March 30, 2005

New open access govt information journal

Here's a new open access journal to keep track of. The inaugural issue includes articles about the UK freedom of information act (which amazingly didn't come into force until January, 2005!), and a conference report on the 3rd intl conference of information commissioners. One of the exciting things to come out of that conference was the "Declaration of Cancún
Transparency and Accountability: A Commitment to Democracy" signed by a long list of NGOs. The PDF of the declaration is linked from another organization to track called Statewatch.

Via Library Autonomous Zone

Posted by yatta at 02:09 AM | Comments (0)
Picotux Linux-Based RJ45-Sized Computer

kleinhenz_picotux_1_.jpg

Kleinhenz, a German electronics company, is shipping their new network-enabled Linux system in a unit just about the size of a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack. The "Picotux,"barely big enough to print its MAC address on, is based on the NetSilicon DigiConnect ME, a fully functional Linux-based OS, with up to 8 MB of Flash memory and blinking LEDs to tell you what's going on in there. It requires 3.3V of DC power but also includes a serial port and a processor up to 55MHz. It's available in Wireless flavor as well, with the wired version costing about $130. A similar, Ethernet-sized web server has existed for some time, but this is likely the first running a Linux kernel on it. It's available today, if you speak German. (Their product page doesn't have any ordering information.)

Linux on an Ethernet Connector [LinuxDevices]
Product Page [Kleinhenz]

Via Gizmodo

Posted by yatta at 02:05 AM | Comments (0)
MicroEmissive Displays outfit sunglasses with TVs
MicroEmissive Displays

Engineers at Scottish electronics firm MicroEmissive Displays have developed a television screen less than half the size of a postage stamp that can be fitted inside a pair of sunglasses — or regular glasses for that matter. We’re not sure if they actually have a prototype of the TV shades or not, but the actual display looks something like this one at the right (one thing we know: those definitely ain’t Carreras). And, before you ask, they don’t expect you to plug a cable into them.They’re hoping the wearable displays will be a better solution for watching streaming TV broadcasts on your cellphone.

[Via textually.org]

Via Engadget

Posted by yatta at 02:04 AM | Comments (0)
Video On Demand for PSP

Gamespot has more noise on the expanding role the Playstation Portable may have in the future. According to the article, when the PSP is released in South Korea in May, it will include a new piece of bundled software called the Network Utility UMD. With that running, users of the PSP will be able to:

Other networked services scheduled for PSP consumers in Korea include on-demand streaming music, on-demand streaming videos (including TV shows), e-learning options, and electronic books. SCEK and KT expect that they will be the first companies to provide a full online experience for the PSP user in any market.
It's unclear from the article whether this service just streams content wirelessly for real-time viewing or if you'll be able to save the result on a Memory Stick Duo card for later viewing. Assuming that you can save the results to the Duo card, this could be a great way to grab a few videos before hopping on a plane.

From my point of view, this seems like a better approach for video distribution than buying UMD discs of movies. I can't really see the financial justification of buying a PSP UMD movie for the same price as a DVD, but only be able to watch it on a small PSP screen. On the other hand, having the ability to download a video for a reasonable fee of $5 to watch while travelling makes a great deal of sense.

Since VOD service provider MovieLink already has licensed content from Sony Pictures, it's not a stretch to think that a service like Movielink would extend their service into the PSP. It's even less of a stretch to think that since Sony is already dipping its corporate toe into downloadable movies, it might try the same approach for the PSP.

.

Via TVHarmony

Posted by yatta at 01:58 AM | Comments (0)
The Broadcasters and Their Billions
  • Drew Clark (National Journal): Spectrum Wars. Generations ago, broadcasters got the right to use the airwaves -- now worth billions of dollars -- for free. Ever since, they have used heavy lobbying and political friendships to stave off rivals. But as the digital age unfolds, change is in the air.
  • Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

    Posted by yatta at 01:55 AM | Comments (0)
    Orb Media Goes Ad-Supported; Signing Up Content Providers
    : orbLogo_02.jpg Orb Networks, a digital media service which runs on portable devices, has gone the ad-supported route, doing away with its premium susbcription service. Orb's service promises access to media files on your home PC from any Internet-enabled device with broadband access.

    The service was costing $9.99 per month..But now, Orb said it will turn to strategic partnerships with content providers and consumer electronic companies to make its money.

    Executives said the revenue will come through co-marketing relationships and transactions for music, video, audio and other services. The company said it is close to bringing about 18 different service and content providers under its wing with some 45 active conversations going on with some of the largest national ISPs, movie and recording studios and international media corporations. Some more details in the release
    Posted by yatta at 01:47 AM | Comments (0)
    MSNBC Deploys Citizen Journalists in Quake's Wake

    Msnbcquake

    MSNBC.com has launched a special earthquake eyewitness weblog written by readers that bolsters its coverage of the massive quake that struck Indonesia today with on-the-ground reports. They also have an entire section of their site for citizen journalism.

    Posted by yatta at 01:45 AM | Comments (0)
    The Podcast Hotel

    The Podcast Hotel, explains Corante's Alex Williams, will turn a hotel in Portland, Oregon, into a podcast and videoblog studio. It's a place where people come to learn and share how these content creation tools can be used in any way they want, be it for their personal use, their business or their community.

    Guests at the Podcast Hotel will create podcasts and videoblogs.

    They'll spread out into the city of Portland. I look forward to riding bikes with video cameras attached to our helmets. We're planning a podcast music jam. We're thinking about a fashion show for independent designers where the models are the podcasters and videobloggers.



    Experts will be there to share and show how the tools can be used. Newbies will be coached and get the chance to learn how to produce sharp, authentic works. There will be "how to," discussions, "think tank," talks and demonstrations.

    cast Hotel will actively involve the city of Portland and will seek people from other cities to participate, too. It happens July 15-17, 2005, in Portland, Oregon. Alex Williams should have more, shortly.

    Via Daily Wireless

    Posted by yatta at 01:42 AM | Comments (0)
    'TV is begging to be reinvented'
    Wired's Chris Anderson explains why TV is the first place to look for "Long Tail" opportunities (if you need a refresher on the Long Tail, read this.) "The ratio of produced content to available content is the highest of any industry I've looked at," Anderson says. "Only television treats its premium content as disposable." So true. Anderson concludes, "TV is begging to be reinvented."

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 01:40 AM | Comments (0)
    The camera that doesn't take pictures

    Alain Bublex' Awareness Box is a camera that does not record images, focussing exclusively on the act of taking pictures. It is an object made to heighten one awareness and attention, a new type of electronic product -developed in collaboration with Siemens- that helps one observe better. ... The Awareness Box allows you to capture an image once in presence of the subject, but without recording it, as each image taken erases the precedent one.

    siem002.jpg

    Via Pasta & Vinegar.

    Via Eyebeam reBlog

    Posted by yatta at 01:39 AM | Comments (0)
    Ubuweb audio and video archives
    At Ubuweb you can find audio and video archives of radio, films, sounds, visual and concrete poetry, literature and other, related subjects. One of the new features, Film, has some surrealistic silent movies from Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and the photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and 37 Short Fluxus Films. Many more good things: read from Eugène Ionesco works, listen to Antonin Artaud declaiming poetry, interviews with Jean-Luc Godard, Marshall McLuhan, and Alberto Giacometti. [Bibi's box]

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 01:38 AM | Comments (0)
    Game Gardens

    gameGardens.jpg
    From the folks who brought you that adorable mmog Puzzle Pirates, Three Rings have created Game Gardens: a place of 'experimental online game development.' So if you know how to program in Java, you can use their tool kit to create you own games and upload them to the site for others to play. They also provide a forum in which to ask questions and share ideas. So if you've ever been curious about what it's like to make a multiplayer game, here's your chance.

    Via Clippings.reblog

    Posted by yatta at 01:37 AM | Comments (0)
    Alternative Music Compensation: The Big Mac Plan

    McDonald's has come up with an interesting alternative music compensation scheme, apparently. According to the New York Daily News, McDonald's will be offering rappers $1-$5 every time a song praising Big Macs is played on the radio (McHip-hop name-drop).

    Via Copyfight

    Posted by yatta at 01:36 AM | Comments (0)
    Why Microsoft Won't Fight the Broadcast Flag

    According to this refreshingly forthright Seattle Times article, it's because Microsoft knows that the FCC is going to start regulating everything its mission touches, so it had better start playing nice:


    Fights over copyrights provide an interesting example of Microsoft's current DC presence and how it switches priorities and sides. ...Only a few years ago, Microsoft opposed the flag, because such an approach attempts to tell software designers what to include and sets limits on the Internet.

    t cannot afford to tick off its fledgling friends from Hollywood, the movie moguls it will need to provide content as it ventures into new video technology.

    And of course there are similar reasons why it's Mark Cuban and not Bill Gates who can "afford" to fight for innovation in Grokster -- despite the fact that not so long ago, Gates was the young entrepreneur on the outside looking in.

    Update: Ernie Miller weighs in with Microsoft Cozying Up to Washington Regulators.

    Via Copyfight

    Posted by yatta at 01:36 AM | Comments (0)
    Toshiba's 'NanoBattery' Recharges In Only One Minute
    Toshiba Corporation today announced a breakthrough in lithium-ion batteries that makes long recharge times a thing of the past. The company's new battery can recharge 80% of a battery's energy capacity in only one minute, approximately 60 times faster than the typical lithium-ion batteries in wide use today, and combines this fast recharge time with performance-boosting improvements in energy density.
    Posted by yatta at 01:35 AM | Comments (0)
    Tag ontology RFC
    An early draft of an RDF ontology for tagging systems.
    Posted by yatta at 01:34 AM | Comments (0)
    Weed grows at the edge | noirExtreme
    "This perspective on things made me realise that what is coming up here is the potential development of new user behaviour where ad-hoc peer to peer connections or even mesh networks are estalished beyond the edge of the traditional network for sharing specific information or content and then are dissolved as quickly as they were formed."
    Posted by yatta at 01:33 AM | Comments (0)
    Using Skype as a Community Media Production Tool
    "Skype was created as a no-cost long-distance phone service. It does that very well. What it also allows you to do, if you're just a little technically-minded and have a homebrew gene or two, is to record your Skype phone conversation, with the other person's permission, to an audio file on a second computer. Once you've recorded the audio, you can edit out the uhms, ahs and pauses, compress the audio and then place it on the web for public consumption."
    Posted by yatta at 01:33 AM | Comments (0)

    March 28, 2005

    Unmediated Sanyo Xacti C5 Review

    Kenyatta just got his hands on a Sanyo Xacti C5 and I've been non-stop bugging him for feedback. The Xacti is a hard-drive based camcorder that's being used by some in the videoblogging community. I was literally about to order one on eBay, but Kenyatta told me to hold off- giving the camcorder a 3/5 (5/5 = best). So here's our conversation and Kenyatta's review of the C5.


    Transcript of AIM IM with Kenyatta (KC) and Eli (EC)
    9:55 PM 03/28/05

    KC: here's the skinny on the xacti: good size, nice lcd... mpeg4 compression was adequate in fast moving shots with lots of color... the different quality levels were nice... extremely poor low light performance...

    EC: hmm

    KC: poor ergonomics... too top heavy and one thumb operation was actually a hinderance with such a small camera...

    EC: yeah. little camera syndrome.

    KC: anytime you went to zoom it shook the shot...

    EC: built in mic audio decent?

    KC: no manual controls whatsoever. NO gain control (!)... zoom slow but adequate.

    EC: no shutter speed?

    KC: mic was actually decent... shutter speed control but buried behind at least five menu movements clicks to change it. (Too many to be handy.)

    EC: yikes. so it's great for daylight, hanging with friends in bright areas.... bad for concerts, bars, and all the fun stuff...

    KC: yep... i tried the mic out at the corner of atlantic and 4th ave in bklyn at rush hour... did a decent job of picking me up.

    EC: nice! pointing camera at yourself? or from behind

    KC: at self and away.

    EC: great

    KC: mic is on backside of lcd

    EC: yikes

    KC: yeah, so if you're shooting yourself.... well, it does pick you up well under low pressure (sound) conditions, but a little harder when having a conversation with someone walking down bway in soho

    EC: hmm

    KC: mpeg4s were easy to transfer. quicktime player had a problem with the mp3 mp4 audio if you tried cutting copying and pasting. (It likes cut and paste.)

    EC: huh... how's file size?

    KC: you had to save it as a mov file to work... file size is decent. the image quality makes sense for the file sizes.

    EC: that's good... you try editing? splice splice splice

    KC: about 5MB per min. spliced the vid. didn't try it with imovie or fcp yet.

    EC: cool

    KC: i have lots of sample video to post as well... hang on. let me check notes for other stuff...

    EC: to be honest, it should be great for peru... it's a travel camera.. outdoors, pretty pix..

    KC: agreed. and with an hour of 640x480 on a 1GB SD card, it'll be a welcome relief from a PDX10 and pounds of DV tape... did i mention the weird weight balance?

    EC: yes... but give me an example... like when you're adjusting zoom, tpaping through menus...

    KC: it's too top heavy, causing my wrist to wobble a lot more (when zooming) than if it were evenly weighted (or bottom biased)

    EC: try shooting upside down

    KC: i did!

    EC: ha!

    KC: and it was a steadier shot

    EC: can the people who design cameras please come see us- paging sanyo product marketing and development!

    KC: and it was probably just for the reason you mentioned - when your thumb is applying so much pressure to the top half of the camera, you have to overcompensate by pulling back with your index finger, more or less.

    EC: is there a tripod screw?

    KC: there is.

    EC: you could add weight

    KC: sure. good idea. first thing i'm buying, though, is a mini tripod... that's the other criticism of the industrial design... because they made it so thin, you can't sit it on a table on it's own.

    EC: lame!

    KC: i mean, none of it's competitors do it either (the sony M1, Panasonic AV100, etc) but if it included a small "travel base" besides or instead of the large round platter that ships with it, it would come in very handy.

    EC: bubble gum works

    KC: so many videobloggers use still cameras for shooting video...

    EC: yeah, good form factor... people are comfortable with them as 'still' cameras.. more social devices than futuristic super 8 cameras.

