unmediated

Perhaps no person has ever been convicted of copyright infringement from mashups. From Mediatrips: I'll give $100 to EFF if anyone can prove to me that a masher/remixer has ever been arrested and/or convicted in the United States for copyright infringement. Specifically, I mean criminal prosecution (not civil litigation).

I want an answer to this question becasue I believe there is way too much fear and anxiety about using/remixing/mashing copyrighted content for personal and artistic expression.

I'm doing this becasue I want to try and counter some of the FUD effects that the MPAA, RIAA, and others have caused around this issue. I would love to absolutely prove that NEVER in the history of the United States has anyone ever been criminally charged for mashing copyrighted content.

Anyways, that my offer. Yes, I know its not much money. If you want to help out and add to the pot then please let me know.

David Goldschmidt

The vast majority of us is used to interact with 2D objects, such as a computer screen. But how do you deal with a volumetric display, such as a 3D collaborative medical model or an architectural model? In this short article, "Gestures control true 3D display," Technology Research News (TRN) writes that researchers from the University of Toronto have devised a method which involves a multi-finger gestural interaction with the 3D display. The users, who carry 'markers' on their fingers which are tracked by cameras, can work together to pick, manipulate or control objects existing in the 3D environment.

As the TRN article was only wetting my appetite, I've done my own research on the subject. And among other facts, I discovered that these computer scientists won the Best Paper Award at the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST 2004). This review contains additional details and pictures.

Fans of the burgeoning technology, which lets users broadcast and download audio content feeds to MP3 players, say it represents audio broadcasting's future. But podcasting still has a long way to go. By Daniel Terdiman.

ALIVE@9th Street Presents "Storytelling and the Internet Age: New Media, Nonlinear Expanded Cinema, Flash Animation and Interactivity."

What do Java Script, Stock Market Ticker Tape Machines, Web Services and User driven interactive digital experiences have to do with storytelling? Find out the answer to this and more as storytellers and technoids who get your heart thumping and have you hanging onto the edge of your seat come together for the second program in the Ninth Street Independent Film Center's inaugural Forum Series ALIVE@9th Street.

Storytelling and the Internet Age takes a look into possibilities for the future of techno-storytelling. Join moderator Peter L. Stein (Executive Director, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival) for a evening with documentary filmmaker, writer and teacher Carroll Parrott Blue (recipient of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Online Award); Flash technology pioneer Louis Fox (founding partner Free Range Graphics); animation whiz, entrepreneur and activist Brad deGraf (credits include Jetsons: The Movie, Robocop 2); and acclaimed video and digital artist, and pioneer in digital innovation, Lynn Hershman-Leeson (Technolust, Conceiving Ada).

When: Wednesday, January 12, 2005, 7 pm

Where: 145 Ninth Street, 1st Floor Screening Room, San Francisco (between Mission & Howard)

Cost: $10 advance, $5 students, call (415) 552-5950.

JD Lasica has announced that a start page is now available - as evidence that ourmedia.org does exist.

It's been a long hard road we've been tolling and our thanks go out to Boris Mann and Bryght - for helping us get there.

We aren't live yet - but we're working on it.

Here's JD's post...

I just posted a Welcome message to the Ourmedia.org site, since we're getting some traffic after the two writeups in this week's Business Week. So we've taken down the log-in module. [NewMediaMusings]

Wikipedia has started to hit the big time. Accordingly, several critical articles have come out, including "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as "When Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive". These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully. I do, however; I co-founded Wikipedia. (I have since left the project.) Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue. These problems could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem. If the project's managers are not willing to solve it, I fear a fork (a new edition under new management, for the non-techies reading this) will probably be necessary.

(Continued at kuro5hin.org)

An idea that's been stewing around in our minds for a while was given a voice and a name last week with the publication of the awesome "Rebel Sell" piece that's been making the blogosphere rounds.

// Part I // Part II

(Hey, Jay. Just caught up with the Vlogging for Dollars thread on the videoblogging list. You guys should check out the This Magazine article. -kc.)

