unmediated

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....

Via Clippings.reblog

Ivy is a software bus designed at the French Centre d'Etudes de la Navigation Aérienne (CENA) and developed since 1996.

Ivy was designed by a research group in Human-Computer Interaction, with the goals of connecting applications written on different toolkits/languages/platforms (such as an OpenGL application on a SGI connected to a PerlTk application on a Linux box), while keeping it simple: no server to be lauched and supervised, a simplistic API, and a communication model compatible with classical event-based GUI progamming. We think we have somewhat reached our goal...

: The most important line in a Saul Hansell look at search-engine one-upmanship may well be the kicker from Seth Goldstein of Majestic Research: "A lot of the real innovation is happening under the radar." While the big dogs bark back and forth, scrappy pups keep popping up all over the world.

Of course, real success for many of them means being acquired by one of the majors. The question becomes how long an innovative service can last on its own -- or how long its founders and/or backers are willing to put off that payday on the chance that it can make more on its own.

One fear: that some start-ups are falling into the bubble mentality of believing all they need is a good enough idea and the business model will follow.

Via PaidContent.org

InformationWeek: People are starting Weblogs in growing numbers, but the owner of the content isn't always clear.

Via Micro Persuasion

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.”

Via MocoNews.net

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.

Via New Media Musings

InfoTrends: 860 million camera phones in 2009; 89% of handset market

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!"

Via All about Mobile Life

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.

Six Big Trends

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!]

Via networked_performance

I'm at the Poynter Institute this week for a seminar called Web+10. It's an examination on what we've learned (and haven't) in the first 10 years of the Web, and an attempt to harness the brainpower of some 40 new-media leaders and pioneers to come up with a prescription for the media industry in the next 10 years.

I celebrated my 10-year anniversary working in the online world about a year ago, and many media companies this year are looking back a decade to the start of their online operations. The Age newspaper just yesterday sent out a press release (...)

Entry continued...

"We propose a new method to extract semantic knowledge from the world-wide-web for both supervised and unsupervised learning using the Google search engine in an unconventional manner. The approach is novel in its unrestricted problem domain, simplicity of implementation, and manifestly ontological underpinnings. We give evidence of elementary learning of the semantics of concepts, in contrast to most prior approaches. The method works as follows: The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and it induces a probability mass function, the Google distribution, via page counts for combinations of search queries. This distribution allows us to tap the latent semantic knowledge on the web. Shannon's coding theorem is used to establish a code-length associated with each search query. Viewing this mapping as a data compressor, we connect to earlier work on Normalized Compression Distance. We give applications in (i) unsupervised hierarchical clustering, demonstrating the ability to distinguish between colors and numbers, and to distinguish between 17th century Dutch painters; (ii) supervised concept-learning by example, using Support Vector Machines, demonstrating the ability to understand electrical terms, religious terms, emergency incidents, and by conducting a massive experiment in understanding WordNet categories; and (iii) matching of meaning, in an example of automatic English-Spanish translation."

"This projects plans to develop a free Media Center application for the Apple Macintosh, bringing togther the power and intuitiveness of the Macs' built in applications under a simple interface, for use as part of a Home Theatre system."



The Mini was not designed to be a Media Center, but the Mac community isn't going to wait around for Apple to see the light. I have to hand it to these folks for their ingenuity. Be sure to take a look at the GUI Gallery which showcases some very sleek navigation interface designs.

Via Digital Media Thoughts

While it looks like plenty of people are starting to have some fun with A9's new photo yellow pages feature, apparently not everyone thinks it's all that cool. A group of privacy advocates (including some of the same folks who objected to Gmail when it first launched) are apparently concerned that the site includes certain photos, including "abused women's shelters, abortion clinics and adult video stores." While the USA Today article suggests the problem is that the service makes them findable, that seems unlikely (if the place has an address, it was already quite findable -- and most of these places have no problem with being found). What could be a bigger concern is if the photos happen to clearly capture someone heading into one of these places who would prefer to keep that info private. On top of that, the article points to a variety mistakes, that suggest certain photos are of places they aren't. For the most part, it seems like the concerns are a bit misplaced -- but A9 may want to have a simple procedure to get a photo yanked -- especially since people are digging up amusing photos of people caught entirely unaware.

