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.

I spent a few days at CES in Las Vegas last week, mostly to get an impressionistic sense of the hot categories in consumer electronics. Aside from the freakish, seventh-seal scene of snow on the Strip and way, way too many huge plasma flatscreens, what struck me most was the explosion in innovation around freeing TV from its distribution shackles.

As your thumb crawls through your several hundred digital cable channels, TV may appear anything but shackled. Yet it is. What seems like everything imaginable is instead a very thin slice on the video world. The existing channel structure mostly rewards focused programming with enough depth to fill a 24/7 window every day of the year. So the DIY channel and History en Espanol now pass muster, but the Halo 2 Physics Hacks channel does not.  An acceptable loss, you say?  How about last year's great season on Bravo, long ago overwritten by your DVR to save space?

Both the channel-centric reality of TV and its ephemeral nature are artifacts of the distribution bottleneck of cable broadcast.  TV is still in the era of limited shelf space, while the lesson of the Long Tail is that more is always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and the size of the potential microaudiences for anything and everything. TiVo may have helped by at least taking the tyranny of time out of the equation, but we are nowhere near the iTunes  model of being able to download everything ever made, anytime.

(Continued at The Long Tail)

Brian Bailey's Top 10 ideas for how to build a better blog are essential for any beginner or intermediate.

As promised, writer Lex Alexander delivered a detailed report to his editors at The Greensboro News & Record on how to make the newspaper's Web site more of a "public square."

Here are some of the more innovative ideas he listed to better involve the community in the news site and make the newspaper more transparent:

Assign local bloggers to cover in depth some things that we don't -- e.g., community sports by team, business specialties, etc.
Recruit a blogger for each neighborhood from among its residents, a la Waterville, NY, paper.
"Get Me Rewrite!" -- readers re-write stories to emphasize what they believe are the salient points, or to highlight what they think was missing in the published story. Reporters and their editors review those comments to learn.

(Continued at CyberJournalist.net)

Firas has created a Creative Commons plugin for WordPress, perhaps the most popular open source blog software.

Now you can add a CC license to your WordPress blog with just a few clicks.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Can this new model of citizen-journalism and aid coordination be extended to disasters and human tragedies that don t get so much mainstream media attention?

Just last week Samsung announced a speech-to-text phone for the Korean market and somewhat miraculously, the same technology will be available in the US in the next couple of months.


The Samsung SGH-P207 is a tri-band EDGE phone with MPEG4 video recording and voice recognition capabilities that let you text message through dictation. When I talked to some Samsung reps at CES, they told me that like in the Korean models, there would be a version that only worked with canned messages (QuickPhrase) but the SGH-P207 has a dictionary of 50,000 recognizable words. When I asked for a demo, they demurred, telling me that the noise levels in the convention center would make voice recognition impossible. It was of course, a complete circus so this makes sense, but if a little noise renders this useless then I guess I'll be driving with my elbows while I text for a little while longer while they work this out. Kidding, I always try to keep one pinkie on the wheel!


The Samsung ACH-720 does the opposite: it turns text to speech. Again, no demo, but try this one out from AT&T Labs Research to get a feel for the type of messages you might be sending out when you use something like this: TTS Multi-Lingual Demo. Audrey, the female voice from the UK sounds almost human, but the others are pretty funny. And yes I just spent half an hour having this thing say lewd things to me in a variety of accents. Very fun.

Both phones are due out on the Cingular network in early '05. Samsung holds the patents so this type of technology won't be available anywhere else for at least the next year.

Now erase all but 240 of your songs. (Thanks, Boogah!)

Kenosis is a fully-distributed peer-to-peer RPC system built on top of XMLRPC. Nodes are automatically connected to each other via a Kademlia-style network and can route RPC requests efficiently to any online node. Kenosis does not rely on a central server; any Kenosis node can effectively join the network ("bootstrap") from any connected node.

Silicon Color announced that Final Touch HD has shipped at MWSF after being announced at Siggraph. Here are some pictures of the UI (at the end of the page). Unfortunately, my carefully written notes didn't show up on the .Mac page.

It's the most interesting product I've seen at the show so far.

It will do realtime color correction of HD footage with multiple color correction effects,

-it will handle 10 bit footage

-all color correction is done in 32 bit per CHANNEL color space (floating point color correction)

-all color correction is done in RGB

-it can work with proxy files for lower throughput drive systems.

-you can have tracked soft matted color corrections with feathered color vignettes, primary and secondary color correction, and gaussian blur...ALL IN REAL TIME.

This sounds very similar to what Nucoda is doing on the PC side...but this is just $5000 instead of circa $100,000.

(Continued at HD For Indies)

So I went by the Apple booth to get the skinny on the HDV support. I asked about how they were editing long GOP MPEG-2, and the first answer I got was that it was put in a QuickTime wrapper. I asked again how they were handling the 15 frame GOP (group of pictures), and was sent to somebody else, who it turns out was a Shake guy.

He told me that they were using some kind of an interstitial codec, and sent me over to find someone else.

So here's the scoop:

The HDV is read in from the tape in real time, but then it is transcoded to an all i-frame intermediate codec. The reason for this is that within the HDV data structure, one "clean and whole" frame is recorded, then the next 15 frames are recorded as changes from the previous frame. So if you want to know what a frame looks like that is 12 frames after an I-frame, you have to calculate what the prior 12 frames looked like going back to that I-frame. Time consuming and problematic.

So the usual fix for this is to transcode to a different codec.

Apple's codec for this is the Apple Intermediate (or is it Interstitial?) Codec, a 4:2:0 codec that matches the 4:2:0 color space of the HDV footage. It's a compressed codec that is all I-frames, so is easy to edit with.

(Continued at HD For Indies)

The world's most powerful supercomputer likely will evolve into a grid architecture of loosely coupled systems harnessed logically to a single task across a global network.

A grid holds the most promise for delivering the biggest and baddest theoretical supercomputing architecture imaginable, a virtual multiple-instruction/multiple-data, or MIMD, global supercomputer.

Absolutely delights to see that the Media Bloggers Association -- via the good work and offices of Robert Cox -- has established the Bloggers Legal Defense Project and appointed an attorney to go with it.

The Media Bloggers Association announces the appointment of Ronald D. Coleman, of the Coleman Law Firm, PC as general counsel. Coleman will be build a team of attorney around the country to provide MBA members with first-line counsel on matters relating to the use of intellectual property, defamation and other issues arising from their weblogging.

Coleman blogs here.

Only last month, I wished that we had such a thing and Cox et al have made it happen. Bravo!

A quite simple, but powerful technology that empowers individuals to keep control over and manage their digital identities. LID is a mechanism for single sign-on (SSO). LID makes vCards always up-to-date with better privacy LID is a password management tool. LID is a foundation for social networking. And there are many other uses.

Just in case ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber, or iChat (among others) don't get you hot and bothered about instant messaging, Comcast has the solution: yet another IM client! And get this (are you prepared for wild, mind-blowing features?): Comcast's IM client will support video chat! Did I fall into a coma, or is it already 2025?

(Continued at Ars Technica)

Thanks to a helpful comment in the Motorola DVR rolling out to Comcast thread, there's a great step-by-step guide to connecting a mac to the Motorola box via Firewire, extracting the video, playing it back, and even using iCal to schedule recordings. It's basically a complete home theater system for recording, saving, and editing video on a Mac. Another handy guide covers the software and hardware requirements of HDTV, from a mac perspective.

If you've got the new Comcast box and an old G4 laying around, this solution just might be perfect for you.

update: here are some instructions for doing the same process on a PC

Andrew Chen writes: "A couple friends and I did some analysis on the degree of centralization between BitTorrent sites, and put it up on the web. Interestingly, the distribution has a very obvious Long Tail pattern:

Key conclusions:

* Torrent files are extremely centralized, and do follow a Zipf Law-like distribution
* However, instead of 20/80, the distribution is more like 4/80.
* The long tail is very, very long - The number of sites with under 100 torrents numbers close to 87%.

