Jurie Horneman tells us about Infected, a PlayStation Portable game that uses the platform's multiplayer wireless mode with a very innovative feature. As Tom Bramwell notes: As well as a single-player mode, Infected will also take advantage of the PSP's wireless multiplayer functionality, and should put an interesting spin on things as, in addition to just blasting each other, players will be able to create a unique avatar which then spreads like a virus through the handhelds of players who lose to them. You'll then be able to check your rankings and see how far your virus has spread amongst your victims.
One shudders to think of the possibilities....
InformationWeek: People are starting Weblogs in growing numbers, but the owner of the content isn't always clear.
A big condenser mic, twin handheld condensers, cables, tripod, headphones and monitors (speakers)... Normally $632.99, now, $299. That's a good deal for getting a bunch of starter hardware for the second generation podcaster. Only thing missing is a mixer/connection kit, but it's a good start for multi-people shows... (watch that compression, yo!) Musician's Friend - Musician's Friend Studio Bonus Bundle C (248149)
“IPWireless CEO Chris Gilbert explains why standard-based solutions will outgun proprietary technologies, why WiMAX won’t cut it and why wireless broadband players need a handset strategy…". Gilbert talks about wireless broadband over different technologies, all bundled together with IP. An interesting interview, with a few pearls of wisdom.
“China’s TD-SCDMA…is about 95% the same as TD-CDMA - it’s got an “S” in it, which changes a few things.”
On his blog, Larry Lessig writes about an astonishing display of democracy and free culture in Brazil, where an entire nation is a free speech zone.
Technology research company InfoTrends says more than 860 million camera phones will be sold in 2009, comprising 89 percent of all handsets shipped. This compares to 178 million camera phone shipments in 2004. InfoTrends predicts camera phones will account for 227 billion photos captured in 2009, more than the combined photos from digital and film cameras.A quote from the original source: Mobile Imaging: Technology Trends, Consumer Behavior, and Business Strategies:
Society is moving into an era of ubiquitous imaging that offers the ability to capture, store, send, print, and view an image anywhere," commented Jeff Hayes, a Director at InfoTrends/CAP Ventures. "We believe mobile imaging will have the kind of impact that e-mail had on document communications in the 1990s. We project that the total number of images captured on camera phones will reach 227 billion by 2009, exceeding the number of photos taken on digital still cameras and film cameras combined!"
TiVo's developer tools on SourceForge
HME is the code name for TiVo’s powerful new open platform for applications that are displayed and controlled by broadband-connected TiVo Series2 DVRs. HME applications are written using the Java programming language and can run on home PC’s or remote servers hosted by TiVo. At this time, HME applications can not control any of the TiVo DVR’s scheduling, recording, or video playback capabilities. Developers use the HME software developer kit (SDK) to create these applications. The SDK is released under the Common Public License (CPL).
(Also check out PVRBlog's summary of HME -kc.)
The Daily Kos is looking into a White House correspondent with questionable bona fides. People in various places are contributing some reporting, and the results promise to be worth seeing, one way or the other.
Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

The Horizon Report from New Media Centers is a annual project identifying key technologies that will inform teaching and learning in the next years. This year's edition highlights six areas: 1. Extended Learning 2. Ubiquitous Wireless 3. Intelligent Searching 4. Educational Gaming 5. Social Networks and Knowledge Webs 6. Context-Aware Computing/Augmented Reality.
The report includes a thorough discussion of each, plus links and other resources. Just a great resource. Go for it in PDF. [blogged by John on ratchet up!]
A Thai political candidate says other candidates are buying voters and asking them to take camera phone photos of their ballots to prove they voted correctly, according to an article in MCOT 1.
The article says, "Mr. Aree Pholrattanasit said that the high-tech method of vote buying had already been piloted during advance election held during the last weekend in the province's Thung Yai district, where young people used the photographic evidence of their ballot choice to receive money from the candidates purchasing their votes.
Via Reiter's Camera Phone Report
Today brings yet another story about how Hollywood's finances are better than ever. Ross Johnson's story ("Video Sales Abroad Are Good News in Hollywood. Shhh.") in today's New York Times tells us that the studios are keeping their overseas DVD sales secret, so as not to interfere with the industry's tradition of lowballing its revenue.
lowballing has enabled the industry to limit its payouts to stars whose contracts call for a share of the profits. As the story reports, that battle goes on."For a long time, the film business was a single-digit business on investment return," said Charles Roven, the producer of "Batman Begins" from Warner Brothers, a division of Time Warner. "Now, because of home video, it's a low double-digit business, and the studios want to make sure it doesn't go back into the single-digit business."
eBroadcast Australia has a TV Guide syndication in Australia link on its new look site. It doesn’t link directly to the XML/RSS feed, but does have an interesting announcement.