Via Techdirt

The headline about a new study concerning how parents and teenagers do things on the web suggests that, contrary to popular belief, parents are more tech savvy than their teenaged children. The details, however, don't actually say that. What the study does show, is that teens tend to get bored and give up on poorly designed websites, while parents tend to take it slow and force themselves to go through the whole thing. That doesn't sound like internet-savvy -- that just sounds like teenagers have a shorter attention spam and that they've learned it's not worth wasting time on badly designed websites (which might actually suggest they're more internet savvy). That doesn't make for as good a headline though.

Via Techdirt

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

This page uses Porter stemming to show where you've made different del.icio.us tags with the same English word stem. You can use it to help clean up your personal fauxonomy.

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.

"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."

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.

These days, of course, surging profits would be inconvenient in another way. They would undercut the industry's rent-seeking in Washington, which relies on a narrative in which technology destroys the industry's revenue stream. If the technology problem is really as bad as the industry says, then it ought to show up in the sales numbers.

The music industry has opened its books, reporting sales and revenue numbers that fell for several years before rebounding slightly in 2004. By all reports, the movie industry is still more profitable than ever.

It may turn out that the net effect of technology on the industry is neutral, or even positive. If so, then no expansion of copyright law is needed, and a mild contraction may even be in order. Remember, the goal of copyright is not to maximize the profits of any one industry, but to foster creativity by regulating just enough to ensure an adequate incentive to create. If the industry wants to argue that incentives are inadequate now, or will be in the future, then it will have to show us the numbers.

The stars fight lowballing by demanding a detailed audit of industry revenue reports. We should demand no less.

Via Freedom to Tinker

This article presents the latest developments in MMAPI: the new security considerations raised in MMAPI 1.1, the differences between MMAPI and the MIDP 2.0 Media API, J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 support for MMAPI, and JSR 234, Advanced Multimedia Supplements.

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.

Via Clippings.reblog

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]

I remember the good old days when just a few of us -- Romenesko, NewsBlues, TV Barn and Lost Remote -- would "blog" about the media. Now there are dozens and dozens of media blogs. And today, MediaBistro launches five more: FishBowlNY, FishBowlLA, FishBowlDC, MBToolBox and UnBeige.

Plus: Gawker Media launches two new blogs

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.

If you've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of FireFox 1.1, you'll have to wait a little longer.

"In a move that I would hope should surprise exactly nobody, we're pushing back 1.1 by a little bit because of the realities of the work remaining to be done (I have a lot of patches that need to be landed, tested, bugfixed, there are other patches from other people to which the same applies; also we need a reasonable stabilization period and a resurrection of the l10n infrastructure in order to do a release of similar quality and range to 1.0.)," says lead engineer Ben Goodger.

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.

Via CyberJournalist.net

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!

Via Smart Mobs

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.

Is Greensboro's blog revolution over-hyped? In terms of dreams realized, sure. In terms of possibilities recognized, not at all.

Certainly we've gotten a lot of attention for what's going on at the daily paper and within the independent blog community. My newspaper column tomorrow touches on that subject. Is Greensboro changing the face of journalism as we know it, and doing it yesterday? No. The real world doesn't work that way.

But what's happening here is interesting precisely because it is happening in the real world, where change is more conditional and the circumstances that allow it can be fragile.

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.

Via Copyfight

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.

Via Micro Persuasion

The New York Times says that VW is upset about the fake ad showing a suicide bomber and a Polo. I'm sure everyone has seen a reference to this in their local papers. (In a Japanese newspaper, they had a hand-drawn story-board of the ad.)

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 - TrackBack

Via Joi Ito's Web

SXSW Interactive Conference is March 11-15

Activist 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.

• Kathy Mitchell, Consumer Union
• Dan Robinson - E-Volve
• Ren Bucholz - EFF
• Shabbir Safdar - Mindshare Interactive Campaigns
• Erin Rogers - Union of Concerned Scientists
• Amalia Anderson - League of Rural Voters

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?

• Jerry Michalski, Sociate
• Kaliya, Identity Commons, Planetwork, and Integrative Activism
• Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy
• Lars Torres, AmericaSpeaks
• Nancy White, Full Circle
• Jed Miller, ACLU

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?

• Dan Robinson, E-Volve
• Glenn Smith, Drive Democracy
• Jon Lebkowsky, Polycot
• Andy Rappaport, August Capital
• Christian Crumlish, author of The Power of Many

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?

