unmediated

From Yahoo! Groups : videoblogging Messages : Message 6825 of 6825


Kenyatta and I were just chatting about how psyched we were for the oh-so-soon day when 1000s of us have hard-drive based cameras and are able to regularly post video with ease into mefeedia, vimeo, medicinefilms, ANT, ourmedia, etc... So while we both work on getting cases of cameras from Sanyo, JVC, et al., we thought it made sense to create a list of digital still cameras that shoot decent MPEG video clips. Some of these cameras are cheap and can be bought used on craigslist and on ebay, so we thought we'd compile the data and make a semi-official list of Unmediated Approved (or something more snarky please) digital still cameras that shoot video clips.


If you know of a camera that fits this description, please reply here (either in Unmediated's comments or at Yahoo Videoblogging Group) with as much of the following information you can provide:

-Brand
-Model Number
-Tell us about the movies it lets you shoot, how long, sound, file format
-How's the battery life on the camera when you shoot movies?

NOTE:
We are NOT looking for are recommendations on cheap tape-based camcorders.


We are NOT looking for recommendations on camera phones that shoot video.


We ARE looking for recommendations on digital still cameras that shoot video clips.

Thanks,
-eli, kenyatta, and the unmediated crew


P.S. If Sanyo or JVC or other camera vendors are here and want to chat, please contact me at eli AT chapmanlogic dot com.

Kedora TV is an online service to distribute video using BitTorrent via RSS feeds. If you're a content producer, you can use Kedora to automatically notify users of when you create new content. Unlike other Internet TV initiatives, Kedora allows you to reach everyone on the Internet with a high-speed connection. No special cables have to be laid or transmitters set up. Thanks to BitTorrent's peer-to-peer technology, you can send to thousands of people and still keep it cost-effective.

A group that wants to assist free speech in authoritarian nations is looking for a technically savvy person -- a CTO or lead engineer type -- who can do a short term study, possibly leading to a longer-term job. This is a paying gig for the right person.

The project is intended, in its intitial form, to make possible blogging that is impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to trace. One of the people involved calls it an "anonymous, anti-tyranny blogging service."

If you're interested, please send e-mail to Jim Hake at jim@spiritofamerica.net --

Note to other bloggers: Please post your own notice about this. It's a good cause.

NOTE: If you tried sending Jim mail earlier today and it bounced, that's because the address was listed incorrectly for a while. Please try again.

: This is not the first time such concerns have cropped up: among other times, it cropped up in April last year. Some labels are again in talks with online retailers to raise wholesale prices for digital music downloads, in an attempt to capitalize on burgeoning demand, this FT story says. And apparently Steve Jobs is angry.
Labels want a bigger slice...but they are divided on whether to do it or not. Wholesale prices are thought to be about 65c. Universal Music and Sony BMG are known to be particularly reluctant to disrupt the market for downloads.
Not known: how much the labels hope to raise prices...some said the labels wanted to introduce variable pricing for downloads.
Related:
-- Downloading Music Gets More Expensive
-- Searching For Download Profit
-- Forecast: Song Costs May Fall Like Rain
-- Jobs Says Apple Won't Raise iTunes Prices

Via PaidContent.org

According to BBC, the world`;s first digital cinema network will be established in the UK over the next 18 months. The UK Film Council has awarded a contract worth £11.5m to Arts Alliance Digital Cinema (AADC), who will set up the network of up to 250 screens.

High definition projectors and computer servers will be installed to show mainly British and specialist films. Most cinemas currently have mechanical projectors but the new network will see up to 250 screens in up to 150 cinemas fitted with digital projectors capable of displaying high definition images.

Cinemas will be given the film on a portable hard drive and they will then copy the content to a computer server. Each film is about 100 gigabytes and has been compressed from an original one terabyte-size file.

Via Physics Org

Britain’s Connectotel has announced the launch of a public beta of its new ‘Skype to SMS’ service designed to let Skype users send SMS text messages from within Skype Chat to any GSM mobile phone user.

“We launched our ‘SMS to Skype’ service just three weeks ago and have been very pleased with the positive feedback from Skype users,” says Connectotel spokesman Marcus Williamson. “Now we are adding the next logical progression: ‘Skype to SMS’.”

Skype users start a Chat with the Skype user called smsgateway, then type the following from within the Skype Chat window to send a message:

+number message

The message is transmitted to Connectotel’s ‘Skype to SMS’ gateway system and is passed from there to the GSM network.

‘Skype to SMS’ is available as a beta for users of Skype who have been authorized by Connectotel.

Tired of what you hear on the nightly news -- and the absence of women sources, speakers, pundits, and subjects? Ready to see progressive women's ideas and lives treated as if we matter?

Women and the Media (WAM), a conference sponsored by The Center for New Words and the MIT Program in Women's Studies, will take place March 18-20 at the Stata Center at MIT. Among the scheduled speakers are Holly Sklar and Betsy Leondar-Wright who will present a session on opinion writing. Given the recent dust-up between Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley, the timing of this is spot-on.

Go here for more info on WAM.

Via Clancy Ratliff, who also hosts the excellent resource, The Link Portal on Gender in the Blogosphere.

Via morph

BusinessWeek maps out the younger generation of executives who are "waiting in the wings" to inherit a brand new world of media. "This changing of the guard comes as media are flourishing but also under enormous pressure, scrambling to stay ahead of every new gadget or innovation on the Net," writes Tom Lowry.

MediaWeek: Big media looks to reinvent itself

Via Lost Remote

Brittanica editor Robert McHenry's “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" is criticism of Wikipedia asserted that quality declines over time. Rather silly, as the one thing that is known about the quality of a given Wikipedia article is that it is better than it was before and will get better with more time and attention. In "The FUD-based Encyclopedia" Aaron Krowne has not only fisked McHenry's claims, but relates open content to open source -- a very similar topic to what I just contributed to a forthcoming book on open source to be published by O'Reilly. Krowne sees McHenry's efforts as similar to the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt campaigns waged by threatened by incumbent software vendors. But of particular interest to M2M readers is Krowne's first two laws of commons based peer production, and the illustration of their interplay:

With wikis, as phantom authority pointed out, transaction costs are low for making a contribution and even lower for fixing mistakes.

