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 separation.

The system works through shoes and clothing as well.



Potential advantages include:
- services tailored to the individual needs of the user;
- as communication is triggered by natural human actions, there is no need to insert smart cards, connect cables, tune frequencies;
- setup, registration, and configuration information for an user can all be uploaded to a device the instant the device is touched, eliminating the need for the device to be registered or configured in advance;
- tables, walls, floors and chairs can act as conductors and dielectrics, turning furniture and other architectural elements into a new class of transmission medium. For example, you could have instant access to the Internet by placing a laptop onto a conductive tabletop.
- the system could be installed on any locations calling for secure access, such that each secure access could be initiated and authenticated with a simple touch.

Press Release.
Via engadget.

Related: Human Ethernet, augmented reality handshake and Human skin data transmission technology.

Via Clippings.reblog

This means CC licensed music will be in the iTunes Music Store

"Magnatune has signed a digital distribution deal with CDBABY, who will be sending all of Magnatune's music to all the music stores listed below. I've been working with Apple since June (and MSN since September), and because they're so overwhelmed with their success, the music is still not up on their store. Since CDBABY has an existing relationship with all these distributors, I'm told the music will get up there fairly fast.

Perhaps more importantly, we at Magnatune greatly admire CDBABY, and they have a great reputation in the indie-industry for treating people well and actually paying their bills (a rare trait). We're really happy to be working with them.

(Very cool. -kc.)

"ResearchChannel is the C-SPAN of scientific and medical research."

Nokia is exhibiting their new 6682 tri-band smart phone (gallery), with 1.3 megapixel camera, built-in light, RS MMC card slot and the ability to record up to an hour of video.

The Photo Marketing Association Trade Show in Florida, which opened yesterday, has a ton of new digital cameras and some phones.

Via Daily Wireless

The debate over the broadcast flag moves to the courts tomorrow, as a Federal judge will hear a challenge to the Federal Communications Commission's mandate that all devices capable of receiving digital TV broadcasts made after July 1 obey the broadcast flag. That flag will be transmitted with the signal and will indicate that the broadcast is protected, meaning it cannot be transfered to non-flag-compliant devices and in some cases, not even recorded in the first place. The theory is that this would result in a major clampdown in the amount of broadcasts being shared over P2P networks.

Tomorrow's hearing comes from a lawsuit filed last March by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups which argue that the FCC has no authority to create such requirements. Essentially, by creating the broadcast flag requirement, the FCC mandated the design of consumer electronics, which it typically only does after being directed to do by Congress. That was the case for closed-captioning and V-chips. In this case, the FCC acted on its own, with encouragement from the MPAA and broadcasters.

Via Ars Technica

As a part of Location One's regular program "Open House Wednesday", I will speak next Wednesday:

*Crisis of Trust in the Media Landscape*
Drazen Pantic

Wednesday, February 23rd 2005
7 pm

The talk will be an elaboration of some ideas I tried to communicate at Voggercon: videobloggers have a HUGE chance to depart from the existing mainstream infotainment matrix and create new formats and new discourse, independent of the existing media structure... What is the difference between video on the Net and videoblogging?

A number of examples of new and creative use of video on the Internet by videobloggers, artists, video producers and journalists will be presented. Examples include recent conference in NY: Vloggercon 2005, the Youngest Videoblogger in The World, Momentshowing, Concrete TV, linuxvirgin (linuxvirgins will make a special appearance!!!) ...

Live broadcast available, as usuall at Location One site. Suggestions and examples are welcome ...

We invite you to submit a Project Proposal to present at the next NEW YORK Planetwork Monthly Forum:

Wednesday March 16th from 6:30* - 9:00 pm
26 Greene Street NY, NY 10013  212 334 3347
*please note NEW TIME*

If you, or a colleague are working on either developing a social networking project or using digital media, the Internet, or communication technologies to address ecological, social justice, distributed democracy, alternative currency, or independent media issues, we invite you to sign up to present in New York. Each roster selection is handled on a first come, first served basis, and is based on the quality and relevance of the project. To apply to present at the upcoming Planetwork monthly on March 16th, 2005, click here.
We will be graciously hosted by Location One, New York's premier convergence space for interdisciplinary, interactive art and new media.

For those not familiar with Planetwork - a brief mission statement: Planetwork illuminates the critical role that the conscious use of information technologies and the Internet can, and indeed must, play in creating a truly democratic, ecologically sane and socially just future.

Planetwork hosts Monthly Networking Forums in San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle. These informal events are designed to allow a growing community to connect and keep up with each other's work. For a sense of these forums and the projects presented click here

The format for the Monthly events in New York is as follows: presentations are selected from submissions made over the previous months. Each presenter gets 1 minute to describe their personal motivation for their project, 9 minutes to give an overview of their work, and 5 minutes for questions. The format is designed to encourage those not normally inclined toward public presentations to share their work, allow for the opportunity for community members to return periodically to update their work, and maximize time for community networking.

The schedule for March 16th is as follows:

6:30-7:00pm: networking & light refreshments*
7:00 - 8/8:30pm: presentations
8/8:30 - 9pm: networking and light refreshments
* a $10 donation to cover costs is appreciated.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Elizabeth Thompson

Copyright Criminals focuses on sample-based music and has a pretty sweet trailer posted under a Creative Commons license. The film is co-produced by U of Iowa professor Kembrew McLeod who once trademarked the phrase "freedom of expression" as a rather depressing joke. Kebrew's new book, Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity can be downloaded or purchased.

The Copyfight: A Documentary About the Copyright Reform Debate by Yaz Santissi looks to be a broader and more academic look at copyright. In an email conversation, Yaz says, "My objective for the copyfight documentary is primarily to stimulate public debate about copyright legislation and inspire activism. The best way to do that is to release it to the general public directly." Yaz is making good on my intentions with Blogumentary and has posted tons of interviews with such luminaries as Laurence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Bit Torrent Release date: April 3, 2005

See also:

DarkNet

Stay Free

illegal-art.org

Norwegian alternative browser developer Opera Software today announced the launch of their voice-enabled Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) for home media.

The voice-enabled EPG allows TV viewers to use simple voice commands to navigate programming.

The voice-enabled EPG is a multimodal (multiple forms of input and output such as speech, keyboard or handwriting) project aimed at increasing awareness in the consumer electronics sector of the benefits of voice-enabled web technologies.

Opera's voice-enabled EPG announcement was made a few weeks ahead of the company's planned roll-out of a voice-enabled edition of the Opera browser for PCs.

The voice-enabled EPG is written in XHTML+Voice or X+V multimodal programming language and is available in English with initial targets aimed at enterprise customers and developers.

Opera's Software Development Kit is based on the IBM WebSphere Multimodal Toolkit, with its IBM WebSphere Everyplace Multimodal Environment, that includes IBM Embedded ViaVoice and allows developers to build multimodal applications for devices ranging from low-resource set-top boxes to high-end digital video recorders using the industry standards-based X+V markup language that combines XHTML and VoiceXML.

Via Digital Media Europe - digital media news from across Europe

Michael Verdi takes you through creating a free blog, using Flickr for free image hosting, and the Internet Archive for free video hosting.

Via Diablog

I spent some time tonight playing around with Greasemonkey, and it pretty much blew my mind. What is it? Well, basically it is a platform for running scripts that inject new functionality into web interfaces. If you’re a UI designer, this might frighten you. What it means is that any kid with a bright idea and a knack for DHTML can create a new interface for your site, and it will probably be better than yours. (There’s a lot of bright kids out there in the world.) Why should you get paid when the bright kids will do your job better for free?

The key to survival will be going meta: design for the bright kids. Create a flexible, modular set of APIs and a well-documented example UI or two that shows how they are used. Learn from Amazon and release your grip on the end-user experience.

But developments like Greasemonkey disrupt more that just job descriptions: they disrupt business models too. For example, I will never see a Google AdSense ad again, thanks to a handy Greasemonkey script.

Will browser customizations like this play TiVo to to Google and Yahoo’s advertiser-supported businesses? Will Google and Yahoo respond like the entertainment industry did? Or will they beat the bright kids at their own game? Some predictions: some future version of a Google or Yahoo toolbar will re-inject any of their advertising that has been removed; uninstalling the toolbar will result in the loss of valuable functionality without which users of their services will be considerably impoverished; meanwhile the APIs for these services will grow ever more closely guarded.

(Also click through to the comments on Ryan's post for an interesting discussion of where this could go. -kc. )

Via Ryan Shaw

This is a collection of collaboratively edited taxonomies.

Stay Free! Daily
The tag line:
Periodic ramblings from Stay Free!, a Brooklyn magazine focused on American media and culture

Via sLop

JD Lasica has a thoughtful essay on blogging and ethics.

Just how far can marketers go in soliciting blog coverage of their products or services? Does the practice of paying bloggers to blog about a product amount to an advertorial, embedded infomercial or product placement – and does such an arrangement violate the compact of trust between reader and writer? Or is it simply the next logical step in the blogosphere’s evolution from hobby to business opportunity? Do different rules apply to journalists who blog?

Via Smart Mobs

The major cable companies are rolling out technologies that allow them to serve a TV ad to a specific zip code -- and even a specific house. "The change coming to TV advertising is tremendous," says Eric Schmitt, senior analyst at Forrester Research. As technology makes it easier to single out households, "Cable will capture a greater and greater percentage of TV ad dollars."

Via Lost Remote

The WalMart TV network. Well, if you equate shoppers with viewers, which is certainly a stretch. But advertisers are jumping on board with 10-second spots.

Via Lost Remote

American International TOY FAIR™ is the largest toy trade show in the Western Hemisphere. More than 1,500 manufacturers, distributors, importers and sales agents from 30 countries showcase their toy and entertainment products.

(Over the years, I've started paying less attention to SIGGRAPH, COMDEX, and NAB and spending a lot more time combing through the goods being presented at CES, E3, and - via Yury Gitman - the International Toy Fair. Sometimes the best tools are toys. -kc.)

Reuters piece (here on CNET) indicating that the UK is the biggest market for TV downloads. Oops, did I say 'market?' Silly me, that would imply someone was trying to meet consumer demand. No, this is not a market, friends. This is a "wave of illicit activity," or somesuch balderdash.

My guess is that we'll see the usual pattern of meretricious Cartel behavior. First, they'll deny it's a problem. Then they'll scream it's a huge problem and demand immediate legislation. At the same time they'll sue their customers, all the while clinging to outdated business models that are based on the absurd notion that the flow of electrons on a wire will obligingly stop at a national border. This will be followed by a wave of public FUD, the suing of several innovative small companies into oblivion or lapdog-like obeisance (vis iMesh).

About ten years later they'll finally launch something that might approximate what BitTorrent was doing two years ago, at sky-high prices. The failure of this commercial petit mal will be named as evidence that there never really was much of a market anyway. That is, unless Apple beats them to the punch.

Via Copyfight

Bruce Schneier broke the news this week that a team of Chinese researchers had shown that SHA-1 was not the rock many thought it to be. He's now offered up a bit more detail and background to the findings over at his blog. "It's time for us all to migrate away from SHA-1," he concludes, suggesting SHA-256 and SHA-512 as alternatives (many concluded that some time ago).

Via Broadbandreports

Here's a transcript of Friday's Inside Politics on CNN with lots of bloglove: First, blog reporters talk about what's happening online (I was surprised to hear them tell my CREEP story); now we have MSNBC and CNN competing to quote blogs and that's good. Then there's a good produced piece on bloggers. And then there's a discussion about blogs between Howard Kurtz and political analyst Stu Rothenberg; rather than right-vs-left, it's a discussion of clued-in-vs.clueless.

KURTZ: But it's not like people standing on the street corner. I mean, they now have an effective message delivery system that rivals having a camera here.

n't -- yes, but, Howie, look, if CNN -- if INSIDE POLITICS is going to do segments on bloggers, they ought to do segments on C-SPAN callers. They have opinions, too. And they may be digging research, and they may have news.

And you ought do segments on poster -- people who put up posters on building sites. They have opinions.

KURTZ: There are a lot of bloggers, and they don't have equal influence. But Trent Lott might still be the Senate majority leader if it were not for bloggers, Dan Rather might possibly still be the CBS anchor and that story might not have gone through the scrutiny. They have a way of inserting into a story and forcing people like us to pay attention, whether we like it or not.

ROTHENBERG: If people at CNN and CBS News are making these decisions on the basis of the bloggers, it seems to me they ought to be -- they ought to be embarrassed about it. You know, we don't know who these people are.

Everybody needs an editor. I've always felt so much better when I have an editor, somebody who looks at my copy and tells me, "Have you considered this? Are you sure about this?" I think that's a big problem with bloggers.

One of the most consistent sources of material for the unmediated reblog has been rss feeds pulled from the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. Anyone can start their own del.icio.us account and contribute a story, project, or idea to unmediated by bookmarking the page and tagging it with the word 'unmediated.' (RSS feed here.)

Here are some other del.icio.us tags we find useful:

del.icio.us/tag/broadcasting
del.icio.us/tag/citizenjournalism
del.icio.us/tag/citizenmedia
del.icio.us/tag/decentralized
del.icio.us/tag/hyperlocal
del.icio.us/tag/journalism
del.icio.us/tag/media
del.icio.us/tag/nanopublishing
del.icio.us/tag/podcasting
del.icio.us/tag/videoblog

Besides the del.icio.us/tag feeds, there are a number of individual del.icio.us accounts that have been so indispensable, I kind of consider these folks the the "unmediated author auxiliary corps." These are individual feeds definitely worth subscribing to:

del.icio.us/akb
del.icio.us/antipasto
del.icio.us/bionicD
del.icio.us/cameron
del.icio.us/cshirky
del.icio.us/dblinks
del.icio.us/filmstreet
del.icio.us/fruminator
del.icio.us/hypergenesb
del.icio.us/jamesmichaelroot
del.icio.us/jeancf
del.icio.us/moth23
del.icio.us/rybesh ***(2/22 - oops! here's one more. this one got lost in some bad html. -kc.)
del.icio.us/revgeorge
del.icio.us/yatta

In Italy, the Fiscal Police are Rome's copyright hitmen for the IFPI (Europe's RIAA I believe). They bust clubs and online radio stations for spinning copyrighted music without a license. Last week they fined an Italian DJ 1.4 million euros (more than $1.8 million) for playing such MP3s at a popular club and possessing more than 2,000 mp3 music files suspected to be illegal downloads and 500 pirated video clips. Here's a bit of the article from IFPI's site, via Digital Wire:

Enzo Mazza, Director of the Italian recording industry association (FIMI), said: "We are pleased with the fine imposed by the Rieti Fiscal police. This DJ was touring clubs and making money out of the music he played - while those who had invested time, talent, hard work and money into creating the music in the first place did not get a cent. We hope this precedent will serve as a deterrent for those who are thinking of doing the same."

Why am I always the last to know?? :) Kenyatta was interviewed on RocketBoom earlier this week and described what unmediated is about better than I've ever heard it done...

Rocketboom wednesday 16 feb, 2005

After WNYC launched the first podcast of an NPR program in January, NPR's On the Media, the station's nationally-broadcast media analysis show, has doubled the amount of listeners it reaches online in just four weeks. On the Media says its podcast audience now rivals the number of individuals that listen to the program in a mid-sized media market like St. Louis or Kansas City.

As a result, WNYC announced today that it will begin podcasting its first local program. Beginning Monday, March 7, select interviews from The Leonard Lopate Show will be made available as podcasts.

"Podcasting is a remarkable boon for local radio broadcasts," said Phil Redo, VP of Station Operations and Strategy, in a statement. "This easy-to-access, easy-to-use technology allows local programming to transcend the limitations of both traditional radio and online streaming, by allowing users to plug into great programming from far-flung places, anytime, anywhere."

If you haven't already, check out the Derek Slater/Edward Felten blogalogue on the newly released Cato paper, Peer-to-Peer Networking and Digital Rights Management: How Market Tools Can Solve Copyright Problems -- a discussion that prompted Prof. Felten to define a new litmus test for whether the recording industry is truly competitive vs. a cartel:

• Derek Slater: "[The paper's arguments] highlight an important aspect of the current debate surrounding Grokster: what does it mean to support 'market forces' or the 'free market'? The paper's conclusion is that market forces will resolve copyright holders' concerns and the government should stay out. Yet, many would say that the DMCA and extended secondary liability are unfortunate interventions in the market."
  
• Ed Felten: "How can we tell whether the record industry is responding competitively to DRM? An interesting natural experiment is about to start. MP3Tunes, a new startup headed by serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson, is launching a new music service that sells songs in MP3 format. Will the major record companies license their catalogs for sale on MP3Tunes? In a competitive market, they would license to MP3Tunes."
  

p.m.): Prof. Felten's follow up: "It makes sense to rely on market competition to blunt the potential downside of DRM. That strategy will only work if we adopt pro-competition policies, or at least reverse the anti-competition aspects of our current policy. Talking about competition is good; but having competition is much better."

Via Copyfight

I have already blogged about this (Audio Messaging), but I found it interesting to hear the name podcasting in this respect.
Xpress Audio Messaging - Podcasting Tool from Nokia


Via Martin

Via All about Mobile Life

This post, made by "alexwcovington" in the Slashdot discussion of the fact that Brits lead the world in downloading TV shows, is a really pithy piece of advice that TV execs everywhere would do well to heed:

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but it's television. Signals broadcast through the air. Sorry to burst the bubbles of the folks in Hollywood, but you can't control the genie if you're throwing it out of the bottle at the speed of light. Accept the fact that people have the right to record their television shows, and don't complain when they trade them.

