unmediated

Iraq the Model announces the start of the Friends of Democracy web site with reporting from citizen journalists in Iraq in English and Arabic (using the Arabic-language blogging tool underwritten, with your help, by Spirit of America). Go read reports from the street, from Iraqis.

At the same time Spirit of America plans to highlight their coverage of the electino next Sunday with an event in Washington; details here. The event will be webcast for two hours starting at 2p ET on Sunday. I can't wait to compare the coverage we find there with the coverage we find on our media.

The first time I ever spoke with Jeff Pulver was years back when he was trying to find volunteers for his "original" Free World Dialup idea. While it eventually became this free VoIP phone system where users could dial other FWD members for free, the original plan was much more interesting. The original idea was to get a bunch of users to connect their traditional phone service lines to a VoIP network, and create a "free" VoIP phone service that terminated calls via the nearest available volunteer's node. In other words, the system would be mostly VoIP, just like FWD is now. However, each user would also connect to their existing PSTN phone system, and basically let the phone calls that are ending within a local area code use your account to complete the call. Since almost every phone system has free local calling, there's no charges for users to worry about (phone companies, on the other hand...). Anyway, it appears that Pulver never really let this idea die, and he's now trying to do it again with a new offering called Bellster. Of course, it's still not simple to be a part of this network, which could be its downfall. It seemed like that's what slowed the original FWD. While it is easier than it was years ago, it still takes some work to get this set up. It's not Skype and it's not FWD. If anything, it's like Vonage, but free. Basically, it's leveraging VoIP for long distance and riding on the "free local calls" aspect of most local telephone offerings. Should be interesting to see what happens.

The Video Blog Festival is dedicated to honoring videos that were shot for the purpose of showcasing it in blogs.

The Video Blog Festival is devoted to the "art" of making videos for video blogging, and not to the politics of what is the best video blog website around.

MoonEdit: multi-platform collaborative text editor. Cooperative multi-user text editing over the internet. Every co-author can edit the shared document at any time, from any place, and at the same time! There's no need to send files via FTP or to compare documents when multiple users need to make changes to it independently.

Turns out 99-cent downloads are no way to make money, or so top music execs told the International Herald Tribune at Midem. Sony BMG's Thomas Hesse calls the quasi-standard fee "an introductory offer" -- "a fair way to begin the business" but, at 99 cents, it's difficult for all of us to make a decent living. ... In the longer term, we believe music is worth more. And we should resist the temptation to price music down to zero just because we're competing with free."

From Christophe Cuvillier from French music retailer FNAC, "The way this business is structured at the moment there's no way today to make money."
For Microsoft, music is another way to become part of the consumer's life. Mike Conte, GM of of MSN Marketplaces, says, "Music is not a big moneymaker for MSN. We cover our costs and little more."
In the same article, Sony's Phil Wiser talks about the company's flawed digital music strategy. "In many ways, our position in the market was ours to lose, and to some extent we lost it because of a couple of bad decisions. One of them was, clearly, going with an internal, proprietary technology, causing more damage than it did good." Now, Wiser claims Sony is leading the charge for open standards. "We're going to transition over time to have multiple formats. If we're successful, consumers will never have to worry about that again."

David Bollier wonders when the phase transition from mass-manufactured to make-your-own culture will take place:

Given the lamentable decline of the mainstream media, the appeal of the emerging make-your-own culture should be obvious. The new culture consists of blogging (amplified by blog syndication and news aggregators); collaborative websites and archives; social networking software; meta-tagging innovations like Flickr, the photo-sharing site, and Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking system; podcasting (syndication of iPod music playlists) and videocasting (uploading of indie video shorts), remix music, and more. This universe of rip-mix-burn creators is only going to grow as digital technologies become cheaper and more accessible.

Lots to digest from the Blogging Journalism & Credibility conference.  Check out the Bloglines aggregator and Dave’s aggregator of people blogging it, a del.icio.us link feed, transcripts and audiofiles from the conference, and the IRC chat transcripts as well. Not everything’s posted yet, but will be soon. Audio coming Monday, hopefully. Note that Wikinews now has a page on our conference. (hat tip to Sandhill Trek)

(continued at Blogging, Journalism & Credibility)

Texas Instruments has sealed a deal with Nokia to incorporate TI's single-chip cellular phone technology into future handsets.

In development since 2002, the DRP integrates the bulk of handset electronics on a single chip, including digital baseband, SRam, logic, RF, power management and analog functions.



(Continued at Daily Wireless)

Desktop video aggregator for OS X now open for public consumption. Go test it out and send feedback.

"There will come a time, and not so long from now, when advertisers will just post their ads, plus some data about them, and how they want them to perform, and how much they are willing to pay for leads generated by them, and the net will do the rest."

"Pew has just released an amazing-looking study on Internet search behavior. Two factoids from the exec summary left my jaw hanging:

Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much....

Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or "sponsored" results and unpaid results. "

Read original post here

The departure of Michael K. Powell from the Federal Communications Commission in a few weeks will lead to profound and subtle policy and personality changes for the agency.

As part of the HDV workflow presentation, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how digital tape is made. Digital Master Media is made by evaporating metal and getting it to adhere (in two layers) to the Mylar base. The particles are laid down in the direction of the heads. According to technical director Wayne Desmond, that means better carrier-to-noise ratio, reduced dropouts (when the head doesn't touch the tape) and fewer errors (misreading of the data). In HDV recording, 25 million bits of data are read per second. The high end tape has a 4dB greater carrier-to-noise ratio. I guess that explains why it costs four times as much. While it may seem costly, it's certainly worth it if you're mastering your film on DV.

(Continued at Cinema Minima)

TiVo's new DRM system allows you to move video from your TiVo to your PC, but not as a plain MPEG file that you can slice and dice and watch in the player of your choice. Here are step-by-step instructions for converting TiVo-to-Go video to MPEG files.

Link

(via Waxy)

No, it's not high tech chapstick or a mentholated nasal inhaler-- it's a Video Bulb.

Ryota Kuwakubo is a device artist. His wearable LED animation Bitman, a cute little guy that dances around within the confines of the display edges, has gotten plenty of attention in the art-gadget scene. His latest evolution of Bitman is in the form of this RCA video plug. Just pop it in to the input socket on your TV and it will endlessly play a Bitman animation.

$38 at Compact Impact

PLAN Pervasive and Locative Arts Network: A two day event bringing together leading international figures to review the emerging fields of locative and pervasive media...The event launches a new international network (PLAN), bringing together artists, activists, hardware hackers, bloggers, game programmers, free network builders, semantic web philosophers, cartographers, economists, architects, and university and industry researchers.

ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) London UK

Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd February 2005

10am-6pm (music 8pm-1am Tuesday only)

PLAN website: http://www.open-plan.org

It's Vloggercon Day at unmediated. Come on by the stream and IRC and check out the discussion.

RSS to SMS (in beta). FeedBeep lets you customize SMS alerts for almost any RSS feed out there.
(and is taking beta testers.) [MetaFilter]

The frequent use of SMS abbreviations has affected the written language of Singapore youth, according to a study by second year Media and Communications students of the Singapore Polytechnic.

A new digital camera from Ricoh has a built-in GPS feature and encodes each photo with information on where in the world it was taken. Special software can then automatically use that information to enable, for example, special travel-photo blogs that bring up photos when you click on locations on a map.

A VOICEMAIL system that labels messages according to the caller's tone of voice could soon be helping people identify which messages are the most urgent. The software, called Emotive Alert, is designed by Zeynep Inanoglu and Ron Caneel of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It might be installed at the phone exchange or in an intelligent answering machine, where it will listen to incoming messages and send the recipient a text message along with an emoticon indicating whether the message is urgent, happy, excited or formal.

It works by extracting the distribution of volume, pitch and speech rate - the ratio of words to pauses - in the first 10 seconds of each message, and then comparing them with eight stored "acoustical fingerprints" that roughly represent eight emotional states: urgent or not urgent; formal or informal; happy or sad; excited or calm.