    KC: sure. problem is they do video poorly or don't handle well when shooting video (high compression AVI, can't zoom in while capturing video)... what bothers me about a lot of these small video-first solid state cameras is that they still seem like interesting gadgets first and video cameras second... it's like they're being marketed to the Sharper Image crowd (who look for cool toys) and not the user-generated content folks.

    EC: yeah, at least cameraphones are often good phones... and their cameras are getting better all the time...

    KC: you know, the ones apple, microsoft, and the like already have in their sights?

    EC: right.

    KC: speaking of which - have you looked at any of the reviews for these small solid state video cameras?
    they're almost exclusively by still digicam sites.

    EC: interesting

    KC: and they spend paragraphs talking about the still image performance, and then leave, like, maybe a graph or two to the video performance.

    EC: nice. gimme a link

    KC: i'm looking through steve's digicams and dcresource right now.

    EC: does the xacti remote do zoom? could be a workaround

    KC: yes it does... which is why i was going for the mini tripod first.

    EC: ahh... i'm looking through dpreview

    KC: http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_m1-review/ review of the sony M1... maybe i shouldn't expect digital still camera reviewers to scrutinize the video on these things, but the manufacturers have to start sending the video-first cams out to videobloggers to test.

    EC: we can be the source! let's do it.... hey, check http://www.dpreview.com/news/0501/05013101casioexp505.asp sounds hot

    KC: a resource is born.

    EC: casio. mpeg4. still

    KC: reading it now. interesting... oh yeah, about the build quality of the C5... looks and feels solid with a hard plastic shell and a nice metal band around the edge of the thing. good construction. but i fear for the life of the LCD screen. I've only had it four days and it already feels a little loose... and (here's the part that kills me) all menu navigation and option selection happens with two buttons: a menu button, and a five way "Set" joystick (five-way meaning: up, down, left, right, and push)

    EC: sheesh

    KC: i can tell you now that the set joystick is gonna take a beating. besides being near to impossible to find the sweet spot when pushing in the set button, after a weekend of use, it's already got a bit too much play in it.

    EC: wow... you're moving me from 3 out of 5 to 2/5

    KC: which means that it's already feeling unresponsive at times and frustrating to use... well, what keeps it at 3 is that there are a lot of things it gets right for videobloggers... the daylight performance is excellent, the built in mic is better than i expected, and the size is incredible.

    EC: and battery?

    KC: battery wasn't bad. i was able to fill the card shooting about 1hr of video over a 12 hour period, keeping it in standby mode in between takes.

    EC: nice

    KC: (card was a 1GB SD)

    EC: nice. ebay? cost?

    KC: (card didn't come standard.) bought the card at j&r. (gotta fill out that rebate form)... i paid $650 for it but i overpaid. you can get it from one of the HK ebayers for about $550+shipping... sanyo is selling a special edition blue one through the sharper image here in the US for $800.

    EC: ooooohhh.... ((((suckaBlue I think it's called))))

    KC: i wanted one that wouldn't look like a video camera, so i figured blue would work. and it did.

    EC: nice

    KC: everyone i showed it to didn't realize it was a camera until i told them. (after I shot a good amount of video first, of course)

    EC: heh

    EC: i think this is good.. i'll edit and post

    KC: cool. we should do all of our reviews this way.

    EC: i was thinking a conversation between us is more valuable than a straight write up, and easier

    KC: cool

    Here are some examples Kenyatta shot:
    xactiC5_lowlight.mov 10.3M
    xactiC5_mic_flatbush.mov 2.5M
    xactiC5_movement640.mov 5.7M
    xactiC5_mpg_flowers.mov 2.6M
    xactiC5_night.mov 4.9M

    Posted by Eli Chapman at 11:14 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
    Flocking; Interpersonal Wireless~Tactile Interface
    This class aims to give students an understanding of the various ways wireless can be used for inter-personal communication. Students will be asked to look at real world contexts in which wireless technology can allow a group (be they a couple, a sports team, a group of friends) to communicate more seamlessly, safely, subtly, or elegantly.


    (Taught by MagicBike creator Yury Gitman and Rocketboom's Andrew Baron. Cool. -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
    Technorati Developers Wiki - PodcastMetadata
    Podcast metadata is a standard for using XHTML tags to define machine-readable metadata about podcast shows for use by applications for searching and organizing podcasts.
    Posted by yatta at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
    Billionaire Mark Cuban underwrites Grokster in file-sharing case
    Mark Cuban explains why he will underwrite the defense of file-sharing in the upcoming showdown at the U. S. Supreme Court: … It doesn't matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry, every single time. It just matters that they can spend more then everyone else on lawyers. Thats not the way it should be. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. This isn't the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me, Mark Cuban, and my little content company. It's about our ability to use future innovations to compete, versus their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. It's that simple. [p2pnet.net]

    Supreme Showdown for P2P's Future. The entertainment industry goes head-to-head against file-sharing services at the Supreme Court this week. Some fear the Grokster case could have a devastating effect on development of new technologies. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
    Reed Hundt on the Dawn of Mass Internet

    From the Code Blog, tracking the wikification of Lessig’s Code: 2005-3-20-A Note From Reed Hundt

    I was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97) when the Internet was, in a mass user sense, invented (1993-95, in my view). This is to report that a tiny group of bureaucrats did indeed sit in a room, or actually more than one room on more than one occasion, and decide that it was our great opportunity and duty to make sure that the Internet would be as nearly free as we could make it, that the telephone lines would be used by Internet service provider for as close to no cost as we could manage, that as many service providers would be able to start providing Net access as we could conceivably foster, and that we would encourage this new medium, as McLuhan predicted, to swallow all previous media and use them as content. And from 1994 to 2000 that is pretty much what happened. There are myriad specific rules that assisted in these ends coming about, which is not to say that technology and history were irrelevant. Indeed they may have been more significant causes of the various resulting effects. But it would be wrong to impute to government a lack of thought or even, in this case, foresight.

    […] Even the most extreme libertarians ought to acknowledge the historical significance of the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, social security, and the atomic bomb – all world-changing events stemming from decisions by small groups in government made under conditions of limited knowledge and necessary compulsion to act. Similarly the Internet’s shape in its first decade stemmed in large part from an architecture of law designed to foster its disruptive impact and its rapid growth and its usage in particular by the young. It all could have been decided differently, as it was in most other countries and as it may well be decided differently in the broadband era. Because, you see, many of these rules have been changed in recent years, and whether all are reversed remains to be seen.

    Via Furdlog

    Posted by yatta at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
    Collective knowledge and The Neighborhood Project

    Interesting experiment in collective knowledge:

    The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users. Addresses and neighborhood data are translated into latitude and longitude values, and then drawn on the map. The address and neighborhood data are collected from housing posts on craigslist, and from people filling out the form below. The coordinates are generated using the free geocoder.us. The map is from the TIGER/Line US Census data. Our first city is San Francisco, but we will add more soon....

    The more people who add their opinion to the database, the more accurate the neighborhood boundaries become.


    Via CyberJournalist.net

    Posted by yatta at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
    Python script for uploading to Flickr
    "This is just a simple python script that looks in a directory, and will upload what ever is there to your flickr account. It keeps track of what it has uploaded, and that is about it for features. The code is available to do whatever you wish with it." Link (Thanks, CJM!)

    Update: Antrix sez, "Michele Campeotto has written the nice FlickrClient interface for those with more ambitious visions of mating Python and Flickr."

    Via Boing Boing

    Posted by yatta at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)
    The Public Library Service in 2015
    (through not sure who): A 15-page PDF (from UK's Laser Foundation) on the future of physical libraries and they should be adapting to the digital age.
    And the development of premium services will be a key to survival, as this paper enumerates. Among the questions to ask themselves: "How will public libraries meet the needs of the information ecologies of the future? Will we be working in a completely changed environment filled with blogs, wikis, amazoogles, podcasts, wifis, blackberries and mp3s? Will these technologies have become archaic hangovers supplanted by a novel fauna? Will the disruptions caused by chasing the next big technology paradigm cause the extinction of skills and values we wish to conserve?"

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 09:04 AM | Comments (0)
    eXeems.com The new generation of downloading
    "Vist the site that is going to make Exeem great,its like a new suprova for Exeem, Theres new links added all day,just click the link and it will automacticly start downloading"


    (Why is the domain exeems and not exeem? Who are these folks? -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 09:01 AM | Comments (2)

    March 27, 2005

    "Interactive Drama" in Matrix Online
    Gamespy reports that Warner Brothers has employed a full-time troupe of 20 actors who will interact live with players of Matrix Online. "These people will assume the roles of popular characters, interact with players, and generally move the stories in ways that only live "actors" can."

    Via Grand Text Auto

    Posted by yatta at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
    The Videogame Industry Union?

    Great article on Gamasutra about the prospects of unionizing game developers. Very interesting.

    Via game girl advance

    Posted by yatta at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
    The rise of camera phone snaps

    Antonio in Ion's Blog points to an impressive picture in El Mundo that demonstrates better than any discourse the growing trend to snap pictures with a camera phone instead of a traditional camera at major events. Here during a procession in Sevilla (Spain)

    Posted by yatta at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)
    Go to the cinema and star in the film you're about to see

    During the Expo 2005, spectator queueing to see a movie at Toshiba’s digital cinema are submitted to a futurecast, they place their faces into a hole in the wall for a few seconds. High-resolution digital cameras perform a quick scan from several angles, and everyone takes their seats.

    The animated film, Grand Odyssey, begins as normal but the entire cast is made up of walking, talking digital replicas of people in the audience.

    i_gofc_04[1].jpg

    Each speactator gets a role — there are soldiers, doctors, scientists and politicians involved in the story — as a Toshiba supercomputer is processing the one-time-only film.

    Elsewhere, Hitachi is inviting visitors to a virtual reality safari where they get handsets that contain a prototype of the mu-chip, a processor which, when brought close to particular transmitters, downloads any information on offer in that area and displays it on a small screen.

    The safari ride employs a 3D projection system designed to work with a set of sensors strapped to the hands. In the virtual reality world, solid-seeming objects can be plucked from mid-air and examined more closely in the hands.

    Elsewhere, NTT DoCoMo shows its object-recognition binoculars which recognise certain objects and displays details about them in the eyepiece.

    Fix on a passing plane and the device will tell you the flight number and destination. Turn your attention to a flower, and it will tell you what variety it is.

    DoCoMo hopes to use the technology in camera-equipped handsets. With particular databases of information installed, the phones could be pointed at objects of interest and used to collect information. Waved past an item in a shop, for example, it might inform users where the same thing could be bought more cheaply.

    Via The Times.

    Via we make money not art

    Posted by yatta at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
    Share those tunes..

    SourceForge.net: Project Info - getTunes
    This is great.. It is a pain to get music off of my media machine on to my laptop this should help. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to recognize my wireless connection.
    From the site:
    getTunes is a Mac version of myTunes, a small application that allows users to download music from local Rendezvous-shared iTunes music libraries (instead of streaming the songs). Don't steal music.

    Via sLop

    Posted by yatta at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
    VIDEO: 1 of 7 for VideoBlogWeek 2005

    Peterfinger

    It's VideoBlogWeek 2005!!!
    This week we are all posting a video a day.
    This is post #1.
    Thanks to Adam for the call to arms.

    It's an attempt to create a conversation and get the juices flowing.
    A loose collaborative process.
    We can make videos often if you just make the process a part of your life.
    And make videos for each other.
    No need to impress invisible TV executives.
    You can see the first VideoBlogWeek2004.

    Anyone can join in.
    Just post a video...and tag it HERE.

    Via Momentshowing

    Posted by yatta at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
    The future of the 30-second spot
    The NY Times has a great overview of many of the new approaches to make TV advertising more relevant and less susceptible to commercial skipping.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
    Alcatel: AmigoTV [pdf]
    The three main features of AmigoTV are presence, voice communications, and rich multimedia messaging on TV.
    Posted by yatta at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
    Videoblogger World Map
    "Seeing that this is an early, early test of the videoblog world map, I ask that you please fill out the form below carefully. This is imperative as the xml file has to be edited by hand while I make edit/delete functionality."
    Posted by yatta at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
    The Free Bandwidth Project
    We provide free bandwidth for your video, podcast, software download, or any other file you want to post--no Creative Commons license required.
    Posted by yatta at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
    PSP Web Browser with Wipeout Pure

    psp_giz.jpgJust a quick word about browsing the web on your PSP. While I think a web browser is an inevitablity for the platform (wasn't that included in that leaked firmware along with the word processor?), I think a few of you might be overreacting a bit when it comes to presuming Sony's response. In short, I don't see why they'd give a flip. Anything that makes the PSP just that much more useful is a good thing. Now one of you needs to figure out how to load a web browser onto a MemoryStick and load it from there.

    PSP Web Browser experience [PSP411]
    Web Browsing on your Sony PSP [DavesIpaq]
    Wipeout Pure: The Hidden Web Browser [FuManchu]
    PSP Web Portal [AbsurdGenius] This is the easiest one for people who just want to try it out. Well done. (Thanks, Justin!)

    Via Gizmodo

    Posted by yatta at 11:36 PM | Comments (1)
    A Citizen Fights Back, Via Web

    A mall developer sicced his lawyers on a man who started a website to praise a new mall. He says: "Since I possess very limited resources with which to defend myself from this legal onslaught, I decided that my best option was to make use of that great equalizer, the World Wide Web."

    Did he ever.

    (Via BoingBoing)

    Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

    Posted by yatta at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Are vlogging and podcasting the ultimate slacker careers?
    Can you get rich recording mp3s in your mom's basement?
    "the handful of bloggers out there with genuine TV appeal -- former AV geeks, mostly, with some public speaking classes or stage experience under their belts -- are discovering there may be some actual star potential in moving to the tiny QuickTime screen."
    Posted by yatta at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)
    Advertising Is Dead - Long Live Advertising
    "There is much talk today about how advertising is changing and how the industry must change in order to stay relevant. However, I have seen little evidence of the depth of thinking one might expect from the people this will most directly impact - the people who create advertising."
    Posted by yatta at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
    Market Intelligence Products - The Telco Triple Play
    The report examines the collision between broadcast TV and broadband video, and makes sense of: layers of convergence and fragmentation; disruptive innovations for scheduling and distributing video; de-centralised content and P2P networks; value chain structural changes, effects on incumbents, accelerating competition; trends in shifting of time, place and media, etc.
    Posted by yatta at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
    DIY PSP games - PSP News at GameSpot
    "Owners of the PlayStation Portable will soon be able to make their own adventure games for the handheld. According to the latest issue of Famitsu magazine, From Software will release a utility game, called Adventure Player, that will let gamers create an adventure game on PCs and then play it on the road with the mobile PSP."
    Posted by yatta at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
    Mark Cuban to fund MGM vs. Grokster

    I think the people of the US owe Mark Cuban a big thank-you for putting himself in the line of fire like this, for such a good cause.