Link

Via Boing Boing

TECH TALK: The Mobile Phone Platform: Quotes
Just quoting Russell:

The person who comes up with the app that compels a person to use their phone without considering the fact that it's a phone is going to have a killer app on their hand. One could argue the opposite, that mobile phone apps *should* only be used in the mobile context, but I think that's too narrow minded.

Via All about Mobile Life

This is brilliant.

The Window Channel is a new video image company that deals exclusively in long-play, native high definition, ambient scenic footage. Each video 'window' is at least five minutes in length and is photographed from a single, locked-off camera position (no panning or zooms). The videos also contain the naturally occurring ambient sound, recorded in stereo, from the location. The effect being a still photograph...come to life.

In addition to the creation of an online HD image bank that will be available to advertisers, The Window Channel will be using the footage for the production of a new Hi-Def television programming concept. The new HD channel will feature TWC’s unique video ‘windows’ presented in a non-narrative format similar to that of music television programming.

According to researchers at Louisiana Tech and Penn State, 'the way you type is as unique as your eye color or speech patterns and can be used instead of a password to protect your computer.' So we're moving from passwords which were 'the way you think up words you'll need to type and recall often,' to 'the way you type when you don't need to think about what you're typing.' In a few years, someone will need to incorporate differences in the way we multi-task into the algorithm ;)

I know it sounds dramatic, but what the hey, it's our industry, let's blow it up! From the yahoo videoblogging group comes a note from Georgia Tech's Karyn Y. Lu:

We are a group of Georgia Tech graduate students who are conducting an ethnographic study on videoblogging for an online communities course we are taking. We are writing to make you aware of our presence on this Yahoo group as observers. We are trying to learn as much as we can about videoblogging technologies and issues, and hope to become active participants in the community as well.

VOCEL, a startup providing interactive texting applications like language learning and SAT preperation for mobile phones, looks to be one of the quietest and most successful mobile companies I've seen. If parents are the ones paying the bill for kids with cell phones, you better believe that learning's going to win over ring tones every now and then. Now, Random House has acquired a "significant minority stake" in the company, as well as reaching other licensing agreements for language and learning texts. What does this mean? It means things are getting really interesting. It means, if you work in the media industry, and you hear the money behind the industry ask,"Is it time for a new business model," and the country's largest book publisher is buying chunks of mobile software companies, then it's probably time to recognize that technology companies are the media companies of the future, because people are the media companies of the future, and the technology companies that help us realize that future will win.

What happens when you get a group of smart people "together" to talk about something they are passionate about -- they can't wait to get started.

We invited Phil Meyer (UNC, Chapel Hill), Mary Lou Fulton (Bakersfield Californian), Stefan Dill (Santa Fe New Mexican) and Tim Porter (Tomorrow's Workforce) together for a discussion about the future of the newspaper business in today's digital world and beyond. The conversation is hosted by Jeff Jarvis (advance.net and Buzzmachine.com) and the conversation is already underway.

Join the conversation or just join us for the 90 minute webcast on Wednesday, March 9 at 2:00 p.m. eastern (yea, it's free). You can register at http://www.mediacenter.org/webcast/march/2005/.

Via morph

The main observations are that while the Flickr social network (measured by mutual contacts) is very tightly-knit, there are "clusters", or "regions" in FlickrLand.

That query was the theme of media investment bank DeSilva & Phillips' M&A Conference 2005, which took place Jan. 31-Feb. 1 in New York.

Went to a Boston Cyberarts event over at Orange tonight. I was overwhelmed with the talent and effort I encountered. Lots of people working on lots of great stuff. Art is now play. Fun. Here's the summary:

"The Boston Cyberarts Festival is an international biennial festival of art and technology in all media. The next Festival will take place April 22 through May 8, 2005. It will include visual and performing arts and explore how artists throughout the world are using computers to advance traditional artistic disciplines and create new interactive worlds.

The 2005 Festival will also feature two conferences during the opening weekend: eMerging Arts and Technologies, for artists and high-tech company professionals; and Ideas in Motion, focused on innovations in dance, movement, and technology."

Bill Seaman's "work explores text, image, sound and interface relationships through technological installation, virtual reality, linear video, and other computer-based media and/or computer mediated media, photography and studio based audio compositions." He showed me some video of his 1999 work, Recombinant Poetics Dissertation (link to PDF file). I'm not sure how to best explain it, but it combined tactile spinning chambers of multimedia that could be spun and manipulated to change and shape in real-time a wall full of realism and design.

Teri Rueb's been working with location, sound, and GPS since 1997. "Rueb's large-scale responsive spaces and location-aware installations explore issues of architecture and urbanism, landscape and the body, and sonic and acoustic space. She is currently working on an interactive sound installation that explores the urban landscape and psychosocial geography of Baltimore, Maryland."

Eric Gunther, John Rothenberg, and Justin Manor were tearing up sound and picture with their custom C++ OpenGL VJ rig and Ableton Live (which has my vote for most fun software ever). Eric turned me onto Proce55ing, built by his friend Ben Fry.

Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, and researchers for learning, prototyping, and production. Here's something fantastic being shown in much more detail on the proce55ing site:


Timescape is the image representation of sequently stacked 1pixel-width video lines that are extracted each from the camera input. Timescape represents the apparition of the time-flow of the space, whereas photography is the visual presentation of the moment of space and movies express the space changed by time. 2005. e.j. gone, Byun Ji-hoon

What should PBS be now that it has all this competition from cable (and pressure from Washington)?

Via BuzzMachine

Motorola's iRadio Will Put Internet Radio Streams Into Your Cell Phone. Motorola's iRadio will mobilize hundreds of commercial-free Internet radio channels and incorporate a user's personal music collection to provide a listening experience for home, in the car, or on the go.

Derrick Oien breaks the news: the Copyright Fairy doesn't really exist.

Earlier this week I did a radio show on KPBS with Dave Winer. At one point in the conversation I stated that if the two of us were talking, and we had a Who song playing in the background, that if we recorded that conversation and made into podcast then this would be copyright infringement unless we had the permission of the various rights holders. Dave retorted that he didn't necessarily think that is correct. There may be some strange application of Fair Use that I have missed over the last 7 years or so, but I don't believe that is the case.


What I found particularly funny about this exchange is how some of the blogger intelligentsia hold themselves out as thoughtful and informed yet fail to do the simple homework when all of the source materials are freely available for them. continued

Dave Winer:

"Over the last week I've been visiting three towns in the Carolinas, Greensboro, Chapel Hill and now Spartanburg. In all three cities, the subject of blogging and local newspapers has been a major topic. Since I'm now giving the same advice over and over, I thought it would be a good idea to put it in writing, because it may be useful to other organizations and communities.

These are just ideas, I'm sure there's much more to it, and other ways to accomplish the same or better results. Consider this a starting point for discussion."

There are a couple of panels seeking Position Papers for discussion at SIGGRAPH 2005 that would be perfect for the work many of us are doing here. The panels have titles like: Rethinking The Narrative Thread: Where Do Movies End And Videogames Begin? Discussing The New Storytelling Paradigm, and Networked Performance: How Does Art Affect Technology and Vice Versa?, State Of The Art In Game Research: Games on the Horizon and Beyond, and Ubiquitous Music: How Are Sharing, Copyright, and Really Cool Technology Changing the Roles of the Artist and the Audience?

Deadlines are approaching!

VersionFest 05

Version>05: Invincible Desire April 22- May 1 2005 Chicago, Illinois

DEADLINE: February 28, 2005.

SEND US YOUR IDEAS AND PROPOSALS FOR: papers, workshops, films, street art (stickers, cut-outs, xeroxable pages, stencils), anti-corporate actions, tactical media projects, culture jamming activities, public art interventions, micro actions, billboard modifications, DIY urbanism, office pranks, social and technology hacking ideas, agit prop posters, how-to guides, creative disturbances in public space, profiles of space invaders and hijackers, lists of tactics and strategies, and psychogeographic adventures.

Via USC Interactive Media Division Weblog

The wire service company has taken a bold step in a new direction by launching an online news service aimed at consumers, according to an article in Revolution Magazine.

Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, said: "This is the first in a series of consumer services we will be launching this year that invite audiences to directly experience our news and information.

"Our philosophy is to offer viewers the ability to choose the news that matters most to them, wherever and whenever it is breaking, and to see for themselves what’s really happening on the ground. This is the future of the television news experience."

Via The Pomo Blog

busa aat and spinach7-digital invite you to join mo:life - a moderated email list focusing on mobile-media culture and technology.

mo:life is interested in how, inherently global, mobile media will be implicated in our daily lives here in Australia and the Asia Pacific.

mo:life maps and explores how we, as a distinct culture, will produce, adapt, consume, buy, sell, accept, and reject new forms and uses of floating communication. As such, mo:life sets mobile media in an Australian context. Our geography, enterprises, and culture lend well to a mobile way of life – a mo:life.

Our region is also the hotbed of technological development and cultural uptake of mobile media, placing Australia in good stead to develop the cultural, economic, artistic, and interpersonal potential of the unmooring of our screens, workplaces, and points of creative production and consumption.

So become part of the mo:life network and keep up to date with the latest information and knowledge about this rapidly moving sector.

To join mo:life - send a blank email to molife-subscribe@lists.s7digital.com or visit http://s7digital.com/molife/

Yahoo will air the first episode of Fat Actress before it airs on Showtime. Damned smart. Showtime will reach a larger audience. Time will tell what the best distribution mechanism is for such programming -- or whether that choice is left us us instead of to the industry moguls.

Via BuzzMachine

From their About page: MP3 4U is a network of music lovers called "sources" who search the internet for mp3s that are available as free and legal downloads. When a source finds a song they like, they post it on their MP3 4U page. They also create a song card containing a brief reason for the posting and a link to download. The MP3 4U sources listen to music all day and only select the music they like...saving MP3 4U users valuable time in discovering quality free music. Sources also keep track of their other favorite MP3 4U sources on their MP3 4U page...helping you to discover more music through people who love music!

I'm listening to Andrew Odlyzko giving a talk right now about why Quality of Service (QoS) and real-time streaming is stupid. He showed a slide showing that P2P and other traffic are generally transmitting files at faster speeds than their bit rates. Basically, if you cache and buffer, you can have outages in the downloads and you'll usually be fine. I agree. I can see why carriers would want to spread the rumor that QoS is some feature that we have to have, but it's strange that so many researchers seem to think we will need QoS supported video streaming. Maybe they need to stop watching cable TV.

Via Joi Ito's Web

A primer on what RSS is and how to use it from CyberJournalist.net's Jonathan Dube. Also includes CyberJournalist.net's set of useful RSS feeds for journalists....

Has anyone ever told you during a conversation: "Stop, that`s too much information?" Well University of Queensland psychologists have discovered just how much too much information actually is. Emeritus Professor Graeme Halford and his colleagues from UQ`s School of Psychology have discovered most humans cannot represent relations between more than four variables.

DRM solutions company Macrovision claims to have developed a new copy protection system for DVDs that is compatible with current players. How long until we see "Son of DeCSS?"

A Google image search for 'chapmanlogic' is an excellent starting point for browsing the photos from this blog. There's a lot that Google could do here. For example, it would be nice if date/time metadata was used so that photos could be viewed chronologically. Also, blog post catagories could be used to cluster groups of photos together. It would be nice to be able to pull up these type of public image results in the Flickr Organizr. That would be sweet.

Photo browsing an entire site with a Google image search can actually be pretty entertaining. In the mood for photos of politicians you could have caption contests with? No faster way to find them then Wonkette.

Here's one that surprised me- compare MySpace to LiveJournal. Hmmm...

And why not finish off with some eye candy google images vs. flickr head to head:
KidRobot in google vs. KidRobot in flickr
SecondLife in google vs. SecondLife in flickr

The FCC today completed the auction of 242 wireless licenses for a whopping $2.2 billion. Verizon Wireless and a partner collectively won 63 licenses after bidding nearly $697.4 million. A big part of the sale were the licenses the FCC received from defunct carrier Nextwave as part of a bankruptcy settlement.

Experts chime in on future of camera phones

[...] "Every year we have a new higher projection for the camera phones market," said panel moderator Jed Hurwitz of STMicroelectronics. "In 2004, mobile phone vendors introduced the first handsets with image sensors that had 3.2 million pixels. And Samsung promises 10 million pixels by the end of the year. But will consumers care?"

[...] Citing what he called "communication ubiquity" and "imaging by the general population" could result in the next big set of mobile phone applications, said Etoh.

[...] "Video telephony is known to be a killer application for 3G," added Jinsung Choi of LG Electronics. "However, it turns out that other relatively simple multimedia applications such as MMS are more popular in reality. The way end users accept new applications are different from what we think," said Choi.

[...] Consumers are accustomed to carrying mobile phones, fueling the used of phone cameras. "The human desire to be able to store memories and share means the camera phone is set to be the preferred consumer imaging solution (vs digital cameras)," said Nokia's Janne Haavisto.

Picturephoning

Via All about Mobile Life

"a GNU FDL-licensed wiki of crazy software- and hardware-projects of geeks all around the world."

The mission of this wiki is to give you a comprehensive overview of what some geeks do, when they have way too much spare time on their hands.

XMLisp is the integration of Lisp with XML. Works with MCL.

XMLisp is the integration of Lisp with XML. The Lisp Meta Object Protocol is used to establish a simple and highly efficient mapping between CLOS objects and the XML extensible markup language. It is not just an API to read XML files and turn them into some Lisp flavored representation.

The aim of Esperonto is to bridge the gap between the actual World Wide Web and the Semantic Web by providing a service to "upgrade" existing content to Semantic Web content.

3d animation for kids

Steve Outing: "Think about combining podcasting with 'citizen journalism.' A growing number of news websites host blogs by members of the public. Why not also host citizen podcasts...?"

mSpace is an interaction model to help explore relationships in information.

At the API Media Center's recent three-day seminar, Emerging Technology, Business and Policy for Senior Executives, J.D. Lasica raised the question: How do you turn newspapers from a publication into a conversation? One way is to turn you reporters into bloggers. But what else can online newspapers do to go beyond one-dimensional Reader Forums to create dynamic social spaces? Three speakers gave excellent responses:

Ross Mayfield: Give users a chance to built upon your product. Give people the freedom to remix your content — to take it in new directions — by tagging your material with a Creative Commons license.

Bob Wyman: One roadblock is that you can't find the conversation about your story on the media site itself. What you need is a button or listing of comments about this story, so that "you suck the entire Internet into your local paper as the environment in which to talk about the paper. They can be blog entries, videocasts, audiocasts, so that the paper once again becomes the focal point of your community."

Jim Kennedy: Let the readers continue the discussion begun in the story by conversing with the sources.

Read more of J.D.'s highlights from the seminar.

Basic Stamp is a hobbyists microcontoller that uses the BASIC programming language. Here's a primer on how to use it. After meeting Joe Grand, I became really interested in the Basic Stamp , made by Parallax. It's a microcontroller that you can program using BASIC. The robotics applications for it look fantastic (check out this Toddler Robot.) I'd love to hear from anyone who has been using Basic Stamp and would like to write a story about it for MAKE.

Via MAKE: Blog

On Tuesday Google had their analyst day, which was focused on articulating their strategy and explaining the underlying dynamics of their remarkable success. I've described Google as a "Long Tail company" before, so I was delighted to see that this is the way they now describe themselves, too. You can watch the webcast here (the image above is slide 10) The San Jose Mercury News report (free reg req'd) on the meeting also discusses the Long Tail strategy.

What Google has done is to find and monetize the Long Tails of both advertisers and publishers. These include millions of small companies and individuals who may never have advertised before, at least not nationally. They were considered sub-scale--too small to be worth a call or visit from an ad salesperson, possible too small to even think of themselves as an advertiser at all. But Google ads are self-service, cheap, and performance based (pay-per-click), which all combine to dramatically lower the barrier to entry.

Matching these advertisers are hundreds of thousands of previously sub-scale "publishers", from blogs to niche commercial sites. Most are too small to have their own ad sales business, but they can now run relevant Google ads by just adding a few lines of HTML to their site. About half of Google's business now comes from such "partners", rather than from ads sold against search results themselves.

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, explained how these millions of small-to-midsized customers represent a huge new Long Tail ad market. "The surprising thing about The Long Tail is just how long the tail is, and how many businesses haven't been served by traditional advertising sales," he said. Google now has revenues of more than $1 billion a quarter, a least half of which is made up of Long Tail advertisers by this definition. This is, needless to say, just a glimpse of what's still to come.

Via The Long Tail

Poynter: 16 news leaders discuss how media organizations could use community-based or grassroots journalism to build audience.

I have a feeling this will be a good thread

Technology Review comments on developments in Augmented reality.
"...Unlike Virtual Reality, which immerses users in a new digital environment, Augmented Reality (AR) -- a broad class of user interface techniques intended to enhance a person’s perception of the world around them with computer generated information -- aims to enhance the analog world...Users, via wearable display screens, see the non-virtual world around them with digital information superimposed into their surroundings. But since each person experiences the world differently, AR developers face some tricky programming and design problems..."

Via Smart Mobs

Ntera is at DEMO this week with their contribution to the growing line of digital paper prototypes. The NanoChromics Display (NCD) brings to the house a patented nanotechnology process (meaning that's all we really know about it) and a dose of titanium oxide, the chemical what makes paper white. Either that iPod in the back has one of the ePaper screens or it's been freebasing Crest Whitestrips.

The NCD promise huge power savings and a crisper display over LCDS, but in keeping with the paper replacements we've seen thus far isn't delivering too much yet. Ntera promise a product launch later this year though, so expect to wake up around July-ish to a world turned upside down by science.

Digital Ink Prototype Uses Nanotech [ExtremeTech]

Via Gizmodo

MotorFM is determined to transform radio in Germany, and it thinks it has the tools to do it: MP3 downloads and songs streamed directly to mobile phones.