Heh. The irony.

If you work at a hosting company that hosts a blog, or at a streaming video provider, please hear our call. Bloggers are losing thousands of dollars doing the tremendous public service of providing video of the tsunami to the world. You don't need us to preach the importance of information during this terrible time. During 9/11, Akamai called us and said they would open their pipes for free. Our company, Mirror Image did the same. Lost Remote appeals to you: help these bloggers defray their expenses. Write off their video charges. Give them a discount. Do something. When you host a blog, you are in the news business. Bloggers who are taking a hit: write us, and if any company is kind enough to provide free mirrors or help with your hosting, we will tell you. And we'll give a big shoutout to those generous companies as well. Please help.

Details: These blogs right here are posting the most video.

(You can find most of these videos at The Internet Archive. -kc.)

Posted by yatta at 01:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

I wasn´t aware of this seminar which discussed different aspects of social software. Fortunately most of it is documented on video, which is accessible from the website.

As 2004 comes to a close, the world is at once very different and much the same for video enthusiasts wanting to take movies from the Internet, store them on their PCs and shoot them over to giant TV screens.

Studies are coming out left and right about "mobile Internet usage," but they're all talking about different things. It makes it too easy to hide bad news behind pretty pictures.

A system for capturing multi-thousand frame-per-second (fps) video using a dense array of cheap 30fps CMOS image sensors.

A benefit of using a camera array to capture high speed video is that we can scale to higher speeds by simply adding more cameras. Even at extremely high frame rates, our array architecture supports continuous streaming to disk from all of the cameras. This allows us to record unpredictable events, in which nothing occurs before the event of interest that could be used to trigger the beginning of recording.

AMC Technology Sub-committee Chair, Tim Halle, sent in this interesting article by Bob Lamm. .

Dave McCarn, WGBH's Chief Technologist, has a mission: He wants to come up with a permanent, universal digital file format for archived media. One that not only carries the original sound and image, but also transcriptions, production notes, authorship/copyright/royalty info, hypermedia links to other media files, etc. Once in this form, it would be free of the underlying tape technology it was originated on, permanently linked to the information that usually gets lost in paper files, and could be stored on the same general-purpose digital media we keep our e-mail and other computer-based files on.

Dave explained a little bit of this vision at our February 18 meeting at WGBH-TV. He pointed out that this was an issue of considerable importance to a station like WGBH: They have something like 150,000 reels/cassettes of one sort or another in their archives. Although WGBH takes great care to store these under optimal conditions, magnetic tape is inherently unstable, and the inevitable deterioration is starting to set in. In addition, WGBH also needs to keep a selection of old machines, also carefully preserved, in operational condition just to play back this media. These machines are starting to show their age and can't be expected to last indefinitely.

(Continued at EmmyAdvancedMedia)

At our Fusion Power conference, Mary Lou Fulton talked about the Northwest Voice, a participatory journalism newspaper project, and said if someone wants to submit a story about a little girl selling lemonade to fight MS, why not find a place for it to run. Here's her logic:

I think one of the things that unfortunately journalism has become really good at is making people feel unimportant, making people feel that what matters to them and the things that are meaningful in their life don't have any place at all in what we do. And so I want to take that whole thing away and say hey if you want to write it and you want to send it in, as long as it's local, we'll publish it. And we do...

The problem with being a great gatekeeper is that you're keeping people out instead of letting people in.

(Continued at PJNet Today)

In case you’re interested here’s an audio interview with Sloncek—the 18-year-old creator of Suprnova.org—happened after the site was taken down. I confess I was underwhelmed with what he had to say, as well as with the questions asked.

It was conducted by a streaming radio station called Novastream.

• Torrent
• MP3

Podcasting brings democracy and a personal touch to tradtional notio ns of broadcasting but with a price -- the continued fragmentation of what was once a national collective audience. If you like to think hyperlocal or niche, that's probably a good thing. But if you think sharing events, entertainment, news connects us in much-needed ways, it may be just another cause for concern. Media critic Dan Kennedy isn't quite sure what to make of podcasting or whether it's going to go the way of cable access channels but he does wonder about the effect.