The fingerprints were created by "learning" software, which was fed hundreds of snippets from old voicemail messages that had been assigned emotional labels by the researchers. In use, the software looks for the acoustical fingerprint that is closest to the characteristics of the voice message and sends the recipient the corresponding emoticon. It also sends a text message indicating the two best-matching emotional labels.

(Continued at bTang ReBlog)

found out yesterday that there’s a shuffle shortage and gadget battery life can only be expected to get worse.  bummer.  at least you can make the most of your waiting-for-shuffle blues and solder yourself a ‘usb battery’.  this little gizmo runs off a 9 volt battery and supplies your favorite little device with the proper 5 volts of mobile power.

(Continued at hack a day)

We've been hearing about "convergence" for so long it's become something of a joke. It's even gone out of style and come back into style... and yet most of the "convergence" we see is still very simple basic convergence rather than anything serious. So, what's holding up convergence? Control. In almost every area where convergence efforts have stalled, it's because of some issue having to do with who "controls" what. How do companies "control" the content via copy protection? Who "controls" the patents that go into this particular standard? Who "controls" the rights to make this particular device work with that particular device. Standards get delayed, products don't get used, and nothing works with each other because someone, somewhere is always worried about control. The end result is that no one actually gets what they want. More open systems, more trusting of the users, more understanding of new business models could help to move convergence forward -- but it will never get anywhere as long as so many companies are so focused on who controls what.

eXeem, the joint venture between Swarm Systems and the late lamented SuprNova, is being promoted as the hottest download of the year and promises to bring all the benefits of BitTorrent swarming, but without the use of problematic Torrent websites, says Slyck s Michael Ingram.

BUT there s a but: optional and compulsory adware installs.

I made eXeem Lite because eXeem has Cydoor spyware that installs on your pc every time you start it up, Dan (who didn t want to reveal his full name) told Slyck.

He believes Cydoor adware with a cookie tracker and a banner will be packed into the full version of eXeem and on top of that, The optional adware will pose a further threat to new users, who are unlikely to receive a clear warning about any dangers of the additional files, says Ingram.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

"ABC News Now aired Sprint 'Video Mail' clips captured from the cell phones of nearly two dozen participants along the inaugural parade route. Some of the Sprint folks sent video clips from aboard parade floats and in marching units. Innovative, yet I'm curious to see how much the video clips will add to ABC News Now's coverage. UPDATE: Just watched a 30-second, edited clip narrated by someone who chronicled his early-morning journey to the parade route. Very poor quality, but it was watchable -- and the video did add a 'citizen journalism' flavor to the coverage. A good first step. We'll see a lot more of this as technology improves."

There's plainly a need for greater education of what I've been calling the "former audience," the people who until recently have been nothing but consumers of news. They now have greater opportunity to put together news reports, from a variety of sources, replacing the static and linear products of a manufacturing age of news. More important, they can be part of the process: part of a conversation and a community. Many will be.

Education and assistance to the former audience will be a piece of the enterprise I'm going to be creating, and I'm all ears on how to approach it.

Much more on this in days ahead...

Congrats to Jason Calacanis - our winner of the week. One of his blogs, autoblog, turned down the opportunity to run VW's suicide bomber ad. Increasingly I believe that the big blog networks - Corante, Nick Denton's Gawker Media and Calacanis' company - will begin to distance themselves from other bloggers. They will operate more like mainstream media outlets with profits (yes, that's right - profits) and reader/advertising franchises that they will do anything to protect. This will also mean they will take fewer big risks - both with their editorial and their advertising - at least until the laws give them the same protections that the mainstream press have had for years.

The Project for Open Source Media is an independent research and development company doing business in three primary areas. The construction and distribution of the Open Media Platform, an open source platform for the development and distribution of next generation television technologies. Providing consulting services to entities wishing to develop next generation television content and applications either on the Open Media Platform or on proprietary platforms such as TiVo and Open TV. The development of next generation television content and applications either on the Open Media Platform or on proprietary platforms.

Michael Powell is resigning as FCC chairman.

I fear that the future will be only worse. As critical as I have been -- justifiably -- of Powell, I know that that in his soul of souls, Powell understands the value of the First Amendment. His successor may not. I fear that the White House and Congress -- from, yes, both parties -- will only amplify the looney voice of a few who would continue to limit our free speech on our airwaves.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's assessment of his tenure.

: I just did a quickie interview on ABC Radio New on Powell.

: Just got email from Jon Bonne at MSNBCi (four chairs to my left):

isn't it amazing that the Powell news broke on the WSJ ed page? the WSJ ed page folks are certainly intrepid journalists in their own right, but i interpret this as a signal from the Bush corps that breaking news can easily be routed around the newsroom and straight to their fellow ideological counterparts. not quite as much as breaking it on a blog, but this has a very different (though not entirely so) resonance as the Juanita Broaddrick episode.

Sony has submitted the UMD optical disc as an official standard for movies and and software, allowing other companies to produce content that will play on the Sony PSP (as well as new devices that would support the format). The 1.8GB discs aren't a bad format, but it's impossible to say what desire other companies have to produce movie playback devices that use a rotating optical disc standard (especially after paying licensing fees to Sony). Nevertheless, MiniDisc was popular in Japan, and it is similar, and it does mean it's much more likely to see movies and other content from studios that aren't named "Sony *"

Sony Considers Opening PSP [PCWorld via PSP411]

I recently wrote a paper (draft) that builds on previous posts on GTxA on procedural literacy (1 2). It argues that New Media scholars and practitioners must be procedurally literate (which includes knowing how to program), and that games (and game-like artifacts), because of their fundamentally procedural nature, can serve as ideal objects around which to organize a New Media-centric introduction to Computer Science. I welcome any comments on the draft.

video that uses intercepted wireless cctv feeds to document an Amsterdam antiwar march

Literally, the XML chiclet. Get rid of it.

Why do you have a link to a machine-only readable file on your web page? Hello, your users aren't machines.

The machines, however, already have this information, it's encoded in machine-readable form in your web page. (If not, go read [insert auto-discovery tutorial here]).

If you already have an aggregator, you already have one-click subscription. (If not, talk to your aggregator author, it's a common feature).

Go read Dave Winer's The solution to the Yahoo problem again. Cut out the middleman, steps three and four.

Keep steps one and two, but strip them bare.

In the future we will tell our children how quaint and restrictive the 'net of today is ...

"Neide is 14. After school and before going to work with her sister, she passes by the public Internet center in Vila Tiradentes, Brazil, and notices that 11 people have already accessed the sovereign services she set up the day before. She doesn't have a PC at home, let alone fast Internet access, nor does she have money for web hosting. This is why she had used a free host called Geocities before, which benefited by placing ads on her site. However she has a classmate, Pedro, whose father owns a shop where he has a PC and fast Internet. With Pedro and another 4 friends that she met on the net, she got 7MHz worth of processing power and some 20MB of HD space in all. In fact she got twice as much, but she let half of it to Gladson, Maicon and Carla, three other visitors of the Internet center. They are younger than Neide and she is teaching them the first steps in computers.

Neide's story is only just beginning."

Including technology and connection making as learning activities begins to move learning theories into a digital age. George Siemens advances a theory of learning that is consistent with the needs of the twenty first century. His theory takes into account trends in learning, the use of technology and networks, and the diminishing half-life of knowledge.

We can no longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections. A network can simply be defined as connections between entities. Computer networks, power grids, and social networks all function on the simple principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole. Alterations within the network have ripple effects on the whole.

Principles of connectivism:
Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

read the full article in the International Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning (January 2005, Vol 2. No. 1)

Film — as opposed to digital formats like High Definition (HD) or mini-DV — remains the shooting format of choice at the Sundance Film Festival, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The article does not consider the implications: the 'independent' film movement has become a rich man's game — and therefore not really that independent. All of the film formats mentioned in the article — 35mm, 16mm, Super16 — are outrageously expensive for independent filmmakers in comparison to the newer digital formats (although certain forms of High Definition can still burn a hole in your pocket). It's therefore difficult to believe that what you're seeing at Sundance is really representative of the 'independent' filmmaking going on out there — as few people under thirty these days are choosing to shoot on film.