The first step has seen MotorFM, launched Feb. 1, abandon on-air commercials in favor of generating revenue from MP3 downloads and targeted sponsoring of its programming. The next step will be streaming audio directly to 3G cell phones and letting listeners pay for downloads by SMS text message.

Microsoft sits at the heart of a five year transformation that should turn your local bell into a TV provider (provided they aren't Qwest). It's one of the most significant shifts in telecom history, with each bell attempting the transformation in a slightly different fashion.

Video via IP was the star of last year's CES, and should be an even larger player in Congress this year. One of the first major bills proposed this session was the "Advanced Internet Communications Services Act", which aims to put the bells on equal footing with the fairly unregulated cable providers.

"DVDs will remain the predominant mechanism for [film] delivery for the next five years," claims one Netflix executive, when asked by the San Francisco Business Times to chime in on SBC's TV plans.

An analyst recently predicted that within five years, SBC could gain 14% of the pay TV market in areas it deploys fiber (of course another predicts they'll quit the TV business by 2007). On a recent conference call, SBC told us that within five years, they hope to be the number 2 video provider in those areas.

Via Broadbandreports

The world will get its first glimpse of Push-To-View (PTV) mobile phone technology when LG Electronics, a global pioneer in 3G technology, showcases the next 3G “killer application” at 3GSM World Congress 2005.PTV is state-of-the-art mobile technology that combines networking and multimedia, allowing multiple users to share live video in real time. Evolved from Push-To-Talk (PTT), PTV lets users select people to share live video with, transmitting an audio/video feed in real time.

PTV also offers functions similar to the Messenger chat engine. It manages user groups, checks reception, selects users for video-conferencing and controls transmission. The package has an invitation function, calling available users to conference and giving them the option of accepting or not.

The FCCs Wireless Broadband Access Task Force has recommended speeding the rollout of wireless broadband services to consumers across America.

Chairman Powell created the Task Force in May of 2004. Comprised of a team of multidisciplinary staff from across several FCC Bureaus and Offices, the Task Force examined technological developments in wireless broadband, surveyed existing and anticipated applications, and conducted a comprehensive review of the Commission's wireless broadband policies.

In fulfilling its mission, the Task Force actively sought the experience, expertise, and advice of consumers, state and local governments, industry (such as equipment manufacturers and service providers), and other stakeholders across the nation.

Based upon its research, outreach efforts, and public input, the Task Force has concluded: "To ensure that our nation's regulatory policies concerning wireless broadband do not impede innovation or delay service availability across America, the FCC should be vigilant and proactive in identifying and understanding emerging technologies and in ensuring that existing regulatory policies do not get in the way of these advances.

Innovative technologies call for innovative regulatory policies. And the American public benefits most when regulatory policies enable consumers and businesses to fully tap the benefits of emerging wireless technologies."

(Check out Daily Wireless for a bullet list of the FCC's recommendations. -kc.)

Via Daily Wireless

Environment for Collaborative Authoring

playListNetWork is a distributed video editing database that allows multiple users in different locations to edit and annotate media clips and playlists simultaneously. The project was initiated by artists interested in collaboratively authoring multi-threaded audio visual works. It's comprised of three parts: the platListNetWork software developed in consultation with the artists, the audio visual media content made with the software and an interface to visualize and navigate the authored structure. The application called disPlayList is the public view and interface for a streaming media work authored with the playListNetWork software. It is a web application embedded in a browser using various plugins to display media. As an interface it is used to visualize the multi-threaded playlists and provide navigation through a 3d representation of their structure. "Though playListNetWork is not performance in a real time sense - the network was used for the authoring and the display of our distributed collaboration."--Willy Le Maitre

Via networked_performance

Wearable Escrow Video

Fair Witness by Rob Tow began with the question "...(W)hat is the structural inversion of television?" "Television is produced by someone else than the viewer; it comes on a set schedule; it is composed of many clips; it has high production values. The means of production are expensive, and centralized. Doing a structural inversion on these qualities lead to the idea of the short video clip, created by an individual, as a media type.

...A video camera has lots of controls, enabling fancy local recording, focusing, playback, etc. It also has local storage. What I came up with is the idea of a wearable camera, rather like a Star Trek communicator pin - which would be turned on when you slap it, and turned off when you slap it second a time...

Via networked_performance

Hypotheses:

• There is a cultural divide between different groups of users of IM, namely the always-on’rs and the just-came-to-chat folks.
• The divide is due to a recognition of IM as a presence tool vs. just seeing it as a communication tool.
• The just-came-to-chat folks assert a power differential between peers by demanding that the always-on’rs pay attention to them when they appear.
• IM exacerbates power-differentials by implying that there is equality in participants, as though it is an equalizing context.

synopsis of a brain candy rant on apophenia.

Via Many-to-Many

ClickZ interviews Cyrus Krohn, former Slate publisher and now executive producer for MSN Video. "My personal goal with the group is to make MSN Video a desirable location for people to want to come first to watch video," he says. "It can mean surfacing new talent that network and cable TV can't offer in a way we're apt to do, [such as] vlogs and proprietary programming. I look at the staff Yahoo! is building, with an entertainment background, and I think there's no reason MSN Video shouldn't be developing content made for the medium."

Via Lost Remote

Remember how the other day Sony Ericsson said that 2005 is all about listening to music on cellphones? Yeah, well they’re cashing in on the Sony part of their parentage with a new line of Walkman-branded music playing cellphones. They don’t have any prototypes or pics or anything to show off, but they did announce today at the big 3GSM World Congress (which is why there is so much damn cellphone news) that they’re going to introduce the line in March. They say the phones will have large amounts of memory, good headphones, the ability to easily transfer songs over from a PC, and will work with Sony’s Connect online music store. Potentially a very smart move, but they better not fumble this; the once mighty Walkman brand name has taking enough of a beating in the past few years already, you know?

[Thanks, Eric]

Via Clippings.reblog

"This is quite a small and handy product for those who do not want to use a nuclear power plant-like device to record TV on their PC and compress the whole thing in DivX files. The V-Gear PocketTV X weighs 780g and encodes the TV shows in real time into MPEG-1,MPEG-2, DivX5.2, with a resolution of 720 x 480 at 30fps. A very nice solution… and affordable too (less than 50 Euros), but only drawback is that it’s NTSC only."

Via Digital Media Thoughts

: An interesting academic article on storing TV, and how new companies like Blinkx and SingingFish, and older ones like Google and Yahoo, are emerging in the space.

Other developments in the space: "The adoption of media asset management systems by TV networks and program producers will make it easier for them to track their holdings, retrieve materials on demand, and sell footage. Development of better rights clearance procedures will simplify transactions. The continued growth of broadband subscriptions, and the growth of desktop video will expand the number of potential users."

Via PaidContent.org

Post all sorts of media types to their hosted blog, great for mp3bloggers

Bubbler is advanced technology for building media-rich blogs at lightning speed. Use Bubbler to add text and post files of any type, including digital photographs, movies, audio, and other multimedia assets as well as business documents like spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations. Content can be presented in dramatically different styles through a rich set of high-quality designer templates. Bubbler has a group model that provides wiki-like collaboration for authorized users.

I had to doublecheck what "conspicuously concealed" meant after seeing these 'DomeWear' cameras from EXISTech—apparently it means something like "wear something obnoxious and you won't get mugged." I don't even know if these bags, pendants, and brassieres even have built-in cameras, or if they utilize the same technique as used in shopping malls, where there are more leering camera balls than actual cameras (for $1,500 a pop, I'm guessing they probably do work, although maybe I'll steal one and find out). It's Big Brother on your back/belly/boobies! (Thanks, Nuklok!)

Project Page [WearCam]

Via Gizmodo

If you're in the Bay Area, here's an event worth checking out:

Berkeley Cybersalon: Television Goes Online
Sunday, February 20, 6 p.m.-8 p.m.
The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley

Speakers:

Kim Spencer, Executive Director, LinkTV
TBA, INdTV
Bradley Horowitz, Director of Media and Desktop Search, Yahoo!
Wendy Seltzer, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Via EventLab

In a 4-to-1 vote, the FCC ruled that cable only "must-carry" one digital signal from each broadcast licensed station in their footprint. This is being seen, rightly or wrongly, as a stunning defeat for the broadcasters and a serious win for the cable industry. "This is a major victory for consumers ..." said exiting CEO of NCTA, Robert Sachs.

For broadcasters, it would have been fun to just do "business as usual" and let the cable guys carry everything - but, it didn't happen! So what are the opportunities presented by this challenge? Let's play the tape forward for a few probable futures:

1) Competitive, Free, Pro-consumer programming - consumers are heading toward triple-play sticker shock, so why not offer a free over-the-air alternative - several different branded channels that effectively compete with cable using an advertiser supported model.

2) Advanced Media Solutions - including broadband delivery over WiMax, 2.5 and 3G cell phones and retail distribution of digital-to-analog converter boxes that will utilize the power of the additional bandwidth to effectively compete with cable.

3) Bundle crap programming that nobody wants with your signal so consumers don't have a choice - wow, that sounds like something I've seen before.

4) Lease your additional bandwidth to people who are smarter than you are so they can offer a better product and you can charge rent.

5) Aggregate the digital signals nationwide and create a free over-the-air, advertiser supported digital television model that is competitive.

6) Make a deal with your local soon-to-be-in-business IPTV provider. They will want your programming (if it is competitive and important).

Of the six probable futures listed above, I purposely left out the most likely scenario. Since most broadcasters I have met truly think that they are in the television business (they are not and never have been), they will probably just ignore or under-utilize their digital bandwidth. That being said, there is a wealth of opportunity built into this FCC decision.

If properly handled, this actually may turn out to be a very big victory for consumers. It is possible, that the broadcasters will actually be forced to use their creative and economic power to create a new media paradigm. And, through the law of unintended consequences, this lemon might make excellent lemon-aide.

The Podcast Network: "Starting on the 14th of February 2005, we will be providing the podcast listening community with one central location from which to subscribe to the best content available. The "channels" (see sidebar) we provide will cover a variety of interests that people have both in their personal lives and their business lives."

In the latest issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, there is an article on blogs by teenagers: ”Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs”.

”This study examines issues of online identity and language use among male and female teenagers who created and maintained weblogs, personal journals made publicly accessible on the World Wide Web. /../ The results suggest that teenagers stay closer to reality in their online expressions of self than has previously been suggested, and that these explorations involve issues, such as learning about their sexuality, that commonly occur during the adolescent years.

Not too surprising I guess…

Another article which seems interesting is ”The Media Downing of Pierre Salinger: Journalistic Mistrust of the Internet as a News Source”

Via Diablog

NPR story on Morning Edition today on the topic of "Who is a Journalist?" Interesting to hear how many people are running away from the journalist label as well as the assertion that 'liberal bloggers' outed the White House press corps faker.

Also, a nice piece on CorpWatch, nailing the role that PR firm Omnicom have in funding and spreading this spin. It's a lot more extensive than the popular press have reported so far. Best quote, from Sen. Richard Durbin:

There used to be a time when our government would let the facts speak for themselves. It apparently is the position of the Bush administration that the facts in and of themselves are not articulate.

Via Copyfight

Verizon has agreed to acquire MCI for more than $6.7 billion in the third big telephone industry merger in two months reports the AP.

The agreement, which scuttles the competing bid for MCI by Qwest Communications, was announced Monday morning. The boards of directors of both companies approved the agreement.

The purchase price was about a half billion dollars below what Qwest offered for MCI, but likely won MCI's favor because it is larger and in better financial shape than Qwest, the local phone carrier across the more sparsely populated Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest.

Via Daily Wireless

As mentioned recently, new stats indicate that the number of PC-using homes without a standard landline increased 60% since 2002 (from 2 to 3.2 million). Nowhere is the cell/VoIP only revolution more evident than on college campuses, where the Washington Post explores how a number of Universities are pulling the landlines out of dorms.

Via Broadbandreports

Interactive TV Poised for a Rollout I want my IPTV? Internet Protocol, the language of most online communications, was supposed to have revolutionized the way we watch television by now, enabling a wide range of multimedia bells and whistles: from multiple camera angles to on-screen Web searches while viewing Gilligan's Island to see which actors are still living.

Via Broadcasting

The source said that the camcorder was announced at a private press event in New York, however journalists were instructed to keep the information confidential. The new camcorder's model name will apparently be the AJ-HDX100 - a name very similar to Panasonic's AG-DVX100.

The addition of 24 frames progressive recording is big news for prosumers looking to shoot in high definition. There is currently no high definition camcorder under $40,000 which records at a 24 frames progressive (24P) rate. Panasonic saw huge success with their 24P mode in their AG-DVX100, especially with the independent film community.

The camcorder will record to MiniDV tapes, however it will also have a P2 card slot. The P2 card format was introduced by Panasonic as a tapeless news gathering recording format. The cards contain a matrix of smaller secure digital type cards and cost upwards of $4,000 each. The benefit of the system is that there are no moving parts, allowing the camcorder to go into extreme conditions.

Micron Technology debute a two megapixel "system on the chip" (SOC) that includes integrated automatic focus and real time jpeg compression, the company announced today.

The company says, "The new ultra low-power MT9D111 integrates Micron’s advanced 2-megapixel sensor core with a new generation of image processing technologies in one monolithic integrated circuit."

Micron says, "This camera-on-a-chip SOC device provides newly-incorporated functions, including an integrated microcontroller that achieves more efficient image processing, global reset to avoid image bending, and pixel binning for enhanced image viewing.

"The microcontroller also increases the device’s flexibility to adjust color and other image processing functions, and the integrated auto focus and JPEG compression save design cost and space normally incurred by a required companion chip."

The chipset is available for a specific customers now, with greater availability planned for April.

Via Reiter's Camera Phone Report

Ericsson today unveiled its "moble triple play" cellular strategy that combines telephony, the Internet and broadcast media (such as television), the Ericsson press release says.

The vision was unveiled at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes by Hakan Eriksson, Ericsson's chief technology officer. He says in the press release, "Triple play is the trend in the fixed networks, enabled by high data rates.

"With mobility as a key driver for consumer convenience, we believe triple play is now going mobile - we call this Mobile Triple Play. The evolved version of WCDMA with HSDPA is a key enabler for this, offering mobile broadband with data rates similar to fixed broadband....

"Already mobile TV is happening, in form of broadcasted TV and on-demand TV shows adapted to the mobile screen. Ericsson is developing mobile TV products based on 3G, both for broadcast and unicast."

No specifics

Ericsson is, no surprise, poised to provide the infrastructure for this strategy, the company says. I wish the press release would have spelled out some specifics.

Perhaps the speech at the conference was more detailed.

Via Reiter's Camera Phone Report

ASCAP Internet License Agreements

"ASCAP realizes that as technological developments progress and users' expectations of on-line music become higher, it must continue to be the leader in Internet licensing. Accordingly, ASCAP is pleased to announce two new versions of its widely used Internet license agreements: "Non-Interactive 5.0" of the non-interactive sites and services agreement; and "Interactive 2.0" of the interactive sites and services agreement. A third new agreement - for Wireless Music Providers (e.g., "ringtones" and "ringbacks") - will soon be available."

Dear Jeff, it's hopeless. Just remember when Times reporters say they're superior, objective, and independent, that they actually write about blogs like French monarchs, with an axe to grind, and a huge undisclosed conflict of interest. We don't need these guys anymore, and the smart ones are getting a clue about that. That's certainly what I saw in North Carolina. My guess is that the news will take a bit longer to reach NYC. They ought to be helping us expose their incompetence, much the way a good software vendor seeks out bug reports.

More than 12,500 internet cafes were shut down in China during the last three months of 2004, according to state media.

Officials in China claim the net cafes were closed down because they were operating illegally - primarily near schools.

The Beijing governmnet is concerned about the influence of the net as a conduit for new ideas. A top official wrote recently in the country's official Communist Party magazine that the domination of the English language and Western ideas online are a threat to China's cultural identity.

The article further warned that "other political patterns, value concepts and lifestyles opposes and undermines socialist values". It continues: "The use of the internet for cultural aggression is extremely dangerous, threatening to a people's culture, independence and freedom, even going so far to possibly unsettle a people's or a country's foundations."

Last month China banned 50 computer games - including The Sims 2, Manhunt, and FIFA 2005 - to create "a good environment" for children.

A Silicon Valley startup called Imeem unveiled their new service at the DEMO conference today. The offering combines instant messaging, blogging, photo sharing, file sharing and desktop search. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately it's by invitation only -- but you can request an invitation at: info@imeem.com.

Via The Raw Feed

Matthias Friedrich has updated his XML schema for XSPF to accomodate the new version of the format: xspf-1.xsd.

Via the weblog of Lucas Gonze

While many people thought that Cablevision's satellite TV division, Voom, had been sold to EchoStar, the details are that only the single satellite, itself was sold. The rest of the company still exists... and Charles Dolan, who fought the sale to the very end has decided that, gosh darnit, he's not giving it up yet. He's agreed to buy out the additional Voom assets himself and see what he can do about growing the company again. It's likely Cablevision's so happy to see it go (and not have to deal with shutting it down) that they gave Dolan a good price. This should increase the speculation over whether or not the Dolan family is going to sell off Cablevision itself. You have to imagine that's one family gathering that won't be much fun next holiday season. In the meantime, though, Charles Dolan finds himself with a satellite TV company, about 26,000 customers, lots of losses and (ooops) no satellites. It's likely that he'll quickly work out some sort of deal to lease space on a satellite to keep the service going and (well, he hopes) growing.