Coding is vertical information assembly, marked by dependencies between contributions. Writing, as in the case of Wikipedia, is horizontal information assembly, which has little dependency. You can get the date of birth wrong in an article, but the article still generally works and can be built upon in the process. Doing the same in software could result in a Y2Kish meltdown. This distinction accounts for the authority models that Krowne describes later in his article, owner-centric and free-form. Krowne also adds a correlary for the two laws:

Dependency is not necessarily a negative factor, as it can prompt refactoring. It has been said (link? will refactor in later) that Wikipedia could not be a poem because of inherent structure. But I wonder what impact a language or fact-checking refactoring tool could have on cohesion by highlighting dependencies.

Too bad people don't get to use the entire album...

"ZeD and ACIDplanet want you to remix William Shatner's songs The indelible William Shatner wants you to remix two of his stellar tracks off his latest album: "Ideal Woman" and "Has Been". Make your mashup so bad it's good because both ZeD and ACIDplanet are offering nerd-chic prizes for the winning remixes."

DubIt is the perfect tool to quickly add voice annotation and sound effects to a movie or image, because DubIt uses the familiar VCR-style "Media Player" interface that everyone knows how to use.

Less than 5 percent of Internet users currently employ RSS readers, MediaPost says. That minority consists mainly of media and tech professionals, and bloggers who contend with information overload on a daily basis.

EE Times reports that a portable, DAB-based, download-ready music player with an electronic program guide (EPG) is being developed in the U.K..

Radio stations in the U.K. are leading the charge to morph Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) radios into pocket radios that integrate TiVo-like features such as pause, rewind and record along with an electronic program guide (EPG).



"We are uniquely positioned," said Colin Crawford, vice president of the Pure Digital division at Imagination Technologies Ltd. (Kings Langley, England). The company's BUG radio (left), already on the commercial market, comes with a Secure Digital card to store music downloads and a USB port to download new software such as EPGs.

Later this year, Imagination Technologies will release its Pocket DAB 2000 radio. Driven by Frontier Silicon's Chorus chip, it is believed to be an EPG-ready system.

Not likely to be available in first-generation radios, however, is support for multiple digital rights management systems from the cellular, MP3 and PC worlds. The horsepower and memory required could be too costly in this price-sensitive sector, said Rutton Ruttonsha, vice president and general manager for personal entertainment at Philips Semiconductors.

Fred Child (right) hosts the wonderfully written Performance Today on NPR. It would look good on a multi-media download.

Can you believe that the CBC's innovative Radio 3 is going away!! Check out the archives. It was a breakthrough for the broadcast industry. Bring it back CBC!!! (INFO@cbcradio3.com).

Instatone Is Radio You Vote On. Looking for a new online listening experience? Instatone is a radio station attempting to be the first Internet station programmed by 100% voting. It's "a music-minded community comprised of both professional and amateur musicians, listeners, engineers, and other individuals..."

Via Broadcasting

So, you may have noticed that I started posting little videos to this blog. I have always been interested in video blogging but could never find the time to create vlog posts on a regular basis. A couple of nights ago I couldn't sleep so I worked out a process to help me out.

Ingredients:
1 Cell Phone with Camera
1 Dedicated Email Account
1 Weblog
1 Unix Cron Utility
1 Perl Script
1 MT-Enclosures Plugin

Put it together:
So, I admit cell phones don't produce high quality video but what follows does work and can be somewhat decent especially considering how easy it is to post videos to your blog once it is setup.

You need a cell phone with a camera that takes video and can do MMS messaging and furthermore send MMS via email. Most modern cell phones have and can do all of the above. I am using both the Nokia 6820 and the Nokia 6630. Both models shoot video in 3GPP format a standard and therefore pretty via to a wide variety of media players.

On my phones, I simply shoot the video (and sometimes edit it on the 6630) and send it via Multimedia Messaging to a specific email address that I have setup for this purpose. Of course, I haven't yet received a bill for all of this from my phone service provider so I am not sure of the repercussions here but I hope it won't be prohibitively expensive to continue.

On my server, I utilize the above perl script (which I originally wrote for picture messages but have recently modified for video and automatic blog posting) run every minute via a cron job. If you take a look at the script, it utilizes the email subject for the blog post title and any text in the body of the message as the body of the blog post. Furthermore, it utilizes an embedded a QuickTime player set to the source of the video that is parsed from the email/MMS message.

Last, I did a slight modification to the MT-Enclosures plugin script so that it would automatically create RSS 2.0 enclosures with pointers to the 3GPP videos. This way folks who subscribe to my feed with ANT or another video aggregator will get my videos.

Here are the lines I added to the MT-Enclosures Plugin:

        elsif ( $url =~ /^.*\.3gp$/i )

        {

                $mime = 'video/3gpp';

        }

Right after the existing lines:

        elsif ( $url =~ /^.*\.png$/i )

        {

                $mime = 'image/png';

        }

Viola.. Automatic Video Blog Posts from my cell phone...

(These instructions are a bit incomplete, I know, but they should get you started on the right path. Also, if you have any mods or bug fixes for the perl script, please send'em to me).

New year, same questions. Sattelite radio has been getting a lot of attention lately. The two players, Sirius and XM, have been signing lots of massive content deals and distribution deals, leading to plenty of new customers. However, the big question remains: can they actually make money? It's the same question that's been asked before. Both companies are losing a ton of money, and its not clear that the big dollars to content providers is being made up. Yes, new subscribers are signing up -- but it may not be enough to overcome both the cost of the content, and the expense of launching and maintaining satellites. Is this another case of a cool offering, but a weak business model?