Two Plead Guilty to Online File-Sharing

Two men pleaded guilty to federal charges in what authorities said were the first convictions for online file-sharing of music, movies and software over peer-to-peer networks.

Converge Digest takes a look at new developments in solidifying the VDSL2 (Very-High-Bit-Rate DSL) standard. VDSL2, which under ideal circumstances can offer symmetrical 100Mbps speeds, is a less expensive solution than running fiber straight to the home. While Verizon is exploring the latter option, companies like SBC are exploring ADSL2+ in trials. Since VDSL2 uses DMT (Discrete Multi-Tone), it should be an easy upgrade path for companies tinkering with fiber to the curb and ADSL2 to the home.

DOMForm is a Python module for web scraping and web testing. It knows how to evaluate embedded JavaScript code in response to appropriate events.

Tarawa is an Web server API, similar to Java's Servlet interface; it provides an abstraction of the Web server that allows you to easily write Web applications, without knowing the details of the HTTP protocol.

I've been trying to come up with a good general recommendation for how people should advertise their torrents on their blogs and webpages. The overall problem is overload. Per each entry item you start with at least the direct link to the content (.mp3, .avi, .etc). On top of this now you also want to direct people to the torrent for that item to try to save your bandwidth. Do you link to the .torrent itself or link to the details page for that torrent or link to your enclosure enabled torrent feed? It's a good thing to have these problems and all these choices, but a good web interface is both concise and consistent.

Linking to the .torrent seems the best thing to do as this ultimately shortens the distance between your audience and your content which drives downloads. I've noticed at least on the Prodigem tracker that people that put direct links to .torrents do in fact get more activity. Over on one of In.the.Trenches, I posted a comment about this where I noticed a lack of a direct .torrent link was having a negative impact on use. Kevin brings up a point about the need for merging all these feeds that people keep aquiring for their content. This is an interesting idea ... the superfeed, which is created by melting all your feeds together into a multiple enclosure per entry format...

(Continued at Torrentocracy Blog)

Zachary Rodgers with ClickZ just published the second part of his two part series on measuring blog marketing.

Big brands are quickly adopting either official or C-level blogs. Google and Yahoo! maintain company blogs. Microsoft supports both official blogs and individual employee blogs. Executives at General Motors, Sun Microsystems and Jupitermedia all write blogs of their own. And smaller companies are using the medium to raise their profile; some even hope to generate sales. But are they working? How can one tell?

Uber PR blogger Steve Rubel is quoted throughout.  An interesting read and something I'll be blogging more about in the days to come.

Rebecca Blood takes a thoughtful look at how software developments are driving the evolution of blogs into densely interconnected online communities:

In early 2000, Blogger introduced an innovation that would forever change the face of weblogs: the permalink. From the start, webloggers had frequently referenced other blogs. It was awkward ("Scroll down to the third entry on September 12th") but this crossblog talk was so compelling it became a primary focus of entire weblog clusters. Permalinks gave each blog entry a permanent location at which it could be referenced--a distinct URL...[T]he feature was so useful that it became a canonical component of the standard weblog entry...

To some extent, the permalink also elevated weblog commentary to a legitimate form of discourse. A link is, after all, a link. Whether it leads to a weblog entry or a syndicated column, each link on a page has equal weight. If the nature of weblogs is to democratize publishing, perhaps the nature of hypertext is to equalize influence, at least within the context of the page.

WiMAX Forum's plugfest -- scheduled for this month -- has been delayed for about 6 months, reports America's Network. Chipmakers like Intel and Fujitsu have yet to release the crucial silicon. Without silicon, there's not much to test.

Plugfests for 802.16-2004, explains Telephony Magazine, have been rescheduled for June or July. Meanwhile, many vendors are opting to go ahead with their own interoperability testing separate from the WiMAX Forum's officially sanctioned event says American's Network.

At last week's annual WCA Conference, many broadband wireless equipment vendors also announced "pre 802.16e", the mobility flavor of WiMax. That version of the standard is not expected to yield equipment until the second half of 2006.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

In a positive note of recognition for an emerging section of the blogosphere, Rich Karlgaard at Forbes has named video blogs as one of his three pics for tech trends in 2005, stating “this year video Weblogs are sure to be the “it” thing".

In justifying the decision he sites a number of Tsunami video blogs and the clip of comedian Jon Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire in October as examples where Video Blogs are making an impact.

Which is true, both examples demonstrate where blogs utilising video saw large amounts in traffic.

However, two examples do not equal a tech trend.

This is not to say that sometime in the near future (2-5 years) video blogs will be the “it” trend.

There are three reasons:

(Continued at The Blog Herald)

What is The Message draws a clear picture of the Academic McLuhan. It points to The McLuhan Program home page, and the McLuhan Program Blog, called (appropriately) What's the Message? The site contains observations and papers and, most interestingly, a link to the Mind, Media and Society blog.

For those who are interested in more traditional - that is P.O.B.-oriented - scholarship, you may be interested in a new paper by Mark Federman that discovers and offers a proof for The Fifth Law of Media [pdf].

Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious aware ness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have "social consciousness" presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (Understanding Media, p. 47)

via OLDaily - By Stephen Downes

Usability is the measure of the quality of a user's experience when interacting with a product or system, whether a Web site, a software application, mobile technology, or any user-operated device.

The Element type is a simple but flexible container object, designed to store hierarchical data structures, such as simplified XML infosets, in memory. The element type can be described as a cross between a Python list and a Python dictionary.

In commenting on an item I wrote yesterday, Barb Iverson brought up an important issue: "When the citizen bloggers get over the initial excitement of seeing their work online, and begin to realize it takes time and that they are part of the audience draw, won't they think about getting paid for their work? Are you thinking about micropayments for the best as time goes on?"

The idea of identifying your best citizen journalists and paying them as they continue contributing isn't a bad one. (Such good repeat performers become somewhere in between non-paid citizen reporters and professional staff.) (...)

Entry continued...

A list of sources for pretty much everything. Online since 1994.

The Globe and Mail: How copyright could be killing culture
The high cost of getting permission to use archival footage and photos threatens to put makers of documentaries out of business

I'll say it does. This article shows how the definitive documentary on the American civil rights struggle, Eyes on the Prize, may no longer be sold or broadcast because archival footage rights have expired. (See also Wired News article)

A study from American University underscores the problem: Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers

In it's current form, I could not afford to legally distribute or broadcast Blogumentary. I own most of the footage, and thank God for the Prelinger archive - but licensing some of the news footage would be prohibitively expensive for me alone. Some of the footage I'd argue is fair use, since the film is media criticism. But other clips are there to help tell the story. Either way, if I was legally challenged I can't afford a lawyer.

(Continued at Blogumentary)

A new study released by Deloitte's Media and Telecommunications division points to a future in which mass marketing shifts to micro targeting. While not surprising, the report speaks to the convergence of of media and the continual merging of electronic devices into one, through which all content will flow - likely the cell phone. Along with the merging of devices will be the transference off all media to digital form coupled with the rise in consumer conversation afforded by weblogs and wikis. This nichification of content will be fast followed by the nichification of advertising.

If we are to preserve journalism and its social-service functions, maybe we would be wise not to focus too much on traditional media. The death spiral might be irreversible. We should look for ways to keep the spirit and tradition of socially responsible journalism alive until it finds a home in some new media form whose nature we can only guess at today.

A video by Brigid Maher, "Stories Untold" is a crisp introduction to the issues of copyright and rights clearance. It combines clips of endangered or altered films, interviews with filmmakers, and animation illustrating the kinds of problems filmmakers have in clearing rights for documentaries. All quoted material in the film was used by invoking fair use. The 8-minute video is designed both for teaching and for discussions. "This is a terrific tool," said filmmaker Peter Wintonick. "I want every doc filmmaker to see it. We need to be able to tell more people why this matters to them, and this shows it to them." Stories Untold [Listen Up! Newsblog]

Icuiti has announced the North American introduction of its V920 Video Eyewear product, a binocular video display which offers semi-immersive viewing of both 2D and stereoscopic video. Offering VGA resolution, the V920 accepts several types of video in, and can be powered both by a pair of AA batteries or directly over USB when connected to a PC.