Some of the entertainment content you see throughout the eBroadcast consumer network is available for licensing. Online portals, print publications, mobile networks, consumer devices, phone services, personal homepages and education organisations around the nation are just some of the mediums that have found our content useful, relevant and extremely cost effective (and in some cases, free).
All content available for syndication is produced in-house right here in Australia by our own expert team using technology developed over the past decade.
For more information regarding eBroadcast’s entertainment content, please make an enquiry.
It’s a shame that it’s not just available, but it’s a neat move in the right direction, and we’d be keen to know what uses would be free.
Vodafone Japan is getting two new Toshiba handsets, the V603T and V603SH, both of which are clamshells. The V603SH has a motion sensor, allowing users to wave it around to perform basic commands (not unlike using mouse gestures)—neat, but ultimately pointless, I fear. At the very least, it's golden, which should be worth some price premium. Its companion V603T appears to be essentially the same phone minus the motion sensing—in its case, Toshiba is focusing on the ability to pick-up analog television broadcasts (something the V603SH can do, as well).
Both phone will be available in February in a Japan near you.
Vodafone K.K. launches motion, tv phones [MobileTracker]
Henning Koch at Software will save us questions the outsourcing of feeds to Feedburner, and uses his own experience with MP3.com for comparison. A decent question that goes for any blog resource that is outsourced (ie not hosted yourself): there is never any guarantee that the service will always be there, and promoting, or even worse, investing content and money into these services comes with an inherent risk. Whilst the likelihood of bigger sites going under is unlikely, it’s still not impossible, and an important question to be asked when establishing and running a blog.
And yes, this site is 100% self hosted and run: it’s a control thing. I never have to seriously concern myself with the ownership or reliability of the domain nor TOS with content (I have a very open host), only that I have reliable hosting.
(via Scripting News)
Via The Blog Herald: more blog news more often
Hitachi's hard drive operation has added 40GB and 60GB models to its line of 1.8in hard drives, which it has refreshed with an IDE interface the better to broaden its appeal from MP3 player manufacturers and the like to notebook makers.
The 20 and 30GB models launched last September had ZIF interfaces; the new models support Parallel ATA-100 at all drives capacities.
One of the best blogs covering the Iraq elections is Friends of Democracy, which is offering excellent "ground-level election news from the people of Iraq," including photos and even a Webcast.
(Note: Check back as this post will be updated)
CyberJournalist has a pretty comprehensive list of blogs covering the election. -kc.
Blogger Russell Buckley of The Mobile Technology Weblog has taken blog advertising to its next logical step: selling blog ad placement on eBay.
As an experiment, he is doing just that, offering a month of premium banner placement on the auction site.
Advertising on blogs is going to be the next big thing, in my opinion. It offers very tight targeting, no wastage and offers the same accountability that has resulted in online advertising growing like crazy in the last few years. All that's needed is a way to connect the buyers and sellers and there you are.
roblem to manage will be how a professional media buyer manages the millions of potential blogs in the inventory. This will require a whole new skill set that doesn't really exist right now.
As of this writing, eleven bids has brought the price to $51.00.
Good luck, Russell!
I love the conversations that have emerged recently on folksonomy/ethnoclassification/tagging/ontology (see del.icio.us tag folksonomy for a good collection of them). Of course, i’m particularly a fan of skeptical posts that raise the social consequences flag (thank you Liz and Rebecca). I wanted to bring up a few things about culture that i feel haven’t been really addressed yet. (My apologies if i’ve missed them.)
First, don’t forget Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Classification schemes are always culturally dependent based on how people organize information. There is nothing universal about the terms that we use, the relationship between those terms and the meanings behind them. Many terms are contested, used differently by different populations for different reasons and otherwise inconsistent. (Take a look at Raymond Williams’ Keywords if you want to see how different socio-cultural terms are employed over time in Western culture alone.)
What makes the tagging phenomenon utterly fascinating is that there is a collective action component to it. We love to see how people will come to common consensus on relevant terms. But part of what makes it valuable is that, right now, most of the people tagging things have some form of shared cultural understandings. The “in the know” groups using these services are very homogenous and often have shared values and thus offers valuable related links. This helps explain why Rebecca Blood is concerned about the MLK tags - they signify a lack of shared common ground. In tagging, quality is not just about ‘accuracy’, but about what cultural assumptions dominate. This is also the problem that motivated my earlier post on digital xenophobia.