• Jon Lebkowsky, Polycot
• Aldon Hynes - Center for Investigative Online Research
• Jerry Michalski - Sociate
• Mitch Ratcliffe - Internet/Media Strategies Inc.
• Rebecca MacKinnon - Blogger Corps
• Ethan Zuckerman - Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Via Clippings.reblog

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.

Via PVRblog

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?"

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.

Listen now.

Via Creative Commons Blog - rss

WebProNews: Wiki-Based Search Engine Claims To Be Web's Biggest.

Via Social Media

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 Om Malik on Broadband

The language of journalism is changing. The terms that define the components of the craft are in flux. The vocabulary of newspapers is under challenge by both critics of the industry’s rigidity and by evangelists for new forms of journalism. The result: A journalistic Babel where confusion reigns.

I have been in a lot of newsrooms in the last year for Tomorrow’s Workforce, some as large as this one and some as small as this one. All desired to improve their journalism in some way, but, apart from their individual strengths or weaknesses, all struggled with two ingredients critical for change: A common definition for success and the institutional means to arrive at one.

In other words, the editors and reporters working at these newspapers want to change their newspapers, but their vocabulary – words like “story” and “beat” and “reader” – refers to forms and conceptions that, while still valuable, are ridden with journalistic baggage and lack the flexibility to embrace new meanings.

Specifically, faced with questions like “how should we ‘cover’ the city council?” or “what does the education ‘beat’ look like?’ or “what components should a news ‘story’ have?”, newspaper journalists have difficulty imagining non-traditional, even bold answers using these traditional terms.

Adidas and game developer Eidos have partnered together to promote adidas’ hyperride shoe. Eidos has apparently been working on a game based on the urban sport of free-running called … ‘Freerunning’! The game will be available for the PSP across Europe in March (and later also for the Playstation console).
In case you didn’t know, and I didn’t, free-running is an “urban sport” that consists of jumping around from building to building … definitely more fun to do it on the PSP, as far as I am concerned. By using the hyperride shoe the player’s performance in the game will be enhanced; while the adidas brand has been seen in videogames before, this is the first time that a product directly affects the outcome of the game.
BTW, Footlocker has the exclusive rights to sell the shoe.

Seen on Brand Republic

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:

• Throughput increases with node density. More nodes add to capacity, not divide it.
• Latency is not a problem.

This is the E=mc² of communications. It means that fibre to the home and so on are just icing on the cake. The lower bound for the future of connectivity is going to be damned high wherever humans or their powered objects congregate.

It means the end game is already pre-determined. Centralised telecom won’t exist in its current form. Don’t hold long-dated bonds in network operators or their equipment suppliers.

The caveat? Getting this into reality is, as they say, non-trivial. You have to make it scale in a world where bad actors may be at play. You have to get all the non-functional stuff right, like battery life. We could be talking anything from years to decades. It’s as big a jump as E=mc² to the atom bomb — the Manhattan Project of communications.

But the theory is rock solid, and the future inevitable. You’ve been warned.

Via Telepocalypse

Verizon plans to formally announce on Monday that it will use Microsoft's television technology in the launch of its FiOS TV service this year. The software maker's platform initially will be used to provide an interactive program guide, high-definition television, digital video recording and video-on-demand. Verizon is now the third major telephone company to help fulfill Microsoft's vision of climbing into the TV business. SBC signed a $400 million deal with Microsoft back in November while BellSouth has announced trials with the technology.

Via Broadbandreports

Congrats Lucas

"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."

While Sony's new attempt at an MP3 Walkman has been a pretty obvious failure, it appears that a lightbulb has gone off with someone at the company -- recognizing that their new portable gaming platform, the PSP could be "the new walkman." It certainly fits with the idea that video games are the new radio as a way of promoting songs. So, now, it appears Sony's plan is to build a music download store specifically for the PSP, suggesting that you won't need an iPod at all, since the PSP is also a gaming machine. Of course, it sounds like Sony might not have really learned the lessons they claimed to have learned recently. From the article here, it sounds like the service is being designed to only work with the PSP. That is, it's not really a general downloadable music store, but a music store where all your music remains on that particular device. That's not going to set the world on fire any time soon.

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.