Last month, we noted that a bunch of companies in the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) had gotten together to pool a bunch of patents that pertained to copy protection. The plan was to let anyone license the whole set of patents for $1 per device. Beyond the fact that the "open" part of the alliances name is a complete lie, we noted that this solution wouldn't do anything but make things more expensive for consumers. It wouldn't stop copying of unauthorized content. It would just add to the cost for legitimate users. Well, it appears that many consumer electronics and handset companies agree, and are saying that it's simply not worth paying $1 for the copy protection, as they won't be able to make that up. They're realizing that they'll be paying $1 per device to make the device less valuable to consumers. The Reuters article is also very misleading in that it repeats (a few times) that somehow this DRM copy protection is "needed." Says who? Mobile phones are catching on around the world at an amazing rate. Mobile data is being used increasingly as well -- and most of it is for communication, not to suffer through some broadcast style content. The only thing this does is make devices more expensive and less valuable. Why is that needed?

Doom9.net - The Definitive DVD Backup Resource

hymn -- decrypt iTunes and iPod music / unprotect AAC files
(m4p --> m4a)

To decrypt your iTunes protected AAC files so that they can be played on operating systems for which no official version of iTunes exists, such as Linux.

To use non-Apple AAC-capable hardware to play your music.

To eliminate the five computer limit imposed by iTunes.

To make archival backups of your music.

As the first step in converting your music from protected AAC to MP3, Ogg, or your other favorite audio file format, for use with your non-iPod portable audio player.

To demonstrate your belief in the principles of fair-use under copyright law.

PeerCast P2P Radio
From the site:
PeerCast is a new, free way to listen to radio and watch video on the Internet. It uses P2P technology to let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of traditional streaming. This means you get to hear and watch stations not normally found on commercially funded sites.

OVOLAB - Phlink
Very nice application integrating voice mail, caller id, address book, faxes and more...

Webcasting - DoWire.Org
A new community of folks involved in webcasting in the public sector (non-profits, government and so on).

They are building a prototype for a low cost audio webcasting system with images.

Very interesting...

After TiVo's stock shot up on rumors that Apple may buy the DVR company, a Smith-Barney analyst says his Apple contacts told him it's unlikely. "Apple's management indicated it expects the long term trend for DVR appears to be headed...

: So the webcast from my den to MSNBC came off tonight. Trey Jackson put it up online (though, of course, MSNBC should do that).

Who needs a multimillion-dollar studio? What you see above is the blogcast studio: A Logitech laptop camera atop my screen; the screen atop a box to get it to eye-level; notes for the spiels taped to the screen; MSM Messenger to show the video; a phone to get the audio back; a very long ethernet cable to get to the router so we didn't rely on wireless; lots of lamps ... et voila: TV.

I was upstairs in the den broadcasting; the family was down in the family room, ridiculing. "It looked like you were lipsyncing," said my daughter. I tried to explain frame rates and backhaul but gave up and confessed that, indeed, Daddy is Milli Vanilli (which is better than being Ashlee Simpson).

This was supposed to be used for segments about blogging but, at the last minute, they canceled the entire show -- just as Bob Cox caught a train to New York -- and switched to Popevision. I had no time to find links but managed to survive three segments. And the topic didn't exactly fit with bloggy geeky fun. But as soon as I got off, the morning bookers called to do the same thing then. That's the wonder of TV: It is the medium made of memes.

What's neat about this is that anybody can broadcast from anywhere. Sure, the quality of the image is still iffy (but it's better than an Ollie North satphone call). But the possibilities are endless.

Housing units get free, or $10/month broadband. The New York City Council has adopted (press release) a new resolution aimed at getting low-cost (or free) broadband service into the city's housing projects. As part of the plan, anyone building public housing for those making less than 80% of the ..

Ev and Noah pretend to talk

Check out Odeo, formally debuting today at the TED Conference (Technology, Education, Design). As this New York Times article explains, Odeo is a new startup from the mind of SanFran cutie-nerds Evan Williams (Blogger cofounder) and Noah Glass (Audioblogging.com founder). Is there money to be made from podcasting? If there is, these two guys will find it. I wish them wild success.

Also at the TED conference are some of my favorite vlog people in the universe: Jay Dedman, Ryan Hodson and Joshua Kinberg. They're conducting a videoblogging clinic and posting vids on the TED Blog.

More poddy/vloggy links:

Ev's backstory on Odeo and Odeo's history in funny pictures

Jay and Ryanne Show #3 on money vs. independence

New York Times: Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings

AlwaysOn Network: Video Blogs and Podcasts

USA Today: Podcasting, it's all over the dial

WIRED: Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star

NewsHour Extra: Podcasting Power for the People

Plenty more at podcastingnews.com

Via Blogumentary

Shared movie watching over a LAN using Rendezvous

"Web logs - the personal online journals better known as blogs - use text to dissect nearly every conceivable topic, and now video blogs, or vlogs, which incorporate moving images, are on the rise"

RSS feeds for just about every AP wire you could want

New West is a network of online communities devoted to the culture, economy, politics, environment and overall atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain West

Welcome to http://jswf.sourceforge.net
Still in the planning stages but could be nice set of classes.. Looks like it has been dormant for a bit but perhaps can be kick-started..

Via sLop

They're amazing. They're Incredibles. They're reinventing TV and technology, music and medicine, buildings, books and blogs. They're 15 mavericks and dreamers, winners of the Wired Rave Awards. From Wired magazine.

[And nearly every one of them -- winner and nominee -- is male. What's up with that, Wired?]

Via shey.net reblog

This workshop will take place during the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan. The deadline for electronic submission is March 4, and the papers from the previous workshop of the same name can be found here.

Via Many-to-Many

A new contest on CBS.com encourages fans to send in home videos recreating their favorite Survivor moments (should be interesting). The best clips will be posted on CBS.com and air on Survivor Live, CBS.com's broadband show.