However, on the plus side, BitTorrent has lowered the barrier to creating new P2P networks down to zero..."

Thank you Andrew !

Greg from Beercasting, Michael from ReelReviews, myself, and Alex Williams sat down for an hour and talked about the challenges of podcasting over on EventLab.

I've sent this podcast down my personal channel, which I wouldn't normally do. I just find this conversation to be useful.

Eric Rice wrote me today with a great idea. Why not devise a way for Prodigem to pull content into your account directly from the web? Since most people provide both the hard copy of their content as well as a link to the torrent on their website, why force them to upload the hard copy to their website and then go through the arduous home-upload-speed task of then also uploading it to Prodigem. Done.

You can now pull content into your account directly from the web. You simply tell Prodigem the URL, it goes off and does its thing and when the process is complete it emails you. Thanks, Eric.

TU Media” has started trials of a satellite television service to mobile phones, with 3 video and 6 radio channels. The service is available to customers of SK Telecom in Korea who own a Samsung SCH-B100 handset. It hopes to start commercial services by May 1, but “Our satellite-based mobile television services is a concept never tried before, so we have no existing model to glean knowledge from. This makes our trail services critical,” said TU Media spokesman Huh Jae-young.

“For its commercial service, TU Media plans to provide 14 video and 24 audio channels with a data channel scheduled for release next year. The company…plans to invest 705 billion won ($667 million) over the next five years to develop mobile content and expand program production facilities.”

Willian Powers has certainly written a brilliant article called "The Massless Media" in The Atlantic... but I have no means to read it. Sorry, I can just quote the summary of this piece: "With the mass media losing their audience to smaller, more targeted outlets, we may be headed for an era of noisy, contentious press reminiscent of the 1800s."

Very promising start! And very accurate about segmented and polarized audiences. This phenomenon can be compared to the birth of a new opinionated press in Italy (Il Foglio di Giuliano Ferrara...)

Source: Atlantic online (paid registration required) through mediabistro.com

A joint venture led by Comcast has purchased the North American assets of Liberate, an interactive TV company. "This acquisition, along with our earlier investment in Guideworks and our innovative video on demand platform, will enable Comcast to move faster toward creating a more interactive television experience," said Steve Silva, Comcast EVP of new business development.

There is a need to reference television broadcasts using URIs; this document describes a widely-implemented URI scheme to refer to such broadcasts.

Richard S has mailed the del.icio.us discussion mailing list, drawing our attention to http://oddiophile.com/taggregator/index.php?tag= ,

a nifty way of displaying results from del.icio.us and flickr under the same tag (just complete the 'tag=' parameter in the querystring).

He had wanted to implement just such a "taggregator", but oddiophile got there first.

(Continued at Preoccupations)

Apparently, Sony is developing software that will allow television broadcasts to be playable on the PSP (and laptops) via wireless internet connection.  The technique is called “place-shifting” and will allow users to access content stored on remote locations.  Interestingly enough, the software will be available in North America first.  No word on release date or price.  We’ll keep you posted.

[See also, the DS TV tuner]

"Have you ever wanted to run your own internet radio or TV station, but thought the bandwidth would cost too much? While Wired thinks Peer-to-peer broadcasting, or "peercasting", will be the future of the internet (previously posted); Peercast.org says it's already here today. Peercast's software is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. You can broadcast both audio and video without needing a whole lot of bandwidth since each audience member also uploads back to the network. The Xiph Foundation is also working on a similar project called "IceShare," but it's still in planning. Peercast, still in beta seems to already be fully functional and ready for an audience (even you dial-up guys)."

I finally posted my short review of the dejaview camwear 100 here: http://www.lisaharper.org/archives/2005/01/mydejaview-out-of-the-bx-experience/
http://www.lisaharper.org/archives/2005/01/deja-review/

Well, the first is a warmup post and the second contains a longer movie made up of bits of video.

- Lisa

Greg Elin is at it again. Fotonotes is now a Wiki environment:

to discuss an open specification for image region annotation and managing photos as a plurality of objects.

Greg is also alpha previewing his FNServer framework - which kind of finally exposes his business model strategy.

You see Greg has been proselytizing and spreading the notion of hot spots on photos, standards for photos and what happens when you start interconnecting imagery with ideas and conversations. Best of all - Greg has been giving away these ideas. Folks like Flickr picked up on that - it's one of the coolio features Flickr supports.

But when you see these hot spots on images, you immediately say "dam, if we had a hypermedia server, a Wiki and a way to author to connect images to links to memes to dyanmic processes - man oh man - we'd be there."

Well Greg is working on that. I'll leave it up to him to explain - but for now - let's just say "Flickr in a box, hypermedia server thingie" technology.



(Continued at Marc's Voice)

Anthony Sampson looks over the last 40 years of UK power structure to find that while virtually all other institutions lost status or power -- one branch of public life stood out as having gained power hugely: the media. Sampson adds that this increase in power has inevitably been accompanied by questions about the media's own legitimacy. Journalists are not elected, and are, by and large, distrusted. More and more people are asking: for whom do they really speak? While he survey's media in Great Britain, his findings could easily be applied to those across the Atlantic. Quoteworthy:

From Michael Bichard: "Journalists are powerful people . . .but one of the dangers of power is not so much that it corrupts absolutely, but rather that it can make those who possess it lazy, complacent and arrogant."

From Tony Wright: "Newspapers are being replaced by viewspapers . . . Boundary lines between fact and opinion are being obliterated. Stories are spun to fit an agenda, and many are simply made up."

Sampson concludes: ". . . the more newspapers can engage in public debate with the institutions they criticise, and the more honestly they can represent their concerns, the more they can safeguard their own relationship and credibility with their readers."

Memsen was showing prototypes of their new 'Click 'n' Share' flash memory drives at CES. The concept is simple, but potentially powerful: each flash drive has (presumably) a 'shared' folder, and when two flash drives are within range, just a simple button press will wirelessly transfer the contents of those shared folders. It's only at the point of reference design for now, but Memsen is planning on licensing the idea to other vendors for production soon. I still want to beam songs from iPod to iPod (or even better, iPod to Any Other Storage Drive).

Wireless USB Hooks up USB Flash Drives [EverythingUSB]

New Voices, a "pioneering program to seed innovative citizen media ventures around the country," has some money available for promising new ventures. Details here.

I am OK with this as long as the tax revenue goes into worthwhile things like providing real barebones broadband (10 Mbps bidirectional and up) everywhere at an affordable price and not into general revenue.

From IP Inferno: Tax-Free VoIP Forever! Forever?.:

QUOTE

OK, so what would be realistic and responsible? Kevin Werbach has laid out a pretty good outline for a prudent way to proceed. Specifically, he's talked about a "layered approach" that essentially distinguishes between networks and the applications, like VoIP, that ride on them. That approach could lead to something you might call an Internet tax: Taxing the connection to the consumer, but not the applications that the consumer runs on that connection. The goal is a fairer and more rational regime of regulation, taxes and fees throughout the telecom sector. The way to get there is to discuss the issues and negotiate the specifics. For someone like Jeff, I'd think that now's the time to get involved in that discussion rather than screaming that the sky is falling the first time someone says "tax" and "VoIP" in the same breath.

UNQUOTE

When the future of The New York Times is cast into doubt, perhaps the end for the Mainstream Media is, in fact, really coming. For one, I can't imagine what would replace The Times. But a Business Week story discusses that possibility.

A year ago I ended a talk, which was updated into an article, with a Jay Rosen quote saying, The age of the mass media is just that an age. It doesn t have to last forever.

(Continued at PJNet Today)

I have posted a bunch of updates to the XSPF specification, including a new feature to allow shuffle mode. See http://gonze.com/xspf/xspf-draft-8.html.