Weighing in at a slinky 3.5 oz or 99 g, the V920 is to proffer an image equal to viewing a 42" display at a distance of 7 feet. Two LCD displays offer 24-bit colour depth at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, for which focal adjustment can be carried out independently. Worn as a pair of conventional glasses, the V920 also provides stereo audio through a pair of detachable, adjustable headphones.



(Continued at infoSync World)

Unfortunately, right now, this story is only appearing in the Wall Street Journal, so most people won't be able to read it. I'm assuming it'll get picked up elsewhere during the day, and will add an open link as soon as I can find one. However, the WSJ is reporting that most of the major consumer electronics firms have agreed to team up and develop a single copy protection standard. Sony, Samsung, Philips and Matsushita, along with copy protection company Intertrust, are joining together in what they call the "Marlin Joint Development Association." For a while, it had seemed like the consumer electronics industry was fighting the good fight for its customers, knowing that locked down equipment is much less valuable -- even if it costs more to build. However, they've apparently been misled into believing they need to do this. The end results will be the same as with all attempts at copy protection. The real "criminals" looking to make and sell counterfeit copies will get around it pretty quickly, and any content will end up being available online in record time -- where it will be accessible to anyone. The only people this will actually impact are those who legitimately bought content and are barred from doing something basic with it, such as making it accessible in the way they want to interact with the content. Even an analyst at Gartner is surprised at this move, noting: "If I'm a user, I'm wondering, is this going to make things more complicated for me?" In fact, if it gets complicated and doesn't work right, people are simply going to go online to download the same content that's there and available for free. You may also recall that many of these companies worked together in the past to let their various copy protection technologies work together well. That did wonders, didn't it? Update: Here's the press release about it.

Texas Instruments today announced Samsung Electronics has selected TI's imaging processor technology for the world's first camera phone with a hard disk drive for storing images and video. Samsung, a global leader in telecommunication, semiconductor and digital handsets, has also selected TI imaging processor technology for three additional camera phones.Samsung has chosen TI s OMAP-DM270 processor, an extension to TI s widely adopted OMAP processor portfolio, to power its new camera phone model. The camera phone with hard-disk drive includes a video-on demand feature.

DaimlerChrysler's Smart claims to be the first car manufacturer in the UK, and possibly the world, to use SMS responses in its TV advertising, allowing viewers to arrange test drives, request brochures or locate dealers by sending text messages from their mobile phones, reports Just-auto-com.

(Continued at textually.org)

MovieGallery takes care of all your movies in a powerful and easy way. Just drag and drop to organize. Create playlists and watch movies in full-screen. Publish and share your movies on the web and on mobile phones with playlists, preview thumbnails, information and everything intact, in just a few simple steps. You can even work with multiple galleries simultaneously. In contradiction to almost all other shoe-box applications MovieGallery is designed as a document-based application.

The target reader of these pages is non-technical, but this does not mean that technical people would not benefit from being exposed to the breadth of issues laid down in these pages. Non-technical people are warned that, since these pages deal with matters that are strongly influenced by very sophisticated technologies, some understanding of them will be required, if knowledge is not to be reduced to thin air and tool building to apodictic statements. In order not to scare these readers, I guarantee that efforts have been made to reduce technical explanations to the minimum necessary to provide baseline knowledge about the issues considered substantiating arguments.

David Berlind at ZD Net is putting his interviews online in podcast form so that readers can check his reporting. See the special report, Media credibility: Where podcasting meets transparency.

Imagine a time when you get The New York Times and listen to the reporters' research to get your own insight into the source material.

An XML Reading Quicktime Linker Movie is a Quicktime-based tool for reading XML playlists.

As I understand it - Vloggercon is booked solid.

That's a trick many NYers do - make something look so coolio and exclusive that EVERYONE wants to attend.

:-)

Anyway - for those of you who can't get in - feel free to come to Katz's Deli Friday night at 7. We'll be holding a "micro-content" dinner - to dicuss how video blogging is part of the future - and ourmedia.org - which will be live - by then.

:-)

Meanwhile I'm so dam busy making that all happen and then I go to Blog Business Summitt - that I haven't had time to blog recently.

Sorry.

While the headline might seem a bit extreme, it seems accurate. A California state Senator with ties to Hollywood has introduced a law that could mean jailtime for any developer of a file sharing application. That's right -- it's not about anyone who actually used the app to do something illegal, but whoever develops an application. This, despite the fact that courts have found repeatedly that you can't blame the application for the fact that some people misuse it. So why is Professor Ed Felten at risk? Well, he recently wrote a file sharing application in all of 15 lines of code. The purpose, of course, was to show that the concept of regulating file sharing by banning the creation of such applications was ridiculous and anti-innovation. By the way, if you're wondering where you've heard of State Senator Kevin Murray before, he's the politician who also made it illegal to send any media file in California anonymously. Despite the questionable basis for such a law (and the fact that it probably violates other laws concerning privacy -- especially with respect to children), it appears that Murray doesn't really care about the facts of the situation, but just that folks in the entertainment industry are happy with all the laws he's passed in their favor. Anyway, based on my reading of the actual proposal, it would also threaten to put anyone who has written FTP software and possibly even web browsers in jail. Maybe his next law will simply outlaw the internet, and force us all to watch broadcast content instead. That would really help, wouldn't it?

Mark Potts , founder of WashingtonPost.com and Susan DeFife, founder of WomenConnect.com, are reported to be fundraising for a new startup with a March launch date to be based in Washington DC. The startup, Backfence.com, a network of blogs and news posts aimed at local news. The current goal is to have ten town sites up and running within 2 to 3 years.

A post to the Google Weblog has confirmed earlier rumours that it has adopted the rel="nofollow” tag that will see the effectiveness of comment spam diminish as it is adopted by major blogging tools. When Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on links, in this case from the comment section of blogs, those links won’t get any credit when they rank websites in their search results, and the spammers will have lost their main incentive to spam blogs. On board include SixApart, SixApart LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, Scripting News and Blosxom.

(And add Yahoo and MSN to the list. -kc.)

In UK, the TV licensing authority is looking to charge mobile handset owners if their phone can receive live TV broadcasts As the law stands the owner of any device which is capable of receiving live transmissions will need to purchase a licence for it. At present 3G networks like 3 only transmit video clips but there are moves towards launching handsets capable of receiving (and recording) live TV.

Mark Glazer says the Media Blogger's Association's Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative, which has already served more than 2 million videos, is "a tantalizing prospect for distributing future citizen video."

Beyond the generous donations from hosting companies, the Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative also broke new ground by brokering a deal between washingtonpost.com and bloggers who needed bandwidth. Tom Kennedy, managing editor of multimedia at washingtonpost.com, told me the alliance makes sense for all involved.

"I think it's important for mainstream media companies to figure out a way to work cooperatively with bloggers, and I think it's in our interests to do that," Kennedy said.

(Continued at CyberJournalist.net)

Jon Dube points to a group of bloggers and journalists who are gathering at Harvard on Jan. 21 and 22 for a conference on how journalism is being transformed by blogging, entitled "Blogging, Journalism and Credibility: Battleground and Common Ground." The invitation-only conference is being organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, the American Library Association's Office of Information Technology and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. However there will be a webcast so that people can participate remotely in the discussion.

Motorola has made two deals focused on digital home, in the last two days:

-- DVN Holdings: A subsidiary of Motorola has invested an additional $7.5m into DVN (Holdings), a media technology company in China. DVN specializes in the development of digital broadcast platforms for cable pay TV operators in China.

-- Ucentric Systems: Moto has also acquired media networking software provider Ucentric Systems, for an undisclosed sum. The company raised more than $30 million in venture financing from Waltham-based Polaris Venture Partners and other firms in the last five years of its existence.

InternetNews: Ucentric provides access to stored digital content -- such as high-definition video on a digital video recorder, music on a hard drive, or pictures on a laptop -- from any connected device in the home.