-- "In a sense, podcasting is just the latest example of how the dot-com crash of 2000 liberated the Internet from the unrealistic expectation of instant wealth, fostering a new climate of grassroots innovation."

-- "The 20 million to 30 million people who still watch one of the three evening newscasts are old and getting older. The buzz is with Fox News, even though it reaches only a fraction of that number, and with Web sites, blogs, radio talk shows, and other media outlets that cater to niche audiences, confirming their beliefs and prejudices rather than challenging them by exposing them to a wide range of viewpoints."

-- "As promising as podcasting may be as a way of liberating us from the likes of Clear Channel and FCC chair Michael Powell, there s a danger that too many of us will be withdrawing from the national conversation still further. You can program your own head. But you ve got to know what your head needs."

ShareTV is going down.

All good things have to come to an end, and unfortunately, here is ours, says the site.

Legal issues get more and more problematic, we are not 16 anymore and with the latest developments we found the situation too unstable/unsafe to continue, so we decided it would be better to leave in dignity. The mainpage will be up until the end of the year, the forum will remain open for now. Yet, we will keep it clean, so no ed2k links, only regular chat.

After we closed the mainpage, we will offer the database as a download for a certain period of time. So please don't go crazy and try to download the page with some tool. This will only bring the server down.

This is a sad moment for us, we love what we do and we love our little community. Believe us - we will miss you just as much as you may miss us.

Bye bye, we hope you enjoyed the ride.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

Hello Everybody!

Please go over to this web survey page to help us decide which sessions to have at vloggercon:

http://multivote.sparklit.com/web_poll.spark/3732

I've filled up the survey with recent popular topics from the videoblogging list, and suggested sessions that Jay received in email.

I'm going to be meeting with Jay and Ryan this weekend to help plan for vloggercon, and we'll be deciding on sessions.

I'f you've got an idea for a session, please email Jay, discuss it here, or leave it as a comment on the survey page.

Thanks for your support,
--Steve

This is what the survey looks like:

We're planning on having 5 sessions at vloggercon 2005.

Please check up to (5) sessions that you would most like to attend.

Video Playlists: Me-TV, ANT, ...
Videoblogging and Money: Can they coexist?
Video etiquette and law: Your rights when you shoot video?
Tools of the Trade: Cameras, Lighting, Audio
Distribution: BitTorrent/RSS/Hosting/Open Media/Creative Commons
Smart Mob Media Production: Exploring the realities of decentralized
collaborative storytelling, newsgathering, and dissemination.
Show and Tell: Videobloggers tell us about themselves and their videos
Video Blog Platforms: Blogger, TypePad, BlogWare, other. What we use
and why.
Videoblogging Today: Who are we and why are we doing this?
The Future: Where do we go from here?

The most constructive work we do in blogland isn't "delivering" the commodity we call "information," but rather exercizing the verbs from which the noun information is derived. We inform each other. As human beings, we are what we know, and we know more because we listen to and read and watch sources that enlarge our knowledge. We are therefore literally formed by those processes. (All of which, Steve Gillmor will hasten to point out, follow our attention.)

As either Tim O'Reilly or I said in a conversation we once had about this process, We are all authors of each other. (Apparently somebody else wrote this as well, but it costs $25 to read the text, so I guess the author won't be authoring too many of us.)

After I wrote that "blogging is about "making and changing minds", Jay Rosen and his commenters enlarged the idea, both informing and forming my own additional thinking about the subject.

Traditional big-J journalism is so much about delivering finished information, rather than thinking out loud about stuff we all need to know more about, I think we need a noun for the latter. That's what I'm vetting in the headline for this post.

(Continued at The Doc Searls Weblog)

Stanford Institute's Quantitative Study of Society: "The survey found that use of the Internet has displaced television watching and a range of other activities."