Via Lost Remote

Two great examples that show how an event gets extended:

Northern Voice
Northern Voice, in Vancouver, B.C. , last weekend, used tags as a way to create an extended event. The site is a blog. They provided ways you could subscribe to PubSub, Technorati and other feed services. They aggregated headlines from what people had to say about the event from around the web,. Their wiki kicks butt.

TED
I talked to someone heading down to Monterey for TED so I went to the site and pecked around until I found the feed for the show. Susbcribed and then forgot about it. Checked it out tonight and saw 61 feeds there. Jason and Ryanne, video bloggers, have posted a few clips. Great stuff these two are doing. Mark from Visual Communicator posted: Mark's Excellent TED Adventure.

I know a bit more about TED by seeing the video blogs. The tags give me another visual look about what happened at Northern Voice

These are events that will be remembered. They are extending what they represent and who they reach.

These are X-Events.

"this howto is aimed more toward a beginner audience, but you ee folks should check it out and use the comments area to assist your fellow hackers and fill in anything i may have missed."

CyberJournalist.net readers have offered up some good suggestions on what topics should be covered when teaching digital journalism. Take a look and add your thoughts.

Via CyberJournalist.net

"Pretty soon, the number of DSL subscribers will come close to matching cable broadband subscribers: we expect 30 million DSL and 32 million cable broadband subscribers in North America by 2008," suggests the author of a new report studying DSL growth (Networking Pipeline). DSL providers are provisioning broadband lines at nearly the same speed as their cable counterparts, and the DSL subscriber base in the United States grew by 41% last year.

Via Broadbandreports

Samsung introduces this television that uses 42" PDP technology and a contrast ratio of 10000:1.

Peter Van Dijk emailed this response to my comments yesterday on the history of podcasting:

I think there was another factor crucial for the tipping point: Adam Curry's relentless "people work" behind the scenes. You need someone who relentlessly promotes and pushes people for this new form. For videoblogging, this is Jay Dedman (and some others, but mostly Jay).

I have been reading a lot about the adoption of new technology (in the social studies field, check out Bijker), and it's always like that: you need to shape your users at the same time as shaping the technology. Remember the Moog synthesizer? It only became big because of the relentless selling (to musicians) by their main sales guy. Adoption of the refrigerator in the US? The phone? The stories are the same, there is always a lot of co-construction of users and technology.

It's not just that the technology pieces fell in place, and that the stories/myths fell in place, it's also that some key people played a crucial role in co-constructing users and technology. That's why when Curry says "users and developers party together", it's so important.

"A U.S. appeals panel on Tuesday challenged new federal rules requiring certain video devices to have technology to prevent copying digital television programs and distributing them over the Internet. U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards told the Federal Communications Commission it "crossed the line" requiring the new anti-piracy technology in next-generation television devices. But another appeals judge on the panel questioned whether consumers can...

"Rumors about TiVo's "coming soon" 802.11g support have recently come true. The Houston Chronicle has a short article about two 802.11g adapters for a TiVo running software version 7.1 (Netgear's WG111 and D-Link's DWL-G120). The support page for TiVo Wireless Adapters confirms that these two wireless adapters will work with your TiVo in wireless G mode, as long as it has the most recent 7.1 OS release. This should make show transfers go a lot...

Sandeep Junnarkar in Thursday's NY Times Circuits section: Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings. Software for creating and maintaining Web logs now offers tools for adding audio, photos and video - and even updates by cellphone. A look at the latest offerings.

Via TivoBlog.com (Congrats on the birth of your son!), a new version of JavaHMO has just been released that supports TivoToGo. An interesting new feature of the product is the ability to automatically download programming based on user selected criteria. That's certainly a big help for someone like me that likes to archive some shows that I don't have time to watch right away.

By the way, the next generation product from the makers of JavaHMO is Galleon, so you'll want to update your bookmarks to stay up to date.

Via TVHarmony

Me-TV's VideoBlogging Wiki is an outstanding example of how online communities can use Web-based collaboration tools to create valuable knowledge bases—for themselves and for others to share. It's also a great resource for anyone tinkering with videoblogging, or vlogging.

News Corporation - the Ruppert Murdoch empire from The Times of London to Fox News in the US - President Peter Chernin challenged fellow executives to face the media industry’s biggest problems through a forward-thinking speech entitled “10 rules for Media Survival” at the Forrester Consumer Forum last week. Chernin explained that networks and advertisers need to work together on new formats, and that companies need to turn to technology for new forms of distribution. In particular, Chernin addressed the most contentious issues currently facing the media and threatening future profits including: fragmentation, ad-skipping, and piracy. After addressing media's increasing difficulty to follow its traditional pursuit of passive audiences due to technological advancements, Chernin laid out his 10 rules for survival.

Chernin?s rules are as follows:

"Rule 1: Realize that consumers? desires of control, choice, convenience, and simplicity have not been altered by the recent changes in technology.

Rule 2: A wired home does not change anything. It merely allows consumers to move content from one device to another within their home.

Rule 3: Media companies and advertisers have to redefine their relationship.

Rule 4: Consumers don?t reject advertising, they reject complacency. Advertisers need to evolve the methods through which they reach consumers, especially their old habit of using 30 second commercials.

Rule 5: Content is still king, but financing the kingdom is complicated.

Rule 6: If content is king, then marketing is the crown prince. Broadcast or cable networks need to create tightly focused brands, like HBO, FX, or MTV.

Rule 7: Get noticed. Even the brightest ideas need to be original, more audacious, and more gripping.

Rule 8: The industry cannot ignore the fragmentation that is going on around the world.

Rule 9: Nothing compares to the spontaneity and thrill of things that are live, including sports, news, and entertainment.

Rule 10: If the industry does not solve the problem of piracy and can thus not protect content, all other rules are meaningless."

It's easy to understand that this "Bible's decalog" mainly applies to the broadcast industry, but some rules are relevant to forecasting the future of the newspaper industry.

Source: Forrester Magazine through paidcontent.org

A new Gallup survey of media behavior finds that 28 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 have a computer and Internet access in their rooms. And 64 percent have a TV in their rooms. (MediaPost has a report on the survey.)

