.

The phrase "transitional fair use" is one to watch because it sounds like an acceptable compromise between viewers and networks when in reality networks would like to roll back the basic freedoms you legally enjoy today. What if you go on vacation for a couple weeks in the summer? What if you're busy at work for a few weeks before you can tend to the backlog of HBO shows saved?  It'll be interesting to watch HBO try and balance the needs of their business while at the same time keeping viewers happy. It's a disturbing trend for those of us that just want to enjoy TV on our own time and it's a shame to see HBO leading the way down this dark path [thanks, Steve]

An internal CBS study found that DVR viewers can recall commercials just about as well as viewers without DVRs. While CBS calls the results "pretty astounding," keep in mind recall is defined as recognizing a spot (either by brand or category). The network's advice to Madison Avenue? Produce commercials with "identifiable visual elements." But I have to wonder if recognizing a spot on fast-forward will still justify the high CPMs the networks continue to charge.

Plus: Madison Avenue comes up with hard numbers on ad skipping

USA Today: Channel-surfers paying less attention to TV

(Will somebody please ask Mr. Russell to respect my two handed set shot? ;) -kc.)

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Glossary of A/V-related terms and acronyms.

Three examples of informative listening about Bit Torrent:

• Engadget’s Podcast number 17
• NPR’s Joel Rose comments on the future of Bit Torrent
• CBC on why Bit Torrent makes Bid Media sad (this link is the MP3 file)

The NewsMarket, an online platform PR pros use to deliver broadcast-standard news video to television journalists, launched a blog for the media community called NewsBluntly. The blog features original content by for broadcast-news staffers with succinct, riffs on major - and not so major -- "inside-the-newsroom" stories. Naturally, in addition to posts and relevant links to other media blogs and useful sites, NewsBluntly also links to the latest VNRs and B-roll provided by The NewsMarket. A sound bite from the press release

"With NewsBluntly, we're addressing television newscasters' unique social network and embracing the concept of participatory journalism," said Shoba Purushothaman, The NewsMarket's CEO and co-founder.

Some of the key concepts of the Cell advanced microprocessor for next-generation computing applications and digital consumer electronics have been revealed by partners IBM, Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment and Toshiba.

Optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications, including computer entertainment, movies and other forms of digital content, Cell is a multicore chip comprising a 64-bit Power processor core and multiple synergistic processor cores capable of massive floating point processing, the companies confirm in a joint statement.

The microprocessor adopts a flexible parallel and distributed computing architecture consisting of independent floating point processors for rich media processing, say the partners.

It supports multiple operating systems, including PC/WS operating systems, as well as real-time CE/Game operating systems. "In addition, the Cell processor is scalable and can be utilized in a variety of applications - from small digital CE systems within the home to entertainment applications for rendering movies, to scientific applications, such as supercomputers," they state.

The design work is taking place at a joint development lab the three companies have established in Austin, Texas, after the project was announced in 2001.

The Python Imaging Library (PIL) adds image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter. This library supports many file formats, and provides powerful image processing and graphics capabilities.

The Santiago, Chile-based segment of Indymedia, santiago.indymedia.org, announced its departure from the Indymedia network on Saturday, citing differences in opinion on various topics. It seems that the Santiago group's hardline beliefs apparently don't mesh with the core Indymedia standards or values.

There's finally some public information about AACS, the successor to the CSS DRM system that's used in DVDs. It looks more or less the same as CSS but with AES as the underlying cipher. Gentlemen, start your debuggers.

The Wi-Fi PLANET Conference & Expo takes place Nov. 30 through Dec. 2 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The three-day event features nearly 50 cutting-edge sessions with a pre-conference workshop on November 30 followed by two days of intensive sessions within the following tracks on December 1-2: Building the Network; Technical Topics; Wi-Fi Outdoors; Hotspot Central; RFID; Securing the WLAN; Wi-Fi Telephony & Convergence; and Special Interest.