It looks like Norway is trying to make sure that a large percentage of its citizens are criminals, by passing legislation that would make it illegal to rip a CD to MP3s and move it to an MP3 player. The legislation seems a bit convoluted, because they would let you copy a CD to another CD or let you break copy protection for things they deem is "appropriate." So... why should a government determine how exactly you can listen to your music? What public benefit does this serve? The only real reason to do this is to protect the obsolete business models of the recording industry (who, of course, applauded the move).

Dialup is dead, right? So why is one company trying to rollup a bunch of dialup providers? Well, the logic appears to be taking the rollup one step further, recognizing that many people using dialup are only doing so because there aren't many alternatives. So, the plan is to rollup and then play leapfrog over wired broadband providers. The company, founded by a founder of MTV, is trying to buy a bunch of small dialup ISPs in "tier 3" cities, and then will build a wireless broadband offering to provide those users a migration path. That seems like a pretty big bet to make. First off, it's not clear that the reason these folks are on dialup is just because they don't have the other options. What if they don't want broadband (or, worse, don't want to pay for broadband)? Also, building a broadband wireless network still isn't that cheap, and there's no real indication what technology (or spectrum) this company plans to use. Finally, building a nationwide brand takes money as well. So, basically, this company seems like a poor man's attempt to be Clearwire (wireless broadband, lower tiered markets), but without money, spectrum, or Craig McCaw's ability to build buzz. And, of course, plenty of folks are pretty skeptical about Clearwire's chances in the first place. The only thing this new company seems to have is a bunch of dialup subscribers they had to buy, who might not want to jump to a (still non-existent) broadband wireless offering.

For a company that claims they've learned their lessons about proprietary formats and DRM, Sony doesn't appear to be slowing down any time soon. Beyond just trying to make the new portable gaming platform, the PSP, have its own download music store they're also going to be releasing videos of some movies for the PSP on the special format discs that will only work on the PSP. At what point does Sony realize that they're shooting themselves in the foot? People don't want proprietary formats that only work in very specific devices any more, and every time Sony tries and fails to do so again, they seem to simply ignore this lesson.

Userplane: AV Mail
Uses Flash Communication server and so on.. Interesting.

Unbound Spiral: Skype Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters
From the site:
Introducing instructions for SkypeCasting. The front-end solution for podcasters to create great sounding audio recordings from interviews and conference calls using Skype.

Mania TV! is pretty good for music videos.

wwiTV has 800 TV stations broadcast over the internet.

REVIEW: MP3tunes.

Michael Robinson’s new service, MP3tunes, is live. (Background post here.) It offers no-DRM MP3 downloads of indie music, striking a pose somewhere between eMusic and iTMS. Let’s see how it shapes up.

Rather than develop a unique indie catalog, Robertson is exploiting the digital distribution program already created by CD Baby. That program also distributes enrolled CD Baby artists to other services such as iTMS. However, there is no editorial moat to cross at MP3tunes as there is in other services; all artists signed up to the CD Baby program are included. (Do not confuse CD Baby’s digital distribution program with the CD Baby CD catalog; they are entirely separate operations run by the same company. An artist can be part of either or both. This means that an artist, or an album, that you find on CD Baby might not be found on MP3tunes.)

Continue Reading...

[The Digital Music Weblog]

Researchers and students at Viktoria Institute in Gotenberg, Sweden, have modified the arcade classic, PacMan, by making it wireless and multiplayer for Pocket PC devices. They call it "Pac-Man Must Die!" Here comes the video!

Nice story at the New York Times on the rise of mythtv and the implications of bit torrent meets the network line-up.

Mr. Poltrack of CBS said that according to his network's research, a large number of viewers would welcome the chance to pay $1 to watch each television show, if they could do it on their own schedule and with the ability to skip commercials. With commercials, they'd be willing to pay 50 cents. And because the average viewer sees only half of a show's episodes, he said, this on-demand viewing won't hurt the regular showing.

Candidates backed by Islamic clerics won races in the Saudi Arabian capital in the kingdom's first regular balloting, an election observer said Friday.

"Capable of projecting a 20-inch diagonal image from a foot away and a 40-inch image from less than a yard away, the $699 PocketProjector appears to be the ultimate mobile presentation tool. That means presenting any images or video from your notebook computer, DVD player, and gaming console for immediate use anywhere. The lamp, good for an unprecedented 20,000 hours, produces an SVGA (800 x 600 pixels) image, making for an incredibly durable and...

(Hmm...gotta put this on my Wish List. -dm)

City battles to offer wireless broadband. Philadelphia's Wi-Fi network terrifies the incumbents, who are afraid the city has set a precedent; so they've not only tried to block such efforts in court, but fund policy front groups to try and discredit city run Wi-Fi. The CIO behind the Philly..

Panel recommends leaving it unregulated. An FCC task force has come to the conclusion that the wireless broadband sector needs competition, not regulation, in order to successfully evolve (see pdf press release). As companies gear up for a re-writing the Telecom Act of 1996, a major push i..

Cory Doctorow: Google has offered to host Wikipedia -- what a bunch of mensches those googloids are!

Google Inc. has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee has been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site.

More details will be put here when the offer is allowed to be made public.

="http://waxy.org/links/">Waxy)

Cory Doctorow: Further to yesterday's post about the on-again/off-again European software patents fight, this news: The Dutch Parliament has voted to reject software patents! The FFII has a petition for you to sign -- get every European you know to go to it now, and we might just kill this. Link (Thanks, Rik!)

The MPAA has scored a victory in its fight against BitTorrent sites. The owner of one popular site will be forced to turn over server logs.

NBC Career Opportunities - Job Opportunities
An interesting listing for a "Product Development Leader, Broadband Video" at NBC.

What interests me the most about this ad is the line:
* Build key capabilities for broadband video: (eg. video archive, searchable video, free video/ad supported (stream/download), paid video, PVR-like functionality/personalization ... personalized storage area, wireless component ... feeding/cashing video to portable devices from online "docking station", video blogging and chat capability, allow for hosting/posting/archiving/search of video submitted by consumers)

although the "consumer" word bugs me out.

German company TC Unterhaltungselektronic plans plans to launch Cybersky, a P2P TV file-sharing network at the end of January or early February. Inventor Guido Ciburski claims his new service will allow broadband users to easily share TV shows in near...

BlogTelevision.net mines over three million blogs daily to find videos for your entertainment. We find and highlight the videos that people are talking (read: blogging) about! Nothing censored; updated six times a day. [unmediated: Tracking the tools that decentralize the...

A new program called Videora combines BitTorrent and RSS to automatically download a computer user's favorite videos. It's another application the entertainment companies will likely hate and consumers will love. Wired...

Perhaps us geeks forget to include those that could care less about losing sleep over some crazy programming idea that gets stuck in our heads...

But, ultimately, it really is about inclusion.

Hopefully, a simple program like this will help people get into the world of BitTorrent more, or maybe help other programmers join in trying to be inclusive.

DropTorrent provides a simple way to handle the first step in using the BitTorrent protocol, by easily creating the .torrent metadata file required by this software.

Just drag it over the icon!

Configure it once, with your favorite BitTorrent tracker, and a comment, and drag & drop your way to sharing your own content.

It may not be thrilling at first, but as people come to rely on your media, this technology can save you bandwidth in the longrun. Honestly, it has yet to have a true test of it's limits. Even the pirates haven't had much of what could be considered a true problem with speed or popularity.

It's that potential, that our own personal media is becoming more important, that drives me to try and offer something like this, even if it sucks. And, to nerds, it probably does... or at least, they would think this gets in the way.

Good luck, thank you for downloading, and I hope that using BitTorrent works for you.

-> DropTorrent 1.0 for Windows @ Sourceforge.net

So who want to port this to the Mac? ;)

Mel Karmizin reveals he approached Apple about including his satellite radio service Sirius in the iPod. Steve Jobs said "thanks, but no thanks." Shame - that would have been a drool-worthy device, and might have convinced older-school iPodders to upgrade....

Much to the chargrin of the show's producer, ABC will add a seven-second delay....

Here's my pitch for a next-generation newscast designed for people who no longer watch TV news: 18 to 34 year-old men. From an "open-source rundown" to Fark TV, I push the envelope a bit. Let me know what you think......

USA Today has run three pieces on podcasting the past couple of days:

'Podcasting' lets masses do radio shows

Podcasting: It's all over the dial (with, above, a photo of Drew Domkus and Dawn Miceli of Wayne, Wis., from the "Dawn and Drew Show," whom I met at BloggerCon 3).

Radio to the MP3 degree: Podcasting

From the first story:

Patchett, 43, is among a growing number of people getting into podcasting, which is quickly becoming another of the Internet's equalizing technologies.

Less than a year old, podcasting enables anyone with a PC to become a broadcaster. It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly nothing, it's enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before.

"It was just one of those things where you read about a technology and it clicks in your head: This is perfect and something I want to get involved with," said Patchett, whose podcasts focus on Christian and family programming.

For listeners, podcasting offers a diverse menu of programs, which can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime. Unlike traditional radio, shows can be easily paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The listener doesn't need to be near a PC, unlike most forms of Internet radio. ...

In "On the coming mobileVideo revolution," Eleanor Kruszewski offers a brilliant post about the appeal of grassroots media in emerging technologies such as broadband cell phones and other mobile devices. That's just what we're shooting for with Ourmedia.

Jobs responds to Karmazin

TI USB dongle

A few months ago, Snapstream released their software and posted a story on their six tuner demo box. TV card maker Hauppauge recently released a dual tuner TV card for the PC and Snapstream upped the ante by using five of them to build a ten tuner PVR. Obviously, just a proof of concept but it does sound like their basic system operated fine while recording on multiple tuners and playing back at the same time. I suspect most enthusiasts would be fine with just one dual tuner card, maybe two, tops, but it's good to know most off the shelf PCs can do much more with the software and hardware available.

Lost Remote is reporting that one of their readers couldn't fast forward while watching an episode of American Idol he recorded on his Comcast HD-DVR, but could on other shows.  The reader in question, even sent in this photo showing the unversal "no" symbol, which we assume showed up while fast forwarding.

This appears to be the 'transitional fair use' that we've been hearing in action. Some of the comments on Lost Remote speculate that it was merely a bug, either needing a reset of the PVR or caused by an encoding problem.  We've previously heard of fast forward problems on 24, another show on Fox.  Have any other Comcast HD-DVR users had problems?  Let us know in the comments.

Watching video online is becoming increasingly popular and news is the most popular topic, according to a study (PDF format) released today by the Online Publishers Association.

Twenty-seven percent of 27,841 Internet users polled on 25 OPA member organizations' websites said that they view online video at least once per week and 5 percent said they view it daily. A majority (51 percent) watch video online at least once per month.

News was the most popular (66 percent) video topic, followed in popularity by film clips or trailers (49 percent), music videos (29 percent), and sports videos (27 percent). The (...)

Entry continued...

LokiTorrent has either been hacked by the MPAA, or crushed by it. After several weeks of fighting an MPAA lawsuit while other torrent directories meekly collapsed (including the once mighty Suprnova), it appears that Loki has fallen. Right now I don’t know whether the site’s contributed legal defense fund ran out, or if some escalated tactic on the MPAA’s side forced the moment. A court order is allegedly involved, but I haven’t found anything more than that. Loki’s brave struggle showed signs of buckling last month when the site domain was reportedly placed on the market. If you go to Lokitorrent.com, you see that the home page has been retitled “MPAA NOTICE” and issues the following hostile and gloating notice:

“YOU CAN CLICK BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE
There are websites that provide legal downloads. This is not one of them.

This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures. The illegal downloading of motion pictures robs thousands of honest, hard-working people of their livelihood, and stifles creativity. Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law, is theft, and is not anonymous. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop.”

Popular as it has become, Bit Torrent isn’t altogether easy on either side of the equation—downloading with speed, or creating torrent files for seeding and distribution. Word of WritTorrent is streaking around; it’s a much-needed drag-and-drop method of creating torrent files from media creations, such as home movies, home music productions, and other content. I haven’t tested it, but another WeblogsInc blogger has, and it seems to work as simply as advertised.

This is Apple's H.264 FAQ. This is next generation MPEG4 codec that will be built into QuickTime 7, and is also adopted as the new DVD codec....

Me-TV.com has become mefeedia, a seriously kewl name. It aggregates RSS from videoblogs, and is the brainchild of Peter Van Dijck. Seriously smart. It lets anyone add feeds, it seems to automatically create an appropriate feed with enclosures if your...

There's a brief PR page up at Apple outlining some of the new features in QT 7. The most significant is probably they H.264 codec, which will deliver much higher frame sizes for very low data rates. This will make...

The New York Times calls Wikinews "The Unassociated Press" in an article in the Circuits section today.

The system's primary check is its transparency. Inspired, in part, by the success of open source software development, the writing process is completely public. Anyone at any time can compose a new Wikinews article, edit an existing one and see an inventory of all prior changes.

I'm really starting to get smitten with the concept of "open-text" which is obviously what Wikinews and Wikipedia are all about. It's just such a perfect description of where we are heading...stories, essays, blog posts created and edited collaboratively, always with the potential for improvement, never finished. I know that's more concept than reality right now, the idea that products aren't final. It would require a whole new way of looking at assessment, wouldn't it? More emphasis on the products relevance, its usability, its worth to the community rather than whether or not it's "correct".

Hmmm...

John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder and cybercurmudgeon from the 1990s, made the following claim at the World Social Forum last month:

"Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger," said Barlow

Anybody up for fact-checking this statement? If true, it's a simple-but-powerful meme...

(Via Gil Friend)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 12:58 PM)

: That's the most interesting bit out of the new research released by the Online Publishers Association. Replaying new snippets is the most popular activity, performed by 66 percent. Watching clips of last night's game and checking out new music videos and movie trailers are also popular video pursuits.
However, sports highlights are watched most frequently, with 48% watching at least once a week, and 11% watching daily.
Another interesting bit which is perhaps understandable (and confirms another study): 1-2 minutes is the preferred length of video watched online, for sports, news and movie trailers, but for music videos, it hovers in the 3-5 minutes range (due to their length)...
() The release is here, and full report for download is here...

(Useful data. But also remember this is "online", meaning sitting at your computer. When the computer's attached to a big screen near a couch, anything's possible. -dm)

USA Today ran two articles on podcasting today. One in the Money section focuses on podcasting as a disruptive force that will impact the media and technology industries. Another in the Life section spotlights Dawn and Drew.

I have watched "Four Minutes About Podcasting," at least five times. As Dave says, an instant classic.

(nice little video - send it to all your friends who are asking what the heck you're listening to on your mp3 player. -dm)

Linda Moss of Multichannel News reports: "Regional phone companies planning video services will be forced to pay cash to carry local broadcast-TV stations -- which will initially put them at a competitive disadvantage to cable, but will ultimately cause problems for MSOs, a Wall Street analyst said Monday."

Add this to the upcoming FCC vote (Scheduled for Feb. 10, 2005) regarding must carry for local broadcasters and you've got yourself a party. Michael Powell has finally made a decision. On his way out the door, he plans to force a vote on a subject that has be passionately debated for years: Will cable companies have to carry one digital signal from local broadcasters or all of the digital signals from the station?

The RBOC's (Regional Bell Operating Companies) have to pay to carry local broadcasts, cable won't - but they collect money to offer the basic service? On the other hand, the cable guys won't have to carry the complete package, only the main channel? Confused - so is everyone else!

According to those who would know, the FCC is going to come down on the side of the cable industry.

So where does this leave television viewers? Just how will these new regulations effect our media bills? (I say media, because you will be getting your content from Telephone Companies, Cable Companies, Broadcasters, Satellite and Broadband, to name a few.) I think we will have to wait for the dust to settle and then watch a close-up demonstration of the "law of unintended consequences" play out before we can even attempt to answer the question. No matter what the FCC decides, you can be sure of one thing - the outcome will materially change the economics of the business and, more importantly, change the way you watch television.

Here's how quoteplay is described at the web site:

quoteplay allows others to link to specific bits of your audio files (ideal for letting weblogs quote from podcasts). Using a Flash-based in-browser MP3 player anyone can play & select clips and create links to them.

The app allows people to make clips and post them at their blog. People reading the blog can then get a better view into what the show is about. By using it, listeners can point to specific parts of a show that they thought was great or a bunch of bull.

The demo shows how it works. It is amazingly simple for the user. You use the orange markers to define the clip you want and then click "generate url." The url is then saved so you or anyone else can paste it into their browser. And it saves it as a clip url and a link url, making it easy to clip pieces of podcasts.

Here's my clip from The Village People's classic: YMCA (Cantonese version.)

I think we'll give this a try. We'll see how simple it is to install on our site. I'll report back about what we learned.

BTW, quoteplay is free. They are asking for donations of $10 to help with development. Seems fair.

Have you tried installing quoteplay? What do you think?

"The license allows one to play ASCAP songs on a podcast in segments not to exceed 60 seconds for a price of $250 per year for individuals who are not realizing any income from the podcasts."

Jeff Jarvis: "I think it's necessary for citizens' media to find its own path, its own sales agent who can sell its own value."

(at the least, Google needs a worthy competitor. -dm)

David Bollier, commenting on the continuing evolution of the Development Agenda -- or as I've been calling it, the proposal for WIPO 2.0:

This is a big deal. Right now, large companies claim ownership of the genes in genetically modified crops and patents on vital medicines that cost too much for developing nations to afford. Large companies are invoking patent rights to interfere with the growth of free software and open source software. Companies are trying to introduce "digital rights management" schemes for television, DVD and CD technology, so that people's access to works, and their ability to record and share works, could be strictly regulated. Companies are even trying to control how (and whether) public libraries may lend out digital works for free.

k [access to knowledge] treaty would be to reverse this tide.

A very big deal indeed. Join the discussion about the treaty here; check out notes from last week's meetings prepping for forthcoming WIPO negotiations here.