Marylaine Block, a very wired librarian, writes with a great example of the Long Tail at work. I'd asked her for some perspective on the ways in which libraries differ from bookstores. After all, on the face of it both suffer from similar scarcity problems: limited shelf space and budgets and the geographic limitations of depending largely on local demand.  Are libraries equally hit-driven as a result?

The answer is no, because libraries (especially university libraries) have changed a lot. They are increasingly connected through shared databases and interlibrary loan networks. Thus they are able to effectively extend their shelves manyfold, connecting their individual collections into a vast supercollection that can go far further down the Tail than any single institution could afford. In other words, networks are turning individual libraries into what amounts to one huge virtual Long Tail aggregator.

(Continued at The Long Tail)

Zack Rosen of Civic Space sits in at his uncle Jay's PressThink and offers some advice for news organizations in the age of citizens journalism.

Bloggers without borders has just launch. Here's the first post from Jonas.

Tsunami Outreach

Submitted by Jonas M Luster on Thu, 2004-12-30 05:23.

We have found our compassion in this one. Yet, one thing remains and is badly needed, says a friend of mine who just arrived in Sri Lanka and will be contributing what he learned in eight years in Uniform. People. Not the odd-job bystander, not the “activist”, and certainly not the journalist. What is needed most, today, are qualified specialists. Demolitions experts to safely destroy dangerous structures, Doctors, guys and gals who know how to handle a syringe or a gun. The latter is needed more and more as the looting increases and food and medical supplies are being raided by black marketers.

From IEEE Spectrum Online - Selling Music for a Song: Online music stores make at most a dime per track — where does the money go?

They start with a single stolen file and pump out pirated games and movies by the millions. Jeff Howe from Wired magazine looks at the 'topsites' that are terrorizing the entertainment business.

The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks girding it all together - is not about trading or sharing at all. It s a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it can be received by anyone capable of typing U2″ into a search engine.

Work ongoing at HP Labs in Bristol UK, at their Semantic Web Research Group. where they have done some interesting work that uses the simplicity of blog posting to construct intelligent repositories of what they call 'knowledge snippets' ... information nuggets we would like to store, annnotate and share ... Steve Cayzer of the Labs, in a provocative recent article (link below) discusses the interaction of this simplicty with the ability to store and retrieve knowledge based on embedded intelligence. Any kind of knowledge management method presupposes you have some critical mass of knowledge to manage.

Without having content, no one will use the source. With a simple blog you can easily add and annotate such snippets, but the only way to retrieve is a search. Improvements like Google Desktop Search, make this easier, but it still suffers from the strength of its precision and recall. Blogs like the one you are reading also contain links, to augment the knowledge they contain by simple reference. This kind of knowledge loading can be improved by adding semantic metadata to the snippits and to their links. The querying and search can be aided by this knowledge. The result is a form of the Semantic Web, overlaid on a simple blog structure.

Of course, this does make the use of the blog structure more complex. It has to be loaded with the semantic knowledge, perhaps through the use of a pre-arranged ontology for classifying and sharing knowledge. This is important work .. with the potential of linking very simple knowledge storing ideas, like blogs, with more complex knowledge management classification and retrieval methods. Cayzer also usefully surveys other knowledge-loading mechanisms for blogs. For more detail, and updated research see Cayzer's Semantic Blogging site, which contains a demonstrator for a semantic blog. And the full December CACM article: Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management, an instructive read. (Full article regrettably only available to ACM subscribers)...

Both the NY Times and the Washington Post (use Bugmenot if you face registration) explore the FCC's somewhat quiet plan to replace cable boxes with Cablecards. They slide into the back of television sets, cost less to rent, and unlike boxes can be taken with you when you move. However there's a good chance you'll never see one.

Waxy.org has been collecting amateur video footage, here's a roundup post: Link. Punditguy has more: Link

Chris Holland says,

I've used prodigem to create torrents for the South Asia tsunami videos. The more people use this torrent, the faster everyone else will be able to download the videos. See also this page to make it easy for people to put an amazon donation badge on their sites.