Technology Review reports that scientists from Toin University of Yokohama have designed a single device that can both convert solar energy to electricity and store the electricity. The photocapacitor can also capture energy from weak light sources like sunlight on cloudy or rainy days and indoor lighting.

The light-driven, self-charging capacitor could eventually be used to power phones, cameras, and PDAs. "Users can just bring the device anywhere and expose it to indoor and outdoor ambient light whether they need power or not [then] release the stored electricity anytime they want," explains Tsutomu Miyasaka, a researcher at the University.

If cities evolve, what will shape their evolution over the next few decades?

Salon has an interesting article today about the use of wireless technologies as the drivers for urban change. "Urban Renewal, the Wireless Way" (subscription or brief advertisement required) looks at the realization that embedding networked technologies in urban spaces isn't dehumanizing, doesn't "eliminate geography," but can be enriching both socially and economically. Cities have long been home to dense social and information networks -- in the ethnic and artistic subcultures, in the patterns of business and commerce, in the every day communication of millions of people -- and digital tools make these networks both more accessible and more powerful.

(Continued at WorldChanging)

Welkin is a graph-based RDF visualizer.

My Movies is a DVD/Movie indexing application, where you add movie titles by either inputting data yourself, or downloading them from the internet. After adding titles you can browse your DVD/Movie collection from Microsoft Media Center Edition 2005, with covers, descriptions, runtime and ect. When you have found the DVD/Movie you whish to watch, you can press "Watch" to watch it. Both online movies stored on your computer, and offline movies stored on DVD discs can be added.

We have already written about the Korean news website Ohmynews a few times on the Editors' weblog, but until now we didn't know the precise figures concerning this website. "According to Min, director of international development, OhmyNews is generating almost US$500,000 a month in advertising revenue."We broke even last year and since then kept generating a monthly profit of about $27,000," The website is ranked in the top 15 in South Korea. According to a website message from the founder, Oh Yeon-ho, after three years OhmyNews was breaking even, with 2004 anticipated to yield a modest profit. According to OhmyNews sources, only 20% of the site's copy each day is written by staff journalists. The balance is totally dependent on outside contributors, including professors, police officers, students, housewives, business people - everyone. "OhmyNews citizen-reporters are paid from US$20 to as little as $5, depending on the place [each article] is assigned by our editors," Min said. The site was recently recognized at the fifth World Forum on E-Democracy hosted by PoliticsOnline, in a ceremony in France, as one of the global players instrumental in changing the world of the Internet and politics.

You knew it would happen. The Nintendo DS has so many features, it’s a hackers dream come true. Sure, Nintendo is notorious for dodging hacks but when they added Wi-Fi to their repertoire, they were just asking for that special attention. The beginning of the process starts here. It’s nothing too sexy; just a method to capture Pictochat sessions. But it will lead to bigger things. Sexy things. The kinds of things that will have you plunking down 200 bucks so you can join the DS frenzy.

* Could BitTorrent / RSS be a winning combination for cable companies (providing both TV and Internet) and Bells, in order to give them significant advantage over satellite TV distributors? Links: Fortune article by Frank Rose (similar article just appeared in December issue of Wired), set:TOP of DV Guide ...

* Does BitTorrent/RSs combination makes sense in the context of cell phone IP based networks? Mentioned DV Guide could be adapted to carry and distribute small 30 seconds clips via BT/RSS to mobile phones. Which are built almost as ready made set:TOP boxes nowadays ...

* Is there any torrent search engine that can crawl and search by media file hash signature? Or alternatively, is there any procedure or sketch of a standard to encrypt ENCLOSURE tag from RSS toward a specific recipient(s)? Search engine could provide effective tool to document number of downloads, while encrypting part of RSS feed could enable targeted distribution toward subscribers ...

UPDATE: 11/30/2004:

Yesterday I've asked some questions about BitTorrent and RSS. To refresh the discussion, today I post a diagram of potential target customers ...