Via networked_performance

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…

Via MocoNews.net

No one in my family watches TV commercials because there's been a TiVo in our house for several years. (The fast-forward button is worn way down.) Now, we're adding Sirius satellite radio service, so we'll be rid of radio commercials; Sirius offers 65 channels of commercial-free music.

As digital video recorders and subscription satellite radio spread to more and more households in the years ahead, this is going to have a profound effect on broadcast advertising, of course. We often talk here about product placement as one alternative as people watch fewer TV commercials.

But I wonder if (...)

Entry continued...

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:

• Why Hasn't TiVo Improved? by Ed Felten @ Freedom to Tinker;
  
• Matt Haughey's response @ PVR Blog;
  
• Debunking a DRM Press Release by Cory @ BoingBoing; and, finally, the ever-so-delicately titled,
  
• DVD CCA Is an Innovation-Stifling Cartel, by Julie Jacobson at CEPro Magazine.
  

Via Copyfight

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!

Via game girl advance

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

Via PVRblog

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.

Via morph

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!

Via Om Malik on Broadband

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

Marcus has posted a page on working with HDR-FX1.

It addresses shooting modes, editing software, frame rates to shoot with, stuff like that.

Via HD For Indies

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.

Via Library Autonomous Zone

Engadget has the scoop on Axentra’s Net-Box which is Windows, Mac and Linux compatible Internet gateway, firewall, 802.11g access point, and web/email/file server.

It comes in two variations: 80GB for $499 and 160GB for $699, and it’s USB 2.0 compatible, so you can add external drives if that’s not enough storage for you. Engadget prediction: before you know it these combo boxes will be as common as WiFi routers.

Features:

• Set up your home network in just a few minutes with Net-Box's wizard driven setup
• Easily manage your entire home network from one integrated web-based toolbox
• Network all your computers together (Net-Box is Windows, Mac and Linux compatible)
• Expand your network with built-in wireless (802.11g) access point features
• Share your broadband connection among all your computers
• Create and control your own email addresses
• Keep hackers and spammers away from your network and your email
• Host your website and publish your photos and videos to the world
• Share your printers among all your computers
• Backup and synchronize your desktop files with your Net-Box
• Access your files from anywhere from any platform
• Enjoy a fully integrated web-based productivity suite featuring email, contacts, calendar, file management, file sharing, photo publishing, notes and more!
• Use any IMAP email clients and LDAP PIM applications such as MS-Outlook, MS-Entourage, Netscape, Eudora Mail, or Mozilla to connect to your Net-Box's email and address book server

Perhaps a $500 community server with a $300 WiMax backbone could be a solution for schools, community centers, and other public or private community LANs, too.

Via Daily Wireless

Another route, the one I'm interested in, is "stopping" piracy by better enabling these actions to be an integral part of the act of content creation itself.

"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."

New research reports huge growth in streaming media usage last year. Research and Markets says video streams rose by 80.7% in 2004. Internet radio use is up almost as much. The reasons are pretty obvious: more people have broadband at home as well as at work. Want to know the top ten sites? So did I, but they charge for that part of the report.

Via Lost Remote

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.

Via editorsweblog.org

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.

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. ...

ting stuff.

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?

Via New Media Musings

TK Pal is a snippet of PHP code you can place in a PHP enabled page to restrict access to content to TypeKey users who have specifically paid to see that content.

Annotated EDLs, done by a fan?

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.

Via The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

It's a bit disorienting: slip on a set of headphones, turn up the volume and, while you move about the room, the music stays put -- as if coming out of five speakers stuck on a wall.

Software engineers in Germany who developed the widely used MP3 audio file format have taken the technology to a higher level with a next-generation format that delivers cinema-like 5.1 multichannel audio.

The headsets dazzled attendees at the Midem music conference in this French Riviera town, where goateed singers, sharply dressed executives and software designers in tennis shoes have been meeting this week to map out how music reaches ears in the future.

The cutting-edge, but disorienting, Surround-sound headphones won't be commercially available for some time. But music fans can hear the new MP3 Surround technology, developed by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, on personal computers provided they have special 5.1-channel sound cards and multiple speakers.

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.

What's potentially revolutionary here is the ability to buy a compilation of music handpicked by another individual, as opposed to the official compilations released by record labels.

An activist group encourages people to download digitized copies of the landmark civil rights documentary, which is currently hamstrung by licensing fees. The effort could draw attention to problems in copyright law, but the production company is not pleased. By Katie Dean.