Link

In case you missed it on my del.icio.us or Restoring the Balance or Waxy's Linkblog (which is where I got it, and run by the guy whose blog who put the Grey Album into the world's ears) the Grey Album is Entertainment Weekly's best album of 2004.

Briefly, US copyright exists because Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution provides for Congress to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Part of that has been challenged in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, where Lawrence Lessig argued that retroactive extensions to copyright didn't meet the "limited Times" clause. But let's look at the big picture.

Because of current copyright law, the Grey Album is illegal. The best album of the year is illegal because of copyright law. You are not allowed to buy a copy of the best album of the year because of copyright law. Is copyright law promoting art?

Check out my interview with James Enck on The Broadband Daily about Prodigem. James is a self-proclaimed "bungling Luddite idiot" when it comes to using new technologies and concludes that he is "truly impressed with how easy this was to do". Cool.

Holy crap. Just read this on Evenlyn's blog, where she's in Bangkok now:

I wonder if blogging really is merely journalism (obviously not for me), but just didn't feel right somehow taking pictures of a floating hospital (except for the Asian doctor on his diving holiday voluntarily assisting with minimal supplies on this rescue, there was no medical attention available until about 11 hours after the tsunami hit), the Phuket hospital scene, or the people in stretchers on the C-130. Although that didn't stop the press. They were even hogging the free email terminals for patients at the Phuket hospital so they could dispatch their stories.

I'm going to need a bit more perspective to adequately relate this as I'm still in the middle of this.

Crossroads Dispatches: Humbled by Stories of Tsunami Survivors

(Actually, I think it's good to repost the first sentence from the first paragraph she mentions this in:

Someone forwarded me the NY Times piece on the tsunami and blogging, but if you were really in thick in the middle of this life-altering, surreal experience I'm not sure you'd be up to reporting it as yet.

-kc.)

Heather Green at BusinessWeek reports on the grassroots movement to post video blogs. She contends that vlogs are compelling in the creativity they're unleashing and the changes they could bring to the media status quo.

Following in the footsteps of text blogs, video blogs are starting to take off on the Internet. This new form of grassroots digital media is being shepherded along by groups of film makers and video buffs who started pooling publishing tips and linking to each other in earnest this year.

Sirius Satellite Radio says holiday sales helped push its subscriber base over the 1 million mark, while rival XM Satellite Radio reports its customer numbers have topped 3.1 million.

New York-based Sirius and Washington, DC-based XM are the two main players in the emerging U.S. satellite radio business.

Sirius recently signed shock jock Howard Stern under a five-year, $500 million contract and hired Viacom Latest News about Viacom veteran Mel Karmazin as its chief executive.

An In-Depth, Detailed Look at your Favorite Public-Domain Movies. A Searchable DataBase of Public-Domain Movie Information, Episode Guides and More.

Created to assist people in their search for public domain movies and to develop a better understanding of the public domain laws, this database is intended to serve as a source for this need

Playing Net movies on your TV

As 2004 comes to a close, the world is at once very different and much the same for video enthusiasts wanting to take movies from the Internet, store them on their PCs and shoot them over to giant TV screens. What s new is the growing list of devices coming out that can connect the two worlds, either wirelessly or with cables. But one thing that hasn t changed, Cai said, is the dearth of high-quality legally available content that would justify the investment for most people. The idea of the digital-media adapter has been around for years through devices like Sony s RoomLink, but they never really took off, Cai explained. One problem has been a lack of consumer awareness. But the bigger problem is the lack of content not self-created content like home movies, but premium content, meaning first-run Hollywood movies.

Efforts to make more legal content available are underway, but it will be awhile before they catch up with the hardware.

Wired News has a lengthy exploration of Bit Torrent, which will have been downloaded 40 million times by 2006. It more specifically focuses on its creator Bram Cohen, and how he came to develop such a popular (and now controversial) bit of software. In April of 2001, Cohen quit his job to work on the software, which now accounts for nearly a third of all web traffic.