Dr James Anderson of The University of Reading has developed the "perspective simplex," or Perspex, a way of writing a computer program as a geometrical structure, rather than as a series of instructions. A conventional computer program is compris...

Serious jump in users cutting the copper. Techdirt points to new statistics that show the number of PC-using homes without a standard landline increased 60% since 2002 (from 2 to 3.2 million). A lot of the obstacles we've talked about that prevent users from going cell or VoIP only - like ..

Easypodcast is a GUI tool for easy podcast creation. Bing!

(haven't checked this out yet. anyone given it a spin? -dm)

This seemed impossible to me on first glance, but information about a partnership is currently linked from the front page of RSA Security, a pretty well-trusted company in the computer security business.

Supposedly, this company, i-Mature, has a technology that uses a peripheral to check how old the user is based on some biometric bone reading. Using that information, they can potentially block or enable access to network resources.

As new ways of receiving radio programs gain hordes of fans -- from satellite services like XM Radio to Internet tools like Audible.com -- a decidedly lo-fi approach is making waves. Low Power FM radio is being touted as an alternative to generic, commercial programming.

(Nice story on LPFM - text and audio. Thanks, am. -dm)

Planet CCRMA (CCRMA is pronounced "karma") at Home is a collection of rpms (RPM stands for RedHat Package Manager) that you can add to a computer running RedHat 9 or Fedora Core 1, 2 or 3 to transform it into an audio workstation with a low-latency kernel, current ALSA audio drivers and a nice set of music, midi, audio and video applications. Damn cool time saver if you want to set up a Linux box for music or video.

okrent finally does his job. too little, too late.

If you haven’t been to Google Maps yet,

1. Get yourself some better RSS feeds
2. Go to http://maps.google.com/

Here are some cool things I’ve noticed about Google Maps. I think this is going to be one of those posts I update a lot in a day.

• The URLs are fairly clean. You can look up an address from your location bar by putting “http://maps.google.com/maps?q=” before it. For example: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield

  You can also specify the latitude and longitude by passing ll=$LAT,$LON where $LAT and $LON are decimals. That means you can make a bookmarklet that would show you the location of a blog based on it's GeoURL. In fact, I did just that: Map GeoURL

• They use semi-transparent PNGs for routes over street maps (do they get this to work correctly in IE?). That means they only have to dynamically generate route images, all the map images can be static.

• Google Local searches are based on what’s on the map by default. For instance, search for your address, clear the search box and search for pizza. Since the map is centered on your address, it will search around you. If you double click somewhere on the map to recenter and search again, it will use the new map center.

  You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around the map. + and - zoom.

• On the driving directions, you can click on the step number to see a cool zoom of what you need to do for your turn.

• Google owns Keyhole, who make a really cool product with pictures of the world. Hopefully those pictures will get integrated real soon.

Salon: Steal this bookmark! Tagging, the Web's newest game, lets you see what other people are reading and thinking. Welcome to the key-worded universe!

Tagging as it is used at some of the Web's most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there's a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn't proclaimed, it just happens.

es for personal goals, the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us does for everything its users are interested in on the Net. Here, what people are looking at and saving from the Web becomes the basis for learning new things, and making connections with each other. "It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned," says Howard Rheingold. "I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful -- and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."

You'll be hearing a lot more about tagging when Ourmedia.org launches. We'll be requiring at least one tag on every media item published.

vloggercon: VloggerCon 05: Conference Sessions Online

T.Whid and M.River are inviting people to watch an online video performance for 31536000 seconds. That's one full year, if you have the time.

Napster to Go's iPod page is probably going to be less-than-successful—I doubt many iPod owners will click the link and find religion because of a simplistic GIF. But they do have a point: no matter how much money you spend on iTunes or Napster, you'll never truly own your DRM'd music. Thanks for the reminder, guys!

iPods and Napster [Napster via MacMerc]

Read also: John Gruber cracking wise about the new subscription service, simultaneously saying that most people buy less than $100 worth of music each year, yet are filling up iPods with legally bought CDs. Possible, but edge cases. Maybe our 60GB music collections are partially filled with stolen music? (I know, crazy.)
Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding the ‘Napster To Go’ Subscription Service [DaringFireball]

Valentine's Day is fast approaching (hint: it's february 14th, clueless one) and a geek girl's fancy turns to shiny pretty things... not diamonds, silly; DS! If you've got a special gamer girl in your life, or maybe if you're trying to woo one, we've got the sleek and the sexy, the silly and the sublime, to tickle her heart.

Some of these can be acquired through Amazon - if you choose to get them that way, we get a few cents! Happy shopping.

Going Glocal

RADIO TAXI is a Taxi Gallery narrowcast and webcast initiative. Taxi Gallery is literally a black cab situated in a council estate on the outskirts of Cambridge, England. Since Sept 2001, over 25 different artists have made new works in response to the specific context offered by the gallery and its location. Taxi Gallery is a project that reaches for an extended conversation with local, national and international audiences (via its website) in response to a broad range of challenging contemporary artworks, approaches and ideas.

The translocal or "glocal" philosophy of Taxi Gallery is reflected in the forthcoming RADIO TAXI project which will integrate a 3 mile radius analogue FM broadcast with a worldwide digital transmission via a server capable of handling multiple streams. RADIO TAXI will be a live(ly) mix of locally originated programmes and interventions (significant community involvement by neighbourhood residents of all ages will be developed, including several major projects with Coleridge Secondary School and an evolving radio club), a curated programme of invited sound works and a schedule of sonic art from all over the world.

Kirsten Lavers, cris cheek, (TNWK) and Simon Keep invite sound artists (including writers, poets, visual artists, musicians working with sound) to submit work for a short range FM and internet radio event in late May and early June 2005.

Submission Deadline: 1 May 2005-01-22 latest
Transmission Dates: 6pm 27 May – 6am 31 May (GMT) & 6pm 3 June – Midnight 5 June (selected highlights)
Queries to: info @ radiotaxi.org.uk

This article by Seattle Times technology writer, Kim Peterson, tells you some of the facts about Halo 2 and Microsoft's unusual plans to make it into a movie.  This is an interesting twist on the concept of line extension.  Most video games that have tried to cross over into linear story telling have enjoyed less than stellar box office performances to say the least.  Many people like to say, "don't judge a book by its movie."  I wonder if this holds true for video games as well?

Microsoft may finally be getting into a business where "blue screen of death" could actually be a good thing.  The company is going from writing code to writing a movie script adapting the "Halo" video-game franchise, according to a report yesterday in Daily Variety. It's wrapping up a million-dollar deal to hire Alex Garland, the writer of the movie "28 Days Later" and the novel "The Beach," to bring "Halo" to the big screen, according to the report.

Variety said it confirmed the deal with Creative Artists Agency, which represents Microsoft and Garland in Hollywood. The agency hired Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley in 2003 to represent video-game makers in Hollywood deals. Microsoft would not comment on the matter yesterday, except to say that "Halo" is a hotly sought-after property in the entertainment world. It added that it has not made any official movie announcements.

"Halo 2" went on sale in November and became the second best-selling game in the United States last year, losing out only to the latest installment in the popular "Grand Theft Auto" video-game series. "Halo 2" has sold 6.4 million copies worldwide since its release, bringing the sales total for both "Halo" games to 12.8 million units. The original "Halo" went on sale in 2001.

According to Variety, Microsoft is planning to develop the script on its own and take it to movie studios only after it is complete. Such a move in Hollywood is unusual for a tech company, the report said.

Microsoft likely wants to make sure that the "Halo" brand isn't diluted, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst covering the company at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based independent research firm.  Alex Garland has reportedly been hired by Microsoft.  "This is one completely new piece of intellectual property that Microsoft owns, and because of that they want to make sure they have control over the image," he said. "They've created this valuable franchise and there aren't many of those out there."

Someone please explain to me what the purpose of PlaysForSure is because it isn't working as a guide to making sure your digital media player is compatible.
Anyway, download your firmware here:
http://www.nomadworld.com/downloads/drivers/...

Every network needs its epicenters. In October, I wrote:

The great glue of of this network is obviously the Net. But networks don't live by bits alone. Networks are made of people, and in order to do truly remarkable things, people need to get together, rub elbows, trade gossip, try out ideas, flirt, schmooze, encourage and learn to trust, admire and love one another. Conferences are great for this. Festivals sometimes can galvanize an entire Zeitgeist. But movements really rise or fall on the strength of on-going social occasions -- salons, showcases, the right bar, the right cafe, the place it's happening. These third places are the epicenter of any movement, no matter how tectonic in its effects.

But where are they today? I might venture a few guesses. I might suggest a few models (most famously, Aula). But above all, I'd be interested in hearing about the places you think worldchangers are to be found...

>This is clearly an idea whose time has come. Katrin Verclas explains why:

Social reformers should heed the role great gathering and community places play in bringing us together as people and as movements. People want to come together -- writ meet-ups in the Dean campaign; there is a yearning for human interaction and community which is arguably the precursor of political activism. ... Amazing, open, warm and lively community spaces where people congregate, meet, converse, share, and have ideas and enthusiasm for each other

As she points out, networked American progressives are suddenly all a-clamour about the need for more epicenters.

Examples continue to come in. There's of course the aforementioned Aula, and London's the Hub. There's the215 Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto; Location1 and The Tank in New York; to a certain degree the Capitol Hill Arts Center in Seattle, Cafe van Kleef in Oakland and the Odeon in SF; perhaps the Forest in Edinburgh, as Jon believes. I bet the telecentros of Sao Paolo are pretty hopping, too.

When discussing this topic a few weeks ago, a friend wondered if conferences aren't where the network meets -- and as I said before, to some degree I think that's true. But I still think that every community needs the space where people who do innovative, creative, risky, noble, worldchanging things get together and fuel each other's ardor. Meeting your allies -- shaking hands, sitting down and eating together, talking, laughing, getting to look one another in the eye, getting to know someone in all the rich, primate non-verbal ways which can only happen in actual physical proximity -- is powerful. Epicenters are tools.

Some, too, suggest that various networking events -- for example, Green Drinks or the PlaNetwork meetings -- are epicenters, but I think they lack a key informal, drop-in element. I think for an epicenter to really be the tool it ought to be, you should be able to show up any afternoon or evening and find someone worthwhile and interesting with whom to strike up a conversation.

So, where's the epicenter in your town?

If you don't have one, what do you wish it were like?

What's the best one you've ever visited?

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Your Turn at 08:01 PM)

(location one - where our own Drazen Pantic spends much of his time - makes the cut! :) -dm)

Total Immersion is a leading software and services company specialized in real time video and 3D images integration.

I think cheap metadata has (at least) these characteristics: 1. It's made by someone else 2. Its creation requires very few learned rules 3. It's produced out of self-interest 4. Its value grows with aggregation 5. It does not break when there is incomple

OS X native BitTorrent client with a cool visualization of peers

If adware and spyware is signed by Verisign, what exactly does a software signature mean?

"You can't buy or sell mashups, but you can play them in a webcast." - IANAL and I don't think Lucas is either

Remember, Kevin Schofield, who gave us a video tour of Microsoft Research? He's back. Microsoft's groundbreaking Channel 9 posted the first of three parts, today, talking to Microsoft researchers involved with innovative graphics and development tools. Here you'll meet researchers who work in graphics and in developer-tool research. In the graphics segment you meet Turner Whitted (the guy ru...

Indian and Canadian telecoms agencies are working jointly to develop new broadband wireless networking technology to provide communication in rural and remote locations. India's Center for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) and Canada's Communication Research Center have signed an agreement to look at the possibility of using MILTON, or Microwave Light Organized Network, a wireless technology dev...

Seamless roaming is Intel's vision. Their goal is a future in which people will transparently move from 2.5G networks to 802.11-based networks to wired LANs, depending on the best connection for their location at any particular time. Intel is actively working with the industry to develop a standards-based mobile solution, the International Roaming Access Protocol (IRAP). It aims to enable seamle...

Following up on Dan Gillmor's suggestion that we rethink the notion of objectivity, Wired's Chris Anderson suggests that "passionate" media can and will replace objectivity: "Today in the US the newspaper is fading, as is its influence on American journalism:...

A Veritable Who's Who Gathered in London

The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network [PLAN] is currently meeting in London. Here are the real time notes being compiled by Nicolas Nova, Drew Hemment and Steve Benford. [Thanks to pasta and vinegar]

PLAN is a two day event bringing together leading international figures to review the emerging fields of locative and pervasive media. Wireless and locative technologies are enabling people to break away from traditional computer interfaces. Mobile devices are mediating new kinds of social interaction and responding to physical location and context. [related]

See Tom Carden's Day 2 and Day 1 notes, and Molly's notes too.

AdAge has presented a very disturbing study on what the Americans are buying and why. Between 1960 and 2003, the spending for reading materials (including newspapers) was divided by three! According to the study, "The share of money spent on entertainment has hovered around 5% since 1950, but priorities have shifted. Spending on consumer electronics has soared; spending on newspapers, magazines and books has plummeted. The average household apportioned just 0.3% of spending ($127) for reading materials in 2003, down from 1% ($51, or $317 adjusted for inflation) in 1960. The rich, who also are more educated, spend more money on print media and books than the poor do. But don’t read too much into that. It turns out households in every quintile of income spent the same average 0.3% of budget on reading in 2003. For publishers, that doesn’t make cents." If you have figures on Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, don't hesitate to forward them.

Source: AdAge

(does this take into account the falling costs of some kinds of media? -dm)

Citizens of China and Vietnam are doing something heretofore unheard of. They're hashing out territorial differences via a China People's Daily web forum. The debate was sparked by the killing last month of nine Vietnamese fishermen (the Chinese call them "pirates"), who were shot by Chinese police in the Gulf of Tonkin (China calls it the "Northern Gulf"). In dispute is the tract of water where the killings occurred. The two not-so-friendly socialist brethren have overlapping historical claims to this sea -- and to the oil deposits that lie beneath. And despite decades of tightly-scripted diplomacy to resolve the territorial dispute, neither is willing to concede an inch.

In both countries, public discourse about territorial authority over the Gulf and its adjoining South China Sea is almost exclusively the province of stiff-suited apparatchik from their respective foreign ministries. Any citizen who dares discuss the issue in terms that stray from his governments' tersely worded stance, runs the risk of interrogation our even imprisonment.

I know from personal experience. In the 1990s, while the managing editor of Vietnam's largest English-language weekly in Hanoi, I was required as a matter of routine to submit all copy to an operative from Vietnam's Ministry of Culture and Information.

(Continued at mediacitizen)

Browse Flickr with your TiVo!

Excellent article from ex-Your Sinclair journalist David McCandless: "Spending an inordinate amount of time at my computer, using my broadband, I'm developing what I can only term an information habit."

John Battelle interviews Reuters CEO Tom Glocer about his plans to build an online broadcast network. Excerpt: Battelle: If this new Reuters offering doesn't look like CNN or Fox, what does it look like? Glocer: What you might have is...

: AOL's gearing for some new launches: it has started beta testing for its standalone AOL Browser and Desktop Search...AOL Browser beta utilizes IE engine, but packs on additional features such as tabbed browsing and advanced pop-up blocking.
And then, the VOIP push, and it is supposed to be launched in March sometime...

Special report in Business Week Online:

HDTV: A Shopper's Survival Guide
The words high-definition TV are enough to give many consumers the sweats. We'll help you relax and buy smarter

Why TV Will Never Be the Same
Digital technologies mean more than just sharper pictures. Here's a look at three major trends they'll make possible

Next: TV Meets IP
Internet technologies promise to soon take couch potatoes to worlds far beyond TiVo. Even phone companies could benefit big-time

TV's Spectrum Showdown
In a deal originally made in 1996, broadcasters may soon be forced to return airwaves now used to transmit analog signals

These TV Lovers Can Wait for HD
They set out to find a high-tech model for under $2,000 that's better than their current 36-inch CRT. They wound up keeping what they have

Cory Doctorow: Using a USB 2 hub and OS X's RAID software, this enterprising hacker wired together four iPod Shuffles into an array that acted as a single logical disk. Link (via Waxy)

Xeni Jardin: MIT Media Lab chairman/founder Nicholas Negroponte told the BBC today that he's developing a notebook computer which would sell for less than $100 per unit. The goal: a cheap computing tool for developing countries and educational entities. Link (thanks, Raanan)

TiVO HME SDK Initial Release

TiVO has released an 'early access' release of its HME SDK. "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."

There are already some tutorials on java.net if you a: have a Tivo, b: can code java. Here's one:

How to start writing apps for TiVO in NetBeans, in 5 minutes or less

So now nothing is stopping you from coding an coding a Tivo widget to read Unmediated feeds.

Not sure if this has been posted here or not. If it has, it is worth a remention:

The Multimedia Training Kit from Itrain Online is a series of modular training materials for use in workshops developed by ItrainOnline partners and others. The materials share a common easy-to-use format, and are freely available for non-commercial use.

While it may seem basic to most Unmediated readers, to others it is a great starting point for building capacity.

From LinuxDevices:


PC Magazine has published a rave review of the Linux-based Sonos ZonePlayer ZP100 digital music hub, calling it "the best and easiest audio-only media hub we've seen," "the iPod of digital audio hubs," and "the first digital audio hub we can recommend without reservation." Check out the Linux based device implementation. Not sure how the P2P "wireless mesh" scales outside of the home network though.

Arcade which is part of Project Blinklights is an interactive light installation, allowing mobile users to play games such as Tetris, Pong or Pacman which are displayed on Buildings, by using their mobile phones.

For instance, a player standing in front of Bibliothèque Nationale de France can connect himself with the building by dialing +33 (1) 44 24 73 50. The current show will be interrupted and the text "TETRIS" announces that the game can begin.