"Toshiba Ltd. said that four major Hollywood studios had signed on to release titles in the HD DVD format, a decision that should have a significant impact on the next-generation DVD forum battle. Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, New Line Cinema, and Warner Bros. Studios all released commitments to support the HD DVD format, Toshiba executives announced at a press conference in Tokyo on Monday.

(Continued at Digital Media Thoughts)

It's great to be back in New York. Every time I leave, I come back to a city that is a little bit more my home than before. Since I've got a lot of catching up to do today (not nearly as much if Brendan Koerner hadn't kept things in check last week, though!) expect quite a few short clean up posts. I'm sure you'll be able to live without my erudite insights into the latest leather cell phone case or whatever.

Inaugurally, this Samsung 'Anycall Theater' is a speaker dock designed to let you use your Samsung phone as a stereo (practical) or television (arrr, squinty).

Samsung "Anycall Theater" [Slashphone]

Hitchcock is a system to simplify the process of editing video. Its key features are the use of automatic analysis to find the best quality video clips, an algorithm to cluster those clips into meaningful piles, and an intuitive user interface for combining the desired clips into a final video.

To simplify the process of editing interactive video, we developed the concept of detail-on-demand video as a subset of general hypervideo where a single button press reveals additional information about the current video sequence. Detail-on-demand video keeps the authoring and viewing interfaces relatively simple while supporting a wide range of interactive video applications. Our editor, Hyper-Hitchcock, builds on prior work on automatic analysis to find the best quality video clips. It introduces video composites as an abstraction for grouping and manipulating sets of video clips.

We naturally assign great importance to things that are right in our faces. With the media, we're impressed with all those new television channels because we see all the programs they carry. We know that high definition TV is big because we see the flat screens and the flawless pictures. We may notice that more and more music, radio and TV are poking onto the Internet.

But we don't really get it, not the big picture. In fact, the entire media landscape is undergoing basic, fundamental, change. A decade from now, much of what we take for granted will be morphed beyond recognition.

Newest WikiMedia project is citizen journalism....

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are quietly developing new search tools for digital video, foreshadowing a high-stakes technology arms race in the battle for control of consumers' living rooms.

Google's effort, until now secret, is arguably the most ambitious of the three. According to sources familiar with the plan, the search giant is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows.

The Internet2 homepage lauds the transmission of uncompressed High Definition (1920x1080/60i) video at a symmetrical 1.5Gbps per second between Australia and Pennsylvania. According to the press release, the end-gear was "off the shelf", but the trip it took was anything but; it was the first use of the Southern Cross Trans-Pacific Optical Research dual 10Gbps Testbed (or SXTransPORT) in Australia. The signal also jaunted across the Pacific Northwest Gigapop and the US National LambdaRail (NLR) 10 gigabit network fabric in the States.

Avid's new patent-pending MetaSync technology allows users to synchronize virtually any kind of metadata with video and audio content during the postproduction process.

As long as a file type or process can be represented in the appropriate XML format, it can now be imported into Avid editing systems using the MetaSync feature and synchronized with video and audio. In the timeline, pointers to the original file can be positioned, trimmed and edited just like video and audio clips. The file can then be launched in its original format from directly within the Avid system to be viewed or updated, and any changes made are instantly reflected in the timeline and bin

HTTP would make more efficient use of network bandwidth if it could transfer a minimal description of the changes, rather than the entire new instance of the resource. This is called "delta encoding."

The thing that interests me most these days is how "personal" media are getting mixed up with, well, media as we know it. More and more we spend time with our own digital pictures, videos, chats with friends, our e-mail, things that we feel are truly our own. How is this form of "media" combined with existing media interests?

Some recent examples I've noticed include the first Dutch Ipod DJ parties (visitors bring their own music selection on an Ipod); video-phone television offered by Telecom Italia's broadband portal RossoAlice (people call in via video phone and are part of (...)