Coverage of the tsunami - particularly the aftermath - served to illustrate that instantaneous opinion and reaction is part of the new landscape of information consumption.

You could soon be able to remotely control your PC using your mobile phone thanks to new software from Toshiba.Toshiba has developed software to remotely operate a PC using a mobile phone over a cellular network. The software, called Ubiquitous Viewer, is installed on the mobile phone and on a client computer running Windows and re-creates the desktop of a PC or notebook PC on the mobile phone's screen. That allows the user, for example, to read e-mails and edit documents held on computer.

So Samsung has made a 5-inch flexible LCD panel out of plastic (most LCDs are made of glass) that weighs a scant 0.8 ounces and has a resolution of 400 x 300. Samsung is looking to roll out (pun intended) the first flexible displays by 2007, with the first applications expected to be for notebook computers and portable consumer electronics.

Fox.com joins ABC.com with promotional video clips that automatically play when you punch up the home page. A good use of video for network TV sites, but ABC.com's clip now starts with an ad. An ad before a promo?

To nobody's surprise, Bit Torrent trading has rolled on despite the recent MPAA/RIAA crackdowns and the closure of several of the most popular Torrent sites. P2P site Slyck notes the closures simply shifted the Torrent piracy around a bit, to other websites. Of course the primary trading still goes on via IRC and Newsgroups, areas against which the entertainment industry has yet to launch serious offensives.

It’s getting closer now:

eXeem is going to be released THIS week (from 17th to 24th January)

It's time to punch a hole in the belief that over-the-air television is free.

The Los Angeles Times reports on how broadcasters are searching for ways to have the public pay for their so-called free television. In the wake of ad-skipping made possible through DVRs, the networks want to know whether viewers can be persuaded to help pay for programming that they're now getting free.

(Continued at The Pomo Blog)

(As mah pappy still sez, "It's hard for a dog to stop being a dog when all it knows how to be is a dog." -kc.)

A Slashdot reader notes that the Net gives news consumers some advantages over traditional media, "as the user has more control over what to view and when to view it. But how does the future of this utopia look?"

An engaging discussion, looking at matters such as the echo-chamber effect and Darwinistic traits in the news process, ensues. (Slashdot general advice: set your comment filter to 2 for mostly higher quality remarks).

Note, this thread doesn't delve much into the citizen-created journalism I'm pushing here. Bur for most people, just being able to get a better report than they've been getting from traditional sources is an important step forward.

The little secret of digital video recorders is that while they allow you to amass a large collection of movies and TV shows quickly, you still have to find time to watch the material you recorded so effortlessly. For all their merits, these things can't add an extra two hours to each day to help you catch up on this backlog of video.

I met a Harvard Business School student this weekend who said he wants to be the next Rupert Murdoch.  But can there be another Murdoch in this age of disintermediation? 

This student didn't know too much about blogs and the emergence of participatory media. You may be shocked, but actually most businesspeople out there don't know much about this stuff. Blogs and blogging (even from the marketing perspective) do not seem to be part of the HBS curriculum. I was going to email him some links. But I might as well make it an open blog post for anybody who is interested.

So if  you're interested in trying to become a media moghul of the future, you better read this, this, and this (PDF). Just for starters. 

So far I've been pretty fully in armchair economist mode here (is there any better reason for a blog?), but it's time to go beyond the charts and trend stats and actually ask: What kind of TV are we talking about, anyway? Are there, for instance, any examples?

There are. But first, let's crisp up what I mean by Long Tail TV. The definition of the Long Tail in this context is: "content that is not available through traditional distribution channels but could nevertheless find an audience." For the most part, that's niche content. It may not have been niche when it was made or niche everywhere but it counts as niche now where you live.

(Continued at The Long Tail)

Sometimes when Skype rings we scramble to find the headset in time to answer the call. This wouldn’t happen with Actiontec’s Internet Phone Wizard. It connects a regular phone to a computer for making, and receiving, calls using Skype. The box channels the sound through the phone instead of the computer speakers and mic. There’s also some echo-cancellation technology that enhances the quality of the call.

Early build leaked onto the web: Sony may be preparing to release its first PlayStation Portable (PSP) update, if a file that briefly appeared on the web this weekend is what it purports to be: a leaked copy of an early version of the update code.

A Japanese company called Canopus Inc. plans to start selling next month a new USB TV tuner card that lets you tune in TV on a PC. The coolest part is that it has a standard cable connector into which you can attach a included antenna that receives standard TV.

First step: Don't publish one. If you don't want your RSS feed to be read in every RSS reader and news aggregator, if you can't cope with the lack of control, skip it. By their nature, RSS feeds come without a lot of the baggage carried by a web site; that's why people trying to make a living or earn money from their blogs are looking for ways to incorporate advertising into their RSS feeds.

Unhappy with the way a couple of hundred people were seeing his feed in Bloglines and dismayed by the possibility that Bloglines eventually might profit from being able to serve it, attorney Marty Schwimmer, author of the Trademark Blog, asked the service to drop access. They complied and Bloglines subs can no longer read or subscribe to Schwimmer's blog, which is published under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. Schwimmer's reasoning? "I create content in part to promote my law firm, which I cannot do effectively if my contact info is removed. I do not participate in targeted advertising programs because the majority of advertisers that target the keyword 'trademark' are competitors. I cannot prevent such advertising when my page is reproduced and 'framed' by a third party."

(Continued at PaidContent.org)

Marco Montemagno writes Smartmobs: P2P Manifesto is a P2P study that I've done and also a project, released under CC license.

This study (30 pages, available on a dedicated blog, in pdf format or in .torrent/blogtorrent) explains why:

- P2P is unstoppable
- P2P is positive for companies
- P2P is positive for the market
- P2P is good for users

All the readers can create their own P2P Manifesto, free to edit this original P2P manifesto.

The idea is to then collect on the blog all the different P2P Manifesto's releases, to create a good knowledge base point about P2P issues.

ps: Smart Mobs is one of the suggested link

Thank you Marco !

Because there simply aren't enough different and incompatible music download stores out there already, a number of radio broadcasters are considering plans to enter the game as well. Of course, they hope to leverage their existing broadcasts by allowing users to immediately download a track they're listening to being broadcast. It's an interesting concept in theory, but considering the hodge-podge of different copy protection technologies, music download stores and devices, you have to wonder if people are going to simply declare that they've had enough. Who wants to worry that the CD they bought at Tower Records only works on Tower-certified CD players?

A research group at University of Maryland has published a blog describing the latest approach for finding and indexing Semantic Web Documents. They have published it in reaction to Peter Norvig's (director of search quality at Google) view on the Semantic Web (Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't): 'A friend of mine [from UMBC] just asked can I send him all the URLs on the web that have dot-RDF, dot-OWL, and a couple other extensions on them; he couldn't find them all. I looked, and it turns out there's only around 200,000 of them. That's about 0.005% of the web. We've got a ways to go.'"

This writeup from Engadget sums up my feelings about a story in the New York Times:

Ok, now we understand why TiVo CEO Michael Ramsay was promoted out of his job last week. You know how people have been telling TiVo how the only way they're going to survive would be to convince some a cable company to license their digital video recorder software for use on set-top boxes? Yeah, well according to the New York Times last summer they were about to score a big deal with Comcast to do precisely this, that is until Ramsay pulled the plug at the last moment because he was convinced TiVo wasn't getting paid enough money or given enough control over the service.

Remember how DirecTV accounts for 2,000,000 of TiVo's 3,000,000 customers and TiVo lost that relationship?  TiVo was negotiating with Comcast last summer and offered less than the $1/month that they get from DirecTV, so Michael Ramsay decided to walk away.

Now it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback in situations like this, but hasn't a big cable company deal been the dream all along? And in spite of sub-dollar monthly fees, couldn't the Tahiti strategy be an alternate revenue source for those customers?

To be fair, if the Comcast deal had been inked and then TiVo was prevented from introducing innovative products because of their threat to the cable companies we'd all be screaming bloody murder.  It's possible (note that word, this is pure speculation) that there was a non-negotiable clause that said something like "Non-Comcast video will not be available on the TiVo" which would have nixed any of the future plans like partnering with content providers.