The translation problem alone offers insight into the problems of collective action tagging (see Benjamin). There are tons of words that cannot be simply translated literally both for linguistic and cultural reasons (such as my colleague’s favorite - ohrwurm from German or any number of metaphors). And there are tons of words with multiple and conflicting meanings. This is why reading a translation of something is never the same - it’s not just a matter of linguistic translation, but cultural translation. That’s almost impossible.
Flipped around, the culture of the people tagging says a lot about how they use language that is quite valuable. We might want to see everything with a particular tag using the sense that we mean.
In a discussion on the online-news list about citizens media content management systems, several writers have nominated some open source systems worthy of consideration.
Travis Smith points to Opensourcecms.com, which lets you try all the open source CMSs, front end and admin side, before you install.
Also, Travis says, keep an eye on J-Learning, which will launch
soon with helpful info about this and other aspects of hyperlocal
community media. My company is building it as a partner site to the recently launched J-Newvoices.
Timothy Brown says: Check out Mamboserver.
Kpaul Mallasch recommends Scoop, which powers Kuro5hin, and CMSmatrix.
And Adam Gaffin recommends Drupal — which we'll be using for Ourmedia.org.
RF Toolbox - Dipole, Yagi, Vertical, Cubic quad, Log periodic, J-pole, helix, helical,coil, and transmission line design package for the Macintosh
From the site:
RF Toolbox is an antenna design and electronics/electrical tool package
That's what the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) proposes, says Fred von Lohmann in a Deep Links post analyzing the organization's brief [PDF] in MGM v. Grokster:
[NAB's] take on the case? P2P must be banned, lest it erode the profits of broadcasters. ...Funny, we recently heard the same thing from certain broadcasters in the fight over the "broadcast flag" regulations -- digital television technology must be locked down, all in the name of protecting ad-supported TV. In fact, they went so far as to threaten to stop broadcasting digital TV unless they got their way.
roadcasters didn't make that puerile threat in their brief: "Unless you ban P2P, we'll stop broadcasting." Because if they had, then we could have called their bluff, taken away their free spectrum, and given it to someone who is willing to play. ...
Oh, and did I mention that 85% of Americans now pay for their television programming? And that some of the most innovative programming to hit TV is produced by HBO, which manages without ads? Makes you wonder whether it's a good idea for the Supreme Court to start regulating Internet technologies to protect one, and only one, business model.
XML programming in Java technology, Part 1
The Washington Post breaks out five ways to make money with a weblog: Google Adsense, BlogAds, affiliate programs, tip jars and selling schwag. Of course, regulars here know I feel there are other ways.

For your reference, Wizbang has links to the video.
And just for old time's sake, here are the snopes.com pages for the Ford SportKa and the Nokia fake ads. (They have links to the videos.)
People used a lot of flash and video during the elections to express their views online. With more bandwidth and easier and easier video editing, video as a form of expression will continue to grow. It's interesting how the TV ad as a form is perfect for twisted humor because it is designed to be short and strong and people are used to the format.
Jeff Jarvis has blogged his thoughts on this.
Comment - TrackBackActivist Technology: Political activists are beginning to depend on technology, especially email and web-based tools (weblogs, wikis, forums, etc.), and we're seeing a community of developers who are focused on building social and political technologies that activists can use. This panel is a discussion of available tools vs. activist requirements: what's there, and what's needed.
Deliberative Democracy and Interactive Technology: How can technology mediate discussions, and how do we avoid the "echo chamber" - how do we facilitate dialog between people with sometimes radically differing viewpoints? Can technology help overcome the current political polarization in the USA?
Are Political Parties Obsolete? If, using Internet applications, we can form and sustain coalitions in a more ad hoc, distributed way do we really need political parties? Do parties, with their top-down "command and control" structures and commitment to specific ideologies, constrain democratic process?
How to think about democracy and technology. Direct or "pure" democracy is often considered unworkable. It doesn't scale well, and it's difficult for the general population to make decisions that require specialized study. Its opponents relate democracy to "mob rule" or "tyranny of the majority." Do pervasive Internet connectivity and technologies for discussion, debate, and advocacy make the concept of pure democracy more viable? Will emerging social technologies facilitate a more democratic system of government? What is the appropriate role of technology in political campaigns, issues advocacy, and the election process?
The New York Times does a wide-ranging article on PVR technologies including profiles on the technologies and people behind BitTorrent, Videora, MythTV, and KnoppMyth.
First popularized by TiVo and ReplayTV about five years ago, the DVR gave consumers a new degree of control: instead of being at the mercy of the broadcast schedule or VCR's, they could now be their own television programmers, scheduling shows at their convenience, pausing live television and skipping easily past commercials. Smith Barney estimates that though only a little more than 6 million Americans now use DVR's, by 2010 nearly half of American television households, or 58 million homes, will have them.