    …the EFF and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. So now the truth has been told. This isnt the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me. Mark Cuban and my little content company. Its about our ability to use future innovations to compete vs their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. its that simple.

    Via [bionic] dan's journal

    Posted by dan at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)
    Local Internet TV Takes Off In Austria
    Cyrus writes "The BBC reports on an Austrian village that is testing technology which could represent the future of television. The pilot has been so successful that Telekom Austria is now considering setting up other projects elsewhere." From the article: "The hardware and software to turn video footage into edited programmes has been provided by Telekom Austria but this equipment, following training, has been turned over to the villagers. Any video programme created by the villagers is uploaded to a Buntes Fernsehen portal that lets people browse and download what they want to watch. "
    Posted by dan at 12:42 AM | Comments (0)

    March 25, 2005

    The Found Footage Festival

    NEXT FFF SCREENING! Friday March 25 at 8pm Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. --MM

    Posted by yatta at 06:16 PM | Comments (1)
    Freecast
    allows you to listen a live stream over Internet by using smartly resources. You can listen a webradio or share an event by allowing other listeners to make the same thing in the best conditions.

    Posted by yatta at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)
    Clear Channel Overhauls Its Net Strategy
    Reuters: "Clear Channel plans to make some of its live morning shows available for downloading, commonly known as podcasting."

    Via Scripting News

    Posted by yatta at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)
    Aggregators: traffic blessing or copyright curse?

    The news industry has mixed opinions about the advantages and disadvantages of aggregators according to the Wall Street Journal Online through Excite. Some editors enjoy the traffic that their site receives when their stories show up high on the list of headlines. Others are perturbed by their lower positions. And in a practice that some in the industry believe will be common place, a few newspapers simply pay for aggregators to give their articles priority, such as the New York Times did with Topix.net. This past week's two aggregator related events, the Topix.net deal and AFP's legal action against Google, whose consequences won't be know for some time highlight the dilemma that editors are facing. AFP demanded that Google remove its content from its GoogleNews site on charges of copyright infringement. Some in the industry scoffed, dismissing AFP to the nut house for canceling the free press and traffic its brand name gets through Google. But this is nothing new as others, notably Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest paper, have also refused Google permission to reprint its material. On the other hand, the Topix.net deal, in which three major newspaper companies - Gannett Co., Knight-Ridder Inc., and Tribune Co., each bought a 25% stake in the high-traffic news consolidator, hints that publishers see aggregators as boosting hits on their own site and spreading their brand recognition. What will be the final verdict?

    We can't be sure yet. But we may be able to make a pretty good prediction simply from this posting. My source for this posting is the Wall Street Journal, one of the very few pay-for newspaper websites in the world, a publication which has been documented as being ignored as an online reference strictly because of its pay-model, yet a news site to which I am not a subscriber. So how did I read the article? I'm only assuming I've been able to access sacred WSJ content because the Dow Jones Co., publisher of the WSJ, has a deal with Excite which allows it to let a free article slip out from time to time. Considering this, my guess is that most newspapers will keep themselves open to aggregators, or else risk suffocation at the digital hands of those who do.

    Source: The Wall Street Journal Online through Excite.

    Posted by yatta at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)
    Video Tour of KDDI Studio

    One of DailyWireless' favorite haunts is Wireless Watch Japan, reporting from the heart of Japan's mobile revolution.

    The top rated website features the latest news, articles and Video Programs. It's always interesting, beautifully shot and well edited. A model of professionalism.

    In today's Video Tour of KDDI Designing Studio, WWJ's Gail Nakada speaks with the Studio's general manager and tours all five floors of the public facility, packed with interactive games, live handsets and mobile demos. Japan is years ahead of the United States, as this tour demonstrates.

    Program Run-time 8:50 -- Coded for broadband connections only

    Via Daily Wireless

    Posted by yatta at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)
    TV explodes on Amazon

    TV explodes on Amazon

    : From PaidContent's digital jobs list, Amazon is doing more in video:

    : Amazon.com is looking for a Content Acquisition Manager (CAM) for our forthcoming Digital Video Store. The CAM's job will be to find and license content from content owners near and far.

    Via BuzzMachine

    Posted by yatta at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
    PC gaming is dying. Again.

    Once every 6-12 months, someone, somewhere, writes an article about how PC gaming is dying.atari joystick So quite why the author of this piece seems to think he’s so special with this proclaimation I’ve no idea. He also believes that enjoying a game console means you have the IQ of a glass of water… Let me repeat: To all you console owners, which includes a good chunk of us here at Joystiq, including myself, Mr. Anthony R. Brock believes we all have the IQ of a glass of water because we enjoy consoles. Ironically, he condemns Electronic Arts (and, somewhat bafflingly, Eidos), a company who, if I stuck with the PC, I’d HAVE to buy baseball games from, whereas, as a PS2 owner, I have a choice.

    I remember reading much the same arguments in PC magazines before the turn of the millenium, about how PC gaming was on it’s last legs, consoles would own all… And yet, here we still are. The author also leaves one huge, gaping hole in his argument. The fact that when designing a PC game, developers have to contend with a million different hardware and software configurations. Whereas with designing for the console, they can design a game, boot it, and if it works on their test machine, they know that it will work on every machine out there.

    So, is it a scathing critique of the PC gaming industry? Or elitist, arrogant posturing from someone who thinks that, just because they game on a PC, they’re better than you? You decide.

    Via Joystiq

    Posted by yatta at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)
    Flickr for Video - The Gates in NYC

    Mefeedia has inconspicuously turned into Flickr for video, at least in terms of tag usage. Several of us that use Mefeedia are putting out a call for people to add videos with the tag "gates", in honor of Christo and Jean Claude's Central Park exhibit.

    You can see the start of the compilation here. More and more videos will be added over the next two weeks and we are encouraging anyone who has video of The Gates posted on their site to submit it to Mefeedia.

    If you use an RSS reader, you can add this feed to keep up with any new videos that show up with the same tag.

    Via Julia Set

    Posted by yatta at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
    Flickr and the 'democratization of information'

    Yahoo's purchase of Flickr is so interesting because Flickr is a pioneer in tagging, which is not just the latest fad online, but has the potential to revolutionize the way information is found and distributed online.

    "The democratization of information is the real interesting thing about this," said Bob Rosenschein, CEO of GuruNet, an answer search engine. "They're messy and noisy and they're not always accurate, but they're people talking about real subjects; and in that manner they have tremendous statistical interest when they get to scale. There's a wisdom of the crowd. The most interesting applications are before us."

    It's a deceptively simple premise that holds enormous consequences for information management...

    .

    Via CyberJournalist.net

    Posted by yatta at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)
    My video rant for the day

    I really like the idea of OurMedia.org. After all, I want to have a service that makes it easy for me to share my entire life with you. Text. Photos. Video. Audio.

    But my experience in the past 24 hours tells me we are a LONG way from a service that anyone can use. Particularly when it comes to video.

    First of all, the uploading experience, in particular, sucked. I tried more than half a dozen times to upload a video. In both IE and Firefox. It barfed everytime and gave very vague error messages.

    This is one place where AJAX just isn't the right methodology. The browser wasn't designed to upload things. I switched over to http://www.archive.org and there they force you to use an FTP client or an app that you download. This was a far superior experience, albeit I had to be a geek because using FTP isn't something that most people are familiar with.

    With my FTP app I could see how progress was going. With the browser I saw no progress. It either works or it fails.

    And that's on top of being forced to be a media file expert to begin with. My new hard-drive based camcorder makes MPG2 format videos. But they can't be uploaded cause they take 4GB per hour. Whew.

    So, you need to pick between Microsoft's format, Apple's format, Macromedia's format, Real's format, or the more generic MPG4 format. Problem is there's no ubiquity in playback (except for maybe Macromedia's format which I don't like as much as the others). I can just imagine a normal person giving up.

    Don't think Microsoft is blameless here. Our encoding tools are WAY too complex. Windows Media Encoder is free, yes, but you almost need a computer science degree to use it. I wish we had a really great compression component and a really great uploading component that we could use in our Web-based apps. You should just be able to drag an MPG2 file onto a target and have the system do everything else for you.

    Well, that's my video rant for the day.

    Posted by yatta at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
    Free Video Content for Your Sony PSP

    You've got your shiny black beast home and charged and you've already watched Spider-Man 2 twice—what video is next for your PSP? You can convert some of your own content using the software tools we listed in our PSP Omegapost (yes, I regret that name now, too), but if you just want some short free clips, we're starting a list of places to get free content that's already formated for your baby. As always, if you have a suggestion, send it in and we'll be happy to add it.

    29 Guide's Daily PSP Downloads [29HDNetwork]
    Sony Connect Official Page [Connect]
    Move TiVo To Go to Your PSP [ZatzNotFunny]

    Via Gizmodo

    Posted by yatta at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)
    DVDs to remain popular, despite new technologies coming on line
    New digital delivery services are not likely to supplant the DVD business, but rather bring digital entertainment to people by adding either convenience or accessibility that complements what the 'Packaged Goods' can provide, according to a report from market research group In-Stat.

    More consumers want instant access to video on their TV sets, portable devices and mobiles, but DVDs will continue to be a popular medium and will continue to experience substantial growth. The worldwide value of all published DVD products is expected to grow with a compound annual growth rate of 18.2 per cent, from about €25bn in 2004 to €60bn by 2009.
    Posted by yatta at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)
    Telco Triple Play 101
    RedNova reports on an article from the Business Communications Review that takes a good hard look at how telcos, and in particular the Big Four RBOCs (Verizon, SBC, Qwest, and Bell South) intend to deliver the magic triple play service of voice, broadband internet, and TV to the masses. According to the article, they will use three significantly different architectures to accomplish this.

    For the moment, however, the cable TV companies are in the lead for delivering Triple Play, both in terms of technology and market positioning. Cable broadband has outsold DSL 2-1, and coupled with a two-year head start in marketing Triple Play service, you get an idea of how much ground the telcos will have to make up..
    Posted by yatta at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)
    The Dead Media Project

    Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Manifesto: It's a rather rare phenomenon for an established medium to die. If media make it past their Golden Vaporware stage, they usually expand wildly in their early days and then shrink back to some protective niche as they are challenged by later and more highly evolved competitors. Radio didn't kill newspapers, TV didn't kill radio or movies, video and cable didn't kill broadcast network TV; they just all jostled around seeking a more perfect app.

    But some media do, in fact, perish. Such as: the phenakistoscope. The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton Heilig's early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the underground of Chicago. Was the Antikythera Device a medium? How about the Big Character Poster Democracy Wall in Peking in the early 80s?

    The collection of dead media working notes is an ad hoc database of the deceased, the slowly-rotting, the undead, and the never-lived media.

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)
    This Is Not A Review of the Marantz PMD660 Pocketable podcasting field recorder.

    I just saw a post on Gizmodo yesterday suggesting the new Edirol R-1 as a most excellent high-end pocketable podcast field recorder. A lot of people seem to be interested in this one, and for good reason: the R-1 has some nice specs for such a small frame. But there's one thing that really bugs me about dropping 4-large on a good field recorder: the lack of XLR inputs.

    To me, a 1/4" to mini-plug adapter for mic input sometimes equals noise and I've been told that in audio recording, unintended noise is bad. If you're a podcaster who's going to spend that much on a pocketable field recorder, may I suggest the Marantz PMD660 instead?

    (By the way, I use the term 'pocketable' as distinct from 'portable'. The way most manufacturers figure it, anything under 15lbs can have a cheap strap attached to it. And anything with a strap must be 'portable.' Add a strap to a pallet of bricks and it's portable.)

    The PMD660 is about the same size as the R-1 and they share a lot of the same features. And while the Edirol does have a ton of cool effects built in to the box (which makes it quite appropriate for the home recording crowd), it's the extra IN/OUTs that make the PMD660 a more impressive pocket recorder to me. Having used the PMD660 for a community radio project, I can say that it just works. And next time I'm at my local pro shop, I'll take a look at the R-1. Looking at it on spec, it seems impressive.



    But the XLR inputs (two of them on the PMD660) gives you a ton more options on what mic, mixing, and capture gear you can go in to and out of. What neither unit has is a digital optical input which keeps me from being able to replace the Marantz PMD660 I use for live event recording.

    If you're a beginning podcaster with a need for field gear, start off with an inexpensive (sub-$150) flash recorder that'll take an external mic via it's line in jack. The iriver 700-series is perfect for this. (Also check out PWOP's recommendations for a home podcasting kit.) If you're an intermediate podcaster looking to spend a little more for a good solid state field recorder, check out the R-1, but make sure that you check out the PMD660 as well.

    Posted by yatta at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)
    Creative Commons Yahoo! search
    Yahoo! Creative Commons SearchA Creative Commons search engine has been released by Yahoo!.

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)
    [no title]

    Doug Kaye interviews Marc Canter and JD Lasica on the launch of Ourmedia.org.

    Via Andrew Grumet's Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)
    Microsoft Launches Electronica Community Site
    Mike from GarageSpin points us to a big story from Microsoft: they've launched a new community site "for the global electronic artist" called Crossfader. It's in beta form, so there's not much there yet, though the focus is clearly on DJs and electronica. There's a section called "The Knowledge" that will eventually have information on production, performance, and business. The descriptions get a little glib ("tips on workin it"? "tweakin it"?), but there are some interesting features, like built-in community blog features and in-line music player. I just hope this developer is being ironic when he says "Cool. They made the UI look like Office 2003!"