The TiVo news just won't stop, and frankly I'm starting to get a little giddy.  The latest bit of information to come out is that TiVo is going to be opening up more to developers.  The three new tools are TiVo Video Publisher, TiVo Multimedia Web Services API and TiVo Service Integration.

TiVo Video Publisher will allow video  creators to provide downloadable content for TiVo.  They talk about how content providers will be able to package and protect their video, but I hope that the amateurs won't be left out of the party.  It would be great to be able to pull up my mom's vacation video as easily as a movie from the big studios.  If they play their cards right they could make a killing off of long tail videos.

TiVo Multimedia Web Services API is a way for web publishers to put their content on the TiVo, the most exciting for me being support for RSS.  Podcasting and videoblogging are starting to get some attention, the TiVo could become the platform of choice for personal media publishing.

TiVo Service Integration is a way for 3rd parties to provide and charge for content on the TiVo.  TiVo users would be able to "purchase/subscribe to" content using their remotes, TiVo would handle billing and customer support.  This opens up a huge market for 3rd party developers to use the TiVo as a platform.

TiVo previously opened up their Home Media Option to allow 3rd party developers to publish media to the TiVo over the LAN.  The most successful project for the Home Media Option is JavaHMO, which many users prefer to the official TiVo Desktop.

O'Reilly and Associates: Blogs are the new journalism and "this blogging thing" is starting to look interesting. (Via the Blog Herald)

The Quicktime Video of the first lecture for Stanford's Toward A Literacy of Cooperation course is online now.

A friend asked me:

If the Supreme Court does away with the Sony doctrine for copyright infringement this year, with what should it replace it? What would be the best way to balance the interests of copyright owners with these emerging technologies?

I believe the best outcome would be for the Supreme Court to uphold the Sony doctrine. Any other outcome will postpone the eventual balancing of competing interests that I believe must come through new legislation.

Here’s why: making P2P services illegal will have no effect on their ubiquity. The technology is too basic and knowledge of the techniques is too widespread. Although specific services may be shut down, hundreds of clones with new security features will reappear in their place, as has happened each time popular P2P services have been shut down in the past.

So: P2P is a given. The question then becomes: how to compensate artists? I believe the best balance can be achieved through an alternative compensation system of the kind espoused by William Fisher. In fact, I believe such a system would compensate artists far better than what we have now.

Unfortunately, the current political climate makes it exceedingly unlikely that the required legislation will come to pass, just as I fear it will result in a neutered Sony doctrine this spring. So the current system will probably stick around for a while, slowly fading into irrelevance, and will eventually be eclipsed by new systems starting from scratch. As Lucas Gonze put it:

Can I just say this? Napster politics are brutally boring. The action right now is in making the music and video owned by the major labels and film studios archaic and unpopular. We’re going to do to those properties what talkies did to silent films, what political bloggers did to Dan Rather, what Elvis did to Mantovani. Our stuff is better, that’s how we’re going to win.

Ross Mayfield writes about “Attention as a Social Fact” as a follow-up to ”Wikipedia: The nature of authority, and a LazyWeb request…“:

”Wikis and blogspace have different approaches for determining what is important. In blogspace, links guide attention which can accrete authority. But controversy and error draws attention and can disinflate authority. This is in stark contrast with wikis, where the goal of your writing is to be ignored — to write for permanence in future edits rather than attention to your Permalink.

Like trust and authority, importance is a social fact. What I think is important (like this post) really does not make it so, but when others do it becomes a social fact. Not fact as in true, but as in worth other’s time and attention.

Referring to Andrew Lih´s ”Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources?”

iPodderSP is a podcast client for Microsoft smart phones.

Once before in my life - Bill Gates and I were in sync on a rising fad. That one was called Multimedia and it went onto being something pretty big.

I got several calls and letter this morning from Vegas telling me that Bill just pitched "Digital Lifestyle" at his annual CES keynote address.

Welcome Bill. So here's an open letter to bill.

First of all - how are you kids? Great! Glad to hear that.

Now 'how yah gonna aggregate' all that stuff Bill?

Are you gonna try and lock it all up under one Microsoft proprietary data silo? I sure hope not. My buddy Kim Cameron told me you're beyond that sort of behavior nowadays.

Or are you going to acknowledge that perhaps us humans are creating our own stuff and we don't necessarily want Hollywood content - exclusively.

Sure - sure - we'll buy some songs and download some movies and we'll even pay for them - but that's not what we're about. We need DLAs to integrate, aggregate and provide customization to our digital lifestyle.

(Continued at Marc's Voice)

I've been waiting for something like this to come out. What is the problem with videophones? People aren t used to holding the handset in front of them while making a call, and what is worse is that the procedure actively annoys them. The answer is to have a screen appear in front of your eyes using a device you wear like glasses, just like in the sci-fi movies. Over at CES 2005 Icuiti Corporation has announced the Icuiti V920 Video Eyewear is available in North America for $499. While that s a huge chunk of cash we ll no doubt see the price fall steadily over the next few years.

(Continued at MocoNews.net)

Real-time data delivery to and from web browsers without refreshing; without installing client-side software; and without Applets, ActiveX, Flash, or Plug-ins. Lightweight web message bus, to relay events between DHTML and server-side scripting languages.

An enterprising bunch of immigrant entrepreneurs have set-up Internet based video conferencing systems that allow New York’s huddles masses to see and communicate with their families in realtime, reports The New York Times.

…it did because of the wizardry of videoconferencing, a technology first devised for chief executives to communicate with their far-flung underlings. The format is slowly becoming popular with the city’s poor immigrants as the most vivid way to communicate with their families back home.

Most of these store fronts have a small room with a computer-driven flat-screen television and a video camera where these video calls are made. Thanks to the easy availability of broadband, and low cost video over IP hook-ups, Philip Kasinitz, a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York very succinctly sums it up when he says

While it cannot recreate the warmth of a relative’s hug or the scent of a cherished child, videoconferencing is a “qualitative leap” in turning the experience of immigration into something less than a permanent break.

I remember my early days in the US, and when I rationed my dollars to make a call every sunday to my parents in India, paying nearly $1.20 a minute to either MCI and AT&T. Oh that was before Joe Nacchio initiated the price wars and destroyed the long distance business. Bad for them, good for us. This is one of the most heart warming stories about technology I have read in many many days.

As we get ready for the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference at Harvard in two weeks, the Poynter Institute's Bill Mitchell weighs in with some important questions. I'll be posting a comment, and encourage others to do so as well.

For the TV industry, CES made it clear that on-demand content will soon dominate the living room. CNN President Jon Klein -- who understands the nuances of on-demand video news -- is positioning CNN's storytelling for the future.

This past week, Klein eliminated the debate show Crossfire and committed to covering hard news with "roll-up-your-sleeves storytelling."

"We report the news. Fox talks about the news," Klein told the New York Times.

It's an important distinction not just for today's ratings battle on cable TV but tomorrow's success in an on-demand environment. From Klein's experience as CEO of The FeedRoom -- an on-demand, broadband news service -- he knows that users would rather click on a well-crafted story (especially with great video) than an excerpt of an interview or reporter live shot. Good storytelling trumps "news talk" day in and day out.

(Continued at Lost Remote)

The Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas uses the credit of "camera phone photo" for an image of firefighters responding to a fire in a pet store (see below).



The photo is tagged "Camera phone photo/Eric Weslander" and the caption identifies the photo as from a camera phone.

Perhaps this isn't a big deal, but it highlights how "citizen photographers" are continuing to snap images used by publications.

Looking at things, a Quicktime videoblog by Jay Dedman, is beautiful.

This month's Wired runs a high-decibel piece by Jeff Howe, on topsites and their denizens:

When Frank ... posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he tapped an international network of people dedicated to propagating stolen files as widely and quickly as possible.