The article also touches upon the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Television Liberation Digital Front which is working towards defeating the FCC's broadcast flag, which will restrict ways in which media content can be used.
The article closes with some quotes from television company executives, who are planning for a pay-per-view future, think that people will pay $1 per TV show (without commercials) and $.50 per TV show (with commercials.) What do you think about the future of TV viewing and pay-per-view? Would you pay per show?
The New York Times> Steal This Show
Thanks to the New York Times Link Generator for a weblog-safe link.
Charlie Nesson writes: "Dave, I've started an audioblog, and want to persuade a friend of mine to do likewise. He asks what it takes to listen in a car. Can you help me on this?"
1. I use an inexpensive device made by Sony that connects into the cassette player in my car. On one end it's got a cassette, with no moving parts, and on the other, a mini jack that plugs into the MP3 player. Just plug it in and play. The sound is pretty good. They sell them at Target and Best Buy.Since we noticed sta(cc)ato another CC radio show has started: The Revolution. After three regular shows, the Revolution is already producing a special: Rip. Sample. Mash. Countdown. Each week until the Freestyle Mix and Militia Mix contests end (February 12), the Revolution will play new entries that have been rated four stars (of five) or higher by the CC Mixter community.
Via Creative Commons Blog - rss
WebProNews: Wiki-Based Search Engine Claims To Be Web's Biggest.
Red Herring (the new one) reports that Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, has roped in Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp. to build a $100 PC which will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software and will be sold in emerging markets. An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year’s end and real production around 18 months from now, Negroponte told RH and they will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list and the minimum order will be a million units. I think this will be subsidized product, because even the back of the envelope calculations show that this cannot be built for $100. I still like the vision behind it. For nearly a year, I have been harping on this stuff.
Via Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women
San Francisco couple Derek and Heather Powazek Champ have launched JPG Magazine, targeting photobloggers who also want to offer their work in print.
The magazineis being published using Lulu, an on-demand publishing tool that offers full-color, print on demand paperbacks.
Photographers can submit photos to the JPG Magazine web site for consideration. The Powazeks, then lay out the magazine and upload the files to Lulu, and set the price for each issue.
“For us, Lulu was the perfect solution. They handle all the boring business parts (printing, shipping, billing), which frees up to concentrate on the fun part - making a magazine we love,” explains Derek Powazek. “The other thing we like about Lulu is that they share our interest in online communities, which is what the Internet is really about. We couldn’t be more pleased with the quality of the magazine and the feedback we’ve received.”
The first edition of JPG Magazine showcases 31 photographers interpretations of the word ‘Origin,’ and each subsequent edition will also focus on a theme. One image in the first issue captures a newborn’s startled expression as he takes his first breath; another captures the crispness of the sky seconds before sunset. There is also an interview with Emilie Valentine, possibly the first photoblogger, as well as a special spread by featured photographer Noah Grey. Plans call for JPG Magazine to be printed quarterly through Lulu. The Powazeks are currently accepting submissions for the next edition under the theme ‘Lost.’
Via The Blog Herald: more blog news more often
I would urge readers to drop the baby, turn off the oven, sit down and read this MIT paper on viral networking.
In a nutshell, it describes the future of mesh networks. There are two core results:
"I've been quiet for the past couple weeks because I have been working furiously to finish a major rewrite of the Webjay.org front page.
You can now play items and playlists right off the browse listings; songs are listed along with the playlist; there are ratings for items according to how many playlisters have linked to them; there's a listing for most popular items in a playlist and for most recent; the look is a lot sexier; load time should be much better; you can now find out everybody who linked to an item, and the first person to playlist a hit gets credit for the discovery.
I hope you'll dig it."
From Street to Chatroom
When live and located, In Conversation provided the means for individuals in the street and on the Internet to engage in a live dialogue with each other. This work by British artist Susan Collins aimed to examine the boundaries and social customs of distinctly different kinds of public spaces - the street and the Internet/chatroom-each with its own established rules of engagement.
Passers-by encountered an animated mouth projected onto the pavement and, through loudspeakers, could hear voices triggered by internet users trying to strike up a conversation. When the pedestrians responded, a concealed microphone and surveillance camera transmitted the responses to the website via a live video stream (webcast). Through the website, online visitors could view the surveillance video and hear the people on the street. They could type messages and send them 'live' to the installation where they were converted into speech and broadcast to the street through loudspeakers.
Go to RespectCopyrights.org, where you can now download Parent FileScan
Parent File Scan software helps consumers check whether their computers have peer-to-peer software and potentially infringing copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted material. Removing such material can help consumers avoid problems frequently caused by peer-to-peer software. The information generated by the software is made available only to the program’s user, and is not shared with or reported to the MPAA or any other body.