    While this site is a long way from replacing EM411 for me, they do have two cool stories up that you should check out:

    Our friend Dave Hill from Ableton (the Berlin developer's man about Brooklyn) has an overview of Live 4.0. DJ Spooky is up for a video interview talking about his collaboration with Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and Public Enemy's Chuck D, and of course Cakewalk SONAR

    I just interviewed Spooky myself, though (as usual) we talked more music than tools. I'll have that interview up soon; editing it now for my upcoming book Real World Digital Audio.
    Posted by yatta at 05:02 PM | Comments (0)
    Samsung Announces Next-Generation Mobile Trends and Technologies
    Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today delivered an extremely optimistic outlook on the market migration to mobile technology before 700 IT technology enablers at the second annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in the Westin Taipei Hotel in downtown Taipei. Samsung, which plans to steadily increase its business and investments in the mobile marketplace, said it foresees dynamic growth in corporate and consumer mobile usage over the next decade. The company predicted that, as the movement toward ‘mobile convergence' accelerates, key functions will merge introducing more user-optimized mobile applications, calling for more innovative advances in semiconductor technology.
    Posted by yatta at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

    March 24, 2005

    CITIZEN MEDIA INITIATIVES LIST
    So many citizen journalism initiatives are cropping up now it's hard to keep track, so CyberJournalist.net has begun keeping a list.

    Here are some of the more ambitious citizen's media efforts that have launched or are in the works. Click on the links for more information and to post your comments about each one.
    Posted by yatta at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
    Brightcove will soon give you a place to sell your wares
    Brightcove will launch a service later this year that will let filmmakers who are not part of the studio system sell their movies directly to consumers. Most won't be two-hour epics. Instead, the site will largely cater to budding cartoonists, independent directors, and the people who happen to have good video of sports moments, natural disasters, or current events. The firm was founded in 2004 by former Macromedia Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Allaire. • Brightcove [CNET News]

    RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
    6Mpix CCD from Sharp
    Sharp unveiled today the world's first 1/2.5 6Mpix CCD which will be also able to take video at 30fps in VGA mode.
    Posted by yatta at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)
    Student Suspended For Posting Photo Of Principal Breaking The Law
    Earlier this month, we had the story of some students who were suspended for videotaping their teacher lose his temper. The punishment seemed somehow backwards (even if all the attention later resulted in videos of those same students destroying property coming to light as well). Here's another case that sounds quite similar. A high school student photographed the school's principal smoking on school grounds, in violation of state law and posted it to the web. He also passed out fliers around the school pointing to the website -- which seems to be the argument the school is using to suspend him. The principal is claiming that the suspension was for "harassing and slandering her and being a disruptive influence." Of course, since it appears she actually was breaking the law, then it seems the slander part is tough to show. Of course, part of this points out a cultural change that people need to get used to: the fact that you can be watched and recorded almost anywhere at any time.

    Via Techdirt

    Posted by yatta at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
    Phone cultures set nations apart

    European and US culture differ in many things, including in the way they use telephones.

    Choices made by governments and companies can mean teens in Athens, Georgia, talk on their fixed-line phones for four hours a day while those in Athens, Greece, send four text messages on their mobile phones.

    While the European Commission helps promote a uniform phone standard across the Union. The Federal Communications Commission in Washington lets the market decide.

    Details in ChinaDaily.

    .
    Posted by yatta at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)
    Playstation Portable now on sale
    Just look at all these crazy people standing in line to buy a PSP at midnight. Best quote from the launch event: "If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it's really a convergent portable entertainment device."

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
    Getting Broadband Through Your Cell Phone
    PC Magazine takes a look at an emerging product and technology that they think could compete with traditional cable, DSL, and satellite broadband... cellular based WAN and Wi-Fi connections:
    "Sony Ericsson will be rolling out a four-mode PC card for notebook PCs that will allow connectivity over an EDGE/GPRS/GSM or Wi-Fi network. EDGE isn't the fastest of the broadband cellular technologies, up to 236 Kbps, but it is the most widely available nationwide. Kyocera showed off an engineering sample of its KR1 EV-DO router at CTIA. EV-DO can, on average, provide 300 to 500 Kbps (carriers and technology providers are quick to point out the potential of getting up to 2.4 Mbps from it). The router, manufactured by D-Link, has a 1x EV-DO WAN interface (requiring either a 1x EV-DO PC card or 1x EV-DO USB phone), plus four 10/100-Mbps Ethernet ports and 802.11b/g support for LAN.

    According to a sign at the Wireless Dream Home at the CTIA show, Motorola's Cellular Residential Gateway is available now... though PCMag didn't find out what network it's available for. The Gateway appears to be similar to the Kyocera KR1.

    "Now all that remains is for cellular service carriers to support these new products and technologies," states PCMag.

    Via Broadbandreports

    Posted by yatta at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

    March 23, 2005

    Social TV

    You just knew this kind of potato salad would happen. BusinessWeek reports on a PARC project, promising the social aspects of the Super Bowl experience without the dropped popcorn and the spilled beer:

    The Social TV project is in research stages right now. But the idea is that, with the help of a bit of software, perhaps a keyboard or two and several strategically-placed microphones, people can remotely discuss a TV program while they are watching it. You’ll be able to see which of your buddies is watching which program in his or her house, and join into the viewing. Or, you might start a program-watching session of your own and invite friends.

    Indeed, in many ways, Social TV will be similar to the Instant Messenger you already use on your computer. Only it will be more dynamic: Social TV software, located on a device like TiVo or even your TV set, might notice that your and your buddy’s yacking has gone well past the commercial break. The software would conclude that you are no longer watching the show and, perhaps, pause the program until you are ready to resume, says Nic Ducheneau, member of PARC research staff.

    The follow-on invention, of course, is a social spam filter that mutes your friends when you are trying to watch TV.

    Via Many-to-Many

    Posted by yatta at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
    SourceForge.net: Project Info - Scuttle
    Decentralized del.icio.us. Interesting.
    "Online social bookmarks manager. Allows multiple users to add, edit, tag and share their bookmarks through any browser connected to the Internet."
    Posted by yatta at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
    How to succeed as a citizen media editor
    There's a new animal in online newsrooms -- the editor in charge of citizen journalism and blogs. These pioneers share best practices and tips.
    "But who do you put on the front line? Who can oversee these efforts with a light but discerning touch, allowing free speech without inviting lawsuits? That's the role of the new citizen media editor, a role that's only now coming into focus at various sites such as MSNBC.com, VenturaCountyStar.com, NorthwestVoice.com and News-Record.com."


    ('Citizen Media Editors'? 'Blogwranglers' is more like it. ;) -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
    Bloggers' future influence on the media industry

    "While blogging is wielding some influence in media and political circles, traditional news outlets are still the dominant sources of information for the American public." This quote from a CNN/USA/Gallup Poll released on March 22 may hold water today, but what future effects does the media industry expect from these digital diaries? The answers are diverse.

    1. The age gap: The Gallup Poll demonstrates figures of blog readership (correlating to internet use) that are the opposite of figures of newspaper readership. Whereas 61% of the 65 and older age group read a daily paper, only 32% of 18 to 29 year-olds do the same. On the other hand, a mere 33% of the older demographic consult the internet, 28% of which read blogs, whereas 91% of the younger age group use the internet with 44% browsing the blogosphere.

    2. The changing newsroom: As online citizens' media websites such as OhMyNews are turning profitable, Mark Glaser has written an article at the Online Journalism Review that describes the evolution of a new type of editor: the citizen media editor (CME). Although there is no paper yet with this official title, Glaser predicts that more will surface such as they already have at MSNBC.com or NorthwestVoice.com. He defines the CME as "Part chat moderator, part copy editor and part ombudsman."

    3. The media's PR role: an article in Toronto's The Globe and Mail shows that blogs are diminishing the media's role as a public relations tool. Blogs, theoretically written by "normal people," empower companies to have direct contact with their consumers, thus bypassing the media who traditionally has played a major role in PR firms' message. A prediction that blogs will become more influential in swaying public opinion comes from two "trust" polls, one in Canada and one in the United States. The first showed that 55% of Canadians trust a "person like yourself," falling only behind academics and doctors, and that 56% of Americans do the same, up from a mere 22% of peer trust only two years ago.

    4. The business opportunities: "The value of blogs to businesses is their ability to enable and facilitate communication," says Frank Barnako at Market Watch. He goes on to say that blogs are both good and bad for publishers; good because their content is being read, attracting people to their website, but bad because it becomes impossible to charge for their content. Chuck Richard, vice-president of Outsell Inc., a technology market research firm that has recently released a report on blogs concurs that "they are going to be big." A similar article at The Deal provides a summary of the venture capital that is being presently put into blogs and citizens' media. Although it notes that it's still early in the blogging game, the article predicts that "social media" investments will not experience the same crash landing that technology companies went through in 2001: Citizens' media is "Not the next bubble."

    Source: CNN/USA Today/Gallup, Online Journalism Review, The Globe and Mail, MarketWatch (registration required), and The Deal

    Posted by yatta at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
    Shinkuro, Inc. - Tools for Collaboration
    Use the Shinkuro software to share files across enterprise boundaries - securely. Just install the software on each machine, create a group and designate a folder you would like to share with the group. Any files you put in that folder will be shared with the other members automatically.
    Posted by yatta at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
    DVD Blowing Away Box Office
    No wonder that the intervals between screen release dates and DVD release dates are getting shorter. Although box-office revenue has remained steady at about US$9.2 billion a year in recent years, since the mid-1990s, home video sales have surpassed the domestic box office. Last year, DVD sales alone — not counting the VHS format — skyrocketed to US$15.5 billion. [Hacking NetFlix]

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
    Wired News: Rockers Flex BitTorrent's Muscle
    "the Decemberists opted to release its new music video, Sixteen Military Wives, for free using BitTorrent"
    Posted by yatta at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
    Geert Lovinks concepts in critical internet culture

    dr. G. Lovink (IAM) The principle of notworking - Concepts in Critical Internet Culture. (PDF; 2196 KB)(English)

    Media theorist, net critic and activist dr. Geert Lovink focusses in this public lecture on three conceptual fields: the relation between multitude, network and culture,the art of collaboration and ‘free cooperation ’, and finally he presents elements of a theory of ‘organized networks ’.

    Lovink critically observes the network dilemmas in the age of smartmobs and describes the impact of smartmobs, social software and social networking.

    (..) "A key question of my recent work has been how networks deal with the ‘frus-trated ’,those who breach the consensus culture.After 9/11 and the following instalment of a global security regime,this is no longer such an odd question. The age of the ‘true believer ’ is over,,as amateur mass psychologist Eric Hoffer (1951) described this twentieth century figure in his study on mass move-ments. Networks are ultimately an obstacle for those who want to sacrifice their lives for a holy cause. To use networks for propaganda purposes is pos-sible but not as effective as old school broadcast media.".

    The videostream of this public lecture delivered in Amsterdam on February 24 2005

    transcript of the public lecture (in dutch)

    earlier on Smartmobs 'Uncanny networks'

    Geert Lovink is Lector Interactive Media on the Hogeschool of Amsterdam

    Via Smart Mobs

    Posted by yatta at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
    Warner Brothers Sponsors Podcaster
    "The company will sponsor podcasts of the Eric Rice Show and provide exclusive audio content from one of its bands." (Go Eric! -kc.)
    Posted by yatta at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
    morph: The Role of Ethics In Weblogging
    People have been talking about the rights and responsibilities of webloggers – and there are interesting discussions taking place even now, I am sure. Yet there is a flaw in this; it's an argument of journalistic ethics based on a system which did not allow as much interaction community as it does now.
    Posted by yatta at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

    March 22, 2005

    Anti-censorship legislation

    FMQB informs about a bill introduced by a Vermont legislator to halt the possibility of censorship of programming on cable/satellite television and the Internet.

    Want to see an uproar of the financial sense? People would start seriously limiting their cable television and other Internet usage if censorship went into effect across the board on those distribution channels - or at least try doing things on the down low. You see, technology always wins. If we're going to make uncensored content illegal in the same sense that something as horrible as child pr0n is, then we might as well just make "Fahrenheit 451" the national book.

    Let's try talking some sense into ourselves before taking the nannyism to a higher level, okay?

    Via The Media Drop

    Posted by yatta at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)
    P2P and Human Evolution

    Michel Bauwens has written a phenomenal essay entitled P2P and Human Evolution: Placing Peer to Peer Theory in an Integral Framework. It’s long and much of it goes far over my head, but reads like a P2P manifesto — Bauwens even concludes by calling it “a guide to an active participation in the transformation of our world, into something better, more participative, more free, more creative.” Really quite fascinating.

    Via Disinformation.

    Via The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Mobile phone plan for Tube users

    londonunderground.gif Passengers will be able to use their mobile phones on all parts of the London underground by 2008, reports the BBC.

    "London mayor Ken Livingstone has announced plans to install transmitters which will also allow access to wireless internet and digital radio.

    In the down side, concerns were raised by the Liberal Democrats last year about the security risks of such plans. And both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives warned the new technology could allow terrorists to detonate bombs remotely. "


    (~~sniff~~ -kc.)

    Via textually.org

    Posted by yatta at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)
    rfid music player
    sid rfid

    don’t take off your tinfoil hats quite yet, but just when you thought rfid tags were all about the man wanting to track you, somebody has come up with a more positive application.

    dividuum figured that since some rfid tags can store a kilobyte of data, he should be able to gzip a sid audio file and squeeze it onto one of these larger tags. he then wrote some software for his pc that interfaces with an rfid reader and will play the sid file contained in a nearby tag. put a stack of cards next to the reader and it will cycle through them like a playlist.

    follow the link if you want to download the source or check out a video of it in action.


    Via hack a day

    Posted by yatta at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)
    transcoder (.AVI to .vob conversion)
    Transcoder compresses MPEG2 video files to fit on a single DVD-R.

    Posted by yatta at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)
    Microsoft ready to spring an eye toy on us?
    eye toy

    CVG is reporting that Microsoft may jump in the eye controller game with their next console, the ol’ whats-its-name. You didn’t know there was such a thing as the “eye controller game”? Funny, neither did we, until we read the article. But Sony’s version is a hell of a lot of fun, and it does open up many more possibilities for the MS box. Especially if you consider the “customization” frenzy that Allard finds himself in. Oh yeah, he’s quoted in the piece. The guy is everywhere these days.