Entry continued...

The Japan Science and Technology Agency have invented a clear, flexible transistor that can be used to make clear, flexible electronic gadgets. Has anyone seen my cell phone?

Martin Rieser has started a new blog to accompany his upcoming edited volume The Mobile Audience: Art and New Located Technologies of the Screen, to be published in 2005 by the BFI.

Looks good.

This is one of the stranger stories to come along.

According to WKRC.com, authorities in Sweden arrested a man who shot mobile phones into the yard of a high-security prison with a bow and arrows, police said Saturday.

"The 25-year-old man is charged with planning to aid a prison escape and could get up to a year in jail, police said.

The suspect, whose name was not released, taped two cell phones and a battery charger to three arrows, and fired them over the 12-foot wall into Mariefred prison outside Stockholm on Friday night."

Imagine that you can browse your files, friends, and photos like they were in a tiny little World Wide Web, using browsers and search engines. You can bookmark everything, link everything and enjoy surfing your data.

Fenfire: A free software project aiming at implementing the applitude-oriented (structured in terms of "zones of functionality") user interface concepts on top of an RDF graph.

From Howard Rheingold on TheFeature.com.

Ross Mayfield on Many 2 Many writes about an experiment from Stanford's Persuasive Technologies Lab: Buddybuzz:

"It helps you find the most interesting articles to read, based upon your friend's ratings -- and allows you to read 300 to 800 words per minute from your mobile phone.

Reading works by having a single word blinked at you at a rate you control, similar to other experiences on the web, but it simply makes more sense with mobile form factor and lifestyle".

The Video Processing Analysis Resource is a toolkit of scripts and Java programs that enable the markup of visual data ground truth, and systems for evaluating how closely sets of result data approximate that truth.

Try this:

1. Slice.

Cut up your shows into stories and put them all online.

After you air a story, it's fishwrap. Nobody can see it. If they missed it, well, that's tough for them. Is that any way to treat your public? Well, you don't have to anymore.

You should put up every story you do -- and not just as a stream but as files that the people can distribute on their own.

You can still make money on this -- in fact, you'll make new money: Put ads on the video; track those ads; and tack on a Creative Commons license that says people can distribute the video but cannnot muck with it. And you'll find something magical will happen: Your audience will market your product for you and distribute it for you and it won't cost you anything more. It's free money, damnit. Tell that to your stockholders.

And while you're at it, take your script for the segment and associate it with the video as meta data (that is, post it on a blog with a link to the video) so people can find your stories on search engines and then watch them.

This means that people who really want to see your stories and are interested in them can now do so. We're no longer captive to your schedule and your selection; we can watch what interests us. We are in control.

The result: You will get a more interested and involved audience. You will get a bigger audience. You will get more people who will like what you do and start watching your old-fashioned shows. You will benefit. We will benefit.

If you really care about informing the public -- which, of course, you do -- then this is the first step to doing it a new and better way.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

Beast is a powerful music composition and modular synthesis application released as free software under the GNU GPL and GNU LGPL, that runs under unix.

"The UK regulator, Ofcom, has decided that managing spectrum is a drag, and there are other people around that might do a better job. It is going to open up 73 percent of the radio spectrum to market forces, and make it technology-neutral and tradeable. So if one technology gets superseded, another one can get rolled out instead (subject to broadcast power limits) without Ofcom having to define what spectrum it should use.

Radio was first regulated here 100 years ago this year, and a new regime is needed to fit new radio technology. Ofcom is quite proud to be ahead of the US on this one, because we have a recent Communications Act, and the FCC is 'hamstrung' by old laws - at least that's what the head of research at Ofcom said."