Talk about cognitive dissonance. p2pnet reports that mostly it flags all media files as potentially infringing. And after all, aren’t most of the “problems frequently caused by peer-to-peer software” the lawsuits that one faces? Seems like there might be other ways to limit those pesky lawsuits.
Oops - wait a minute – that’s only supposed to be alluded to in the press releases about lawsuits and public “education,” not in writeups about “helpful” software.
Anyway, you might get that if you elected to read the EULA:
(Continued at Furdlog)
Wireless review has a good article on mobile video which points out the irony of new dedicated video technologies designed to offload video content from 3G networks, when the main benefit of 3G was seen as its ability for video delivery. The article compares Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology with the more widely used DVB-H technology, as well as MobiTV.
And for anyone still doubting the commercial viability of mobile TV at its most basic level, look no farther than the next La-Z-Boy. America is a nation of couch potatoes, and if anyone can intuitively grasp the intrinsic value of making television mobile, it’s this country.
nds back and considers media consumption more broadly, in the U.S. television sets are on an average of 4.5 hours a day,” Lorbeck said. “This is a behavior we don’t have to teach.” So there’s always the possibility mobile television will help by getting people out and walking while watching sitcoms…
Here is one of the reasons I've been relatively scarce of late -- we at EFF have been working on a brand new campaign to demonstrate the many ways that the copyright cartel is spoiling the environment for innovation:
FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo "God's machine," and its devotees have been known to declare, "You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!" But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo -- or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn't grow up to threaten the status quo?
gy the entertainment industry is using to control the next generation of TiVos and iPods. Its arsenal includes government-backed technology mandates, lawsuits, international treaties, and behind-the-scenes negotiations in seemingly obscure technology standards groups. The result is a world in which, increasingly, only industry-approved devices and technologies are "allowed" to survive in the marketplace.
This is bad news for innovation and free competition, but it also threatens a wide range of activities the entertainment conglomerates have no use for -- everything from making educational "fair" use of TV or movie clips for a classroom presentation, to creating your own Daily Show-style video to make a political statement, to simply copying an MP3 file to a second device so you can take your music with you.
Rather than sit back and watch as promising new technologies are picked off one-by-one, EFF has created the Endangered Gizmos List to help you defend fair use and preserve the environment for innovation.
For more on precisely these themes, check out:
The first-ever Advertising in Games Forum represents, I think, a sad trend. I'm not one of those anti-advertising purists. I enjoy many ads on TV, I think they have a place in our culture, and I think kids can be taught to be savvy about them.
But I can't help comparing games to other media. Product placement is a big deal in film - there are people who get upset about it. And there was at least a stir in the publishing industry when it was reported that Fay Weldon was paid an undisclosed sum by the Italian jewelry company to write "The Bulgari Connection." I wonder, was that book cheaper for Weldon fans because they were essentially reading just one big ad? Are the games going to be cheaper for the consumers if they're sponsored by Coca-Cola? Somehow I doubt it.
No one, however, bestirs herself for the cause of keeping videogames pure. I look forward, however, to the opportunity for devilish protest as we come up with clever hacks to either erase or transform brand logos. That could be fun. Virtual vandalism!
Om Malik has a bunch of links to new survey data that supports information we have known for quite some time.
A lot of people laughed at Steve Jobs when he introduced a hard-drive based music player nearly three years after the competitors introduced his. But his timing was right. It is the same issue at work here - TiVo and its ilk came out too soon. The Ipsos study finds that people would rather get a DVR from their cable or satellite (or soon telephone) company than buy a standalone product.
Om Malik on Broadband » We Like TiVo, Just Don’t Want To Buy It
Over at Slate, Jack Shafer put together a column this week about how blogging has had such an impact on the world of media in a short, short time - but that the people behind it and involved in it need to be more realistic about what the medium should - or can - be used / relied on for. He penned this after his time at last week's "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" conference, where he heard blogging pros Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen (to name a few) discuss the transformation of all things media and took into considering the requests that "new" media have for "old" media, much like some of the transparency suggestions I wrote about in an earlier Morph entry.
While all of the points were surely valid at the conference, it must be clear that blogging is not a) an overnight sensation or b) something that should be taken lightly - by people on either side of the tool. The comparison Shafer makes to technology of a few decades ago with regard to the "self promotion" that bloggers perform is probably not so out of line as it might seem at first glance. Unfortunately, the rest of the piece is under debate, as Rosen took Shafer's other characterizations and perceptions of what was going on - or said - at the conference to task this afternoon. Rosen's post points out inconsistencies - or at the very least lack of clarity - as to statements he and other people at the event made. It's almost like an article written by one source to goad another critical source into making comments on a whim, which is a frequently stated dig at bloggers. (Also known as the "no editors" thing.)