[via Elastico.net]

From Grand Text Auto : Hey this is a cool project: Grafedia is attempting to write a hypertext on the streets of New York. All it takes is a picture cellfone and some magic chalk. Like the Yellow Arrow project,...

"Cellphones" is a new rock musical playing in New York written & directed by William Electric Black, where audience members get calls from the cast. (Thanks Anthony!)

Synopsis:

The war in Iraq and terrorists’ threats keeps America on constant alert. Homeland Security is not only the buzz, but the only place that’s offering a decent job. A new recruiting booth is about to open up at 7:00 am Monday, in Central Park.

booth opens, twenty strangers gather and wait in line. While they wait, they rock out about timely topics such as Britney Spears, botox, SUVs, MP3s, rap music, fast foods, low fat diets, saving Michael Jackson, gay marriage, the Internet, porn, soccer moms, Enron, Bush, Starbucks, Martha Stewart, weapons of mass destruction, and of course, cellphones.

Move over “Hair”--cellphones are now the rage. In fact, during/ the rock musical, audience members get calls from the cast.

PocketMac - The Original Mac-to-Pocket PC Sync Solution(TM)

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > What's Next: Phones to Use Wi-Fi Instead of Cellular Systems, or Both

So a few weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft's Consumer Electronics Endgame which was focused on the PlaysForSure brand and WMA DRM format. Well, today Napster announced its awaited Napster To Go service which will allow subscribers (at $18 a month) to download any of the million songs in the Napster catalog to their mobile music player that supports the Janus DRM - i.e. PlaysForSure - like the iRiver H10 pictured above. Another device would be the Audiovox SMT5600, which I just saw in a music video the other night by Maroon 5.

Wow.

This just opened the crack just a little more to the apocolypse I was predicting for the other standards in the mobile media space. I'm not going to claim that Napster's service is going to take down Apple's iTunes for example, I'm just going to say that it's one step towards that eventual outcome. Why? Well, if Apple's business model is to sell both the razors and the blades, Microsoft just took a good shot at the revenue from the blades. Look for Napster and other companies offering similar services to hammer away at the idea that it'll cost you $10,000 to fill your iPod with 10,000 songs, or only $18 to fill your PlaysForSure player with 1 million. That's bound to sink in sooner or later.

And from personal experience, I've used Napster's service before (in December 2003) and liked it *a lot*. However, I couldn't take the music with me, so I eventually dropped it and started using iTunes more. Well, that's no longer an issue. The only issue left is the players. The other manufacturers have to get off their asses and compete with Apple. The devices suck or are just too expensive. Even Microsoft employees prefer iPods. But I can't imagine it'll be much longer.

I hate it when I'm right sometimes.

-Russ

Last month we posted about a New York Times story that said TiVo walked away from Comcast.  USA Today published an interview with Michael Ramsay, ex-CEO and current-Chairman of TiVo, that asked about the Comcast deal reported in the Times.

Q: There've been reports that TiVo was close to striking a licensing deal with Comcast, but you scrapped it.

A: That is totally untrue. I sure as hell am not going to walk away from something that makes sense for the company and its shareholders. That rumor, wherever it came from — and God knows where it came from — is totally fabricated and completely false.

Q: How close did you and Comcast get?

A: Well, we're still talking. We're in discussions with cable companies. We have a variety of offerings for them. These kinds of deals can take months, years to develop because they have great strategic importance for both companies. We're committed to developing those relationships no matter how long they take. If we thought the outcome was futile, we wouldn't be doing it. There's been no pulling back. In fact, it's accelerating.

TiVo's stock has dropped from a 52 week high of $12.94 to $3.63 this morning, due to the loss of DirecTV as a future partner, slow introduction of HDTV and TiVoToGo and most recently the resignation of their President.

Thomas Hawk, who tipped me off to the story, is frustrated with a couple oddities about the timing and the New York Times sourcing.

Well for starters Mike, it is a leading misleading to say "and God knows where it came from" when I damn well hope that you are reading something in a publication as influential as the New York Times about the future of your company. Ok maybe you meant you didn't know where it came from prior to the Times printing it.

If in fact this is not how the deal went down I think this points to a significant credibility problem for the New York Times. The Times published, "Yet, at the last minute, Michael Ramsay, TiVo's chief executive, decided to pull out of the deal. Comcast was not going to pay TiVo enough money or give it enough control over its service, Mr. Ramsay told the company's board, according to people involved in those discussions."

...

However, on a second point, you wait until February 3rd to come out and call the news completely false? I mean yeah the closing price the day before the news of $4.44 a share is not much better than the $3.51 closing price of today but on a percentage basis it's kind of significant.

One of the things that frustrates TiVo fans and investors alike is its inability to effectively communicate.  Is this another case of bad PR or is there something else going on? 

A deal with Comcast would be huge for TiVo, but TiVo's plan to use the Internet to make an end-run around cable and satellite providers might be a deal breaker for Comcast.

A recurring theme in internet businesses is how to turn folks from freeloaders into customers, which I think most industries do well. The ones that lag behind are TV and Movie studios. I've long wondered why they didn't stem the tide of file trading shows by simply offering a reliable fast download for a small price. I'd much rather pay a little to grab exactly what I need without having to search or wait for it. The iTunes Music Store is a great example of this in action.

So with that in mind, I was happy to hear that CinemaNow will be offering NBC shows and movies for download at $1-3 each.  They already offer tons of movies, but adding TV Shows into the mix is a welcome addition. It'll likely come in handy if I miss TiVoing something and need a way to catch it.

As a self-admitted media junkie, my collection of CDs, DVDs and, yes... still a few leftover VHS tapes has grown to immense proportions over the years. Alphabetizing what's on the rack used to work, but it's not foolproof. It doesn't keep complete track of my entire inventory, since things can be scattered at home, in the car, at the office, or "borrowed" by a friend. Long ago, I had a lot of stuff cataloged in a spreadsheet, but it was a bear to keep it up and was limited in the information I had recorded.

Well, Hallelujah! My prayers have been answered! Socket Communications has introduced OrganizeIT, an elegant new solution to keeping track of everything digital and analog. Its main feature is a barcode scanner that attaches to many popular PDAs via an SDIO card. This allows for easy identification and tracking via the standard UPC codes on the media cases. The next component is a software workhorse. It connects to an online service to pull all the details into your new media database by using the barcode info. Movie details like cast, director, ratings, and CD details like track info and label are all automatically updated. You can even create barcode labels for all those homemade CDs! OrganizeIT also goes so far as to give pricing information, so you can have your collection's replacement value at a glance for your insurance agent. The software can be loaded to a PC and synched with the PDA, or can utilize your PDA's wireless technology to keep the complete database on your handheld!

I might actually be able to get my marass in order! No more buying duplicates for me! Now, if only they could invent something to deal with the growing collection of CDs with missing jewel cases and jewel cases with no CDs that I have...

Special report in Business Week Online:

HDTV: A Shopper's Survival Guide
The words high-definition TV are enough to give many consumers the sweats. We'll help you relax and buy smarter

Why TV Will Never Be the Same
Digital technologies mean more than just sharper pictures. Here's a look at three major trends they'll make possible

Next: TV Meets IP
Internet technologies promise to soon take couch potatoes to worlds far beyond TiVo. Even phone companies could benefit big-time

TV's Spectrum Showdown
In a deal originally made in 1996, broadcasters may soon be forced to return airwaves now used to transmit analog signals

These TV Lovers Can Wait for HD
They set out to find a high-tech model for under $2,000 that's better than their current 36-inch CRT. They wound up keeping what they have

Michael Madison's two cents on the Virginia teacher threatened for planning to show "Eyes on the Prize" to students:

Does anyone actually read the Copyright Act? Take a look at section 110, subparagraph (1). Teachers who show copyrighted films to their students in class are not infringing anyone's copyrights. Period. No permission or license is necessary, and fair use is irrelevant.

Via Siva, the cited section:

§ 110. Limitations on exclusive rights: Exemption of certain performances and displays

rovisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:

(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made;

Update: Joe Gratz: "In this case, the teacher presumably planned to use a copy of 'Eyes on the Prize' downloaded via Downhill Battle's BitTorrent links. As the law stands, that's an infringing copy, no matter what you or I or Downhill Battle think the law ought to be...Plus, there's a substantial question as to whether a showing 'for students and community members' is a showing 'in the course of face-to-face teaching activities.'"

Update #2: Nicholas Reville of DownhillBattle, via email: "Actually, the school has real, school-version, VHS tape of Eyes on the Prize."

Update #3: Elizabeth Townsend: "I think this is very very important point that teachers are often not aware. Show what you want in class. That's your right. Use it! Use it! That's part of the Copyright Act."

Nice piece by Randy Dotinga in The Christian Science Monitor summarizing the issues about to be argued as Apple sues two bloggers for spilling what Apple calls secrets. Dotinga's story focuses on the question of whether the bloggers may be shielded under California statutes that protect journalists.

That's obviously of no small interest to the bloggers being sued, but there are larger implications. In particular, bloggers may yet force the mainstream social consciousness to reconsider its view of what makes something news and what makes something reporting. This view has been under occasional challenge from places like the Drudge Report over political events, but these seem to fade as quickly as they burst on the scene.

Dotinga notes that the blogs' claimed readership puts them ahead of many recognized paper publications. So if it's not readership size that makes a journalist, perhaps it's the structure of a newspaper. But it seems antithetical to our notions of reporting to claim that unless your material is reviewed by an editorial board. Was James Madison not a journalist when he reported on the goings-on in Colonial America? I doubt he had an editor reading his broadsheets.

Perhaps then, the argument goes, bloggers are not journalists because they don't maintain the vaunted "objectivism" of mainstream journalists. If all they're doing is printing what they have opinions about then they're no better than William Safire... oops, scratch that argument.

Maybe it's about the money. Some bloggers talk about things and then take money from companies with an interest in those things. Oh, you mean like Armstrong Williams or Maggie Gallagher? Both of whom have admitted taking money under the table to promote Bush administration propaganda campaigns? We may call them bad journalists (no journalist biscuit) but we don't seem to have any doubts that they are journalists.

It seems to me that what gets under the skins of anti-blog people like Randall Bezanson, quoted at the end of Dotinga's piece, is that blogs fail to follow the familiar hierarchical model that has dominated American media for at least the last two centuries. I mean, really. If you let the people start talking to each other instead of lapping up the corporate consensus pap who knows what kind of trouble will follow.

Michael Malone has his latest opinion piece, where he looks at how news consumption has changed over the years, comparing different major news events across time, and noting that, these days, people want to "inhabit the news," rather than just receive it passively. This shouldn't be all that surprising. Think of various major media moments (JFK assassination, space shuttle explosion, 9/11) and one thing that people always do is ask the "where were you...?" question. It's an attempt to bring yourself closer to that event, even though you had nothing, at all, to do with it. However, in some sense, you could go even further. While Malone talks about "inhabiting the news," it seems that the rise of personal publishing platforms (which he credits for making it possible to inhabit the news) is even more about letting people spread the news themselves. It's not only that people can "inhabit" and surround themselves with news items and analysis and video and photos, but that anyone can actually take part in adding to that infostream as well. Again, this has huge implications for professional news organizations, who can certainly jump on that bandwagon. Unfortunately, most still seem themselves as being the end-product of news delivery, rather than a raw material that goes into the news flow.

Via Techdirt

Via Clippings.reblog

The Via Ruf Betten Cinema Bed takes this home multimedia craze to another level. For $20,000 you get a complete home theater system at the foot of your bed that is remote controlled and collapsible right into the footboard. A shelf for the projector behind your head, and compartments for all your components. Very retro in design and execution, very german. A plasma or LCD version would woo me in more, I'm not such a huge fan of projectors, but I do dig the idea here.

via Engadget

Via Clippings.reblog

Computer-generated scenery can be realistically added to live video footage, using a machine vision system developed at Oxford University. Previously, it has only been possible to add special effects to a scene in the studio afterwards. The Oxford...

Coming in a month or two. As we first mentioned last year, AOL has been planning to offer VoIP service in 2005; Light Reading cites internal sources that say the launch will be sometime between now and March 16. As their article notes, Beta tester opinions of the service in ..

David Pescovitz: Paul Bourke's iPod-Photo Stereoscope is an exquisite retro tech/new media mash-up:

For those wondering what "stereoscopic" is all about, viewing stereoscopic images give an enhanced depth perception. This is similar to the depth perception we get in real life, the same effect IMAX 3D and many computer games now provide. Stereoscopic viewing of any sort involves independent presentation of a different image, called a stereopair, to each eye. These stereopairs are essentially two different views of the world corresponding to the slightly different views our eyes see because they are separated horizontally....

Images can be downloaded to the IPOD-Photo, the images can subsequently be recalled and presented on the colour display. A series of images can also be presented manually or as a self running slide show with some user selected delay between each image. So to use this as a stereoscopic storage and presentation device one simply labels two IPOD-Photos as "left" and "right", the images corresponding to each eye are installed on the appropriate IPOD-Photo.

Link (via Leander Kahney's The Cult of Mac)

Xeni Jardin: Verisign subsidiary Jamster is the subject of this online petition by annoyed persons who claim to have been charged for ringtones they didn't willingly purchase. If you ask me, though, the obnioxious late-night TV ads are cause enough for civil disobedience. Link (Thanks, Hal! via unwired.)

Cory Doctorow: Rick Prelinger sez, "Jason Hartley, writer of the widely read and acclaimed blog Just Another Soldier, writes here how he was demoted to E-4 and fined as a result of his blog. If you haven't seen Jason's blog, it's well worth reading: the perceptive, sometimes disturbing and often self-deprecating words of a citizen soldier." Link (Thanks, Rick!)

Backed by a US$30 million ad campaign, Napster launched Napster To Go, an update to their music subscription service. The difference is that subscribers can now copy an unlimited number of songs to portable music players.

Europe will have to wait awhile for software patents. The European Union is sending the process back to the starting point, in a victory for anti-patent forces.

Attention video-loving citizen journalist creative types—there's an interesting opportunity out there for you to make $15,000 and get your work on the new INdTV cable channel launching this summer. They're taking submissions from the community in an attempt to find talent (or at least that's my guess) and thought Gizmodo readers would be prime candidates. Let me share the email I received after the jump and it'll start making a bit more sense.

(Release the rabid hounds of the videoblogging list! ;) -kc.)

Via Gizmodo

" Sound of Traffic is a Java "application" which converts TCP/IP header information into midi notes via the Java Synthesizer. The purpose is to listen in on network traffic in ordered time, via a tempo, rather than realtime, which could be more chaotic. In this sense it becomes closer to music then noise.

Play back of traffic is sorted by source and destination addresses and ports. Ports are assigned individual midi instruments and played on odd or even ticks depending upon whether it is a source or destination packet. The note played by the port is based upon the number of hits (amount of traffic) occurring on the port."

I gave a talk last week to the Knight Ridder editorial page editors, who assemble periodically to have a "whither the editorial pages" confab. My role was provocateur. First, I gave them my standard schtick on how journalism is shifting from the lecture mode to something between a conversation and a seminar. Then I got to the recommendations, which went roughly this way:

Newspapers, with few exceptions, are strangely oblivious to the huge opportunity in citizen journalism. More than almost any other entities, they could be taking advantage of their innate advantages. Yet they are not.

Yes, newspapers have been losing circulation and power, but they retain a surprisingly deep reservoir of credibility and authority in their communities. The reservoir must be replenished, and it is the citizens who -- given the opportunity -- will be able, and perhaps glad, to help.

The key is in having the conversation with the community and, even more, helping community members have a conversation among themselves. Newspapers, given their positions, can be at the center of this conversation -- not the object of it in most cases, but the enabler and, to some extent, agenda-setter. (The Greensboro (North Carolina) News & Record is a leader in this arena already, and has plans to move much farther.)

(Click through to continue...)

STMicroelectronics, one of the world's most innovative semiconductor companies, will present a record twelve papers at this year's International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, California, during February 6-10, 2005. ST's most notable contributions cover advances in Digital Video Broadcast and Radio Frequency (RF) integration in 3G applications. ST experts were also selected to chair the sessions on the latest developments in RF technologies.

The Street suggests that Verizon is seriously considering a purchase of Sprint, though at this point they're simply "fact-finding" and no serious talks are underway. "I think in Verizon's case, they are being pushed," says an analyst in the article,..

Via Broadbandreports

Cory Doctorow: A recent "independent" report did a hatchet job on municipal wireless networks, damning them as an expensive failure. Glenn Fleishman took the report to pieces in a series of long blog-posts, exposing its shoddy methodology and dubious provenance. Now he reports that the organization that produced it, the New Millennium Research Council, is a front for the telecoms lobby.

The ever-insightful Carol Ellison also weighed in about the NMRC report. She summarizes the phone conference about the release of the report today as, "The rollout of municipally held Wi-Fi networks will likely have a detrimental effect on city budgets and on competition." Ellison castigates the press event and the report, noting, "But while the session promised to fill the gap on the dearth of in-depth analysis on the subject, it and the report that accompanied it offered many more sweeping statements about failed projects than information about why they failed."

Ellison shreds the NMRC for its undisclosed connection to Issue Dynamics: "The NMRC made a point to say that none of the researchers who participated received any money from NMRC. But in case you're wondering who's paying the bills at IDI, take a look at its client list. If you don't want to read the whole huge thing, let me summarize those of interest in this issue: Ameritech, Bell South, Comcast, Pacific Bell, Qwest, SBC Communications, Sprint, U.S. West, Verizon and Verizon Wireless."

Via Boing Boing

The problem with social software as a recommendation network has its roots in the problem of social software itself. "Friend" is a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to describing relationships, especially in matters of taste.