There are a couple key reasons for the discrepancy between TV and Internet-connected computers in teens' room: first, PCs are still more expensive; and second, parents are wary of their kids running across inappropriate content such as pornography or otherwise getting in trouble online.

(You can count my home as among the minority: Both my daughters have PCs in (...)

Entry continued...

Via Poynter E-Media Tidbits

Podcasting pioneer and former MTV VJ Adam Curry is profiled in the new issue of Wired magazine.

Via Micro Persuasion

Even as we patiently wait for fiber to the home, VDSL chip maker Ikanos Communications has released a new chip that will allow carriers to stream data at speeds of upto 100 megabits per second over boring-ole copper cables. The new chip - Fx 100100 - allows 100 megabits both in upstream and downstream directions over a single copper line. Ikanos believes that its new solution enables carriers to increase their revenue stream by offering the same high-speed symmetric bandwidth over existing telephone lines. This chip could also boost ethernet-over-copper as well. Now if we could get the company to work on its product naming strategy. The chip can push data at those speeds over a 150-to-200 meter span, depending on the condition of the copper loop. [Press Release]

Via Om Malik on Broadband

If you have a copy of MechAssault 2, and you want to (possibly) contribute to the next generation Xbox, then follow the link. It takes you to a survey that asks:

”It is important that the next videogame system I purchase connects to my TV wirelessly.”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Strongly Agree Strongly Disagree”

Okay , you can take this a number of ways. First, what the hell do they mean by “connects to my TV wirelessly”? Do they mean connects to the Internet wirelessly? Or a media hub wirelessly? Maybe they just want to see if you would buy a wireless access point to play your Xbox Live! games. OR (the option we’re hoping for), Microsoft is looking into making the next Xbox wireless out of the box, as a media hub. It would make sense on so many levels for them to include this. Ease of use, “cool factor”, game console as center of entertainment hub, etc. They already appear to be making the controllers wireless, why not the entire box?

Note: If you follow the link, you’ll need to sign in with a Passport account.

[Thanks to the eagle-eyed Jaron Kenney for spotting this one!]

Via Joystiq

File trading road map

""It's a guidebook to trading music, movies, photos, software and just about any other type of file. More than that, it's a guidebook for trading as anonymously as possible and via methods the big media companies would prefer the average person not know about. It's this rich content - not the writing or lack of a clear audience - that makes the book a treat. Why not give the mogul a heart attack before the coke gets a chance?"

Funny.

"...breakthroughs in information retrieval would come when researchers gained a deeper understanding of how humans process information and then endowed machines with analogous capabilities." —Ben-Ami Lipetz

So you know how Flickr has tags, right? It lets visual images have searchable text describing what it is, like IKEA or meatballs. It's like letting pictures talk in word-language. Or letting us speak in pictures, just like Peter Gabriel does. Anyway, it's crazy cool. And this networked intermedia symbiosis party is spreading to video. The party's just gettin' started.

Witness what a couple of my vlog-buds are up to:

Michael Verdi is shaking things up in the land of mefeedia tags. Check out the growing little video conversation surrounding vlog anarchy. Another popular tag is The Gates.

Jakob Lodwick, who writes an ever-expanding epiphany on tagwebs, has taken his vimeo project from hobby to beta. Vimeo goes beyond showing you videos with certain tags. It assembles them into "automatic movies" - for example, automatic movies about a concept: funny or a place: 349 broadway where Jakob and the boys live. This isn't available for the public to play with just yet, but from what I've seen this could be huge. And huge fun.

Plug in, zoom on and freak out man.

Not entirely related: Check out a review of Jahshaka, "grassroots real-time video production powerhouse" that does just about all the audio and uncompressed video editing and effects you'd ever want... for free. It's in alpha right now - download here.

Via Blogumentary

Allows programmers to identify word forms that have the same root ("connect", "connections", "connecting", etc), with links to many implementations for a slew of languages. I wish del.icio.us would use this.

asynchronous javascript and xml

We know that small-town libraries have shed their image as fusty repositories of moldering encyclopedias and are now high-tech temples of e-learning, but we were still impressed to find out that at least one library has come up with a novel way to get teens into libraries: put audiobooks onto iPod Shuffles. We have it on good word that the South Huntington Public Library in Suffolk County, New York, is doing just that. They apparently have a handful of Shuffles, pre-loaded with books, and are planning to add more. Given the ongoing Shuffle shortage (even Apple’s online store has a two-week delay on shipping them), we’re surprised that the library has any at all to share; let’s hope for their sake that borrowers don’t “forget” to return them.

[Via WWWAC]

French telecoms supplier Alcatel and US software company Microsoft have signed an agreement to make available internet protocol television (IPTV) services for broadband operators worldwide. The two companies are to develop an integrated IPTV delivery solution that is targeted at IPTV service providers.

American International Toy Fair boasts plenty of techie newcomers to compete with the old standbys. Aspiring spies in particular seem to have many choices. Rachel Metz reports from New York.

Being a zealot for both TiVo and Apple can be tough at times. We can't watch TiVoToGo files yet, even though the CEO is a switcher. We have to listen to people constantly telling us about how the companies are about to die. At least now people who encode their music in Apple's AAC format have a way to play their music on their TiVos through TiVo Desktop 1.9.

According to Dennis Wilkinson on the TiVo Community forums, 1.9 includes a program called "SoundConvert" that will run AACs through LAME, if LAME is installed in /usr/local/bin/. All you need to do is install LAME and restart the TiVo Desktop. macosxhints has a guide to installing LAME, or you can get it from Vas the Man.

Unfortunately, you can't play songs you bought from the iTunes Music Store because they have DRM. If you thought you should actually be able to listen to music you bought on your TiVo, you'd need to strip out the DRM with something like jHymn.

Via PVRblog

The Committee to Protect Bloggers points to this Reuters story on the conviction of 28-year old Iranian blogger, Arash Sigarchi. His crime? "Insulting" Iran's leaders.