That being said, I wasn't at the event and didn't participate much in the online "festivities" so I can't counter or support the points made by Rosen or Shafer about it, specifically. But while I might disagree with Shafer's thoughts on certain things, I can't say that the overpromotion or chin-uppedness of some bloggers or blog advocates isn't out of line occasionally.
So unmediated is back up after a weeklong server shift that coincided with a major flare up of yatta's repetitve stress injury. Thanks for being patient and thanks for sticking around. Fortunately about 25% of you are getting unmediated through RSS (Thank god Winer). We'll have to figure out a way to let the rest of you know we're back. We have a week's worth of aggregation to catch up on, so forgive us if we post something that's, like, sooooo four days ago.
See you on the other side of twenty reblogged posts.
Within ten years, the majority of Philips Semiconductors' television chips will be incorporated into cellular phones, not traditional television sets, says Leon Husson, executive vice president for the consumer businesses at Philips, in an article in The Register.
Philips predicts that in 2013, half of cellular phones will offer TV capabilities. Out of 600 million cellular phones produced in 2013, 300 million will have TV.
Via Reiter's Camera Phone Report
Poynter Online has two articles on the problems and potentials that newspapers face in making economics work in this new era of citizen journalism and online news.
The mobile industry is growing fast, and there are just too many players in too many different sectors. Even guys like me who follow the business day in day out find it hard to figure out who’s doing what. Thankfully there is some help at hand. San Francisco based investment bank Rutberg & Company has come up with a map of the wireless world and breaks down nearly 2035 companies in 431 subsectors of wireless in an easy to use manner. Check it out here!
Amazon's A9 Yellow Pages search has been causing some buzz around the place, some of it from dear curmudgeonly friends suggesting it is nothing new and that there have been many projects like this over the last 6 or 7 years.
I would suggest the difference is not that A9 have not just made the bear dance, but made it tango.
The user-experience of this service is pretty fantastic compared to predecessors - easy-to-use and with plenty of opportunities for users to refine and feeback on the information.
Inviting users to feedback on which is the most useful picture of a business or landmark is particularly clever, and could generate some fascinating insights for students of Kevin Lynch and other academics of urban persuasion!
Also - the amazon feature of inviting customers to contribute images could lead to a mappr-like photographic annotation of the United States...
I guess it goes without saying that this would become a must-have service if it could be ported sucessfully to the mobile phone, especially if you were trying to find places of high digital repute with pretty anonymous physical presences.
Speaking of Prentis Hall...I tried this search, and wound up with the image above. It's lovely, but I'm not sure it would help anyone find the building. However, I now have concrete evidence that those urinals have been cleaned at least once since the early 1990s, since the paint is no longer on them. --dr
White House Drops Effort to Relax Media Ownership Rules
This is great news. However, there's a cloud in this silver lining (see quote below). The FCC didn't want the SC to take the case because they want to keep hammering away at first amendment issues with the stringent indecency rules that Powell put into place. I'm sure there will be more to come.
Officials said one reason the administration decided not to seek Supreme Court review is that some lawyers were concerned that the case could prompt the justices to review related First Amendment issues in a way that could undermine efforts by the commission to enforce indecency rules against television and radio broadcasters. Over the last year, the agency has issued a record number and size of fines, and has been pressed by some conservative and other advocacy groups to be more aggressive.
"So, I believe that creatively compiled aggregates of sites are on the verge of becoming interesting publications in their own right. I would point to Attention.xml, Kinja, and the new Technorati Tags all as examples indicating this trend, albeit each with different concepts about how to manage (centralized, decentralized, human or machine) the editorial and creative functions."
First there was the trend to compact newspapers, and then an explosion of new titles to compete with free papers and attract young readers. But what will be the defining newsroom trends in 2005? The answer is certain to emerge at the 12th World Editors Forum, to be held in Seoul, South Korea, from 29 May to 1 June.
Among the topics to be examined at the Forum, the annual global meeting for senior newsroom executives, will be:
- The rise of the "citizen journalist." Call it what you will -- participatory journalism, public journalism or open source journalism -- it is becoming a clear that more and more readers are becoming involved in the news gathering and debating process. Conference participants will be able to discuss the subject with keynote speaker Dan Gillmor, ex-columnist of the San Jose Mercury News, major blogger and author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People."
- The risks and challenges posed by RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and news aggregators such as Google News and Google Alerts, in which general and personalised news is provided by machines, not editors. "Personalised news" has moved from being a slogan to reality, but very few newspapers are ready for this revolution. The session will feature Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix.net, Susan Mernit, a US-based consultant and former senior executive with AOL, and a representative from Google.