It's all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about "the scene," fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that original file - spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry.

The story paints this as a sort of organized-crime scene, akin to a drug cartel, in which a great many people conspire, via some kind of command-and-control network, to achieve the widest distribution of the product. If true, this would be good news for law enforcers -- if they chopped off the organization's head, "the P2P networks would run dry."

But this is wrong way to interpret the facts, at least as I understand them. The topsites are exclusive clubs whose members compete for status by getting earlier, better content. The main goal is not to seed the common man's P2P net, but to build status and share files within a small group. Smebody on the fringe of the group can grab a file and redistribute it to less exclusive club, as a way of building status within that lesser club. Then somebody on the fringe of that club can redistribute it again; and so on. And so the file diffuses outward from its source, into larger and less exclusive clubs, until eventually everybody can get it. The file is distributed not because of a coordinated conspiracy, but because of the local actions of individuals seeking status. The whole process is organized; but it's organized like a market, not like a firm.

(continued at Freedom To Tinker)

Sales of song downloads overtook those for physical singles for the first time at the end of 2004.

Who do you think? Porn Business Driving DVD Technology [pdf]

As goes pornography, so goes technology. The concept may seem odd, but history has proven the adult entertainment industry to be one of the key drivers of any new technology in home entertainment. Pornography customers have been some of the first to buy home video machines, DVD players and subscribe to high-speed Internet.

One of the next big issues in which pornographers could play a deciding role is the future of high-definition DVDs.

The multi-billion-dollar industry releases about 11,000 titles on DVD each year, giving it tremendous power to sway the battle between two groups of studios and technology companies competing to set standards for the next generation.

As we pointed out yesterday, it appears that Verizon Wireless will launch a new television-over-cellphone service as early as next month. The new service, named VCast, will offer unlimited access to about 300 daily video clips for $15-a-month. The video clips, running from two to five minutes, including many specifically produced for the limitations of a two-inch phone screen, will include NBC news clips, music videos from MTV and the Country Music Channel, and mini-episodes of Fox entertainment programs like "24." One phone Verizon will be promoting for VCast use is a $200 LG VX8000 unit that also has a 1.3 megapixel digital camera with a zoom lens and flash.

Want to MAKE MONEY FAST on open source software? I just realized that the tools to do so are out there and already being used. I'm just here to put names on the things and point you to them.

Dropcash is one of those dead-simple sites that follows the unix philosophy to do one thing really well (although it doesn't read mail, yet). It allows people to create a donation campaign, where they pick how much money they want and then are able to publicize their campaign with tools from the website.

The Street Performer Protocol (Google's HTML version of the full text) is an electronic-commerce mechanism to facilitate the private financing of public works. To describe it in a sentence, someone creating a copyrighted work would publicly set a price for their work and hold it for ransom until their price was met.

The only disconnect between the Street Performer Protocol and Dropcash is that the Street Performer Protocol has a trusted third party hold the money in escrow until the work is delivered. An auction escrow service could probably make a nice market for itself by providing escrow services for Street Performer works, although adding one onto Dropcash might add too much complexity. Still, using Dropcash to put a price on an open source product seems like a great idea, and the market can respond if someone sets a price too high because someone else will see an opportunity to release the same software for a lower price.

(Continued at 90% Crud)

The cool head of Amazon.com talks about the rise of the obscure, taking on Netflix and why he quit spending on TV advertising. By Chris Anderson from Wired magazine.

Website for WFMU Podcasts

I'm looking for some advice. I'm taking some video podcasts and converting them to 3gp format, yet I'm having a few snags:

1. My phone doesn't seem to like the 3GP format that Quicktime Pro converts them to. (I have an i860)
2. What's the easiest way to podcast to phones? Is there an RSS reader that can be installed?
3. Are phones + carriers disjointed so that there's just no all-encompassing solution?

Attached 3GP video is 2.5 MB.

"Helping people share their pictures from any room in their house, Eastman Kodak Company today introduced WiFi support for its EASYSHARE Printer Dock Plus snapshot printer. The KODAK Wi-Fi card will be available this June for US$99 (MSRP). After inserting the Wi-Fi (802.11b) card into the Printer Dock Plus, pictures from a docked EASYSHARE digital camera can be transferred effortlessly to a computer on the home network for immediate viewing, sharing and printing. In addition, the Printer Dock Plus can then act as a wireless picture printer for WiFi-enabled devices such as desktops, laptops, and even the new KODAK EASYSHARE-ONE digital camera."

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, notes, "I'd like to point out that although a number of very large BitTorrent-based web sites have been taken down recently, downloads of BitTorrent have only gone down slightly. There's a widespread belief that BitTorrent is used almost exclusively for warez, probably a perception of people who themselves use it almost exclusively for warez, but that impression is simply untrue."

Link

CES is in full swing, and its a shame I could not go. I still feel sluggish, much like a Windows machine infected with spyware. Still, looking through all the news that is filtering in my InBox, I see that place shifting, which I covered in my article, Home Entertainment To Go, is becoming more mainstream. Kinetic Tide, is working with Motorola, while Sling Media is getting kudos for its SlingBox. Orb Networks, which does pretty much the same thing in software and charges a monthly fee, is also getting some traction. Elsewhere, SBC has announced a new set-top box, which grants partial freedom to our digital music. “The big trend for the show is going to be around place-shifting of media,” declared Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for research firm NPD Group.

I was getting ready to write a long piece about the South Asia catastrophe's effect on citizen journalism, when the Poynter Institute's Steve Outing called to discuss it for a piece he was writing. He quoted me at length in his piece, and captured the important points. I called the tsunami horror a turning point, because it brought the grassroots front and center in an even more powerful way than occurred on and after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Read Steve's piece here.

I'd add this: We used to call mainstream journalism the "first draft of history." Now, I'd argue, much of that first draft is being written by citizen journalists. And what they're telling us is powerful indeed.

CBC releases code to the web portion of its amateur media show

"If you try to transpose traditional television (hundreds of channel of linear programmes delivered in parallel) to a new medium without reinventing it in the first place, your only chance is to apply brute force to make it fit and pay the hefty price of your lack of creativity in hardware, middleware, integration and consultancy.

But if you manage to discover how the characteristics of the new medium can better fit the needs of the public, chances are you are in for an exhilarating ride: you'll have a solution of reasonable complexity and cost an order of magnitude less complex than "transposed" television, new users jumping in in droves and lauding your solution as "something they have been waiting for for so long" and last but not least a nail in the coffin of an industry overfed by artificial profits."

Thomas Slattery of California has sued Apple Computer for engaging in monopolistic practices. Slattery was apparently displeased when he learned that music purchases from the iTunes Music Store could only be played back using iTunes and Apple's portable iPod line of players. The suit was filed this past Monday in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, and alleges that "Apple has turned an open and interactive standard into an artifice that prevents consumers from using the portable hard drive digital music player of their choice, even where players exist that would otherwise be able to play these music files absent Apple's actions."

(Continued at Ars Technica)

VoIP is so 2004; as Techdirt points out, Video via IP is going to be all the rage at this year's CES. Video over IP is also going to be a big player in Congress this year; one of the first major bills proposed this session is the "Advanced Internet Communications Services Act", which aims to remove all regulation and rules from the bells looming video over fiber/DSL services.

Samsung, [yesterday] introduced HiWAVE (high-throughput wireless AV entertainment), to deliver wireless connectivity around the home. Samsung and Athena Semiconductors developed the chipset.

With high-throughput MIMO (multiple input multiple output) technology as the foundation for its WiFi network, HiWAVE was designed to effectively service multiple AV streams for the home network environment. Users can share broadband connections further and faster, supporting live broadcasting and room-to-room streaming services.