When the story of TiVo is written, this Comcast negotiation could be the point when the company's outcome was decided.

The Me in Media started, not with TiVo or weblogs, but with the remote control, argues Christine Rosen in her fantastic essay, The Age of Egocasting.

As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.

Now as most of us who debate and deliberate about this customization, might think of it as empowerment of the individual, in reality, Rosen thinks we are losing some of the joys of consuming the very same media. The biggest one being, surprise.

By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they contribute to what might be called “egocasting,” the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste.

She points out very eloquently, like all the egocasting devices, the original purpose of the remote control was to tune out those annoying commercials. Ironic, isn’t it that the PVR was based on the same premise, and if TiVo’s commercial casting antics are any indication, then perhaps we will continue to grapple with the same problem. Rosen also points out that it was 1956 when the remote control was invented but it wasn’t till 1985 when it became a routine accessory for all televisions. 29 years.

Now that’s a long time in Silicon Valley. It is also a cautionary stat, because it tells you how long big ideas, like remote, VCR or DVRs and in the future, the concept of exploding TV will take to proliferate and propagate amongst the masses.

Only a small minority of homes currently own DVRs—about four percent, according to marketing research firm Knowledge Networks. As Advertising Age recently noted, this means that “more homes in the U.S. have outhouses” than these devices.

She finds the same me-power the main reason behind the feverish devotion to IPod and what it has done to change our music listening patterns.

TiVo, iPod, and other technologies of personalization are conditioning us to be the kind of consumers who are, as Joseph Wood Krutch warned long ago, “incapable of anything except habit and prejudice,” with our needs always preemptively satisfied.

Read The Age of Ego Casting/ New Atlantic

Bill Rosenblatt over at DRM Watch has compiled a very useful overview of the state of DRM (inlduing mobile DRM) and content technologies in 2004 and what to expect in 2005…a must read:
– 2004 Year in Review: Online Content Services
– 2004 Year In Review: DRM Standards
– 2004 Year in Review: DRM Technologies
– 2004 Year in Review: Legal Issues

If EA has its way, it will soon become as much of a household name in entertainment as Disney. However, it plans to do so by dominating the videogame industry rather than branching out into film or music. In the short-term, it hopes to double its revenues from their US$3 billion level by 2009, primarily by making the games appeal to a wider audience than they currently do.

In an update to our earlier version of this story, we have now learned that EA has signed a an exclusive deal with ESPN for ESPN-branded games. You may recall that EA stunned gamers last month when they locked up the rights to NFL-based games for five years, granting it exclusive rights to use NFL players, teams, and stadiums in its games. Now EA has scored another such deal that will grant the company a 15-year licenses to develop games based on ESPN's holdings. This comes as a serious blow to Sega Sammy Holdings and Take-Two Interactive Software, with whom ESPN previously dealt.

(Continued at Ars Technica)

I4U has the lowdown on Sony's new line of consumer DV recorders with 16:9 ratio video. Lots of cool new camcorders, and the prices are very reasonable too, with one model (the DCR-HC21) starting at just $400.

Sadly, a Committee to Protect Bloggers is an idea whose time has come, given what is happening to our colleague bloggers in Iran, China, and elsewhere. Its goals:

: We are concerned primarily, though not exclusively, with the well-being of the bloggers themselves. Press freedom is extremely valuable and will be agitated for, but our primary concern is keeping bloggers alive and free.

: We are concerned for them as bloggers, even if some are also journalists or activists.

: We are a group of bloggers, communicating via blogs, about other bloggers. We have some understanding of our fellows that other groups, no matter how well-meaning, cannot. We also have immediate access to the communications power of the blogosphere.

I know nothing about who's behind this; heard about it on Global Voices; eager to hear more.

High street shoppers are to face street marketing teams attempting to download promotional material to their mobile phones, warns The Guardian.

Teams of promotional staff will be given special sashes containing microchips that beam information to the mobile phones of passers-by. The downloads could take the form of electronic money-off vouchers, competition entries or simply the phone number and website address of the company in question.

Hypertag, the company behind the idea, said they have already signed up three clients who would be using the new wearable technology in the next month. One is a retail group and the other two will target crowds at sporting events, offering people a free ringtone for their phone or inviting them to take part in a competition.

Ms Harker, one of three directors who co-founded Hypertag, insisted consumers would always have to give their consent to receive information from the promotional teams. "You have got to decided you want to interact. We did a lot of consumer research before we launched and we know that if they broadcast anything to their phone that they haven't asked for it will be a real turn-off." She predicted the technology could soon replace leaflets and flyers.

Related entry:
- Field marketers armed with electronic tags.

Andy Carvin discusses mobcasting -- combining mobile phone-enabled podcasting with smart mob-like group action to cover events simultaneously and from a variety of perspectives. Mobcasting would also allow groups of citizens to distribute their coverage instantaneously to a centralized website via RSS. This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, writes Carvin, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting.

James D Miller believes that although the Blogosphere can politically polarize audiences, in the end it will reduce political differences among Americans. Why? Because the web is replete with blogs that bypass traditional ideological divides and, like the best Internet dating services, engage individuals who share opinions on certain issues but vary on others. This is the best way to open up more democratic discourse, Miller argues, and to test one's own political views. In doing so, blogs can begin to disassemble traditional media's bi-partisan divide, which often sees everyone as following one or the other party line.

Miller's own line contradicts that of Cass R. Sunstein, who argues that the process of web "filtering" segregates people into more isolated niche communities -- where they're exposed to very few other opinions and become ever more entrenched with their narrow beliefs.

More evidence we're living in a new media world with few rules. David Akin notes that The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Daily Kos and another blog received $3,000 a month for four months from the Howard Dean campaign.

The story reports that the bloggers disclosed on their blogs that they received funds from the Dean campaign.

UPDATED 1/16/05: Daily Kos yesterday posted the Dean campaign's side of the WSJ story.

Over on PressThink, Jay Rosen tries to put another nail in the coffin of the ever-absurd debate of "bloggers vs. journalism" (Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over). Read the whole thing.

(Continued at The Importance of...)

Are feeds implied licenses, or can they alter express ones? I don't think there's an easy answer, but a court could be asked this question before long as businesses built on RSS continue to explore what they can and should be doing with the material they aggregate. Marty Schwimmer (Bloglines, no thanks), Dennis Kennedy (don't make me put ads in my feed), and Robert Scoble (people who live in full post houses shouldn't throw republication stones) have more. Mark Fletcher expands and contracts.

The mission of the Center for Community Journalism is to foster effective community journalism by training working journalists and forging a link between academia and the world of community journalism that strengthens both.

Freeplay, the same eco-friendly company that makes the Jonta wind-up flashlight, has another human-powered invention, dubbed the Lifeline radio. But unlike other solar- and crank-driven products from Freeplay, you can't buy this one, at least not for yourself. Instead, each $55 purchase pays for one of the AM/FM/Shortwave receivers to be shipped to a developing nation, where communication with others in their country can open up opportunities for learning, better ways to deal with disasters, and a young sharecropper's first taste of The Stooges—can you put a price on the future of rock?

Lifeline Product Page [Freeplay via TreeHugger]

Instant Radio Feedback From Your Cell Phone

Nokia is set to introduce mobile phone technology that allows listeners to send instant feedback on songs to radio stations, as well as compete in contests. The new phones will have what is called "visual radio" capabilities, according to a Financial Times report. The new technology lets stations send information directly to listeners' mobile phone screens during a song, ranging from a picture of the artist to polls asking the listener to rate the song. Replies are instantaneously sent back to the station.

(...)

Nokia's Reidar Wasenius told Financial Times: "This is a potential disrupter to the music industry business model. Rather than radio stations being paid rates based on the estimated number of listeners, they could pay stations based on how many copies of a song they sold. Radio stations could become more like retailers."