- An audit of changing formats. The rush to compact newspapers is well documented, but what is less clear are the results of the latest format and design changes. The WEF conference will examine the innovations that have worked and those that have not in a session featuring newspaper designer Mario Garcia and Didier Pillet, Editor of France's largest circulation general interest newspaper, Ouest France.
Hundreds of chief editors and other senior newsroom executives are expected to participate in the World Editors Forum, which runs concurrently with the 58th World Newspaper Congress and Info Services Expo 2005. The events are
the global meetings of the world's press, drawing more than 1,000 newspaper executives to a unique annual gathering organised by the World Association of Newspapers.
The Winter 2005 edition of the Community Technology Review is now online. Titled e-Liberation: Broadband, Wireless, Blogging, Podcasting, Open Source, Community eBay, Digital Divide Network," it includes dozens of articles on projects, advocacy and policy; updates and reviews of what's happening in community technology in the U.S., from San Diego to Champaign-Urbana to Philadelphia, as well as the Owerri Digital Village in Nigeria, the Ecuadorian rainforests, and teen mobile phone culture in Japan; and, a resource section with software and book reviews.
(Posted by Emily Gertz in QuickChanges at 07:03 AM)
Via WorldChanging: Another World Is Here
Michael Bazeley in today's San Jose Mercury News: Google to offer TV search.
Google is again expanding its technology to enable people to search for information beyond the Web, announcing a service Monday that hunts for content from television news, sports and entertainment shows.ting stuff.With Google Video (www.google.com/video), Google is indexing the closed-caption transcripts from PBS, C-SPAN, Fox News, the NBA and others. Closed captions, originally intended for people with hearing impairments, are the text translations of program that typically scroll across the bottom of TV screens.
For now, the Mountain View search engine will not link directly to video content. Instead, when users click on a search result, they'll be taken to a ``preview page'' that will show excerpts of the closed-caption text alongside relevant still images from the video program. ...
One thing that leaps to mind (from the POV of a content provider rather than a reader), which the story doesn't address, is this:
There's only one (or perhaps two) closed-caption company doing this, right? How are they able to get away with this under their contracts with PBS, C-SPAN, Fox News, the NBA and the major networks?
This is private, proprietary content. PBS, for instance, sells transcripts of the NewsHour, Frontline and other programs.
And now users will be able to get the (admittedly unpolished) transcripts for free through Google? That will completely gut those services.
What am I missing?
Bookmark the EFF page on the building Supreme Court case about P2P companies; it links to every brief filed, and they are pouring in now. Neutral and supportive (of the petitioners, the content companies) briefs are coming in now; briefs supporting the P2P case are due on February 28. At stake: the landmark Betamax decision of 1984, which establishes the legitimacy of technology that allows both infringing and non-infringing uses. Read Fred von Lohmann’s statement of the importance of Betamax.
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Where to start? Well, while on a trip to Tokyo, Flickr user Matt took the picture to the left. It's a neat "meta" picture of an interesting looking phototgrapher taking a picture of an interesting bunch of teenagers in hip Harajuku putting on some sort of performance. A nice photograph. (Matt took a few more of these meta pictures while in Harajuku .) But then... He posted the photo to Flickr, where someone saw it and recognized the interesting looking photographer from her tattoo. He sent her a link to Matt's photo, she joined Flickr and posted the photo (below left) she was taking at the time Matt took his photo! (CherryVega posted a wonderful collection of photos, including this one, that she took in the Tokyo Streets.) Man do we love this stuff! Flickr user Brock maybe says it best:
More amazing Flickr coincidences can be found in the thread from which I stole this story. |
Yesterday I had a long chat with one of the humans at Microsoft, Marc Smith, who runs the Netscan project which provides analysis of Usenet. During our conversation he shared how they are using social network analysis to identify types of participants in threaded discussions.
One of these types is represented in these three graphs produced by Danyel Fisher, also of the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group, is of Answer People. Marc described them simply as people who answer people who dont answer people. They are the central nodes with many uni-directional ties. APs are what Malcom Gladwell would call Mavens, their influence is through their expertise, which they share widely.
AOL isn’t just handing over Usenet to Google, Netscan has a firmer grasp of this very long tail. It will be disconcerting for most to find data about you made explicit and visualized, especially when its personified, which raises real issues. At a certain point, being Profiled (RSS) as a Maven for Windows XP (RSS) who has bad Mondays may innundate you with pitches every other day of the week, so you might stop. The difference between explicit and implicit categorization and relationships is going to blur very quickly.