HiWAVE's throughput of more than 60 Mbps also enables streaming of HD video anywhere within the home, providing consumers the fullest enjoyment of wireless multimedia entertainment. The new system, which Samsung developed over a two-year period, is backwards compatible with Legacy 802 products, offering seamless interoperability with existing wireless networks.

Various products with Samsung's new HiWAVE technology are scheduled to launch in the second half of year 2005. No details on costs or availablity were announced.

Samsung backs TGn Sync for a 802.11n "standard". Airgo's chipset is based more around the WiSE Alliance MIMO "standard". (See Atheros Announces MIMO Chips).

When I asked the Samsung rep if I could get a demo unit, she sort of laughed. Then I asked again and just got a stern look. Guess that means I'll be stealing the 102-inch prototype they had in the next room.

An excellent interview with Hank Barry, who is a partner at the venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, and has been a close observer of the evolution of digital media - he was CEO of Napster and previously was a partner with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

This point is excellent: "I think all businesses have tremendous opportunity here. To survive and prosper, they simply need to adapt...They have moved much of their ordering and sales configuration online. It's working. Perhaps contrary to expectations, customers prefer a consistent machine interface to an inconsistent human interface." That's why I like banking online completely, than going into the bank or even the ATM.

Today's announcement of the Sony DCR-PC1000 marks the first camcorder ever to use a CMOS imaging sensor. Previously, all camcorders used CCD technology - however, the digital imaging industry is moving towards CMOS chips which are easier and less expensive to produce.

Both chips are packed with a matrix of pixels. Each pixel is sensitive to light, the more light that the pixel is exposed to the greater the amount of energy the pixel "stores up" during it's exposure to an image. This energy that is stored in the pixel needs to be converted to voltage, so that it can be read by the camcorder. The key difference between a CCD chip and a CMOS chip, is that the CCD chip sends all of the "stored up" pixel energy to a processor outside of the chip where it is converted to voltage, while each pixel on a CMOS chip is able to do this process on it's own. Another way of putting it is that a CCD puts out a signal as electricity, whereas a CMOS chip puts out a signal as computer bits and bytes. The other major difference between CMOS and CCD chips is that many more other camera processing functions can be done on the CMOS chip, whereas with CCD chips those processes must be done through external chips.

(Continued at CamcorderInfo)

Neil McIntosh has a great post on the importance of the tsunami to the future of citizens' media.

In short: this wasn t a few political hacks talking to each other. For the first time, powerful coverage of a huge news event was not brought to you purely by established media. An army of "citizen journalists" played a new role, perhaps all the more vital considering the effect vivid reportage, online and off, has had on the subsequent fundraising efforts.

A little "postcard sized" portable, embedded Linux piece of spatial annotation hardware - and the operation here seems to have some smart things to say about why spatial annotation is a promising activity..cool stuff..

Location aware computers and the content and services that run on these devices, will change the way that society experiences the real world. Node is a world leader in developing both the technology and the content production methodology required.

Node provides services and products that take the visitor experience of a building, national park or city further and deeper than ever before.

Node

Stars are a necessary part of the economy. If citizen media is going to supplant that old style, citizen commercialization is going to have to supplant that old style of commercialization. My paid blogging for Marqui is citizen commercialization.

In a Marqui-sponsored blog entry, Textura design looks at paid blogging for Marqui as an entangling of personal and business agendas:

David Byrne, writing about agents in his blog (December 6 post), asks, "When did I become an agent?" Byrne continues to compare agents to a Philip Dick world and how damn scary that is. I covered agents in my, You can front on that post and Jason Calacanis posted BzzAgent: What people are really saying and BzzAgents Suck.

[...]

The difference between agents and blogging for Marqui is that there's no deception about the agenda. There should be no question as to when a blog is an agent or not. Despite the detractors, Marqui is engaged. They're not hiding behind a Kid Halloween or receiving secret messages from VALIS.

If you're a rock star and you sign a sponsorship deal with a soda company, there's no confusion about the agenda. A famous person is an invention of the camera, so everybody involved knows the difference between the person and the persona. Endorsements by stars are ethical because there is no real person making them.

Citizen musicians like norelpref or citizen writers like myself don't have that fallback. The persona in my blog writing is as close to my person as I can arrange. And yet, in this sub-entry in today's blog I am thinking about my sponsorship deal with Marqui. I get paid to post this, and at the same time I am not posting from a persona.

That is, while there is no deception about my agenda when I know that I am an agent, at this moment I have no idea whether I am being an agent or not.

Tim Karr [via] leads us to a blog*spot-hosted site where someone has chosen to express themselves in a hateful manner towards tsunami victims in southern Asia and India.

As a commenter on Karr's site states, I'm curious to see if Google looks at this site as hateful, and in violation of the blog*spot terms of service. I'm guessing that the following from the Blogger TOS:

Member agrees not to transmit through the Service any unlawful, harassing, libelous, abusive, threatening, or harmful material of any kind or nature.

[...snip...]

TERMINATION Either Member or Pyra may terminate the Service with or without cause at any time and effective immediately. Pyra shall not be liable to Member or any third party for termination of Service.

(Continued at The Media Drop)

(What happens when a forum that gives everyone the ability to speak isn't a forum for free speech? Can an end user agreement preclude the Bill of Rights? Stories like this trigger interesting questions for us citizen media folks. -kc.)

I just added a link to a registration page, so all of you who are planning on going to vloggercon on Jan 22 in NYC can register now.

The blog also has a link that lets you see who is registered.

The blog is at:

http://vloggercon.blogspot.com

We've added a video blog post in the first post. Let us know what you think.

Jay is finishing up the information on all the sessions and should have those sections updated later this afternoon. He's doing a great job contacting all the session moderators.

So take a look and let me know any feedback you might have.

Thanks, --Steve

A collection of Pythonic tools for XML data binding.

ffmpeg-php is an extension for PHP that adds an easy to use, object-oriented API for accessing and retrieving information from movies and audio files. It has methods for returning frames from movie files as images.

Years ago, fellow weblogger Matt Kingston was one of the first people I ever saw that hacked his TiVo to do all sorts of amazing stuff like output his now showing list to his website (his hacking also inspired me to dip into my TiVo's case). Another TiVo Hacker and weblogger named Dave Wild came along and wanted to do the same thing for his site, so he hacked together some RSS output feeds for TiVos running TiVoWebPlus. The files are on Dave's site and here's a TiVo forum post about the details.

Last night I downloaded these hacks and loaded them onto my TiVo, but I haven't gotten it to work quite yet though I'm optimistic I'll have it running in a few days, after which, I'll start publishing my Now Showing and ToDo status here.

update: actually, the relevant code is in the TiVo Forum post, which I did get to work, no problem.

I’ll pick on two of David Isenberg’s recent entries, but there are many others that illustrate the same point.

First quote:

The Death of Distance first appeared in The Economist about a decade ago. In that decade we’ve seen international telephony prices fall from dollars per minute to Skype-free, while we think nothing, nothing, nothing of accessing a website halfway around the world. Minutes are dead. Area codes mean nothing. Country codes are fading.

Indeed. I read Frances Cairncross’s similarly-titled book on the matter a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely.

What it missed, however, is shown by the next quote:

What does wireless broadband have in common with water and solid waste management? Like the first two items, wireless broadband is becoming a municipal utility as dozens of cities have started the process of creating public wireless networks.

The city of Cerritos, California started the trend early in the year and, by year-end, dozens of U.S. cities had jumped on the bandwagon. […]

What this tells us is that, short of pervasive wireless broadband utopia, where you are really matters. If you’re in the right coffee shop, community or city, you’re in luck; you can connect quickly and cheaply. If not, tough.

So where you are matters, whereas the distance to where others are doesn’t. The death of distance is fuelling the rise of geography. It really matters if you’re in Cerritos or the next-door town. (But when you Skype someone over that municipal wireless network they could be anywhere in the world. (Indeed, you can’t even tell where the callee is without calling them to ask! A weakness in Skype’s presence system and an oportunity for a premium feature of enhanced presence?)