Tried searching the archive for a post along these lines but could not find one. So here goes...

A vlog camera should ideally be portable - to carry with you easily and whip out whenever you feel the impulse to film. The content should be encoded in a format that keeps the size relatively small and makes transfers/editing easy. The resolution should be greater than the standard 320*240 available on most picture cameras with added functionality. There should be a microphone jack for when you want to obtain better sound quality.

Based on these loose guidelines, which is the best vlog camera available in the market today?

(They're talking about the Sanyo Xacti C1 and C4 on the videoblogging list. Gary from Prodigem had a Panasonic AV100 at Vloggercon. Does anyone have any other suggestions for small and light videoblogging cameras? -kc.)

Via videoblogging at Yahoo! Groups

The Game Developer's Conference is coming up - March 7-11 in San Francisco, California. You still have a chance to register early for the special deal.<

The GDC is one of my favorite events. It's an actual conference, unlike E3, which is more of a buzzbath and industry hoopla. The focus of GDC is, as the name suggests, game development - from design to production to marketing and selling. For the next week or so I and my cohorts will be writing about the highlights of this year's GDC and why you need to be there. Call it the GGA Guide to GDC 2005.

The most unpredictable - and thereby the most exciting - event is always the Experimental Gameplay demo, run by Jonathan Blow. It's a free-for-all of risky games, games that were developed with little commericalism in mind, all to test out a new mechanic or to make use of an interesting interface or just for the hell of it. It's open to everyone from game veterans to absolute beginners. It's exhilerating, fascinating, and totally impractical. I never miss it.

And, needless to say, I also never miss any time Will Wright speaks. He'll be talking this year about the Future of Content. It doesn't matter what he talks about, his lectures will always leave your mind spinning with about a billion ideas. You could write a book on every "talking point" he introduces.

And then there's Ernest Adams, iconoclast, rebel, free-wheeling intellectual. Some would add, crazy old coot (I mean that in the most affectionate possible sense, Ernest). He often relates videogame thematically to literary tropes or mytho-psychological undercurrents. You'll hate him or love him, but his remarks will always stimulate hours of relection or debate during the afterparties.

Via game girl advance

Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis's We Media white paper is now available in Spanish.

More from the HypergeneMediaBlog We Media webpage:

Guillermo Franco Morales, a university professor and manager for El Tiempo in Colombia, South America, has translated the complete text of our paper, We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, into Spanish. The translation, called Nosotros, el medio, is now available online in HTML and PDF (2.7MB) formats.

Via PJNet Today

Podcastcon 2005 - the UK's first podcasting conference. Date and venue to be confirmed....

Via Strange Attractor

While it was announced weeks ago, Verizon Wireless has finally launched their VCAST 3G streaming video content. It's still not at all clear that there's any real demand for streaming mobile broadcast style video. While it's probably a "nice to have," it's hardly a strong motivator. People still buy mobile phones to communicate -- not to consumer broadcast style video. Especially when they're on the go. While it does have a nice novelty factor, that's not the same as a sustainable business. On top of this, it looks like Verizon Wireless is already selling this based on the fact that, you know, it doesn't actually suck, rather than what it's useful for. As pointed out by Broadband Reports, the first thing a Verizon Wireless product manager said when asked about the offering is: "it's not choppy." Well, there's a strong selling point.

Via Techdirt

: A fascinating story on the broadband life in Switzerland, and the one to watch: Switzerland will be the front line in one of the cardinal business wars of the 21st century--a battle royal for telecom supremacy between cable and telephone companies. "The TV industry as a whole is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the next generation of digital programming: high-definition television."
And some balanced reactions over Microsoft's IPTV platform, not the usual reaction these days...
In a related story, the scenario stateside...and some people are betting on Apple rather than MSFT: "But the Microsoft vision and technology is still too cumbersome," META Group's analyst Bruce Hudson says. "Watch Apple in this space as they digest the success of the iPod and figure out a way to become the media center of the home."

Via PaidContent.org

Michael Malone has his latest opinion piece, where he looks at how news consumption has changed over the years, comparing different major news events across time, and noting that, these days, people want to "inhabit the news," rather than just receive it passively. This shouldn't be all that surprising. Think of various major media moments (JFK assassination, space shuttle explosion, 9/11) and one thing that people always do is ask the "where were you...?" question. It's an attempt to bring yourself closer to that event, even though you had nothing, at all, to do with it. However, in some sense, you could go even further. While Malone talks about "inhabiting the news," it seems that the rise of personal publishing platforms (which he credits for making it possible to inhabit the news) is even more about letting people spread the news themselves. It's not only that people can "inhabit" and surround themselves with news items and analysis and video and photos, but that anyone can actually take part in adding to that infostream as well. Again, this has huge implications for professional news organizations, who can certainly jump on that bandwagon. Unfortunately, most still seem themselves as being the end-product of news delivery, rather than a raw material that goes into the news flow.

Via Techdirt

public domain news footage on dvd

Kevin Werbach, assistant professor of legal studies at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and organizer of the popular Supernova conference, writes Tivo's obit.

OK, I have to admit it. Tivo's goose is cooked. I've been a Tivo user for years, and like most Tivo owners, I absolutely love the product. I've been convinced since I first plugged it in that some day, all TV would work like this. And I'm still convinced of that. Television as a fixed schedule grid determined by networks and cable operators is doomed. User control is the future of TV.
...
Tivo, though, still has two big assets. I'm reasonably confident those assets will be valuable enough for one of the major industry players to purchase, or perhaps a consortium. The assets are Tivo's brand, and its patents.

What do you think will happen to Tivo? Who might benefit most from Tivo's patents or brand? Or is there another important asset of Tivo that Werbach missed?

Werblog: Who will buy Tivo for scrap?

Via PVRblog

Interactive TV List of Companies, Manufacturers, and Organizations

Via sLop

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005
Will somebody please give me a view through iChatAV?
----
Taking Back Television: An Open Approach to the Development and Deployment of Next Generation Media
Tim Halle, Director, The Project for Open Source Media (POSM)

Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 4:40pm - 5:25pm
Location: California Ballroom B

Via sLop

SciSpot: PIC Microcontroller Programming for Macintosh

Via sLop

An interesting analysis recently published by Gazette magazine concludes that there is both an "internetization" of traditional media and a "mediatization" of the Internet going on. But while the former is having less impact, the latter "threatens making the Internet a monological space."

The Y!Q service offers "contextual" search that analyzes the page being read and gives a list of related search results.

Unlike traditional searches where you begin a search from an empty search box and then shift through information that may or may not relate to what you need, Y!Q lets you search from any web page you're reading and offers a unique way to tell the search engine what kind of information you're interested in.

Here's how the Y!Q DemoBar works. You tell Y!Q what you're looking for by highlighting text on a webpage. The highlighted text becomes the context of your search —letting Y!Q know to relate your search to what you've highlighted.

The battle among Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others is extremely heated, with new services coming almost daily. Just in the past several days, Microsoft replaced Yahoo's search technology with its own MSN tool. At the same time, Google has recently released new products designed for businesses.

Via Physics Org

Did you know that stalwart tech analysts Rob Enderle, Richard Doherty and Tim Bajarin have a group blog? I didn't. The blog, called Technology Pundits, features the writings of the three most well-known analysts in the industry. They have been covering the computer and consumer electronics sector for the past 20 years and have written about and chronicled the impact that technology has had on business, consumers and education. Unfortunately, none of the three blogs support comments or trackbacks so there's no way for us to give them feedback.

Via Micro Persuasion

A report has been produced indicating that WiMax and WiFi are the future of wireless communications, and their integration into 4G will effect both mobile operators and landline telcos alike. This is in direct contrast to the increasing number of people who say WiMax won’t cut it…

Via MocoNews.net

"An [audio] e-book can be downloaded from the library's Web site onto a computer and either burned to a CD or transferred to an MP3 player. For free."

Sony today said that the long-awaited PSP will be coming to North America on March 24 of this year. The "value pack" edition will be priced at US$249.99, and will include basic accessories, and a bit of a surprise if you get one of the early units-Spider-Man 2, on Sony's proprietary UMD disc format.

Via Ars Technica

At a dealer event in Prague today, JVC displayed a new hard drive based Everio camcorder, the GZ-MC500, featuring 3 CCD technology. This new camcorder, the third out of JVC, is also the smallest 3 CCD camcorder ever. The camcorders of the Everio series record to Microdrive hard drive disks instead of tape based media.

According to online reports, the GZ-MC500 uses 3 CCDs and pixel shifting technology to produce 5 Megapixel still images. This camcorder includes a 10x optical zoom and records MPEG-2 video to cards, just like the GZ-MC100 and GZ-MC200 Everio camcorders, which are on the market currently.

(I'm almost as excited as I'm gonna be when these things -- the ones with 3CCDs -- drop to about 1/3 of the price. -kc.)

ONJava.com: Streaming QuickTime with Java
An online suppliment to Chris Adamson's recent QuickTime for Java A Developer's Notebook.

From the article:
In this article, I'll introduce the basics of simple webcasting with QTJ.

AWESOME!!!!!

Via sLop

In the future, mobile phone users will be able to leave messages anywhere in the form of what might be termed electronic post-its.

Via Clippings.reblog

On the videoblogging list there's been some light discussion about genre. I suspect it is pretty much time to recognise that blogs are not a genre. They might have been, briefly, but not any more. They're a medium (that's medium as in singular of media). A blog is like 'CD', 'book', or 'painting'.

So in CD's we have genres, the really big ones would be things like pop, jazz, rock, classical. But of course each of these can be subdivided into 100s of smaller generic categories. With books we would include fiction, non fiction, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, western, mystery, and so on. With the same ability to further discriminate. We can do the same with painting. In each case we can also identify style, so that in painting a genre might be still life, but it could be fauvist, cubist, late renaissance northern, and so on.

So it is now with blogs. There are multiple genres, each with variable styles. Blogs are now in fact a medium. The first specific medium to have emerged from the World Wide Web http protocol.

What topics in digital journalism should students explore? Patrick Phillips, the founder of the media roundup site I Want Media, is teaching an undergraduate course in digital journalism at New York University this spring and wondering what he should teach. The course covers Internet culture, online magazines, blogging, and more. Scheduled guest speakers include writer/editor Kurt Andersen, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, WSJ.com managing editor Bill Grueskin and bloggers.

Phillips is seeking suggestions and advice for teaching the class. Send them to feedback@iwantmedia.com or post them here and CyberJournalist.net will share them.

ITworld: Interview with David Weinberger, author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Today the software knowledge is shifting from producers to the users.
Learners are willing to participate in the construction of software knowledge and they have a new powerful tool to do it: Folksonomy.

read the full posting by Marco Montemagno on Learning IntelliCAD.

Via Smart Mobs

The GNU Netcat -- Official homepage
From the site:
Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol.
It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

Via sLop

I hope some journalism/sociology/communications student is studying the birth and spread of political memes -- formerly known as party lines and spin -- in the era of citizens' media.

Case in point: After the election in Iraq, we first heard silence from the anti-war crew and the left and then, as if they'd all gotten the fax, we heard an echo of a line something like this: an election does not a democracy make.

The similarity was striking. Somebody started that line. Somebody thought it was good and picked it up. And it spread quickly, in both big media and citizens' media.

Of course, this happens on the right and the left. This is merely a current example.

I'd love to know who first said it and how it spread. How is spin spun now?

Pantech & Curitel continue to explore new form factors with this PH-L4000V 'Camcorder Phone,' which adopts features normally seen in video cameras. The camera sensor itself is a 2.1-megapixel model, with flash and optical zoom, which can also record video clips to memory cards (I'm not quite sure what format yet).

While there are no plans to release the phone in the West to my knowledge, many Korean phones can be imported and used on US CDMA networks like Verizon, albeit with often-confusing interfaces and broken features. I'd like to try using one, though—it looks fun.

A Glimpse of the Future of Mobile Telephony [Chosun via LivingRoom]

Via Gizmodo

LG Electronics developed a 120-gigabyte hard disk drive with a mounted digital versatile disc (DVD) recorder that can download multimedia contents from PCs through wireless local area network (LAN).LG is currently the world`s largest supplier of DVD players.

Via Physics Org

We've cited Big Champagne statistics numerous times to point up the differences between 'facts' from the entertainment industry on the fanciful corporate music download businesses, and what's happening in the real world of online music, which is to say the p2p networks.

The differences are in orders of magnitude. Can they possibly be accurate?

Yes, Big Champagne ceo Eric Garland promises.

p2pnet: What, bottom line, does Big Champagne do?

Garland: Big Champagne gathers information about activity on all of the most populous/popular p2p file sharing networks by large-scale participation in those networks.

p2pnet: How do you manage that?

Garland: The process involves passive observation of what users are downloading to shared directories, sharing over time, and what they're searching for - all recorded and analyzed continually. Our systems are constantly monitoring activity globally, and have been doing so for more than four years.

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has announced that its free open source wireless networking software is available for download....

CUWiN has been developing an open source, turnkey wireless networking solution that exceeds the functionality of many proprietary systems. They want to bring ubiquitous, extremely high-speed, low-cost networking for every community and constituency. Following in the footsteps of Linux and Firefox, CUWiN has focused on creating a low-cost, non-proprietary, user-friendly system. CUWiN's software will share connectivity across the network, allowing users to buy bandwidth in bulk and benefit from the cost savings. CUWiN networks are self-configuring and self-healing -- so adding new wireless nodes is hassle-free, and the system automatically adapts to the loss of an existing node. And, because CUWiN networks are completely ad-hoc, there's no need for expensive central servers or specialized administration equipment.

Via Muniwireless

New free XML Exporter from Automatic Duck - easier than the Apple methodology where you have to re-key all your settings every time, free tool from Automatic Duck to export XML files. What are you going to do with that XML? It'll matter more at NAB...

Via HD For Indies

What do you get when you cross The Monkeys with The Beatles? Paperback Believer. Seriously, this is the VERY BEST mashup I have ever heard. I'm biased because I love the Beatles already but you just have to hear how much better this version is. Mixed by Mark Vidler of Go Home Productions.

Via Julia Set

Part 1: A look at how it works. Analysis No chip in years has caused as much excitement as the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It promises to be the most important microprocessor of the decade, with potentially enormous repercussions for how the industry computes, and how the rest of us use digital media. It will power the PlayStation 3 and technical and commercial computing.…

It's the question I get most as a blogger: "Are bloggers journalists?" My answer is always the same: sometimes. It's a silly question, really. It's like asking if someone with a pencil and a pad of paper is a journalist. A blog is just a publishing tool; journalism depends on what you do with it. Now, a California court is taking up the matter.

Via Lost Remote

Introduction to Digital TV Applications Programming
From the article:
Television viewers with Java-enabled digital television receivers will be able to receive and interact with Java TV applications while watching network programming. The tool for interacting with Java TV applications is the viewer's television remote.

Via sLop

OpenMHP - OpenMHP is a Free implementation of MHP classes.
An open source implementation of The Multimedia Home Platform, a standard in Europe (?) for set top boxes and interactive media is now available..

Via sLop

It may look like "a dog's breakfast," but this Wi-Fi detector ring is out of sight. When it detects a 2.4GHz signal, it flashes—even if it's not a proper Wi-Fi signal. With a little bit of help from a manufacturing company, though, I'm sure they could figure out how to filter the signal from the noise. I don't wear rings anymore, but this would give me a reason to.

Protoype Page [Moon-Beam]

Via Gizmodo

The Software Freedom Law Center will provide "legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software." (Here are more details from today's Mercury News.)

We need something like this for grassroots journalism.

Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

: Google netted a profit of $204 million ($0.71 per share) in 4Q04 on gross revenues of $1.032 billion during 4Q04; the gross take was up 101 percent year over year and 28 percent over the previous quarter. Operating income was $303 million (29.4 percent of revenues) compared to $86 million (16.9 percent) the previous year. For the year, Google reported a profit of $399 million (up 278 percent of 2003), adjusted to $406 million, on revenues of $3.189 billion (up 118 percent). Some other quick observations:

-- Google spent $378 million on traffic acquisition costs. Translated: that's the amount Google shared with Google Network partners in 4Q04. That 77 percent of the $490 million generated by the Google Network through AdSense. Total revenues are up 92 percent over 4Q03.
-- The Google Network accounted for 48 percent of total revenues.
-- Google-owned sites generated $530 million (51 percent)of total revenues, an increase of 118% over 4Q03.
Update: More coverage: The Street | MSNBC (AP) | Bloomberg | MarketWatch

Via PaidContent.org

UPDATED

Ad Age (reg req): Sony Pays $25,000 a Month for Gawker Blog. Sony Consumer Electronics e-Solutions Group is the exclusive sponsor for the launch of LifeHacker, a blog that goes live today about the software of personal gadgetry by Gawker Media, according to the online company. The deal, which also includes placements on Gizmodo, Gawker's earlier gadget title, will cost Sony in the range of $25,000 a month, according to a source close to the deal. The sponsorship runs for about three months.

Well, there go the pay scales at Nick Denton's company...

the sole-sponsor ad model, but it's obviously going to be a wave of the future in personal journalism.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, a big-time blogger is taking a break. Andrew Sullivan announces he's going on hiatus.

Ebb, flow. Just like the real world.

(Sony item via Alan Mutter)

Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

More on documentary clearances, copyright, and Eyes On The Prize. Some interesting developments in Downhill Battle's EYES ON THE PRIZE action. [Signal-to-Noise]

RadioScape, a software-defined radio developer, and partner Texas Instruments said they will deliver a multiformat radio receiver capable of receiving different digital along with AM and FM signals.