The BBC has a report about the dangers of blogging in Iran, plus a story about today's action day.

The future, high-speed DSL lines will no longer be the sole preserve of computer users. The TV set will also become a multimedia device, capable of downloading videos for instant viewing via telephone cables. Up until now the required data volumes have been too large for transmission with good picture quality. Researchers from Siemens and MainConcept have now developed a system applying the latest video standards to compress the huge streams of video data.

A column in Forbes sets out to explain why new technology is shaking up the business model that supports quality journalism. "The Internet has changed the economics of the publishing industry in a way commercial television never did," writes Paul Maidment, Forbes' executive editor. "Television news' answer can be summed up as: Comment is cheap, but fact is expensive. So it has gone the low-cost route." For the record, TV news still covers the facts, but I can see the point Maidment is trying to make. (From the pitch box. Thanks, Jim!)

"But every one of these solutions – including the bogyman, Notes – was hierarchical. There were folders within folders within folders. Sure, there were key word searches. And categories could be assigned. Different views could be produced. But we all assumed that most people would approach information through the categories they assigned the information to.

To put it mildly, we were all wrong!"

An excellent report (available as a complimentary download) on the current state of broadcast TV, the current state of broadband video, how the two will collide, and innovations that are sustaining or disruptive, and to whom.

The report starts with the UK perspective, but pans out to global implications: "Freeing users from the TV/home constraint will be achieved with place shifting solutions via streams, downloads and device transfers. Adoption characteristics will differ to iTunes/iPod, as video place shifting requires a user's total attention, most appropriate for nomadic scenarios; of which a manifestation may be a preference for short - bite size - video clips. End-to-end systems with rich content libraries may prove difficult to negotiate and offer. Media shifting and P2P blur the professional/amateur divide, making possible point-to-point distribution of video content and user-generated videos."

() Download the report here (1.2 MB, 45 pages)...

Via PaidContent.org

Definition of ENUM: The mapping of „Telephone Numbers“ to Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) using the Domain Name System (DNS) in the domain e164.arpa

The purpose of ENUM is to enable the convergence between the PSTN* and the Internet.

*PSTN = Public Switched Telephone Network, which refers to the international telephone system based on copper wires carrying analog voice data. Telephone service carried by the PSTN is often called plain old telephone service (POTS). See also PSTN on Wikipedia.

***

From Domain pulse 2005 looks at the key topics of convergence of telephony and the Internet, and spam

Accessing the Internet with a (conventional) telephone
ENUM (Electronic Number Mapping) is the name of the new application which provides a link between the classical fixed network and the Internet. Contrary to the case in Germany and Switzerland, where ENUM trials are still underway, the Austrian registry, nic.at, is already able to report on the experience it has acquired. The University of Vienna's more than 3000 employees will soon be accessible under a single ENUM domain – whatever the time of day and irrespective of the particular location they happen to be in.

In Switzerland, SWITCH is initially testing the convergence of telephony and Internet in the university sector. As Marcel Parodi from SWITCH reports: "Our test operation is intended to provide information on the particular local situation. All of Austria's experience is beneficial to us." Europe ranks right up front in the international comparison. The world's first international ENUM telephone call took place between Austria and Slovakia.

See also:
ENUM - Intro: Grundlagen, Wirkungsweise und praktische Vorführung von ENUM
ENUM - Erfahrungen aus Österreich
More at: Domain pulse

Via All about Mobile Life

In five years, the things that defined podcasting in 2004 will be forgotten. What will remain are the things that the first generation took for granted and yet pioneered: URLs, open wrapper formats, open protocols, open media formats, and open licensing.

Here is the latest in my series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This is the first time I've seriously examined the complex issue of paid versus free content for online news publishers, and it will likely not be the last. After all, we ARE in business to make money.

The first question I'm often asked in discussing these matters with broadcast executives is, "Where's the money?" Unless there's an immediate payoff, many television people are simply unwilling to talk further, and it's a difficult position to argue against. My point is always that the money is there — it's just that we can't always see it with old eyes and old ways of doing business. Moreover, the Web is still a new phenomenon, and we're all still figuring out how it works.

What we must always remember is that the architecture of the Web is without command and control functionality. It's what makes it such a wonder, but it's also what causes status quo business methods to sometimes fail. Here's the essay:

The Devaluation of Information

This is kind of strange and interesting. From reader Steve Case (thank you, Steve) I learned about revGtv, a company that sells games and ringtones but also features videos from camera phones and camcorders (see below).

There's not a great deal of information about the company, but you might find the home page interesting to view. In its briefs FAQs section, the company says:

Q. Who is RevGTv for?

A. RevGTv is Mobile Reality TV. It's a mobile blog taken to the next level. Camera phones are sending pics and video to RevGtv from all over the world every second and millions are watching. Get creative and go live with your own show.

Q. How wild and crazy can I get on here?
A. As long as their is no nudity, abusive content -such as hate messages- or copyrighted material- such as commercial records or pics that are not yours - you can do whatever you want. Dress up like Shakespeare in scuba gear and recite lyrics from your national anthem, the zanier the better.

It's probably an inappropriate comparison but the revGtv's home page reminds me of something out of the late and, for me, lamented television series "Max Headroom."

Via Reiter's Camera Phone Report

Kpaul Mallasch on grassroots journalism:

I always thought journalism was about being a watchdog for the citizen, a helper in this, the crazy information age. And if journalism *is* about that, shouldn't the citizens be part of that process? ...

Via New Media Musings

All the fuss over ripping Napster streams has exposed, in the words of Eric Hellweg writing in the M.I.T. Technology Review, the “soft underbelly of the subscription music business model.” While very few normal consumers will attempt the learning curve required to rip off napster during its 14-day trial. But the discussion over that publicized scheme is illuminating the larger issue of legal streamrippers—stand-alone programs that record audio streaming through the computer, creating non-copy-protected files in the process. Three examples of such programs are in fairly wide circulation: Streamripper, which operates most often as a Winamp plug-in; TotalRecorder, a commercial application; and Replay Music, another commercial app. Each of these utilities operates legally, in a gray area of copyright law that leverages personal-use rights and hinges on the 1984 Betamax Ruling that sanctified VCRs as having substantial non-infringing uses.