(Continued at Telepocalypse)

LG has introduced what is arguably the first digital multimedia broadband phone, which can receive terrestrial television signals. The phone also has a mega-pixel camera and MP3 player functions. Apparently the company spent nearly $9 billion and two years developing this phone and has filed 150 patents including one for H.264 video decoder enabling technology. What LG has done is essentially put a whole lot of functions on a “system on a chip” and plans to include this SoC in other products like laptops and hand held computers as well. (Read the full article)

Ramesh Jain: Most new technology is initially used using the legacy approaches. Thus when CD ROM first appeared, people started scanning and putting books on CD ROMs and called it multimedia. Much of the talk about convergence is about communication and computing and really does not go beyond putting them together. When we throw content also in this convergence equation, the situation changes dramatically. This convergence will result in more potent technology and approaches than most of us have imagined it so far. Continue Reading at The Broadband Daily

John Blossom of Shore breaks it down for us...he sees four key areas in which the rapidly shifting action will unfold in creating and expanding these new models: cooperation, commercialization, containerization and consolidation. Cut through the consultant jargon and it is good stuff...I'm personally most interested in the consolidation "stuff", the behind the scenes power plays which gets journalist's juices flowing...
It would be interesting to see all of this play out in a month at the SIIA's Information Industry Summit in Feb. I'll be there to pontificate and report....

WestportNow is a "citizen journalism" website (published in blog format) serving a tony Connecticut community of 26,000. Run part-time by Gordon Joseloff, the site puts special emphasis on photography by community members. You can see the work of more than 50 citizen photographers in the site's "Year In Pictures 2004" feature. (Alas, there are no captions, but it will give you an idea of the contributions the site receives.)

While most of the images that run on WestportNow.com aren't professional quality, many are. And when news breaks in Westport, the website does a nice job; the site was the (...)

Entry continued...

hyku has put together by far the best guide for using RSS to monitor media that I have ever seen. Listening/monitoring is the the single most critical discipline that any 21st Century PR professional needs to practice regularly. RSS makes it a snap.  Josh R. Hallett gives you at a glance all you need to know to get started. Great work, Josh.

Alert Retreival Cache Is a system of collecting, sorting and routing SMS messages for the purposes of alerts and relay communication. I heard about it on NPR today and of it's importance in the wake of the recent Tsunami. I thought it was a pretty neat idea and was especially pleased to hear how fellow geeks are working together to solve real world problems. More here (World Changing) and here (Audio).

Seagate Technologies LLC will begin offering a Compact Flash (CF) card form-factor hard-disk drive from February this year, the company said at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, on Tuesday.

Samsung's new 21" OLED display raises hopes that large screen displays will be mass producible before the close of the decade.

Popular encoding/guide/news site doom9.org has published its CODEC shoot-out for 2004, comparing file-compression software: 3ivx 5.0, Divx Fusion 5.9 (prerelease 6.0), Nero Digital Main Profile and High Profile, RealVideo 10, On2 VP6, VideoSoft's VSS, Xvid 1.0, MS's WMV9 and, last, newcomer Jomingo's HDX4. The comparison covers the speed, accuracy, target-file-size-adherence and other aspects of the CODECs — but also lets you compare via high– and low–bandwidth framegrabs of each codec. codec is an acronym for "COmpression–DECompression". [p2pnet.net]

While we've been testing out CC Publisher betas over the past few weeks, we've recently gone 1.0 on the application and figured it was a good time to create an easy to follow tutorial for using CC Publisher. We've also created one for CC Lookup, our audio file verification app. In addition to both new tutorials, we've also added one that highlights new Creative Commons aware features that were added to the Windows P2P application Morpheus. If you'd like to share your Creative Commons licensed music on their P2P network in a way that others can find it, follow our instructions.

Hopefully Six Apart would devote some designers to LJ

Start-up beams TV to your hand. Orb Networks lets consumers view live TV though cell phones or PDAs, and big-name companies are paying attention.

I wish everyone would take the time for this.

9:37 AM
I post this message to the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group regarding today's Wall Street Journal story on video blogging:

I found it interesting that the newspaper got the $20k
instead of the original videographer. Probably because he just gave
the video away without any Creative Commons license on it.

"The video, which shows an elderly couple overpowered by a wave, was
filmed at the Kamala Beach Hotel near Phuket on Sunday morning by a
31-year-old factory worker from Sweden named Tommy Lorentsen.

Reached in Thailand, Mr. Lorentsen said he salvaged the tape from his
camera after it was soaked and gave a copy to Fredrik Bornesand, a
Stockholm police detective who appears in the footage trying to rescue
the couple. Mr. Bornesand handed a CD of the clip to journalists with
Norway's Dagbladet newspaper who then uploaded to their Web site on
Monday.

...

Dagbladet editor Oliver Orskaug says once the clip began circulating on
Web blogs and forums "suddenly the networks were calling from Japan,
Spain and France and everywhere to buy the video." He says within 12
hours he sold rights to CNN, ABC News, and others for a total of about
$20,000. Mr. Orskaug was not surprised bloggers grabbed the video
without paying. "That's the Internet. We expect that would happen," he
says."

10:02 AM
R. Kristiansen sends this email to Oliver Orskaug:

"Hei Oliver Orskaug,
/ Hello Oliver Orskaug,

Jeg leste i dag denne saken p Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB110470611254614746,00.html

hvor du siteres.

/ Today I read this story in the Wall Street Journal
... where you are quoted

Jeg lurte egentlig bare p om Tommy Lorentson som var den som egentlig
tok den filmen fikk en del av de 20.000$ som nevnes i artikkelen.

/ I basically wondered whether Tommy Lorentsson who was the guy really
shooting that footage got a piece of the 20.000$ mentioned in the
article.

Sp rsm let er alts om Dagbladet "overtok" rettighetene da dere fikk
dem fra Bornesand. Dette er nemlig et sp rsm l som sirkulerer p
nettet i disse timer..

/ The question is then whether Dagbladet "took over" the copyrights
when you received them (the movie) from Bornesand. This is a question
circulating on the net in these hours...

mvh
Raymond M. Kristiansen
blogger og politisk aktiv og som selv s langt har diskutert saken her:
http://dltq.blogs.com/dltq/2005/01/the_vlogging_er.html

/ best regards ... blogger and politically active and who so far has
discussed the case here ...

2:27 PM
R. Kristiansen gets permission to post the full story behind the story.

This is an amazing example of Citizen Journalism getting the real story.

Howard Rheingold: "The devices that most people on earth will carry or wear in coming decades could become platforms for technical and entrepreneurial innovation, foundations for industries that don't exist yet, enablers of social and political change. However, it is far from certain that mobile media will go the route of the PC, where teenage dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and millions of others actively shaped the technology, or the Internet, where search engines were invented in dorm rooms and innovators like Tim Berners-Lee gave away the World Wide Web for free without asking permission or changing any wiring."

Engadget says the Vonage F-1000 WiFi phone, made by UTStarcom, will let you make VoIP calls from any WiFi hotspot using your Vonage account. Vonage plans to market their phone around $100, and release it sometime between April and June of this year.



(Continued at Daily Wireless)

Jay Rosen: "In Greensboro we find a newspaper awakening to the culture of the Web. "

Lars Hasselblad Torres of AmericaSpeaks, shares this fantastic grid of Technologies for Online Public Engagement (PDF). Entitled “Approaches to Online Public Engagement”, the grid summarizes 17 organizations that offer tools for online public engagement. Some are familiar, like Weblab. Others are unique tools developed by local and national government.