See also:
Original Financial Times article: Radio stations dial into instant feedback

Via Adverblog: Nokia introduces the "visual radio"

Technorati announced their new tag search engine recently (more info on that), so I've written a Movable Type plugin that will take an entry's Keywords field and turn them into Technorati tags. If you want to see it in action, look at the sidebar on the top right of this entry.

Download TechnoratiTags 0.2 (zip)

Update: If you have the PerlScript plugin already installed you can achieve the same effect with these instructions.

A movement is afoot for community members to become news producers -- citizen journalists -- and to interact more with members of the mainstream press, creating more of a dialogue then "lecture" format for the news.

This (Digital Divide Network) community will share news and ideas about the citizen journalist movement.

wwiTV.com is an index to streaming media available on the web. We do not provide streaming content ourselves.

A Word macro to turn Word formatting into Wiki markup for the Wikipedia (works with Office X)

Last week the panel investigating CBS's botched reporting about President Bush's military service released its report. The report was offered on the net in PDF format by CBS and its law firm. CBS was rightly commended for its openness in facing up to its past misbehavior and publicizing the report. Many bloggers, in commenting on the report and events that led to it, included quotes from the report.

Yesterday, Ernest Miller noticed that he could no longer copy and paste material from the report PDF into other documents. Seth Finkelstein confirmed that the version of the report on the CBS and law firm websites had been modified. The contents were the same but an Adobe DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) technology had been enabled, to prevent copying and pasting from the report. Apparently CBS (or its lawyers) wanted to make it harder for people to quote from the report.

This is yet another use of DRM that has nothing to do with copyright infringement. Nobody who wanted to copy the report as a whole would do so by copying and pasting -- the report is enormous and the whole thing is available for free online anyway. The only plausible use of copy-and-paste is to quote from the report in order to comment, which is almost certainly fair use.

(CBS might reasonably have wanted to prevent modifications to the report file itself. They could have done this, within Adobe's DRM system, without taking away the ability to copy-and-paste material from the file. But they chose instead to ban both modification and copy-and-paste.)

This sort of thing should not be a public policy problem; but the DMCA makes it one. If the law were neutral about DRM, we could just let the technology take its course. Unfortunately, U.S. law favors the publishers of DRMed material over would-be users of that material. For example, circumventing the DRM on the CBS report, in order to engage in fair-use commentary, may well violate the DMCA. (The DMCA has no fair-use exception, and courts have ruled that a DMCA violation can occur even if there is no copyright infringement.)

(Continud at Freedom to Tinker)

According to DM Europe (via picturephoning), Norwegian TV viewers can now send in video clips from their mobile phones and have them shown on the national TV programme Svisj, an entertainment for youngsters.

NRK television is considering extending the technology to entertainment, sports and news programmes. When newsworthy events occur, any phone with a built-in camcorder can provide video coverage to the broadcaster.

"This means that we have thousands of latent video reporters all over the world," said Gunnar Garfors, director of mobile services at NRK Division of Developments, "and Norwegians take up new technology very early, so mobile videos will be commonplace on TV in a few years' time."

Inclusive:

Technorati just launched Tag Search across blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us and Socialtext wikis. Here's a zeitgeist and a search for social software tags.

(Continued at Many to Many)

XM eyes TiVo, iTunes functions. New patent application filed by satellite radio leader details plans for recording and other capabilities.

How to design a radio without buttons.

The Mouseradio from Germany is a fully functioning radio without buttons. The idea was to use the mouse navigation and to implement it in a radio. Moving the radio vertically changes the volume, moving the radio on the horizontal axis changes the frequency being tuned to. The radio is on, when the black speaker points up in the air.

Here's the video.

Another citizen journalism project, where users send submit news to editors

I'm putting together some notes for my session on the Masses' Media at vloggercon next week and decided to aggregate some comments I'd left on blogs around the web. If there was a better tool for this than my blog, I would have used it. ;p

From CamWorld. Original post- link.

Mail for December 28, 2001

From: Eli Chapman
Subject: metadata

Hello Cam. I see you're getting interested in metadata. I've been stopping by camworld (and reading the cms-list) for sometime now and have always enjoyed your thoughts and insights. I've been working with companies that do media asset management, and have seen the potential power of metadata. BBC and CNN (and the software vendors they work with) are some of the pioneers in this. There's an interesting project on sourceforge (aaf.sourceforge.net) that is moving towards an open format for media and metadata which would allow someone to see how an asset has been used and referenced throughout its entire life.

On a sidenote, I believe there is an opportunity for a new media asset management product which I'd love to see if you were interested in. The goal is to utilize metadata and user-history/interactions thereby creating an intelligent search, retrieval, editing and publishing system for video. At the onset, the system would be made for newsrooms (like BBC and CNN), where I know there is a demand. Much of the system has been developed already. We are going to license SDKs, integrate them together, and then develop the core funcitonality we need. I'm working on the requirements doc right now.

(Continued at ChapmanLogic)

Le Canard Encha n a satirical French newspaper ran an article on the spectacular failure of FT's Livebox a few days ago and I can't resist the pleasure to share the story with English speaking readers.

France Telecom's miracle box supposed to deliver TV and Telephony over the Internet is a fiasco".

(...)Well, the phone did ring: over a 4 months period Wanadoo's hotline has been swamped by 90,000 calls of irate customers. At the other end of the line, helpless CSRs exhausted by daily insults lost it in the end [and went on strike twice in December]. That's the Internet revolution!(...)

While Inventel and Sagem, manufacturers of the Livebox, produced 3,000 pieces a week, FT sold 2,000 boxes a day. Customers had to wait up to 2 months for delivery but had to pay their monthly subscription already.

And then the real troubles began. "I didn't understand the manual therefore I paid 48 for a technician to come on site. He didn't understand anything either and needed 4 hours to get the box to work". "Internet phone? At best cutoffs, at worse nothing!". "MaLigne TV? The image is shaky, disappears, comes back then feezes".(...) "It takes forever to change channel. And when you finally get TV to work, the phone line goes dead".(...) "And I can't even cancel my subscription!" (...) "When I download a large file, I lose the TV signal."(...)

(Contined at noirExtreme)

A little birdie told me that the coolest thing at MacWorld was the LaCie - silverscreen - Multimedia Hard Drive. It's a USB powered hard drive, with a video out snake cable with RCAs, and other standard connectors for playing back video files (MPEG 1, 2, 4) on a TV. It has a remote control that you use to open, play, and browse the videos/files on your drive via the TV. I haven't seen it yet. But it's listing for $329 and is supposed to be available next month. The only negative I see is that it's USB powered- which means you still need a computer nearby when you're playing off the TV. Maybe the USB on the set-top will work. Hmmmm. LaCie! Send unmediated some demo units! We'll add video aggregation to it! Anyone know how they're doing this? Is it one of those multimedia playback browsers?

How about using RSS to deliver classified and calendar listings? Or even personalized news feeds based on keywords and favorite columnists?) Sites likes LISJobs.com, Pickajob.com and RSSJobs.com are already distributing job feeds via RSS....

Andrew Losowsky looked in an article in Guardian at the technology behind the success of Sony PlayStation2's EyeToy. Recently he followed this up in his weblog quoting Gonzalo Frasca, a researcher in computer games at the IT University of Copenhagen who emphasizes the impact of embodied interaction in games.

"With these games, players can use their bodies to communicate, to express themselves," says Gonzalo Frasca, "In addition to your play style, you also have your body language style. For example, some EyeToy players will try to make minimal movements, while others enjoy doing more grotesque ones. Lots of people also enjoy doing movements that are not functional to the game itself, like spinning or jumping, just because it's a cool thing to do and they are aware that they have an audience."

Posted by Gerrit Visser on Smartmobs, originally from OLDaily

"There are two main reasons why it works so well," says Gonzalo Frasca, "The first and obvious reason is that it is extremely easy to learn and it involves a very natural interface: body movements. But the most important reason for its popularity is that it is also a fun game to watch. People make a lot of goofy movements while playing it, so it is very enjoyable for non-participants.