    Via Joystiq

    Posted by yatta at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
    MessageCast to Launch Keyword Driven RSS Ad Network

    MessageCast, a desktop/mobile RSS alerting tool, plans to launch context-appropriate ads for RSS feeds via a new keyword program that sorts feeds into categories that can be purchased by marketers. Deborah Branscum has the scoop and more info here as well

    Via Micro Persuasion

    Posted by yatta at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)
    From Meet the Press to Be the Press
    The Economist just said it: the "the traditional notion that the media play a special role in informing people is breaking down." Rising up: government as a "purely neutral" news provider, credible where a sinking press corps is not.
    Posted by yatta at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)
    Marketers Feverish Over Viral Ads
    Flushed with the success of several word-of-mouth ad campaigns, advertisers are abuzz about how to get consumers to do their work for them. By Daniel Terdiman.
    Posted by yatta at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)
    The Sitcommercial Makes a Return
    The Sitcommercial Makes a Return. Marketers seeking to stand out are crowding their campaigns with ensemble casts that continue from one commercial to another, just as if they were the regular cast of a television series.

    Via Broadcasting

    Posted by yatta at 08:45 PM | Comments (0)
    Primetime hypermedia: Why now?
    The umbrella title for this series of columns--Primetime Hypermedia--suggests that, for what used to be called multimedia, the long march through the desert is finally over. The mission of these columns is to explore and document the promised land that we are now starting to colonize. But here's a question I've been asked a lot lately: Why now?

    The question is subtler than you might think because, in some ways, little has changed. We've had audio and video on the internet for nearly as long as there's been an internet. At times I feel like an archaeologist hacking through underbrush to find artifacts left by an almost-forgotten tribe. When I investigated SMIL, for example, the trail I followed had been blazed years before. The video genre I've rechristened screencasting has antecedents that go back a decade or more, as does the audio genre now called podcasting. So, again, why now?

    Two reasons. The platform for hypermedia has matured, and so has the publishing environment. In both cases, obvious and not-so-obvious factors are in play. [Full story at O'Reilly Network]
    ...

    Via Jon's Radio

    Posted by yatta at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)
    Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

    I'm going to have to get my hands on this book:

    "Is this book sociology, anthropology, or taxonomy? Sorting Things Out, by communications theorists Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, covers a lot of conceptual ground in its effort to sort out exactly how and why we classify and categorize the things and concepts we encounter day to day. But the analysis doesn't stop there; the authors go on to explore what happens to our thinking as a result of our classifications. With great insight and precise academic language, they pick apart our information systems and language structures that lie deeper than the everyday categories we use."

    On another note, I've just been informed that I will be presenting at the Canadian Library Association on folksonomies as part of their hot topics track. Here's the description I sent in:

    Tag - You're It!

    "The collective intelligence of Web users is not new. We have seen them work effectively in forums, newsgroups, and even electronic discussion lists. Social-tagging tools (also called folksonomies) such as del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr, Digg, and Feedmarker move this collective work into new ontological avenues. The presenter will discuss why information professionals should embrace the unstructured nature of folksonomies and how they can be best implemented into the structured library community."

    Posted by yatta at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)
    Bring the distribution channel to us

    jeremy.jpgSo Jeremy Allaire talked about Brightcove [Monday] at PC Forum. Hidden between the hyperbole, rehashed models and ever hopeful attitude were nuggets of brilliance that I wanted to highlight to you folks. And sorry for the shitty photo - J. I'm clearly NOT a photographer.

    Up until now - all video on demand interfaces have been giant shopping catalogs. Download sites today are also catalogs - as they enable customers to 'walk the virtual aisles, browsing for music or video - just as one browses for web pages or up and down search results lists.

    But Brightcove has turned the notion of distribution channel back onto itself. Any Brightcove publisher, after using the Brightcove tools to encode and upload their work onto Brightcove's servers, can then take special javascript code and embed the entire 'DRM-like playback/chooser interface' directly into their own web page.

    This not only gives the publisher a convienient way of promoting one's products by 'baking it into' one's own site, but it also gives Brightcove a great viral way of spreading their brand and services!

    It's brilliant!

    So congrats to Jeremy Allaire and co on that one. Maybe next time - we'll find out MORE about what you're doing.

    To my eyes - I saw the ON2 codec - a beautiful, hi-res codec and pseudo-sexy Flex interface (the Laszlo stuff is better - needless to say.)

    And I'd also like to shout out to Brightcove's investors. This is gonna be on drawn out battle of attribition. If it didn't work for Atom/Shockwave - they sure as hell better figure out why it's gonna work this time around.

    But I actually do agree that this is teh right model and the 'last man standing' - is gonna win - big!

    Posted by yatta at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)
    Grokster Preview: News Roundup
    * Lee Gomes: If Studios Get to Curb TV Shows on the Web, Let's Ask Quid Pro Quo [wsj]

    * Marcia Coyle: Justices to Weigh Key Copyright Case [via]

    * Derek Slater: Nearing Grokster - Petitioners have filed their reply brief in Grokster.

    * Denise Howell: WLF Grokster Program Thursday - Thursday morning 3/24, 9:00 - 10:15 a.m. EST, the Washington Legal Foundation will Webcast a program in its "Media Briefings" series, titled "MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.: Can the Court Advance Innovation while Protecting Property Rights?"
    Posted by yatta at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)
    UK TV Channel 5 offers Legal TV Show Download

    We talked about TV stations to offer legal internet downloads of their shows. Now UK's Channel 5 seems to beat everybody in being the first TV channel to offer shows for download for a fee.

    BBC News reports that channel five offers DVD quality downloads of their car show for £1.50. It looks like the billing is done via SMS and mobile phones.
    The BBC story has also statistics from a survey with high numbers of brits download US TV shows. So Comedy Central! start offering the Daily Show for legal download now! The world is waiting for this.

    Posted by yatta at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)
    My interview with ChangingMedia
    I spoke with Brandon Watts and Matt Hartley of Changing Media about where I stand on podcasting, videoblogging, and the whole big picture thing. Planning podcasts; defining Videoblogging; Teaching kids to make media; Audioblog.com the Podcasting Creation Tool; the wireless future of podcasting; community vs. corporate, and being *involved* in community. Changing Media :: Interview with Eric Rice of EricRice.com

    Via Eric Rice

    Posted by yatta at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)
    wi-pics -- aim, snap, transmit
    If you have a CF slot in your camera, you can attach this gizmo and upload photos to a pre-determined site wirelessly. You can also get one of these puppies with a barcode scanner or harddrive.

    tags:
    Posted by yatta at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)
    Blog, Vlog, Podcast, Mobcast

    So many new words, so little time. Blog (web log), Vlog (video web log), Podcasting (including audio in your RSS (really simple syndication) feed for download into an Apple iPod or other MP3 player) and Mobcasting (mobile podcasting) an Andy Carvin acronym which posits the use of smart phones to create podcasts -- are all relatively new words that represent one extremely big idea -- unfettered plebeian access to the fifth estate.

    Until a few years ago, governments (secular or non) had almost complete control of information. That made (and continues to make) information a form of currency -- like the military and other stores of economic value. These "new words" are much more powerful than the technologies they represent, they speak a new language of information and, to be sure, currency.

    The value you will place on this information is in direct proportion to the use you have for it. Most people won't care about the rantings of a technophile or a housewife lamenting her need for appropriate child care -- or will they? Imagine a world where a group of protesters use their cell phones to acquire and document their experience with government forces and aggregate (and spin) that audio/video experience on the web. How about a simple group of friends witnessing a car accident or something worse.

    We are at the dawn of a new era -- not the cliche version of the phrase -- "new era" the home game! Imagine the power of an individual when they are able to publish and internationally distribute audio and video more efficiently than CNN or Fox News. That's not years in the future ... it's already here. Want to believe? Check out some of the websites like http://tv.oneworld.net
    or http://www.audiolink.com or http://www.audiolink.com and just play the tape .. err ... file to the end.

    Posted by yatta at 07:19 PM | Comments (3)
    Implementing a Rating-Based Item-to-Item Recommender System in PHP/SQL
    Includes code
    Posted by yatta at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)
    Everything is Possible - Storytelling in Games
    Gamespot has a thoughtful and interesting piece up entitled Everything is Possible, where they interview several game designers with a strong storytelling background. The interviewees include Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment), Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear), Ken Levine (System Shock 2), Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango), and Ragnar Tørnquist (The Longest Journey). These gaming luminaries discuss the finer points of creating a plot in an interactive universe, and it makes for a fantastic read. From the article: "Ken Levine: I'll never forget the first story I wrote in gaming. It was for a (eventually canceled) Star Trek: Voyager game. I wrote the opening cutscene, which included this gem: THE CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON JANEWAY...WE SEE A LOOK OF TERROR IN HER EYES AS IT REFLECTS THE INCOMING MISSILE The lead programmer pretty much laughed in my face. First of all, our characters were low-resolution bitmaps, with one fixed expression on their face. Their eyes were maybe 4x4 pixels each. The camera zooming in on that wouldn't have shown a performance; they would have shown a scattered mess of random pixels."

    Via Clippings.reblog

    Posted by yatta at 07:18 PM | Comments (0)
    Between crisis, panic... and opportunity
    The Guardian stitches together a bunch of quotes about American media in crisis:
    "It's somewhere between crisis and a panic," says Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, New York. "The generation that lived through Woodward and Bernstein and Vietnam has almost gone. They had an idea that they could make a difference and that they were a force. It might have been pompous but it was there." ...

    ption that the media has failed," says Michael Wolff, a media commentator and Vanity Fair columnist. "There is a general understanding that something has gone radically wrong here." It is a feeling coming from both outside the industry and from within. Gitlin was recently invited to a meeting at the Times to discuss how to combat the erosion of confidence and stagnant sales. "There was a real sense of urgency," he says. "They were asking some fundamental questions. It was not a casual exercise." I think we're moving onto the next phase, having gone through the stages of denial, resistance, and panic.

    Whether at those darned conferences or in conversations with people I know, I now see big media looking -- some eagerly, some desperately -- for ways to embrace the new ways. It's more than a blogs-are-hot fad moment. I'm starting to see a realization that this is about a new relationship with the public, new ways to gather news and information, new ways to involve diverse viewpoints, and -- at long last -- new business models.

    Via BuzzMachine

    Posted by yatta at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)
    SimpleTech 128 GB Solid State SATA Drives

    simpletech_logo.jpgSimpleTech has announced their new Serial ATA Solid State Drive called the Zeus. Lacking any moving parts, it's effectively a gigantic flash drive with an SATA interface. The Zeus will be offered in capacities up to 128 gigabytes with read and write rates reaching 60 megabytes per second. (Being a solid state drive, though, it's true speed is in the seek time, which is negligible.) The drives are also only 9.5 millimeters tall, making them easily stackable and expandable. No word on price, but assume it will require a second mortgage, considering their 8GB CF card was selling for $6,000 last year.

    Press Release [SimpleTech via DesignTechnica]
    More from SimpleTech: 8GB CompactFlash card [Gizmodo]

    Via Gizmodo

    Posted by yatta at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
    HP to acquire Snapfish
    Technology solutions provider HP has signed an agreement to acquire Snapfish, an online photo service.

    Snapfish offers free online photo sharing, photo storage and management, free editing tools and software, online print ordering, wireless imaging services for camera phone and colour handset users, and some 70 personalised photo products, such as calendars, mouse-pads and the like.

    Snapfish also provides infrastructure services to retailers, internet service providers and wireless carriers, allowing them to offer these same products and services to their own consumers.

    Snapfish has some 13m registered members.
    Posted by yatta at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)
    Why The Long Tail of video is about to get longer
    Broadband Directions: New forces are at work which hold the potential to flood the market with a torrent of new video content. This would dramatically lengthen the long tail of video programming, as it would be defined today. In addition, consumers will also have new ways to find, share and consume this video.

    While these disruptive influences are well-known, their effects are not yet fully understood. Broadband and IP have opened up a new path to deliver quality video directly to the end-consumer; wireless connectivity and new devices are redefining how and where video is consumed; production costs to create high-quality digital programming are low and getting lower; video search engines from Google, Yahoo and Blinkx, which extend existing internet usage behaviors, are becoming more sophisticated and widely adopted; and most importantly, traditional television advertisers are increasingly shifting their mindsets (and their bucks) from big brand-building campaigns to surgical, ROI-based online tactics prompted by consumers' heightened disdain for commercial interruptions.

    Examples of non-traditional publishers who are enticed by the potential of direct-to-consumer video opportunities abound. Recently I've seen video product demos on CNET and print reporters doing video news and features on USAToday.com and NYTimes.com. TheKnot.com is planning bridal related programming on its site. Last holiday season, I watched Amazon's short films. Meanwhile, a resurgent AOL.com is preparing a fall relaunch of its site with a video-centric strategy. Plenty of more announcements are on the way.

    Via CyberJournalist.net

    Posted by yatta at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)
    PodcastExpert.com - Where the Podcasting community is the expert
    PodcastExpert.com is a community-driven site for resources on creating, producing, and receiving Podcasts.

    We strive to have the most relevant links about equipment, software, and audio production techniques that will assist you in making your Podcasts easier to produce, sound better, and attract more listeners.

    From software to hardware, mics to mixers, RSS aggregators to audio editors, PodcastExpert.com has something for everyone!
    Posted by yatta at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

    March 21, 2005

    Content? That's The Easy Part
    The retro refrain from this week's CTIA appeared to be "content is king" when it came to the mobile phone. With that in mind, suddenly everyone's trying to answer the content question. However, when it comes to the mobile world, content is the easy part. Everyone will create it.
    Posted by yatta at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
    Adding more metadata to .torrents
    I spent last night shoe-horning in more metadata in the .torrent files that Prodigem creates for its torrents. Dovetailing on the effort started by Thomas Winningham, I accomplished this by adding some new dictionary entries within the bencoded torrent format. My main goal was to add information about the license associated with the content delivered by the torrent, but along the way I decided to throw in tag info for good measure. Below is a basic example of data that will now be added to all Prodigem torrents (tabbed formatting added here for clarity):
    7:license
    d
         5:about
         43:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 
    e
    4:tags
    l
         11:hello world
         10:folksonomy
         11:another tag
    e
    
    The previous discussions linked to above on how to properly go about this were not quite definitive, so this is more of my best effort based on that. It's very much fluid so please send your feedback if you think this is all wrong (or if you think it's all right). With the license entry, I decided to make it into its own sub-dictionary to allow for larger, more precise, future descriptions. I described the URL under an "about" heading so as to match example RDF over at the Creative Commons. The tags entry is straight-forward enough. It's just a list of folksonomy-enabling entries. Given recent interest I thought this might lead to ... well, who knows what...