Mike Masnick says it's more like "open market" spectrum. The spectrum is still licensed, but once licensed, the owner has much more flexibility in doing what they want with it. The Spectrum Framework Review sets out four key recommendations:

1. Allow the market to decide the best use for new spectrum allocations.
2. Allow licence holders to trade spectrum in an open market and change the use they make of spectrum rights to develop new technologies and offer different services to customers (also known as liberalisation).
3. Clearly define the rights of spectrum users, giving them the confidence to plan for the future.
4. Increase the amount of licence-exempt spectrum which allows businesses to develop and bring to market new technologies and services without the need for a licence.

In the United States, Nextel, Sprint and Clearwire own most of the 2.5-2.7 GHz band (MMDS). Nextel expects to make a decision on next generation technology in January and is reportedly looking for an alliance with a cable operator.

(Continued at DailyWireless)

Linux PR: SolarPC Announces the $100 Personal Computer talks about the latest PC - perhaps a response to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer's request to build a $100 PC.

Burning only 10 Watts, an aluminium case with a 20 year warranty, a lead free motherboard.

Down side: You need to order 100,000 units to get one, apparently.

I saw this over on Mathemagenic. Hey, Adam. Lilia wants to know if there is a need for a weblog conference in Europe. Of course there is. Why don't you do BloggerCon Europe? Just an idea.

The cable network experimented with citizen journalists during the election, posting their reports online. Now MSNBC is encouraging citizen reporting on a wide range of topics. "We will put most of the stories you file up on our Citizen Journalist Blog, and take the best reports and talk about them on the air," said Joe Trippi. "Some people send in stories, others who are handy with a camera, have sent in pictures that help to tell the story visually but let your creativity go if you have a knack for animation have at it and send it in!"

You know I like to tell you about stuff that will change the way we do business.  Here are the first consumer camcorders that use Hard Drives instead of Videotape.  What with Moore's law and cost per gigabyte getting so cheap, you'd think that this is a natural, "the passing of the magnetic-tape era," proclaimed the New York Times.  Well, not exactly - but the news is still wonderful.

The new Everio GZ-MC100, top, and GZ-MC200 are JVC camcorders that store video onto a tiny removable hard drive.

The hard drives are 4GB, that's .7 GB less than a current recordable DVD.  The camcorders will cost somewhere around $1,200 and the hard drives will cost about $200 each.

Good news, bad news.  The good news is that these little guys mark the beginning of the way video should be acquired - IF you're going to edit!  Yes, if you are going to edit, this is the only way to fly.  No encoding time, just hook the camera or drive up to your computer and start to edit.  If, on the other hand, you are shooting for archival purposes or you just never edit your stuff, this is a terrible idea.  You'll fill up 4GB in about a nanosecond and then you will be forced to transfer the contents to your computer for storage or to a DVD recorder or to tape, you get the point.

(Continued at EmmyAdvancedMedia)

I agree with Dave Winer on this one. Even with the disclaimers about newsreaders and such, there's still a pretty good chance that the reader will wonder why there are two versions of the blog homepage. At the opposite end are the readers who "think the link is broken" when they see all those angle brackets. Here's my claim: it's okay, people will figure out that all those angle brackets make their life better and will eventually forget about them. That is, they will disappear into the background, but not because we went out of our way to hide them.

Before dismissing me as technology-elite, take a listen to this talk by Malcolm Gladwell at IT Converations. He talks about peoples' reactions to new products and ideas. Quote:

There's a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly, and when we say that they're ugly, they really are ugly and we're always going to think that they're ugly. Right? They're never going to be beautiful. But there's another class of products that we see and we don't really know what we think. They challenge us. We don't know how to describe them. And we end up, if we're forced to explain ourselves, calling them ugly, because we can't think of a better way to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don't have a good way of distinguishing between these two states. We don't have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly, and the thing that is radical and challenging, and simply new and unusual"

It's probably a stretch to equate XML with the Aeron chair, but perhaps they're not so different.

According to David Sifry, Technorati 's chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003.

The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Meanwhile, Pew Internet & American Life reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.

Blog traffic - Weblog Posts / Day

go to ClickZ for a full report