You've heard it before, of course, but analysts say that TV sports will change dramatically in the next 25 years. "The balance of power is shifting from providers to fans," ESPN's Len DeLuca tells the Baltimore Sun. Fans will be able to see and experience everything the players do, as they choose their own camera shots, graphics and instant replays. If this means I can lose that annoying, flashing Fox stripe atop my NFL games, I can hardly wait.

Following up on yesterday's post about finding photos and video and the tsunami, Brian TVNewser Stelter sends this good quote from David Carr's NY Times story:

Bob Calo, an associate professor at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said that there had been something of a reversal in the news-gathering process. "If you think back, news gatherers would get the story and then commission a photographer to go and get the pictures," he said. "Now we have flipped it around to where reporters are chasing the pictures, trying to create some context for what viewers are seeing."

We are all reporters. I've written often that I wonder what would have been different if I'd had a camera or cameraphone with me at the World Trade Center on 9/11: An event viewed from a rooftop three miles away would have been viewed from a human level instead.

Meanwhile, Punditguy sends a link to this dramatic tourist video of the wave engulfing a resort and these photos. Those photos are taken by an American in Thailand named Ernest and if you scroll down on his blog, you will read how he ended up in Phuket. This makes the news very human.

Technology which enables the merging of real and virtual elements - MixTV allows free camera movement and zooming and enables interaction with virtual elements in production.

"The risk is no longer of losing readers with an an insufficient volume of posts, but of annoying readers with insufficiently interesting posts" - is this the end of blogging about not blogging?

Consulting group Classified Intelligence said newspapers have lost between $50 and $65 million in employment ad revenue along with millions more in real estate and other classified categories. Together, online job boards bring in $217 million in recruitment revenue compared to newspaper's $1.1 billion. Classified Intelligence predicts online job board revenue will eventually surpass newspaper recruitment advertising revenue.

A BBC news post reports that in a recent project wireless technology has been adopted in the Huaral Valley, a farming community 80 km north of Lima, Peru. Built with open source software, the project, providing wireless to a community of 6000+ with $200,000 in donations from an NGO, has also set up 14 telecenters that will set out to provide "...training on computers and internet skills for both operators and users of the system," with a goal of helping rural people share information with each other in new ways.

This is an interesting project that sets the stage for a large community of people, many diving into technology for the first time, to experiment with how networks can help them do what they do. Even if in the long run funding dies out, the classes stop, and it just ends up being a bunch of loosely connected internet cafes in the middle of North Peru - it still provides access, maybe not to everyone, but to those in the community who are interested in working with the technology -- and that is what matters.

A group of volunteers set up a blog to coordinate information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts in response to the devastating Southeast Asian earthquake and tsunami. [Link]

(We're getting a large amount of traffic to this post in searches for 'tsunami aid'. If you're looking for tsunami aid resources, please visit ReliefWeb, WorldChanging, and the Tsunamihelp Blog -kc.)

China says it s achieved a world-first with its next generation Internet network CERNET2, the largest Internet Protocol Version 6 network anywhere.

Compared with the current IP Version 4, the new version is capable of allocating endless IP addresses, and features a transportation speed of 10G per second, 1,000 times faster than the current speed, says state news agency Xinhuanet.

By creating a digital network in their own homes, in the near future Chinese people could use it to enjoy video and audio communications, information resources, and the benefits of far-away education and health care services, it says.

CERNET2 links up 25 universities in 20 cities, says China Daily

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

ClickZ expert and Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein takes a look back at 2004. His favorite topic? You guessed it:

The ability to tap into consumer conversations is fantastic and powerful. Companies are falling all over themselves trying to figure out how to use the blog phenomenon to their advantage. All too often, they conclude they should use blogs to talk. Please. Brands do enough talking as it is. Use the blog space to listen.

I read (on a blog, of course) Microsoft is doing just that: It uses tools such as PubSub and Bloglines to capture consumer feedback on its products. From that insight, it culls the most approp