    Posted by yatta at 07:55 PM | Comments (0)
    World After The Music Industry
    Mobile operators and music labels are currently fighting over the mobile music industry, or specifically which industry should get the lions share of the revenue. It’s true the operators take an indecent cut of the revenue, but it’s nigh on impossible to feel sorry for the music labels, who have been gouging everyone for decades. However, new systems are popping up that allow artists to sell directly to the consumers. One version uses reverse billing via SMS, but rents low-cost short codes to ensure the operators don’t gouge the musicians with high fees for the SMS.

    These smaller retailers won’t be making huge headlines with the money they generate individually, but it’s feasible the system could provide extra cash to the artists themselves…
    Posted by yatta at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)
    Film Financed By the People, For the People

    There's a new type of connection being formed between people and the products they buy, including film and television audiences. Books like the Cluetrain Manifesto have identified how people have built communication networks to establish this connection. As customers, people are becoming more and more involved in the creation and promotion - they're interacting in ways we haven't seen before. And now there's the opportunity to contribute to the development and financing of independent film in small doses. Movieforthemasses.com is looking for small contributions to their projects and allowing input into which projects move forward. It's an interesting idea - financially contributing to someone elses passion so that you can partake in the end result. Are people ready or willing to actually do it? I don't know, but if people start to consider how much they're spending for a movie ticket and what they're actually getting, they may appreciate the idea of contributing less to the movie house and potentially gaining more from the experience.

    Statement from movieforthemasses.com
    Home of IBI
    Full Story from Hollywood Reporter
    Blurb from HLA

    Via ploosh!

    Posted by yatta at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)
    Exploding Radio II

    Radio2This week has brought more evidence that radio is an industry in the midst of disruptive transformation. The big news was that Viacom is planning to split off its broadcasting side, including the troubled Infinity radio division. But there were many smaller signals as well that radio as we know it is about to change. For instance:

    * Arbitron and comScore Media Metrix released the online radio ratings for January, which for the first time include Live365. Led by Yahoo! Music, AOL and MSN, the four top streaming radio sites now have nearly 5m listeners a week. That's not only a lot, but it means (if I'm reading the stats right on the "persons using radio data" here) that the top Internet radio sites have more listeners than any US radio station.


    * The WSJ had a great page one piece (inspired by our own cover package, I suspect) that discusses how the trend to ever-tighter playlists is now reversing as stations play more music. With listenership at a multi-decade low, they recognize that the quest to keep listeners by using market research to pick the perfect top 40 has now proven a failure. Instead, more stations are playing more eclectic, even iPod-like, mixes. They're also starting to cut down on ads, which today make up an oppressive 22 minutes per hour for many stations.

    Meanwhile, there's been a lot of interesting Exploding Radio commentary and analysis around the web this week:

    * Barry Ritholtz, a good financial analyst, adds an interesting perspective to the WSJ piece:

    One thing I note as missing is a discussion of the long term generational effect, and the threat to a possible radio recovery: Since 1996, radio's decay has led to an entire generation of listeners who have essentially written off radio (at least, when it comes to music).

    The other key issue: Radio as a source of new music, and its relationship to the labels. It used to be part of the draw -- a relationship with a trusted DJ who plays music you like, combined with introducing you to new songs (trust is the key component in granting someone taste-maker status).

    * Technology Liberation Front, a blog worth subscribing to, has an excellent analysis of why concern over Clear Channel's radio "monopoly" is so misplaced. It also notes an amazing (and very encouraging) new white paper from the FCC:

    "[T]he Scarcity Rationale for regulating traditional broadcasting is no longer valid.” So begins a stunning new white paper from the Federal Communications Commission. In the paper, “The Scarcity Rationale for Regulating Traditional Broadcasting: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed,” author John Beresford, an attorney with the FCC’s Media Bureau, lays out a devastating case against the Scarcity Rationale, which has governed spectrum & broadcast regulation in the United States for over seven decades.

    * The Pew Internet Project released a report that finds that the Internet surpassed radio as a source of political news for the first time last year.

    * NPR's "Here and Now" show had a segment on exploding radio, based on our issue (I was a guest). You can listen to it here.

    * Fred Wilson, a NYC VC who has written some of the best analysis of radio's future, disagrees with my flip assessment that radio is "hosed". Two responses: 1) I meant "radio as we know it" 2) That was "endism"--exaggerating decline for rhetorical effect--and it's okay.

    Posted by yatta at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)
    New media for the Mobile

    People that have been wondering what ever happened to Macromedia Flash on Mobile Phones beware. After visiting Macromedia at 3GSM and CeBIT I downloaded the Flash Lite Player to my 6630 and started developing some content and was thrilled. It's as easy as any Flash authoring and integrates nicely into the phone UI. Within minutes I had the first app up and running and the possibilities for developing content are nearly limitless. Now if you think of the tens of thousands Flash developer out there, only one challenge remains: Macromedia must get the Flash player on every mobile. And they have signed deals with Samsung and Nokia to do just that. There is no doubt that a new wave of multi media content and applications will come to a mobile near you. So stay tuned and if you really cannot wait, you can purchase and download the flash player for your mobile from the Macromedia website and see for yourself.

    We thank Christian Ehl for writing this article.


    Did you know that hundreds of readers see this page everyday? Learn more about our advertising options, contact our sales department at advertising - at - creative-weblogging.com or via phone (+1 866 817 7077).

    Posted by yatta at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)
    Wikimania Call for Papers

    The announcement speaks for itself:

    Wikimania 2005 - The First International Wikimedia Conference will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005. Wikimedia is the non-profit organization operating Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, and the Wikimedia Commons. We are now accepting papers and other submissions (from everyone within and outside the Wikimedia and Wikipedia communities) for presentations, workshops, and discussion groups. We are also accepting nominations for speaker panels and keynote speakers, and suggestions for other activities. Mail all submissions to cfp@wikimedia.org. For more conference information, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Main_Page

    Via Smart Mobs

    Posted by yatta at 07:18 PM | Comments (0)
    Blogs Get Prime Exposure on CNN

    USA Today: Mainstream media continue to be wary of Internet bloggers because the reporting and opinions on their Web sites are often not subject to journalistic checks and balances, such as editing and rules on sourcing. But Jon Klein, a former CBS News producer who jumped to an Internet venture before being tapped to run CNN a few months ago, says that there's no sense in ignoring the "blogosphere," which is why he has created a daily, four-minute segment on Inside Politics.

    Via Micro Persuasion

    Posted by yatta at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)
    BBC sees potential in downloads
    Some more details on the BBC's plan to allow users to download the last seven days of TV shows -- for a price, of course. The service will launch later this year.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)
    Netflix Close to 3 Million Members

    This image was at the top of the Netflix Web site:

    Netflixcloseto3m

    I wonder if they'll be giving out Reed Hastings bobbleheads this time.

    Posted by yatta at 07:08 PM | Comments (0)
    Here come the VJs

    Of all the radical ideas that I've pitched over the years, none gets more criticism than the notion that a broadcast newsroom can run efficiently and more like a newspaper if we (mostly) abandon the idea of 2-person crews. Video Journalists (VJs) are individuals who shoot with small, consumer digital cameras (like Sony's PD-170 and Canon's GL-2) and edit on laptops with Final Cut Pro software.

    This concept is sweeping Europe, thanks to the efforts of Michael Rosenblum. His vision is a newsroom where everyone is a VJ, and local television in England, Sweden, Germany and other countries are adopting it quickly. But not in America. Why? Good question.

    That may change now that two VJs from the WashingtonPost.com have won National Press Photographer Association (NPPA) TV News awards. The loudest objections to the VJ concept have come from station photographers, many of them NPPA members. Now that their association has given their stamp of approval to the work done by VJs, it's just a matter of time before U.S. TV stations move to Rosenblum's system.

    If you're currently employed in a TV newsroom, I suggest you approach this with an open mind.


    (Back in my public broadcasting days we had a name for our one-person crews. We called them 'underfunded.' I think the unions called them 'illegal.' ;) -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)
    Context: Journal on Media, Community Intersection

    The Winter 2005 edition of Context, produced by the UCLA Center for Communication and Community, devotes this issue to the rise of community voice and the grassroots organizing and the technology that is helping advance the movement.

    Via PJNet Today

    Posted by yatta at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)
    CyberJournalist.net - New citizen journalism site, NowPublic, to launch

    A new multimedia "citizen journalism" site called NowPublic is getting ready to launch. The site will allow readers to "assign" stories to reporters; sign up to be a reporter; file photographs, video and MP3s; and "build your own newsroom" and follow the news with "watchlists."

    According to the beta version of the site, which is now password-protected, here's how the site will work:

    First, a member logs in and opens an assignment for a reporter. Once the assignment is opened, it appears on the homepage of all reporters (provided they are logged in) in the area. Once a reporter has filed a photograph, video or MP3, then the assignment becomes a news story and appears in the developing news section and within the appropriate categories.

    Via del.icio.us/tag/journalism

    Posted by yatta at 06:34 PM | Comments (1)
    A Look At The FCC’s Scarcity Policy

    From this page, FCC, Media Bureau Staff Research Papers Affecting Media Policy and Regulation, you can get to John Berresford’s Scarcity Rationale for Regulating Traditional Broadcasting: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed which has garnered a certain amount of comment (CoCo, Freedom to Tinker, The Technology Liberation Front, Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog)

    Abstract

    This paper concludes that the Scarcity Rationale for regulating traditional broadcasting is no longer valid. The Scarcity Rationale is based on fundamental misunderstandings of physics and economics, efficient resource allocation, recent field measurements, and technology. It is outmoded in today’s media marketplace. Perhaps in recognition of the Rationale’s flaws, many variations of it have been attempted, but none fares much better under sensible, factual analysis.

    Jumping off from National Broadcasting Co,. Inc., et al. v. United States et al.; 319 U.S. 190 (1943) and Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC; 395 U.S. 367 (1969)

    .

    Via Furdlog

    Posted by yatta at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)
    mSWV+ Technology for Wide Angle Mobile Viewing Under Impaired Lighting Conditions


    Samsung Electronics, the world's leading supplier of thin-film-transistor, liquid crystal displays (TFT LCD), has developed a new design for mobile displays 10 inches or smaller that allows viewing of ultra-sharp LCD images at a 160-degree viewing angle in a variety of low or high ambient lighting conditions.The company's proprietary PVA technology, which until now has been used to improve off-axis viewing characteristics for large-sized LCDs, has been successfully adapted to work with small and medium-sized LCDs. When combined with a transflective mobile display mode, the new Mobile Super Wide View+ (mSWV+) will enable a new generation of rotational mobile multimedia displays.
    Posted by yatta at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)
    What's a hit worth?

    Jerry Romano sent me a short news clipping, "19 Entertainment owns the format rights to Pop Idol, here known as American Idol, and pulls in an estimated $1 billion annually in merchandising, ad sales, sponsorships, etc." along with a simple personal message,"WOW!" What is more remarkable: the fact that American Idol is can gross $1B annually or the fact that it is a simple talent show with a slight twist?

    I think the lesson to be learned from 19 Entertainment is that there is nothing more powerful than a simple, time-tested concept, well executed. Reinventing the wheel is fun, but perfecting the packaging is genius. We know the old adage, "Artists create, pros steal and genius steals from itself." The international distribution and protection of the Idol format is truly genius and the revenue is simply a measure of how well the company has executed its plan.

    There's not much else to learn from this. Their success is unique to their team and execution. You can intellectualize the idea that you need to have a hit, but you can't manufacture them. Hits have one component that can not be intellectualized ... magic. You can call it what you want, but magic, an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source, will do just fine. Consumers make hits, not producers. So, kudos to 19 Entertainment for a job well done, but following their business plan will not guarantee you the same results.

    Posted by yatta at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)
    Paul Boutin on newsmashing, or the remixing of the news
    "Every killer app needs a killer name. Creating a new product by writing all over somebody else's article is kind of like making a mash-up. Let's call it newsmashing—that's just nerdy enough to catch on."

    I think we should call it reblogging --MM
    Posted by yatta at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)
    Enhanced TV Show, London - September 28-29, 2005
    Building on the success of the previous enhanced TV event in 2004, Junction is proud to present the second annual Enhanced TV Show, 2005.

    The previous event brought together the key players within the industry and highlighted the need for further partnerships between the broadcast and production communities to push the technological boundaries. There were many useful insights offered, with numerous broadcasters and program makers offering their expert views on how the enhanced TV landscape is likely to be shaped.
    Posted by yatta at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)
    Bitmunk lets you make a profit with legitimate P2P

    Crazy bitmunk cartoonBack in August we reported on Bitmunk, a new music service a la iTunes Music Store or (the new) Napster. Details were few back then, but now it looks like Bitmunk is up and running, and here’s the twist: When you buy a song from Bitmunk, you can turn around and sell it to others, with a part of the transaction going to the artist and the rest going into your pocket (as demonstrated by the scary cartoon on the right, from Bitmunk’s official documentation).

    Bitmunk seems to have gotten most (all?) of its music through a deal with CD Baby. Unfortunately, the site is fairly dismal when it comes to finding good music, with an absence of user ratings, Top 10 lists, or even a search button, and the process to get started buying and selling music looks pretty convoluted, but if they can get their act together, they just might be on to something.

    Via The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)
    QuickTime Latency

    I have done exhaustive research regarding this in the past but I still have persistent problems with latency when using QuickTime or MPEG-4 streaming in my projects so I am doing the research again (and posting it here so I can find it later).