Slashdot links to Internal documents from Sharman Networks (the makers of Kazaa), revealed during court proceedings. They seem to have been aware that bundling spyware could cause Kazaa's popularity to plunge (which it did): "if consumers can connect to FT (as well as Gnutella 2, eDonkey and Bittorrent) and it has no ads or adware then it would seem a good choice."

The documents even show how even Sharman employees hated installing the Kazaa media desktop because the included spyware "slows your machine down and can hijack your web browser." However money talked, and logic walked. Kazaa is now seen largely as a joke among p2p users, who have largely migrated to other applications.

Via Broadbandreports

Lindows founder and ex-MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson is set to announce yet another online music store, with a twist: no Digital Rights Management.

The US Congress Joint Committee on Taxation has suggested that the existing 3% telecommunications tax could be extended to all forms of modern communications, including broadband, mobile phones and voice over IP, reports Computer Weekly.

"The Bush administration is considering ways to raise taxation to pay for the war, and the congressional committee says extending the 3% tax from traditional phone services to newer voice and data technologies should be considered."

Via textually.org

BusinessWeek Online features a commentary this week by Catherine Yang about the future of the FCC after Chairman Michael Powell's departure next month. Yet again, I'm surprised to find a piece that mentions Powell leaving, commissioner Kevin Martin possibly taking the top slot, but failing to mention the expected loss of commissioner Kathleen Abernathy later on this year. It's no small potatoes that two of the four individuals leading the FCC are on the way out at a time when issues such as media consolidation, VoIP, and other Internet-related topics are on the front burner. There might not be as much press related to the replacements for these positions, but be assured that the impact may be close to the importance, at least for the 4-8 year timeframe, as whoever is chosen as the new Supreme Court Justices.

Via The Media Drop

The project aims to develop an intelligent playlist for the KDE media player Noatun. Intelligent in the sense that songs are selected from a (possibly large) repository of audio files in a smart manner. Think of it as your personal radio station that plays your favourite songs all day long.

Skype has finally released the full versions of Skype for Mac OS X and Skype for Linux software which means now the software won’t crash in the middle of a conversation. Download away folks!

Via Om Malik on Broadband

I sat in a conference room at Universal Music Group a few months ago with some very high ranking officials and was surprised to hear one marketing executive tell me that music videos were, "valuable content" and, "UMG should be compensated when a network or show airs them." I asked her the obvious question, aren't they really just long promos created to sell albums? "Yes, she answered, but we ain't in the album business no more."

So, today's twin big music company announcements follow the sentiment expressed by this particular music executive. Universal Music will start charging online, satellite and cable companies for each music video streamed over VOD (video on demand) services. The change in policy will effect companies like AOL, Yahoo! and Viacom's MTV.

Verizon and Warner music have teamed up with another "charge for music" video play. Hoping that the 3G (third generation) cell phone gets a toe hold. (LG VX8000, UTStarcom CDM8940, etc.) they are going to start offering downloadable music videos for your cell phone. Verizon's V Cast is already $15 per month, but you'll pay an additional $3.99 for each music video you download to your phone.

OK, here are the big questions: 1) Are music videos content or just long commercials for music-based entertainment products? 2) If I skip commercials by a) walking out of the room, b) changing the channel and c) fast-forwarding my PVR (personal video recorder), why will I pay $3.99 to watch them at some reduced frame rate with reduced audio quality on a postage stamp-sized screen? 3) If I really want them, why won't I just download them for free to my WM9 compatible smart phone? 4) Just how many people have that kind of money? I will pay $.99 for the whole song on iTunes, $2.49 for the 10 second ring tone, $2.99 for the 30 second ringback and now, $3.99 for the low resolution/low quality video in an emotionally unsatisfying form factor? That's $10.46 invested in one song.

We are going to learn a great deal about what consumers will and won't do here. This is not a technology play. It is not like mobisodes of hit television content that are emergent and plot specific. It is not about news that is emergent and relied upon. The music business is obviously desperate to reinvent itself and, knowing the players that I do in the business, I find it absolutely amazing that this kind of future-thinking "content" play could get done at all. But, they should have done their advanced media homework. Remember a few years ago when record companies made you buy 12 songs for $17.49 even though you only wanted on song off of the CD? Consumers just found a way to get what they wanted and it took a computer industry executive to "get the online music business right." Wow! This feels like an old mistake. Remember, just because you can, doesn't mean you should!

International Herald Tribune: Media consumers will increasingly get their news from blogs and seek their entertainment online, says new media pathfinder John Battelle. "Now any individual can become a film studio or a publishing company."

From his perch on the "Left Coast of America," in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, Battelle feels the media industry is at a "chasm-crossing moment." The era when big media companies delivered news, information or entertainment to consumers via mass-market television or printed publications, financed by the sale of advertising, is rapidly drawing to a close, he says. . Media consumers will increasingly seek out the democracy of the Internet, getting their news from blogs instead of print on paper, and seek their entertainment from a limitless supply of quirky online content, he says. . And if they do choose to watch television, they will skip the ads, using personal video recorders. Battelle would benefit if that prediction came true. A founding editor of Wired magazine, which he has since left, Battelle wears several hats. He runs several Web sites, including a blog, and he plans to start a business that will sell advertising for other blogs. By pooling ad sales, he says, blogs could protect editorial independence but benefit from the ability to aim specific spots at target audiences. "Big media's revenue premise is based on the delivery of advertising on a platform that's no longer necessary," he said. "Now any individual can become a film studio or a publishing company."

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Via New Media Musings

InternetNews.com: Is journalism something Craigslist might pursue?

Craig's List CEO Craig Newmark: We may do something along the lines of citizen journalism. We don't know what that will be yet.

Steve Rubel: Here's one idea, Craig. Free for the taking!

(Via JD)

Via Micro Persuasion

A resource blog for writers and journalists

Fantastic collection of websites for those thinking of starting a community radio station

Verizon's "BroadbandAccess" EVDO ( Evolution-Data Optimized) wireless broadband service has been popping up in major cities, and Verizon today launched a new content service for those customers. Dubbed "VCAST", the $15 a month product offers a number of video clips, games, music and assorted content (see the flurry of press releases) to customers of the 300-500kbps service. "It's not choppy," insists a mid-west Verizon product manager to the Chicago Sun Times.

Via Broadbandreports

HP Propose Alternative to Transistors Challenging a basic tenet of the semiconductor industry, researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. have demonstrated a technology that could replace the transistor as the fundamental building block of all computers.

Via Broadcasting

Cory Doctorow: If you're in Toronto on Feb 11, you shoudl really check out this copyright and technology conference at the University of Toronto -- it looks wonderful.

The student-run Technology and Intellectual Property Group of the University of Toronto will present a one-day academic conference called "Sound Bytes/Sound Rights: Canada at the Crossroads of Copyright Law." In 2004, the Standing Committee for Canadian Heritage issued recommendations for changes to the Copyright Act broadening copyright protections. In the same year, the Canadian courts headed in the opposite direction by handing down important judgments recognizing user rights. The conference will be a forum for law students and academics as well as practicing lawyers, policy makers and those in the music industry to hear about and discuss the emerging legal framework for copyright law in Canada with a particular emphasis on music and entertainment law.

Speakers will include musicians Paul Hoffert and Neil Leyton, Michael Geist (Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and author of the "Law Bytes" column in the Toronto Star), Bob Young (co-founder of Red Hat Software), Sarmite Bulte, MP (the chair of the 2004 standing committee), lawyers Ron Dimock and Barry Sookman, Casey Chisick (professor of intellectual property law at the University of Toronto), and Graham Henderson (president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association). Also speaking will be William W. Fisher III, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and author of the new and important book "Promises to Keep: Law, Technology and the Future of Entertainment".

The conference will be held in Flavelle House, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, 78 Queen's Park, Toronto, on Friday, February 11, 2005 from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm. Lunch will be provided and a wine reception is planned. Admission is $30.00 for pre-registration, $40.00 at the door. Admission is free for college and university students but registration beforehand is essential.

Ted!)

Via Boing Boing

TiVo President Marty Yudkovitz announced his resignation today, less than a month after Michael Ramsay stepped down as CEO. What does this mean for TiVo? Yudkovitz came on board in 2003 to help "build closer ties with major TV players." TiVo's schizophrenic role of trying to put people in control of TV while appeasing the TV networks has been criticized for not focusing on the features customers want, this may signal a turn-around for the company.

Thomas Hawk posts that the two recent departures don't bode well for the company as a whole:

To have a second high level executive, fresh after Ramsay's announced departure, leave the company as the stock has been under such pressure may be seen by some as further evidence of the rats jumping ship. On the other hand it certainly is possible that both Ramsay and Yuddovitz are being forced out by a Board that may be increasingly disappointed in company management -- particularly in light of the recent stock performance.

Yudkovitz was previously reported as saying "I have at least a dozen No. 1 priorities. But there is no priority more important than (landing a cable TV deal)," per TV Predictions. Most recently the New York Times reported on January 17th that while a deal had been in the works with cable giant Comcast it had ended when TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay decided to pull out of the deal. "Comcast was not going to pay TiVo enough money or give it enough control over its service, Mr. Ramsay told the company's board, according to people involved in those discussions."

Via PVRblog

Requires a key, so it's sort of like HYMN. Google for DrmDbg.exe and DRM2WMV to get the software

Microsoft offically joins the search age with the full-fledged launch of MSN Search. We knows it's official because it comes with a letter from Bill Gates, who explains the MSN front-page re-do is to make it "faster, simpler, and more organized" and the new search tool was refined with "input from millions of our customers - including me."

Gates hasn't been shy about admitting Microsoft's previous failure to grasp the importance of search. He was at it again in Davos. From Dow Jones (via John Battelle and the Seattle P-I: Asked if Microsoft had missed the boat on search, Gates noted that Microsoft had previously relied on a Yahoo. "It's certainly our fault that we didn't recognize that that reliance was not going to get us a state of the art experience." How did that happen, given Microsoft's big research budget? "We were stupid as hell," Gates said, prompting a round of laughter from the audience.

Microsoft will spend some serious money promoting MSN Search , with an exec telling the NY Times (reg.req) it will be less than the $300 million spent on the 2003 MSN campaign. My question: How much will be spent online?

MSN exec Christopher Payne told the Seattle Times: "Moving this category from links to answers is the thing we are going to be laser-focused on." One example: Encarta's entire library, sub-only until now with limited info for non-subs -- is now wide open.

Via PaidContent.org

A fanlisting is a place for all fans of a particular show, movie, actor, actress, singer, etc. to come together and build the biggest listing of people from all around the world who are fans of that subject.

The first question I had for Howard Look at TiVo when I heard about the new HME launch today was "is there some sort of gallery/forum that I can go to find the best apps or share apps I build?" His answer was basically no, but they were hopeful that someone could put something together. I pinged a few friends and eventually George Hotelling, who has been posting here, put something together.

I give you: http://hme.pvrblog.com/

Our goals were to get a place where we could have a categorical list of applications, a way to rate those apps, the ability to add screenshots, and a forum area to discuss each app and topics in general. I encourage any new HME app developers that want others using, rating, and commenting on your work to get the word out by uploading them to our new site.

Via PVRblog

Something dawned on me while reading that Gawker has launched a couple more weblogs including LifeHacker. It looked pretty interesting, so I signed up. In doing so, however, I started questioning the business model of these sorts of blogs. What happens when all the niches have been filled? And what happens when we're all using our aggregators for most of our online reading?

Then I started to think about the coming advertisements we're going to see in RSS feeds. There's already some sites out there doing it, and I assume it'll become more common soon. I started realizing some of the effort I put into some posts lately to drive traffic, but how for the most part I still use this blog for personal rants, etc.

What's happening is that online content is becoming a series of single serving content bits, sent around and filtered in a variety of ways. It's the same way that online music stores like iTunes have pushed singles back to the forefront again. Remember when you used to buy singles on records, and then it became a waste and you just bought the whole album? But now kids just buy the one song they like and don't waste money on the rest. Those that really like the song will explore the rest of that artists catalog, but for the majority, the one song is fine.

Amen, brother Bob! We need enlightened regulators to ease the transition from the spectrum scare world to the spectrum rich world.

From SATN.org: Comments from Bob Frankston, David Reed, Dan Bricklin, and others.:

QUOTE

SFS and SHS seemed wonderful in their time just as leeches seemed essential to 18th century medicine. We pay a high price for SFS and SHS in a technical policy that protects them from newer technologies that can do far better. They aren't just inefficient but toxic - we have to create a dead zone around SFS/SHS to avoid "interference". The bureaucracy created to police the ownership of radios goes further and regulates speech, not just technology.

In the United States we require extraordinary justification for restrictions on speech. Coddling obsolescent technology doesn't meet this test. Ignorance of the laws of physics is hardly a justification for such blatant disregard for the Constitution.

The restrictions on innovation required to protect SFS and SHS come at a great price both in restrictions on speech and prohibitions on innovations that drive the economy of the US and the world.

UNQUOTE

Via North American Bandwidth News

New Jersey's courts, for at least three decades, have been among the most forward-looking in the nation.

Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen Litigation Group today reports on yet another good decision coming from the New Jersey court system:

I want to call your attention to today's excellent decision of the New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division in Donato v. Moldow, upholding a citizen's right to host a forum for discussion of local affairs without being held liable for offensive postings made by visitors to the web site. available online here (PDF).

This is the case involving the "Eye on Emerson" web site, created by a resident of Emerson, New Jersey to discuss local affairs in the Borough of Emerson. Several public officials sued over allegedly defamatory and certainly offensive comments posted on a bulletin board that was part of the web site. The officials sued both the anonymous posters and Moldow, the creator of the web site. After failing to obtain enforcement of a subpoena to identify the posters, because the plaintiffs refused to submit evidence to support their claims, they dismissed those claims and concentrated their efforts solely on the web site host, whom they held responsible on the ground that he had facilitated the offensive comments by creating the discussion site, and had failed to comply with plaintiffs' demands that he take down every post to which they objected, or require posters to identify themselves.

In the decision released today, the Appellate Division agreed with the vast majority of courts that have addressed this question, holding that the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. section 230 protects all persons who host discussion forums, whether or not they are Internet Service Providers like AOL. The court also refused to treat the Good Samaritan provision of section 230, which precludes liability for good faith efforts to remove offensive material, as modifying the CDA's basic grant of immunity. Thus, allegations that Moldow was hostile to plaintiffs, that we was happy that plaintiffs were attacked on the bulletin board, or that he made negative some postings more readable by toning them down or that he removed praise but not criticism, all failed to undermine the claim of immunity.

Via New Media Musings

"Alright, I know more then the average person when it comes to audio and video decoding. That's a problem! The average person on the web searches there favorite search engine for “codec” and will mainly get a bunch of crappy sites offering pirated and hacked codec downloads. These Codec Packs, as some refer to them, are hell on your PC. They will install a number of codec's that you don't need or want. However, many people think it's the more the merrier type of thing here. The truth is far from this! Taking MCE PC's for example, the MPEG-2/DVD decoder is a rather large part of it working or not. Most “Codec Packs” include at least one (and it some cases up to 4) MPEG-2 decoders. Okay, that is a huge problem for anyone running Media Center. You now have a number of codec's that are basically wanting to decode the video, and only one can win for it to take place."

Via Digital Media Thoughts

Andrej Preston, from Swarm Systems Inc, took some time out to answer some of our questions about Exeem. Here is the brief interview (our questions are in bold):

1. Why build Exeem?
We made eXeem, because we felt that there was time for a new kind of P2P networks.

2. What were the reasons behind adding comments and ratings to the Exeem network?
They were implented, to try to avoid the fakes and viruses that were flooding other networks. Although they are not 100% correct, they are in most cases.

3. What do you see as important, future features you would like to add after beta?
There are many functions that we are still working on, which are all very important to us.

4. Users are reporting some issues with the types of software bundled with Exeem. They even use the word Spyware. Are you afraid these bundles might affect growth? Any changes planned?
We have heard alot of critics because of the adware inside eXeem. Those thinking that eXeem has spyware inside are wrong. eXeem does not contain any spyware, all the ads inside are adware. Mostly adware inside is going to be opt-out. And currently we are going to be testing http based ads, similar to those that the websites have. We do not yet know, what kind of ads we will include in final. We will see how this test goes.

5. How do you think peer to peer applications will change over the next few years?
I personally think, that they are going to become faster and more reliable. We shall see ;)

Thanks Andrej. Best of luck.

(The Peer-toPeer Weblog has been a great source for all things eXeem lately. -kc.)

Some articles looking at the future of media, and some skeptics:
-- In search of more: Some future scenarios: "January 2010. 10 years after America Online bought Time Warner, Google acquires Walt Disney. The mania for internet distribution again has the upper hand over entertainment content."
-- A nice and rambling post...
-- Hey, what about the consumer?: When company innovation is driven by the desire to keep up with rivals (and investors' high expectations) rather than what consumers need and demand, it's an invitation to trouble.

Headline says it all.

Worth reading to understand some of the things that will matter to HD folks over the next few years, including HD broadast and high definition DVDs using H.264. A bit of a rah-rah piece for Apple, but still good stuff to be aware of. Not that it's all going to go the way they're calling it, but to see the potential. -mike

The movie industry is on the verge of a major technological transition -- one that seems likely to be a jump cut, rather than a slow fade. Inexpensive digital video cameras, editing, and effects software that runs on a laptop, and a new set of Internet- and DVD-based distribution mechanisms are cracking open the clubby Hollywood scene. At Sundance this year, 6,500 features, shorts, and documentaries were submitted to the festival organizers for consideration -- up from 5,874 last year. Of the 202 films that were picked to be shown at the festival this year, an astounding 51 were from first-time filmmakers.

(Also check out Cinema Minima's coverage of Sundance.)