The transformed game structure has some interesting aspects that the original game does not have. In the transformed game, the players have included an element of conscious choice in the rules by including an action where they have to choose whether it is profitable to do calculations to make a piece. Making the right choice depends on cooperation and interaction between group members in the physical space...

The design of both hardware and software for a camera-based interface is a new challenge. Suddenly there is an importance not just on who is playing but exactly where they are doing it, and what the conditions are like in players' front rooms.

Mark Jones:

Steve Rubel is right in that newspapers and magazines are no longer the only information gatekeepers. That's not been the case for a long time, at least in Internet time. The difference in my mind is that traditional media have been joined by bloggers, not overrun by them. The idea that traditional media must accept that they have been eternally backed into a corner by bloggers is, well, propaganda.

Traditional media, like blogs, have their own set of values that determine how news or information is presented. Readers, for want of a better term, give their attention to information sources that either align with or challenge their views, depending on your perspective. My experience shows that people will read your stories if you've got their attention, and importantly if you manage to keep their attention. But does the traditional media have to change? You bet.

Background link: This piece in The Age.

Samsung has announced a new cell phone which interprets motions as commands, allowing the user to dial by writing numbers in the air, and delete unwanted mail by shaking them out. [warrenellis]

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem. Sites that volunteer to run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it. Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects' URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating cache nodes, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

Sanyo was showing off this prototype phone at CES that has a built-in TV tuner. The clamshell screen can be flipped over so television can be watched while it's closed, as well. Don't ask me why, but something clicked inside my brain when I saw this prototype—broadcast TV on a phone could be really great. I might even accept streaming video via EV-DO (something this phone ostensibly supports), but it just doesn't have the same punch—probably because it wouldn't be free.

With their latest assault resulting in the closure of many Bit Torrent websites, the RIAA and MPAA now focus their efforts on original seeds. Via software they've dubbed "First Source" (see press release), BayTSP - an intelligence gathering company employed by the entertainment industry, hopes to better track the first users to upload pirated films, software and music via Bit Torrent and E-Donkey. Slyck has more detail; they also point to this useful analysis of how Bit Torrent operates.

"XSPF Web Music Player is a flash-based web application that uses xspf playlist format to play mp3 songs"

Photospace is an open platform for searching, viewing and annotating digital media in time and space. It is built to handle a large set of media and to provide tools to easily find and use what you are looking for.

This proposal outlines a new XML syntax for RDF that relies only on XML attributes, and so can be easily imported into other markup languages allowing them to carry arbitrary RDF.

TiVo CEO and Co-Founder Mike Ramsay, 55, has announced he will step down as CEO, a position he held for eight years, after a successor is in place. TiVo has been under the gun from cable and satellite operators who have been building their own, non-TiVo technology into set top boxes. On a brighter note, TiVo recently launched TiVoToGo, a product that enables TiVo users to transfer recorded programming to their computers and portable media players. Ramsay says his move has been in the works for some time and is not in reaction to any particular event.

The Philips Streamium SL300i and SL400i are polished wired and wireless digital media hubs capable of handling music, photos, video, and streaming Internet media. They are good (if a bit pricey) solutions that would be better with support for more media formats, album art, and more features on the remote.

An update on the Tsunami Video Hosting Project: we're at more than 1,800,000 videos served in ten days. The work by Robert Cox, the Media Bloggers Association, Alex Yuriev at Zubr Communications, Mirror Image, The Internet Archive, and Washingtonpost.com continues to be astonishing and wonderful. Keep in mind: my original plea was posted on 12/31.

Earlier:OJR's Mark Glaser on the project.

Posted by yatta at 10:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Howard Fineman eulogizes mainstream media and the Fourth Estate, "which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards." Jeff Jarvis doesn't share Fineman's nostalgia. My concern: can Jarvis' emerging Fourth Estate (bloggers, citizen journalists and the like) legitimately challenge the powerful in the same way?

(Also read @ BuzzMachine: The gradual end of TV as we know it)

Rubberduck Media Lab” and Mobile Media have teamed up to bring streaming TV to mobile phones, using technology already in the handsets.

C/Net reports that Intel on Wednesday plans to provide a high-level perspective on the ongoing debate over the role of the public and private sectors in providing broadband services.

In a speech at the Wireless Communications Association in San Jose, Calif., Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney is expected to encourage commercial service providers and public agencies such as city governments and municipalities to work together in building out new broadband infrastructure.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

Fascinating discussion going on over at Don't Lose the Question: Can grassroots news sites ignore copyright during a big news story like the tsunami?

Quite a few of you have written in to tell me that LG's weird 3d gaming phone isn't so weird after all, since it actually opens up to be used like a proper handheld console. That makes a lot more sense. I hereby rescind 'weird' to replace it with 'ugly.' Okay, actually it's not all that ugly, but I don't like the look of the D-Pad.

LG Develops World's Fastest 3D Game-Phone [Chosun]

Hackers are using the newest DRM technology in Microsoft's Windows Media Player to install spyware, adware, dialers and computer viruses on unsuspecting PC users.

Security researchers have detected the appearance of two new Trojans, Trj/WmvDownloader.A and Trj/WmvDownloader.B, in video files circulating on P2P (peer-to-peer) networks.

According to Panda Software, both Trojans take advantage of the new Windows anti-piracy technology to trick users into downloading spyware and adware applications.

Andrew Losowsky looked in an article in Guardian at the technology behind the success of Sony PlayStation2's EyeToy. Recently he followed this up in his weblog quoting Gonzalo Frasca, a researcher in computer games at the IT University of Copenhagen who emphasizes the impact of embodied interaction in games.

"With these games, players can use their bodies to communicate, to express themselves," says Gonzalo Frasca, "In addition to your play style, you also have your body language style. For example, some EyeToy players will try to make minimal movements, while others enjoy doing more grotesque ones. Lots of people also enjoy doing movements that are not functional to the game itself, like spinning or jumping, just because it's a cool thing to do and they are aware that they have an audience."

"There are two main reasons why it works so well," says Gonzalo Frasca, "The first and obvious reason is that it is extremely easy to learn and it involves a very natural interface: body movements. But the most important reason for its popularity is that it is also a fun game to watch. People make a lot of goofy movements while playing it, so it is very enjoyable for non-participants.

The transformed game structure has some interesting aspects that the original game does not have. In the transformed game, the players have included an element of conscious choice in the rules by including an action where they have to choose whether it is profitable to do calculations to make a piece. Making the right choice depends on cooperation and interaction between group members in the physical space...

The design of both hardware and software for a camera-based interface is a new challenge. Suddenly there is an importance not just on who is playing but exactly where they are doing it, and what the conditions are like in players' front rooms.

via Stephen's OLDaily

IBM has announced that it will turn 500 of its software patents over to a "patent commons" that can be freely implemented by anyone. This is big news for free software authors, since it's often impossible for all-volunteer projects to defend themselves from patent infringement claims when there is a bogus software patent (like the thousands that IBM has accumulated) that overlaps with their work. Groklaw's got an excellent piece on this:

IBM has more patents than any of them. And if they have decided to carve out a protected zone for free and open source software, then it will happen. If the proprietary software world is enamored of patents and wishes to continue that system, at least for now, while making an exception for GNU/Linux software, I call that a positive move.

I know some would naturally argue that all software patents are bad. NoSoftwarePatents.org has taken that position and are critical of IBM's pledge.

I think software and patents need to get a divorce myself, but I also see that we are in a period of transition. Old business models are dying, and new ones are coming into being. And if there is a way to allow everyone to make money the way they want to, that may be, for now, as good as it gets. This is a creative response to the particular issue that GNU/Linux faces with patents, and I applaud it.

...More

Always On: "The collective intelligence and power of the blogosphere are bringing accountability and competition to broadcast news and journalism."

Derrick Oien on User Generated Content reflects, through personal experience, on how we are clearly at the dawn of a period where media turns in on itself and we all become Real Time Media Producers and Consumers or Real Time Media Prosumers.

The New York Times: Against the backdrop of the Macworld Exposition in San Francisco this week, a series of legal actions filed by Apple Computer over the last month highlights the difficulties of defining who is a journalist in the age of the Web log.