According to Hellweg’s article, no executive of a subscription service will comment on streamrippers. Reportedly, employees of these services love ‘em (the rippers). Nobody seems to know whether they are legal—that will have to be established by court precedent. The upcoming Supreme Court case could impact all this mightily, especially if Betamax 1984 is modified.

Om Malik started the ball rolling, suggesting what he would do to save TiVo: He'd give away 2 million boxes to get to 5 million customers paying the annuity for what he thinks can become a premium club sold without marketing. Next, George Hotelling at PVRBlog reacts. Then Fred Wilson decides not answer the TiVo call but then imagines what he'd do, which is pretty much what I'd do with a few variatons on his and Om's themes:

1. Turn TiVo into the anti-cable: Let us download, store, organize, and serve media from both cable and -- this is the important part -- the internet. Let us use it for BitTorrents, podcasts, recorded satellite radio shows, recorded broadcast radio shows, MovieLink et al movies, Audible stuff, MP3s, my pictures: anything. Make it a place for my stuff.

2. Release TiVo from the box; store my stuff in the Internet so I can get to it from anywhere, including the den and the bedroom and soon including my mobile phone. Yeah, sure, you'll have fun times with the MPAA and RIAA but by the time they get you into court, the people will be addicted to the freedom and you'll have won. Make it the everywhere gadget, the tomorrow device without the gadget or the device.

3. Forget about getting people to pay for another TV guide. Ask TV Guide: People don't pay for that anymore. That has been my problem with TiVo; that is why I have resisted: I didn't want to pay for a grid, no matter how good it is. But I also understand that selling hardware is not a great business. So follow the Apple example and sell software: The best way to store and serve my stuff and let me do that on the box you sell or on a box I buy (OK, that's more Microsoft, but you get the point: sell the functionality, not the chip). More important, follow the Apple example and sell community (by making it, as Om suggests, an exclusive club): Aggregate the opinions and recommendations, the links and behavior, the Flickrish tags of the TiVo audience so they help me find what I want to watch even better than today's TiVo (or TV Guide) do; when I organize my own media, capture that and share the logic in aggregate with everyone else in the club. Charge a one-time admission for the box or software and the entry into the club (and then charge me for upgrades later, a la Apple).

4. Market yourself as the alternative to cable that does cable and the internet and more, as tomorrow's everything, anywhere, anytime, any way ticket to media freedom.

That's what I'd do.

Jason Kottke becomes the NPR of personal publishing

"I recently quit my web design gig and -- as of today -- will be working on kottke.org as my full-time job. And I need your help.

I'm asking the regular readers of kottke.org (that's you!) to become micropatrons of kottke.org by contributing a moderate sum of money to help enable me to edit/write/design/code the site for one year on a full-time basis. If you find kottke.org valuable in any way, please consider giving whatever you feel is appropriate.

Apparently there are some provisions in federal law for situations where a copyright holder cannot be found....

Happy Birthday to OhMyNews which as of today has been making every citizen a reporter for five years. CEO Oh Yeon Ho's dream of a breaking Korea's traditional media mold by starting a citizen journalist site that today has caught on throughout the world with the launching of its English-language site last June and the worldwide proliferation of its citizen journalists. Congratulations to Mr. Oh and good luck with the continued success of OhMyNews!

Source: newsnow.co.uk

I know it's not just Sean Gilligan and me. Show yourselves! Visit the Yahoo! Group for videoblogging or comment on my blog. East Bay representin'!

Via Eric Rice

Communicating using instant messenger, text messaging, even blogging are changing the way humans communicate, writes Wired.

"The technologies have opened up a whole new field of linguistic studies, and researchers say the impact will be as significant as the advent of the telegraph and telephone.

Traditional linguists fear the internet damages our ability to articulate properly, infusing language with LOLs, dorky emoticons and the gauche sharing personal information on blogs. But some researchers believe we have entered a new era of expression.

"Resources for the expression of informality in writing have hugely increased -- something not seen in English since the Middle Ages," said David Crystal, an author and linguistics professor at the University of Wales at Bangor.

During a seminar on language and the internet at the AAAS meeting Friday, researchers presented their findings on internet communication techniques. Read on in Wired

FM never sounded so freaking good. How the coming digital boom -- and Big Radio's bottom line -- is driving the new golden age of multichannel, microniche broadcasting. By Charles C. Mann from Wired magazine.

Via Wired News: Top Stories

The Committee to Protect Bloggers is asking bloggers to dedicate their sites today to the “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day", two bloggers currently in prison in Iran.

The Committee is asking bloggers to place ‘Free Mojtaba and Arash Day’ banners on their blogs and to consider other actions, including writing to local Iranian embassies.


The BBC reports that the Committee to Protect Bloggers was started by US blogger Curt Hopkins and counts fired flight attendant blogger Ellen Simonetti as a deputy director.

Via The Blog Herald: more blog news more often

Scott Matthews, developer of the Andromeda digital music service and jukebox, has posted a proposal designed to manage some of the mayhem in the P2P world. The idea, dubbed DRUMS, suggests:

Essentially, the idea is to create a central database, along with an authority (or a handful of authorities) that can add/update it. The root DRUMS database would likely include data such as author names, work titles, publication dates, types of work, file checksums, flags indicating which rights remain reserved and which rights have been granted, and so on. It would not contain the actual works themselves.

Something to think about. A means for ascertaining the owners of creative works, knowing what rights the authors would like to pass along and so forth. (Note: I am one of the people posted on the sidebar of the site supporting the proposal).