    Here are the links for further examination (from Apple's Mailing Lists):
    Latency on Streaming Server - Some information - How to change a setting on the QTSS that controls one aspect of latency created by the server.
    Re: latency problem - Explains the reasoning for the latency from Apple's point of view.
    Re: Instant-On & double frame rate - Gives a rundown on editing the server config to reduce latency.
    Re: Video conferencing - More of the same
    Getting real-time streaming to be more real-time - interesting note regarding specifing time stamp increments in video/audio samples to reduce latency. A major hack.
    Re: I found there are more than 7 seconds time delay between the real live - More about what the latency is all about.
    Re: Getting real-time streaming to be more real-time - Change the SDP file to set the default buffer on the player lower.
    Re: Streaming latency between two separate computers - Use multicast
    Re: Request for User-Configurable Latency Parameters - One of the original emails quoted above for changing latency parameters.
    Re: buffering time - Changing buffering time in home made QT playback app (using QT API, should therefore work with QT4J).
    Re: buffering time - More of the same.

    Last: Use these libraries to build own streaming server and client: LIVE.COM Streaming Media: RTP/RTCP and RTSP Open Source Libraries

    Ok.. now to try out all of the possibilities..

    Posted by yatta at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)
    Creative Commons Deed Wiki License -- Attribution-ShareAlike 0.5 (Beta)
    CC is working on a Wiki license
    Posted by yatta at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)
    Self-healing networks

    John Borland profiles some research out of Cornell University on self-healing P2P networks (where "network" includes the people as well as the software+hardware). The goal is to permit network users to root out spam, but Credence could also easily be used to remove the various spoof and decoy files that the Cartel has used to pollute the P2P waters.

    Via Copyfight

    Posted by yatta at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)
    PSP Video 9 - PSPcasting
    There are tons of videos available for download from the internet. Unfortunately, nearly all of it is unplayable on the PSP. Wouldn't it be cool if you could automatically download, convert and copy these videos to your PSP for later playback? Well now you can.


    (Also check out iPSP. Good find, Josh. -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)
    Hint: It's Hyperbole

    A predictable uproar will soon erupt in the blogosphere over Tina Brown's latest column (reg req) for the Washington Post. The piece, after rambling around a bit, ends up being a useful exploration of why our society has become so dangerously risk-averse, and notably so in our private lives.

    Bloggers are already starting to complain about one sentence in this paragraph:

    We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks. We're always under surveillance; cameras watch us wherever we go; paparazzi make small fortunes snapping glamour goddesses picking their noses; everything is on tape, with transcripts available. No matter who you are, someone is ready and willing to rat you out. Even the rats themselves have to look over their shoulders, because some smaller rat is always waiting in the wings. Bloggers are the new Stasi. All the timidity this engenders, all this watching your mouth has started to feel positively un-American.
    Yes, I'm talking about the "Bloggers are the new Stasi" line.

    Of course it's idiotic, and it unfortunately detracts from the otherwise reasonable point of the column. We are, indeed, in a world of busybodies where the slightest gaffe, depending on your status or notoriety, can be a disaster.

    Who among us hasn't said stupid things, especially in situations we considered private? Who among us would not be chagrined if our every utterance was available to the world, and if a casual remark was taken out of context and turned into a damaging faux pas?

    Tina Brown made one dumb remark. She's not wrong with her overall point.

    We need to start cutting each other some slack. Soon.

    Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

    Posted by yatta at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)
    MSNBC: "HERE COME THE VLOGS"

    Msnbc_vlogs

    MSNBC: Ready for your close-up? Here come the vlogs is a great snapshot of videoblogging by Michael Rogers. He namechecks all our favorites including Rocketboom, Ryanne, Jay, Human Dog, Steve Garfield, and Dylan. He also mentions the tools making it easier to find videoblogs, such as ANT and MeFeedia. And, inescapably, Serious Magic's Vlog It! software, which nobody I know actually uses.

    Check out Rocketboom's aggregation of SXSWi video/audio/pics/text and the official video coverage of SXSW for all the geekery you'd ever want to munch on.

    If you're just looking for fun, please immediately watch Dylan's latest vid, Toys of Our Lives, where Dylan's dolls engage in sick and hilarious romantic shenanigans. Then why not see me "shake my thing" (am I saying that right?) on 6th Street in Austin for DanceFlash - it was like a mini-Burning Man.

    Via Blogumentary

    Posted by yatta at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)
    Avid to buy Pinnacle
    In a deal announced this morning, digital editing powerhouse Avid is buying Pinnacle for $462 million. Avid will add Pinnacle's MediaStream broadcast server and Deko graphics systems to its product list. "By acquiring Pinnacle's consumer video business, Avid will be able to tap into the next generation of video editors while they are still learning their craft," said Avid President and CEO David Krall. "This creates a very large potential customer base for Avid's future."

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
    Yahoo Acquires Flickr (And They Better Not Screw It Up)
    : Flickr finally announced via its blog this afternoon what founders have oh-so-coyly been denying sidestepping for weeks: parent company Ludicorp is being acquired by Yahoo for the traditional undisclosed amount. Or as VP Marketing & Community Caterina Fake posted: "We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!"
    I was actually working with my Flickr stream when I flipped over to Bloglines (recently acquired by Ask ) and noticed a post from Jeff Jarvis. Wondered if I was seeing things since the lead Flickr news item showing on my page was about a new feature added Mar. 18. The lead item at Ludicorp is from Jan. 18. Given the ramp-up time on this deal a tad better organization could be expected ...
    So how will this deal work? According to the Flickr post:
    -- Flickr will not morph into Yahoo Photos, which will get some Flickr features. Other areas around Yahoo "will also be Flickrized where Flickrization would be good."
    -- Free accounts will have more storage and uploads; pro accounts also will be improved and the price, currently $59 a year (discounted to $41.77), will be cheaper.
    -- The Flickr staff will be staying on.
    Given our digital meme feature, can't pass this up -- Flickr won best blog "meme" at the 2005 Bloggies this weekend.
    Update: Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens tells CNET News that Flickr will remain a standalone site for now but that its staff will relocate from Vancouver, BC, to Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale. "We look forward to working with them for their innovation and product development across the Yahoo Network in the coming months."

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)
    Ourmedia Launches
    Media storage and sharing for everyone


    (at the moment, their servers aren't fully handling the new load, but ourmedia is a service to keep an eye on. -dm)

    Posted by dan at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
    Mobile Video on the Go: Geo-referencing Photos
    This article will discuss two topics in geo-referencing. First, we'll talk about how you geo-encode, or geo-reference, photos so that you can link them to a map. Second, we'll talk about how you display your GPS on a map and then link photos to particular
    Posted by dan at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
    Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr
    Posted by dan at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
    SXSW2005i : Video, Audio, Image and Text
    Rocketboom posts a collection of video, audio, image, and text from SXSW 2005

    Posted by yatta at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

    March 20, 2005

    Micropayment Smart Codes

    At first glance, Micropayment Smart Codes: New Online Payment System to Help Artists Make a Living seems like a jillion other schemes out there. I'm interested in this one, however, because the author, John S. James, proved himself to be a profound thinker and hands-on innovator when I first began exploring social cyberspaces more than 20 years ago. In Tools for Thought, I wrote about Origins, a practical spiritual practice that popped up on one of the first sophisticated BBS systems, CommuniTree. Yesterday, twenty two years after I stumbled on it, I heard from John James, who created CommuniTree and ORIGINS in 1978. He offers his Smart Codes plan under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

    I designed a new way of making small payments online, with advantages over current systems such as credit cards or PayPal. It uses secret, computer-controlled ("smart") payment codes that can reproduce any number of "children" codes, through any number of generations, creating family trees that inherit options, properties, and services. Anyone with a smart code can pay anyone else who has one. And anybody who buys or is given a smart code can use it immediately, like a universal gift card that can receive money also -- without ever registering, logging in, giving personal information, or having a user name or password.

    This payment system could help artists sell downloads of their work at low prices through social networks worldwide, with little or no startup expense or hassle. It could help solve the download-copy problem by allowing supporters of the artist or the art to buy download permissions in bulk and give them away to selected communities, which could pass them on -- so that most downloads could be free while the artist still gets paid for every one. Also, smart codes will help organizations raise money -- especially for causes likely to be recognized as historically important (for reasons explained below).

    The estimated processing cost per financial transaction with smart codes is about a tenth of a cent
    .

    Via Smart Mobs

    Posted by yatta at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
    Blogspot Eclipses NYTimes.com in Traffic

    More fun with Alexa, this time from Rick Bruner. Collectively the blogs hosted on Blogspot (e.g. most Blogger blogs) get more visitors than NYTimes.com.

    Posted by yatta at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)
    TiVo's going to Japan

    All we have now is a headline that reads "TiVo to launch in Japan by 2006 - report" and this short blurb:

    TiVo Inc. is expected to launch its digital recording service in Japan as early as next year, according to a published report Sunday. The Alviso, Calif.-based company will form a Japanese unit and is looking to partner with local cable television networks and Internet providers as part of the deal, reported the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

    We believe the headline to be an imperative statement, telling reporters to do their job and publish some details on this story; there's not a lot more in the new about this story yet. We'll update this post when new details (by which we mean any details) emerge. One question remains: do the Japanese even like gadgets?

    Via PVRblog

    Posted by yatta at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
    Re-Mixable (videoblogging) Stock Footage Repository
    Hi, Videobloggers,

    I would like to announce that I set up a file within the videobloggers group for members to create and share short unedited uideo and audio clips members to re-mix within their own vlogs and collaborative projects.

    This can be z great resources for members to tell interesting stories using re-mixable visuals and audio clips.

    We have enough members to compile all the clips we need to capture everyday life all over the globe. This is a dream come true for would-be videographers and internet filmmakers.

    Let's start uploading clips here for everyone's enjoyment http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/files/RE-MIXABLE%20STOCK% 20FOOTAGE/

    JV - Free 4 Filmmakerz


    (I hope they don't mind us sharing this with the rest of the community. Drop me a line if we should pull this back ;) -kc.)

    Via videoblogging at Yahoo! Groups

    Posted by yatta at 11:44 PM | Comments (1)
    Streaming Media East 2005: - May 17-18 2005 - New York, NY.

    Streaming Media East 2005: New York, NY
    The exhibitors list has been published.. Some interesting things, like Webcast in a Box (although I think it is Real only). What I don't understand is why companies continue to market themselves and their products as "proprietary". For me, a streaming media professional, this means, stay away, far away..

    Via sLop

    Posted by yatta at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)
    StreamTranscoder
    Take one incoming stream and offer in multiple formats

    This command line application was designed to provide opportunities for broadcasters to support multiple types of formats/bitrates/samplerates for their streams. It will act as both a listener client (for many different types of streams) AND as a source client (for many different types of streaming servers.
    Posted by yatta at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
    AFP Sues Google Over Google News
    : Reuters reports that Agence France Presse is suing Google in U.S. District Court, claiming that Google News uses AFP content -- images, headlines, stories -- without permission. AFP wants damages of at least $17.5 million and is asking the court to bar the service from using AFP content. AFP claims that it has asked Google to cease and desist but the company has not acted on its request.

    The economics of this could get interesting: AFP wants damages for a service that is free to users and ad-free; some, myself included, think one reason the site remains ad-free and in beta is to avoid complications/confrontations like this. AFP says Google News is damaging its subscription-only service.

    Many other news organizations have found ways to be comfortable with Google News, learning how best to use it to drive traffic. For instance, some reg-only outlets allow those following links to read that story without registering and then offer a registration form when they try to see another story on the site. Others simply put the registration form up. BTW, I found out about the suit by reading Google News; the image with the story is a thumbnail of Google's logo on CNN International.

    For my part, the story uses some questionable language when it says flat out that "Google News gathers photos and news stories from around the Web and posts them on its news site..." Google News often includes story leads with headlines and links and it showcases photos on news servers by using coding but it does not post news stories. The whole point of the service is to expose readers to a variety of news sources and take them directly to the source. In fact, one of the longest-running complaints was that Google was linking too deep.

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)
    Notes on Internet Movie Financing

    The holy grail of independent movie financing will be the ability for independent movie makers to utilize the internet to raise funds for their movies, collecting a dollar here and a dollar there from a prospective mass audience.  To contribute to the overuse of the 'Long Tail' meme, let's call it the 'Long Tail' of movie financing.  I've seen a few nascent attempts at this, with Civilian.com's Ethan Hawke movie being the most prominent.  MoviesForTheMasses is a new entry in the category and it will be interesting to see how successful they can be without any recognizable names.

    Hollywood Reporter

    .
    Posted by yatta at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
    TiVo 30-Second Commercial Skip Hack

    eCoustics has instructions on how to program a button on the Tivo Remote to act as a 30 second skip button, like the ReplayTV has. I still remember the days owning a ReplayTV 5000 series that automatically skipped commercials.

    Details on how to get your Tivo to have a skip button visit eCoustics.

    Posted by yatta at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)
    Amateurs vs Professionals

    In yesterday's discussion and in Charles Leadbeater's discussion the day before, there was a lot of talk about the rights of amateurs, the "pro-am revolution" and other arguments about how amateur content and creativity was important. I described how in the blogging world, it's mostly the people who create content who "pay" in contrast to the professional content world where it is the creator who gets paid. I talked about how Creative Commons was really helpful for amateurs who were more passionate about having their works widely accessible than making money. This is not to say that Creative Commons isn't useful for other things of course.

    There was a bit of slippage in the discussion in the afternoon when several people pointed out that maybe I was suggesting that amateurs shouldn't/couldn't become professionals. The point, if I understood it correctly, assumed that most amateurs wanted to be professionals and that somehow amateurs were proto-professionals or professional wannabes. At least some of them.

    I think this is a mischaracterization and maybe a reason to dump the word "amateur". I think that in the case of many amateurs such as many bloggers, Wikipedians and most open source developers, the amateurs are happy being amateurs and don't feel that they are in any way inferior to their professional counterparts. Many of the heads of open source projects have a day job, but probably believe that they are superior to comparable professionals at Microsoft or other software companies. I doubt that many Wikipedians wish that they could get paid for what they do. There are very few people who prefer professional sex to amateur sex. (I think I got this example from Steve Weber's book.)