UPDATE: Go see Danyel Fisher’s subsequent comment on AOL/Usenet and his comment below which implies Connectors in these images. Also take the Rorschach test for yourself.
Just today I've seen two examples, one from ibiblio, the other from hurricane electric, of dedicated torrent hosting. It seems like Prodigem is onto something here :). Now, how to stay ahead of the curve? The answer is for Prodigem to keep on the path of the groundbreaking, and I've got some ideas as good as the original...
(Via Thomas Winningham and slashdot)
It's so easy to publish blogs that there are tons of them, and the effort to aggregate them is beginning to again attract editor-like and writer-like functions.Yesterday I paraphrased Jay's point as:
...the dividing lines between manually generated content, content generated by bots reaping the manual content, and insight generated as bots become refined enough to perform a curatorial role."Today Richard MacManus found an application of this idea in business:
A good role model for this type of editorial functionality is Amazon. Ever since they opened for business in 1995 (10 years ago, seems like an eternity in Web time!), Amazon has provided interactive functionality on their site and they raise the bar every year. Although their core task is to aggregate information about their products - e.g. books - what makes Amazon stand out from its competitors is their ability to creatively mine that aggregated data and enable users to do all sorts of things with it. Including, most importantly, contributing to the data (user reviews, etc). Which of course leads to more content/data to aggregate!
Here's new evidence that 2005 will be the year of folksonomies - commonly
known as tags. Metafilter, a popular
community weblog that anyone can contribute to, has just incorporated tags. Metafilter's tags are
simply free-form keywords people have used to describe their posts. They are launching tags to create "a great
bottom-up way of organizing everything that has ever been posted to MetaFilter."
The larger a word is, the more times it has been used to tag a MetaFilter
thread. The site has also posted a page that breaks out the top 150 tags.
This year many web sites will incorporate folksomic structures to make it easier for users to find and share information. Currently, tags can be found on Furl, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati and now Metafilter. By the end of this quarter I bet that other social media sites like OhMyNews, Kuro5shin and even Slashdot will incorporate them as well. By mid year the bigs will join the fun. At least one major news outlet - perhaps CNET - will also start use tags to organize their stories and feedback. (John Roberts, you listening? I just gave you a free idea!)
Tags are a natural complement to search because they empower users to create structures that organize unstructured consumer-generated media. Last week I wrote about the need for marketers and communicators to monitor folksonomies. However, the online marketing opportunity here is actually much greater. As tagging takes off, the next step will be for all of these sites to monetize this content by launching contextual advertising programs, perhaps powered by Google
Adsense. This will give the marketer new ways to reach engaged consumers by sponsoring tags across one or more sites that carry folksonomies. I call this "Tagtextual Advertising" and it's a coming.
Sometimes I'm amazed (should I say frightened?) that incidents like this one continue to happen. This isn't about "pushing the envelope," which I'm pretty much all for. I'm a card-carrying member of the Jeff Jarvis "change the channel" club, and don't want any further restrictions and regulations put on various media outlets. At the same time, I think they have to think before they do something.WQHT's apology was late in coming and occurred only after angered listeners responded to a segment of the offending broadcast featured on its website.
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)
"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....Read original post here
Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or "sponsored" results and unpaid results. "
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 UKTuesday 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"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)
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.

It’s getting closer now:
eXeem is going to be released THIS week (from 17th to 24th January)
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.
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.
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 !
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
promotedout 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.
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)
: 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.I know nothing about who's behind this; heard about it on Global Voices; eager to hear more.
: 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.
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.
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]
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.See also:
(...)
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."
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.
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)


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(Continued at ChapmanLogic)
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.
France Telecom's miracle box supposed to deliver TV and Telephony over the Internet is a fiasco".(Contined at noirExtreme)
(...)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."(...)

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?
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.
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.
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.

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.
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.
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....More
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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
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.
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.
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)
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."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."
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."
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).
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)
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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)

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.
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.
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
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.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.
[...]
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.
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.(Continued at The Media Drop)
[...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.
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.
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.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. […]

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
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.
I found it interesting that the newspaper got the $20k10:02 AM
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
$20,000. Mr. Orskaug was not surprised bloggers grabbed the video
without paying. "That's the Internet. We expect that would happen," he
says."
"Hei Oliver Orskaug,2:27 PM
/ Hello Oliver Orskaug,
Jeg leste i dag denne saken p Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB110470611254614746,00.html
hvor du siteres.
/ Today I read this story in the Wall Street Journal
... where you are quoted
Jeg lurte egentlig bare p om Tommy Lorentson som var den som egentlig
tok den filmen fikk en del av de 20.000$ 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 ...
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;
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.
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.
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).Link. More background here.
inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="
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!
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.

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]
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.