Via The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

Reflecting on Bram Cohen's talk, I thought I'd take just a second to refresh some of my numbers on the bandwidth savings power of bit torrent. Between Prodigem and the old torrentocracy tracker there's been a lot of great public domain content posted and there is no further proof of that then through the willingness of random strangers on the internet to join in and donate their own bandwidth in order to spread and help distribute whatever they see fit. In fact, for the most popular of it all, there simply would have been no way for a single hosting provider to get this stuff out there via more traditional means without some serious $ expenditures. I'd really be interested to see others in the legal torrent hosting circles provide similar information (likely putting these to shame), but without further ado, here are my top 3:

1. Outfoxed (torrent). Robert Greenwald, the producer of the movie Outfoxed agreed to Creative Commons license the interviews from the movie and let me host the content. The interviews run just about 529MB and have been downloaded 2,465 times so far. This represents roughly 1.25 TeraBytes of traffic of which I only personally contributed around 5 GigaBytes (all within the first 2 days of launching the torrent). This ~$4 investment (for the 5GB) represents just 0.3% of the total amount of bandwidth consumed by this torrent. This even got me a mention in Wired magazine.

2. Tsunami Videos (torrent). Worldwide demand for videos of the tsunamis brought down even the largest traditional hosting providers. Prodigem user Chris Holland posted a torrent of some videos he collected (and certainly Prodigem was just a minor provider of tsunami videos via bit torrent), yet there still have been 3603 downloads of the 43MB. This represents about 151 GigaBytes of bandwidth of which Prodigem made up just 1.26 GigaBytes. This represents 0.8% of the total.

3. Uncovered: The War on Iraq (torrent). Again, Robert Greenwald licensed interviews from a movie of his under the Creative Commons. The 644MB of video have been downloaded 608 times. This represents roughly 382 GigaBytes of bandwidth. I only personally provided around 5 GigaBytes of this bandwidth which represents just 1.3% of the total.

The Media Center at the American Press Institute and The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University have invited leading thinkers on the vanguard of news, information and society, to contribute to discussions and dialog on the "mediamorphosis" of society. The gathering, Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good, will take place March 3 to March 5, 2005, on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Whose News? will address the future of news media, the changing relationships between media and the society, and technology's effect on news and information. Proceedings will be captured and published as part of our broader mission to foster a better-informed society in a connected world.

Via morph

Media -- stories, songs, art pieces, dance performances, and movies -- is a tricky idea to get your head around. Even setting aside our present copyright/copyleft/freeware/myware/yourware conundrum, it's still a complicated little fella. And in our present technological state, where digital systems allow everyone access to anything all the time, it's important to keep in mind why people get such a kick out of their iPods, TiVos, and little forwarded videos of chubby singing Romanians. In an age where media has no physical embodiment, users seek status by becoming curators.
...

Via IDFuel - The Industrial Design Weblog

If you haven't already, be sure to book your travel and register for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference March 14-17, 2005 in San Diego, CA.

Citizen engineers are throwing their warranties to the wind, hacking their TiVos, Xboxes, and home networks. Wily geeks are jacking Jetsons-like technology into their cars for music, movies, geolocation, and internet connectivity on the road. E-commerce and network service giants like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Google are decoupling, opening, and syndicating their services, then realizing and sharing the network effects. Professional musicians and weekend DJs are serving up custom mixes on the dance floor. Operating system and software application makers are tearing down the arbitrary walls they've built, turning the monolithic PC into a box of loosely coupled component parts and services.

The Make Magazine crew will be there, details to follow on that. See you there!

Via MAKE: Blog

"The scene" in this case refers to the social culture that goes along with the "pirate" infrastructure (the so called "darknet") that is behind the release of Hollywood movies onto the Internet. We see that scene through fictional character Brian Sandro, NYU college student and member of the notorious CPX release group.

The drama unfolds entirely from the point of view of a webcam focused on Brian at his computer and a recording of his desktop as he IM's, browses the web, rips DVDs, listens to mp3s, etc. Of course, looking at someone's desktop is normally boring but in this scripted desktop world its the vehicle for the character interactions, so we see Brian as he organizes rips with his release group mates, makes shady side deals with a street vendor in Asia, worries about financial aid and flirts with his girlfriend.

The age-old debate on who own the desktop is creeping up again, this time due to Google:

Google 's latest browser toolbar for IE inserts new hyperlinks in web pages, giving it a powerful tool to funnel traffic to destinations of its choice. People are comparing it to Microsoft's doomed Smart Tags technology, which tried to do a similar thing, but was shot down due to trust and trademark concerns.

The bigger picture: Does the consumer have the right to install software that can manipulate the appearance or delivery of web pages? Or does the web publisher have the ultimate say and control over how its content is displayed?

(A comment left by Robert Scoble on MicroPersuasion reveals that the guy behind Autolink is the same guy behind Microsoft's Smart Tags. -kc.)

Via PaidContent.org

"HP Research is working on ways to enable DJs to scratch and mix digital music. The HP DJammer has three programmable buttons that can be set for specific features: DJs can hold a track (just like they hold vinyl on a turntable), and a built-in motion sensor monitors the DJs hand movement. Moving the hand, and the DJammer will scratch the track at the point the music is held. Over wi-fi several DJammers can also be used collaboratively."

Via Digital Media Thoughts

Verizon has embraced the EVDO wireless broadband standard (300-500kbps), and last year managed to get the service to around 30 major coverage areas. This year is dedicated to "filling the pipe" with their new $15 a month VCAST mobile-phone service, which users in our "Cellphone providers and plans" forum have been giving the once over. "So far the service is just a novelty," opines one user. The EVDO service itself however is getting very good marks so far.

(Isn't it $50 for their EVDO service plus an additional $15 for VCAST? So it costs $65 to graft one-way communication onto a two-way medium. ;) Hmm. -kc.)

Via Broadbandreports

GoDaddy is offering a 1 year cert for Open Source projects

RedTacton is a Human Area Networking technology developed by NTT Docomo, that uses the surface of the human body as a network transmission path. Communication starts when the skin comes in contact with a transceiver and ends with physically separat