One question I had for Lars was an indication of the underlying technologies offered — all they all home grown or based on commercial or open source products? Lars thought most were homegrown. If you know more, I’d love to know more! Likewise, Lars says he’d love feedback on any parts of the chart. He can be found at lhtorres at americaspeaks.org

As I scan the chart, I can’t see some of the emergent technology efforts I hear about from folks like Jon Lebkowsky. CivicSpace Labs, and the work that Jerry Michalski and co are doing at Yi-Tan. With a little thinking, I’m sure others comes to mind. I suspect this is because these folks have not been oriented specifically towards online consultations which is a very specific online interaction domain. They have been more in the activist domain.

That said, I sense there is a lot of opportunity bridging between the two domains.

I appreciated these observations about the need for increased editorial quality in Jay Rosen's PressThink's Top Ten Ideas of 2004. In Idea 6, "Content will be more important than its container," Rosen emphasizes a "disruptive idea in journalism" in which mainstream media's monopoly is coming to an end thanks to RSS which is detaching news from "brand." He cites Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press who says, "The franchise is not the newspaper; it's not the broadcast; it's not even the Web site. The franchise is the content itself." Rosen continues the theme of increased quality in Idea 7 entitled, "What was once good - or good enough - no longer is," saying that the impact of blogs has already increased the quality of commentary and editorials. But he points out that newspapers could vary from their printed content on their websites by providing more depth, for example, posting links for further investigation.

Source: PressThink;

Beating Apple to the punch, little-known peripheral manufacturer Nyko has unveiled an iPod accessory which enables the popular audio player to play back videos on a 3.5" display.

At the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nyko Technologies has announced the MoviePlayer, an iPod peripheral which gives owners the ability to play back video stored on an iPod on a 3.5" display. Currently at the prototype stage, the company says the accessory is slated for release in the spring 2005, utilizing a portable cradle concept to connect the accessory to an iPod.



The MoviePlayer will connect to the iPod via the dock connector and draw upon its storage capabilities, delivering video playback on a 3.5", 16-bit TFT display as opposed to the small, monochrome display of the iPod itself. The accessory also includes built-in stereo speakers, although whether users will be able to utilize headphones is still unclear.

(Continued at infoSync World)

When I wrote my initial paper about videoblogging last summer I was looking for a number of technical solutions in order to make sharing and co-creation of video more feasible. A lot of people seem to be interested in videoblogging and a number of new services and ideas have emerged during the last six months (By the way: Those living close to New York should attend Vloggercon 2005 at 22. January).

BitTorrent has been around for quite some time, but it has become more accessible to those of us who are not into the technical stuff: Licensed under GPL Blog Torrent is a software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the BitTorrent protocol. It’s goal is to let you post video or other large files to your web site as easily as you post text. If you´re not into hosting torrents yourself you might want to try Prodigem. Prodigem is a service hosted at Torrentocracy that uses Bit Torrent filesharing. The service is currently free. See what’s available from the Prodigem Torrent Tracker.

Another interesting service is Vimeo which generates a movie for you using the Vidbits that I’ve uploaded individually. I believe the movie creator uses close to the same approach as I suggested for an editor using SMIL, kind of like the one I wanted to implement in my own videoblog. I can hardly wait to see the further development of this one, perhaps into something more like an universal playlist creator like Webjay.

And of course, I still whish for an editor which makes it possible re-edit “play-lists” created by others.

Aware: The Aware Platform-New locative platform developed in conjunction with UIAH Helsinki


"Working from the lowest common technological denominator to maintain flexibility and inclusiveness, a person can use whatever media capture-device they have available. More important is, what contextual information is associated - such as proximity, location, temporality, theme and event. Aware focuses upon bundling these relationships, both automatic and given, to the media. Contributions are made via a networked-device, using common protocols such as email, SMS, MMS, or a custom application.

The Aware platform consists of three enveloping layers: interface, process, storage. The outermost interface layer is extendable, modular and reacts to project requirements - it is the layer people interact with when contributing and experiencing media. A process layer bonds the interface and storage layer together, translating data in both directions into formats that each element of the system can process. Meanwhile, the innermost storage layer is in essence a data structure that enables the association of media with context information.

There are two representable formats of this process - the packet itself (encapsulating the media and context information) or a feed of a series of packets, ordered according to certain filters. These formats may be distributed in human or computer-readable representations with graphical-user-interfaces, XML or RSS.

In this way, a person at the receiving end of these representations experiences contributions through casual browsing, subscribing to a feed, or with message notification, via interaction with a networked-device. The act of browsing itself generates filtered views, which can be saved as feeds, making them accessible for that person or for others. This feedback flow indicates the potential collective process in the sharing of mediated context and experience between people."

The Southeast Asia Tsunami-MISSING PERSONS

offers

If you are looking for someone missing in any country affected by the earthquake and tsunami on December 26, 2004, please post a photo of the person

FOLLOWING THIS FORMAT:
1.POST PHOTO--PLEASE USE PERSON'S NAME AS PHOTO TITLE
2. In description, list COUNTRY AND LOCATION WHERE LAST SEEN.
3. In comment section, add any other information you think is RELEVANT.
4. TAG your photos with the following: missing, tsunami, and country where last seen. TAGS HELP!

This group is formed in conjunction with The South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog (SEA-EAT).

more posts at this blog on missing persons and notice the listing of images galeries.

Yesterday, walking on the beach, I had a minor epiphany about the press that I thought I should share asap. Talking to a reporter recently, about the difference between bloggers and pros, I tell a story I often tell, the interchange between David Weinberger and Walter Mears at the blogger's breakfast at the Democratic National Convention in July.

Weinberger asked Mears who he planned to vote for in the presidential election. Mears said he couldn't say because that would bring his biases into the discussion, and he writes objectively, his biases are irrelevant. This was about as clear a distinction as I've seen, because bloggers seem to view it exactly the other way. I can't trust you until I know where you're coming from. So a blogger always discloses his opinion on something he's reporting on, so we can triangulate, get a variety of points of view to determine what's really going on. Triangulation is something bloggers and their readers depend on. In the world of the pro, apparently triangulation is not necessary, because in theory every reporter is objective.

(Continued at Scripting News)

Fred Wilson blogs the big announcement that radio companies have committed converting 2,000 stations to HD. Now if we can just get the FCC out of the radio business.

Cleverly-aliased BoingBoing reader numlok whispers:

This is both very cool and very scary. Use this search string below with Google, and you will find dozens (hundreds?) of unsecured webcam feeds (most seem to be security cams).

inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="

Link. More background here.

BoingBoing reader Nick adds, "This is a Google search that gives 2000 cams instead of just 800. Pointed out on MeFi."

Their target audience is kids in cars. From Reuters/Yahoo: The satellite radio company's former chief executive, Joseph Clayton, said in May that Sirius would introduce four and possibly as many as eight video channels for children riding in the back seats of cars.



Too bad there's no video upload service from the car!

The United States accounts for more than half of the world's file traders, according to a new study spotlighted at p2pNet. Using data collected from Big Champagne, the OECD reports Europe and Canada are experiencing the fastest p2p growth, and overall traffic has increased some 30% since last year.

Podcasting is DIY radio for programmers and listeners alike. Will it save us from corporate radio? Or further isolate us inside our own miniature media worlds? BY DAN KENNEDY. The Boston Phoenix, January 3, 2005.

Thanks to MediaCitizen

Like TiVo for BitTorrent, in that it has "Season Passes" and "Wishlists"

As we kick off 2005 in the mediasphere, expect to see the winds of fundamental change whip harder.

Rarely can those in periods of major transition see past the fog of the here and now. But let's try.

Clues and foreshadowings abound.

Dan Gillmor left his job as tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News on Saturday, after 10 years in the high-profile post. In his new life as an independent agent, he says his new task will be to ponder the present and future of grassroots journalism; to begin to figure out what we might do together in this new world; and, in general, to have the kind of conversation that this huge topic requires.

Dan and I spoke by phone Saturday about the intersection between his new for-profit initiative and my new non-profit initiative, Ourmedia, an ambitious effort to create a global home for grassroots media. We believe that advances in personal technology and the rollout of the broadband Internet pave the way for a shared community space a global commons, if you will to advance, share and preserve works of personal media: photo albums, original music, documentary journalism, music videos, Flash animations, student films, grassroots political ads and much more. With any luck, the site will launch late this month.

(Continued at morph)

Au1200 processor offers ability to store, manage and play fresh multimedia content on the goAMD today announced availability of the AMD Alchemy Au1200 processor, a low-power, high-performance, system-on-chip solution designed to provide living-room quality video entertainment for consumers on the go. The Au1200 processor has been optimized for personal media players (PMP) and enables a new generation of conveniences and features, including scalable DVD-quality displays, effortless video content transfers directly from digital video recorders, and long-lasting battery life so consumers can stay mobile longer.

Readers on why the deadly tsunami was the biggest story of 2004.

I'd watch. Other shows under consideration for Al Gore's new cable network: INdTV Paparazzi, Citizen Reporter, All-Nighter and Addicted. Edgy stuff, just "no X-rated content" allowed.

('Edgy' lineup sounds like daytime public access to me. ;) -kc.)

Which includes a more polished interface which feels more responsive and support for podcasting and the like

There's an opportunity for set-top manufacturing companies like Moxi and 2Wire to really outclass TiVo, simply because they designing devices around a very specific set of, well, specifications. The newly announced 2Wire MediaPortal, for instance, isn't just a satellite receiver. It's also an internet/Ethernet-enabled media streamer with a built-in 250GB hard drive, designed to provide all the PVR functions you'd expect, (including HD recording), as well as over-the-wire on demand content. Wrapping that all up in a cohesive, consistant interface makes for a much more pleasant, integrated experience that generic set top boxes can't as easily provide.

Wouldn't it be hot to type "Law & Order" in the search field, then page through results that included PVR-recorded shows, ripped DVDs, live TV, on demand streaming media, and downloaded videos that live on your PC's networked storage? This MediaPortal box can't do all of that (the DVD ripping and the downloaded movies part might be trouble), but it can do everything else, plus stream your home content to a mobile device. Who knows how well it'll all work together, but it holds a lot of promise.

Product Page [2Wire via GigaOm]

Clay Shirky responds to the article complaining about Wikipedia by one of its ex-founders with a point-by-point refutation and the observation that Wikipedia's detractors are going through the Kubler-Ross stages of death:

It s been fascinating to watch the Kubler-Ross stages of people committed to Wikipedia s failure: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Denial was simple; people who didn t think it was possible simply dis-believed. But the numbers kept going up. Then they got angry, perhaps most famously in the likening of the Wikipedia to a public toilet by a former editor for Encyclopedia Brittanica. Sanger s post marks the bargaining phase; OK, fine, the Wikipedia is interesting, but whatever we do, lets definitely make sure that we change it into something else rather than letting the current experiment run unchecked.

Next up will be a glum realization that there is nothing that can stop people from contributing to the Wikipedia if they want to, or to stop people from using it if they think it s useful. Freedom s funny like that.

Finally, acceptance will come about when people realize that head-to-head comparions with things like Brittanica are as stupid as comparing horseful and horseless carriages the automobile was a different kind of thing from a surrey. Likewise, though the Wikipedia took the -pedia suffix to make the project comprehensible, it is valuable as a site of argumentation and as a near-real-time reference, functions a traditional encyclopedia isn t even capable of. (Where, for example, is Brittanica s reference to the Indian Ocean tsunami?)

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

Good piece by Adam Mathes, Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata:

Perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users. In an information retrieval system, there are at least two, and possibly many more vocabularies present (Buckland, 1999). These could include that of the user of the system, the designer of the system, the author of the material, the creators of the classification scheme; translating between these vocabularies is often a difficult and defining issue in information systems. As discussed earlier, a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents. In this way, it directly reflects their choices in diction, terminology, and precision.

BURST! Media, an ad network, has launched an weblog sub-channel which includes Gawker Media sites Gawker, Wonkette and Defamer as well as the blogs BlueLemur, CelebCourthouse and 2WallsWebzine. Kyocera Wireless is the first advertiser to to use the channel.

While the independent games scene isn’t quite as spectacular as independent film, it does share one important characteristic.

Original ideas. Rather than cookie cutter games (and at the risk of being boiled alive, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are merely refinements to an already saturated genre), indie games seem to show actual creativity. There is nothing WRONG with refining a genre, don’t get me wrong, but when you’ve eaten a steady diet of, say, chicken recipes for years… When someone comes along with some beef, it makes a great change.

Okay, so that can go in the “worst analogy of 2005” list probably, but it’s late and it’s new years… You get the idea…

Remember when I said TiVoToGo was launching soon? I was mostly right—it launched today. If you have a Series2 TiVo you can go to the website and download the software today to copy shows to your laptop, although the DVD burning software that will facilitate permanent archiving is still not available. (Thanks, Dave!)

TiVoToGo Product Page [TiVo]

Update: Wired has a preview piece up here.

TiVoToGo will be an automatic, free service upgrade for subscribers who own standalone Series2 TiVo DVRs. It will not work for subscribers owning DirecTV-TiVo satellite boxes. Also, the technology will work only with computers based on Microsoft's Windows XP or 2000 operating systems, although a version for Macintosh computers is planned, TiVo officials said.

Update: The AP has a a piece on TiVoToGo, too. As soon as any of you guys actually get the software pushed to your TiVos, let me know what you think, huh?

The 2005 Consumer Electronics Show show (FAQ), January 6-9, 2005, will be chockablock with WiFi, Wireless and personal electronics gear. Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech and PC Magazine will have extensive coverage of CES 2005. LetsGoDigital will cover digital camera announcements.

Ultra-Wide Band technology will be demonstrated by Wisair which develops UWB chips based on the MBOA standard favored by leading computer companies like Intel, Sony, HP and others.

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

Another must-add for your favorite RSS reader.

Dan has set up his new blog: Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism. According to his latest post:

For the immediate future I plan to use this blog to ponder the present and future of grassroots journalism; to begin to figure out what we might do together in this new world; and, in general, to have the kind of conversation that this huge topic requires.

Although he’s not saying what his new business is, he does say he has “support from some first-rate folks,” Mitch Kapor and Pierre Omidyar.

Good company, indeed.

Jiwon Kim, Steven M. Seitz (University of Washington) and Maneesh Agrawala (Microsoft Research) are working on the Video-Based Document Tracking project to integrate the paper world with the world of electronic data.



The prototypes use a computer and overhead camera to track physical documents on a desk and automatically link them to appropriate electronic documents. The prototypes built can track paper documents and sort photos without the use of special tags, paper or marks.

With the system, users can pinpoint the location of a given document within a stack of papers on their desktop, searching by keywords, document appearance, or by how recently a paper was moved.

The researchers' system infers the structure of a stack of papers from video images. A user moves paper X from stack A to stack B, then moves paper Y from stack A to stack C, for example. The system parses the video into a pair of individual movements and then interprets each event to determine how the documents were reorganized.

Even better, users can also browse desktops in remote locations by clicking and dragging on an image of the remote desk.

Very bad news: the system could be ready for practical use in three to four years.

Video.

Via Technology Review.

From Marc's Voice: Last night at the Geek dinner - people scoffed at me - when I mentioned VloggerCon 2005. Fucking cynics.

I can't believe that from the crowd that was attending, that people would scoff at a videoblogger conference. Hello? Did people suddenly get jobs at AOL Time Warner?

Video editor built on the GStreamer multimedia framework.

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

interesting concept in creating a low tech tv "station"

Pirate LPTV in SF begins broadcasting 1/1/05

MPEG-7 content-based image retrieval server and GUI..