    My sister pointed this out to me last week by IM as well. I think the answer lies in the mode of production. Money creates a power relationship between the payer and the payee. I think cases where the production is happening in some sort of enterprise or a "firm" where having a manager and having access to resources allows production to be more efficiently, financial relationships and "professionalism" seem to "feel OK." On the other hand, when working in what Yochai Benkler calls "commons-based peer-production," the "professionalism" is replaced by amateur passion as a primary driver.

    I pointed out several times yesterday that I don't want to impinge on the rights of professionals, but I believe that monopolistic professional organizations such as rights collection agencies, the Hollywood lobbies and Microsoft are hurting the ability for amateur artists from participating by creating technology and legislation that focuses exclusively on protection instead of the sharing of creativity. I think it is the role of government to call into question the practices of these monopolies which are the unfortunately byproduct of an unchecked free market economy and prevent the passing of legislature that increases the power of these monopolies such as software patents and extension of copyright terms. Instead, they should be focusing on activities that make it more difficult for such monopolies to form such as focusing on open standards and open source and whenever possible, preventing proprietary standards from being funded by public funds.

    Comment - TrackBack

    Posted by yatta at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)
    Remote Vjs control

    For the VJ who wants to join clubbers on the dance floor and still keep control over the video, Belmer Negrillo has imagined Go Dance . So far, there's only a prototype. But the concept is brilliant.

    The tool would allow Vjs to control the video mixing remotely, without wires, and with more natural gestures (than keyboard, mouse and sliders).

    process_03[1].jpg belner1.jpg

    People could also use the tool in a kind of simpler "user mode" to play with the video in the screen, learning how it works on the fly by looking at the visual feedbacks.

    The prototype consists in a wrist brace, 8 pin-buttons (in fact RFId tags) with icons that identifies basic commands for VJ and a box connected to the computer by USB port.

    The pin-buttons, which can be attached to the garment by pins or Velcro, are basic commands (play or increase speed). Besides, the VJ can use arm and body movements to produce analog and continuous changes into the video properties.

    Video scenario.
    Related: DJHammer.

    Via we make money not art

    Posted by yatta at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
    Kaiser Foundation Survey: Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds

    The Kaiser Family Foundation has just released the results of a survey of media use among 3rd through 12th graders. More than 2,000 youth participated in the project, which comprised answering detailed questionnaires and, for nearly 700 self-selected participants, maintaining seven-day media diaries.

    The survey, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds, found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using “new media” like computers, the Internet and video games, but without cutting back on the time they spend with “old” media like TV, print and music. They manage this by media-multitasking.

    Via morph

    Posted by yatta at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

    March 18, 2005

    Wired News: New Line on Mobile Sex
    I think the parallels between amateur journalism and amateur pr0n need to be explored more, and I'm willing to do the research.

    Posted by yatta at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)
    MovieSeer and IFILM Provide 3G Video To Asia

    Movieseer has licensed video content from iFilms for distribution in 13 countries and territories in Asia. The content includes “more than 20,000 pieces of digital media including short movies, video clips, movie trailers, TV clips and music videos”. “MovieSeer will create a portal of select properties from the IFILM catalog reformatted for distribution across all mobile phone platforms”, and the service will initially launch in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia.

    Posted by yatta at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)
    Microformats could describe online news intelligently | Holovaty.com

    A lot of the buzz at South by Southwest was about the concept of microformats, which are lightweight, informal standards for adding metadata to Web pages by using existing XHTML elements. Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer both spoke enthusiastically about the idea, and I'm grateful I had a chance to speak with both personally.

    A good example is XFN, a way of identifying human relationships within a Web page's code by putting a rel attribute on <a> tags. (I've written about XFN previously.) For instance, I'm friends with Simon Willison, so I put rel="friend" in the link to his Web site, and services such as rubhub do cool things with the aggregated data.

    It works, because it's easy for humans to understand, easy to implement, uses existing infrastructure (XHTML) and solves a small, specific problem.

    Posted by yatta at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)
    Measuring the Blogosphere's Influence

    Technorati's David Sifry writes that the following chart shows the most influential media sites on the web are still well-funded mainstream media (MSM) sites, however, a lot of bloggers are achieving a significant amount of attention and influence. Blogs like Boing Boing and Instapundit are highly influential, especially among technology and political thought leaders, and sites like Gizmodo are seeing as much influence as mainstream media sites like MTV.com.

    Slide00061

    Via Micro Persuasion

    Posted by yatta at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)
    MacKinnon's "Blogging, Journalism..." roundup at The Nation
    Just saw that Rebecca MacKinnon had an article published in The Nation today, with excerpts of comments made by those who participated in January's "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" session at Harvard. If you hadn't followed this event before, then this wrapup should provide some really good insights into what went on.

    Via The Media Drop

    Posted by yatta at 02:51 PM | Comments (0)
    search.cpan.org: Benjamin Trott / WWW-Blog-Metadata-0.02
    Extract metadata from blogs, like feed and FOAF info
    Posted by yatta at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
    Help defend bloggers’ rights to keep their sources secret

    Boing Boing is going into bat for the California 3 in the Apple v Bloggers case and needs your help:

    Boing Boing will be signing onto a bloggers’ “amicus brief.” Our lawyer is Stanford’s Lauren Gelman, and she needs your help for the brief. She writes: “I need links to news stories broken by bloggers– things a court can look at and say ‘this looks like what we traditionally think of as journalism.’ I am particularly interested in examples of stories based on sources, but any news will do. I will use these both as facts for the brief and I want to attach printouts from the blogs as attachments to it. I’m looking for as many as 50 examples, but I need at least 10.”

    If your able to help email your comments with links to gelman@stanford.edu.

    Via The Blog Herald: more blog news more often

    Posted by yatta at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
    Podcast advertising RSS metadata
    A picture named moneymoneymoney.gifPodcasting News proposes a way for casters to include metadata about advertisements that go in their RSS feeds, so that when they display a link to your podcast they can also display your ads. They asked me about this a few days ago, and I said it's a good idea, and a good use of RSS. There are too many plans for world domination in the podcast world, frankly I don't think any of them will work. A mini-dotcom boom. The people at Podcasting News are proposing something more modest, more realistic, more cooperative, less about domination and more about working together.

    Via Scripting News

    Posted by yatta at 02:46 PM | Comments (1)
    South Wales Police launch 'virtual' police station

    South Wales Police have launched the UK’s first 'virtual' police station. The interactive kiosk has materialised at Mumbles Police Station, Swansea.

    In partnership with British telco BT, South Wales Police has installed a multimedia kiosk in the police station’s renovated foyer. People can use the kiosk’s videophone to speak directly to an officer at the nearest Police Control Room 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In an emergency, the foyer can be locked to provide a safe refuge for anyone under threat.

    It is the first location in the South Wales Police area to use the interactive technology that will be installed across the region during 2005.
    Posted by yatta at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)
    Buffalo Launches LinkTheater, First Wi-Fi Enabled DVD Player
    Buffalo Technology is first to market with a DVD player that supports 802.11g Wi-Fi networking (also supports an external 2.4GHz antenna for increased range). The major benefit of the LinkTheater progressive scan DVD player is that it enables multiple users to wirelessly access DVD-Movies and regular files stored on disc - on their TV, computer or laptop. Based on a EM8620L decoder chipset from Sigma Designs, the chipset is the first of its kind to support Windows Media Video 9 and Windows Media Video High Definition formats. As a result, the LinkTheater supports resolutions up to 1280x720 pixels and offers DVD up-conversion to 720p/1080i.

    Posted by yatta at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)
    Replicating Rapid-Prototyper

    Adrian Bowyer, from Bath University (England), envisions a make-it-all machine that would enable you to design and manufacture yourself plates and many other consumer goods.

    The idea is based on the "rapid prototype machines" used by industry to make plastic auto parts. A concept is detailed in 3D on a computer, and the machine manufactures the item automatically.

    050317_device_03[1].jpg

    Bowyer thinks the machines, called Replicating Rapid-Prototypers, will even manufacture themselves, as little robotic factories could be instructed to make copies of themselves, and the clones would make more, and so on until the price of each became reasonable.

    The researcher says he'll put his plans in stages over the next four years on the Internet, so anyone can build one of these self-cloning devices.

    The idea is not new. Bowyer's device, if he succeeds, would be a techno-child of the never-built Universal Constructor, proposed in the 1950s by John von Neumann.

    Via LifeScience. More details in PhysOrg.

    Via we make money not art

    Posted by yatta at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)
    BBC to pilot local interactive TV news service
    The service will be available through an interactive application on satellite television, together with on-demand bulletins on other platforms.

    “They will be as local as our radio services, serving individual cities, conurbations and counties,” said Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, speaking at an engagement in Birmingham.

    Satellite viewers will be able to see the bulletins at fixed points within each hour, accessed through the red button on their remote control.

    The same regularly updated sequences, up to ten minutes long, will also be available instantly on demand: on the internet, on broadband television, or even mobile phones.

    The aim is to create a new model of local television, based on news and information, in partnership with the community, working with the public, private and voluntary sectors to build and sustain the service.

    [...snip...]

    To deliver all 60 bulletins by satellite on a similar model would require 12 television channels, which could be reduced to 4 by limiting the service to a quarter screen. Even then, each ten minute bulletin would only be shown once an hour.

    However, in the future local bulletins could be recorded through a personal video recorder, and cable and new broadband television platforms may ultimately make the bulletins available on demand. When analogue television is evenutally switched off, local digital terrestrial television could even be a possibility.
    Posted by yatta at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)
    Free AV Mixer with Effects (Mac)
    Just saw this on versiontracker and wondered if it's useful for anyone.
    Neuromixer Pro is a full-featured DJ style video mixer designed for live performance visual artists and musicians. With NM Pro, you can change playback speed, select loop range, set cue points, forward and reverse on two seperate video banks. The ability to control NM Pro via MIDI hardware such as a MIDI keyboard frees you from the restrictions of the mouse, allowing total control over the videos.
    Posted by yatta at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)
    Can’t We Just Make The Internet More Like TV?

    This Register article, Don’t let etopians define net literacy, is based upon a larger paper, Influence and Control: Getting Citizens to Behave in a Digital Society, part of Manifesto for a Digital Britain from the Institute for Public Policy Research. While the Register article is something of a muddle, the paper has a clearer, albeit surprisingly disturbing, message:

    The current state of the Internet is often characterised as being in the midst of a battle between anarchy and control: a fight between proprietary models and the open source movement, consumers and producers, rights-holders and the “copyleft,” and moral guardians against misbehaving users. The outcomes of these battles do have important public policy ramifications, especially for the intellectual property regime and the mere conduit status of ISPs, which should be taken seriously. It is important the Government consider in the long term the choices we are currently facing and that, should either side win outright, the public is likely to be the loser.

    For the majority of the public, the battles go unnoticed, and bear no direct relevance to the every day workings of their lives and we should not lose sight of this. In so far as it is the role of regulation to protect the public, we need to find a policy approach which navigates a way through anarchy and control, does not compromise the functionality of the Internet for all but only provides choice where choice is needed. […]

    […] If media literacy is about empowering consumers and enabling them to go online with confidence then providing so much choice will lead to failure. Instead there is a strong argument for limiting choice, in Internet terms the number of available sites to visit, with a focus on fitting the services to the citizen. This is not to recommend the World Wide Web as a whole be filtered to provide only government-endorsed services citizens feel safe with, but instead to recommend the provision of a ‘walled garden’ service aimed at adults, and with a non-commercial bias that can provide access to functional services –– e-banking, local government information, news etc. –– limit choice and empower citizens to use the Internet in a way which works for them, rather than being forced to consider the ‘battles’ that may rage in the wider Internet world. […]

    […] A ‘‘limited’’ World Wide Web in the sense suggested above, combined with an eBay-like rating system, would provide a guarantee of safety and validity of content accessible within the walled garden. It would thus reduce chances of individuals accessing harmful or undesirable content accidentally and could limit calls to the government to further censor the Internet using ‘cleanfeed’’ technology.

    Of course this system may not meet all of the future challenges the entirety of the Internet poses. However it limits the panic that suddenly people will have no idea what and when to watch programmes with the absence of a watershed. Even in the absence of such a longstanding regulatory tool it is likely that people will continue to stick with known brands, such as the BBC, Channel 4 etc. and watch output created by them. They may do it at times more convenient to them, and powerful brands may not remain the BBC and Channel 4 for long, but nonetheless consumers will not be thrown into a frightening wilderness without assistance.

    “Panic?” And here I thought that the perception was that the US policy paradigm was too paternalistic. This is spooky stuff, arguing that we need to regulate the internet for the good of the mass consumer.

    And, although she asserts that the copyright/control fight is somehow beside the point for the majority of online users, I would argue that a large number of the agents responsible for the “panic” among online users are acting specifically to advance their position in the fight between copyright and information anarchy.

    Posted by yatta at 02:10 PM | Comments (1)
    Extreme Usability

    A month ago I participated in the Open Source Usability Sprint.

    For me it was revelatory. Something I started doing last August and September with Tantek Celik, at Technorati (I used to work there). We would sit, side-by-side, working on the usability of the site, where we picked through about 50 little niggling problems that I'd found over the previous 9 months (yes, I'd found more.. but fixing 50 was great) to make those little problems go away. We started out deciding just to fix a couple of things, so I took him through the user's perspective about why something might be broken from their perspective, and it was boring, tedious, time-consuming to do this.. and yet.. immediately as we refreshed the changes, we would both see the improvement and understand how users would like the change. So we fixed another and another.

    These were problems that I knew about, had documented, or had found in several rounds of user testing. I did what is common in usability, documenting these issues. The engineers would read the reports, comment on them in conversation, quote the user's, and generally agree. But then, nothing would change. And that's not to say that these engineers at Technorati, or the ones I've worked with elsewhere, weren't brilliant or personable, or desiring of good usability and user satisfaction. They are.

    But the reality is, written reports, while read and interesting to engineers, are hard to translate into change. But this extreme usability (we didn't call it that then) actually worked (though I left Technorati just after so it didn't continue there that long).

    One thing to note is that this sort of extreme usability takes different forms depending on the stage of engineering development. I have worked with it at early state needs assessment and prototyping, in the form of rapid iteration during development of working software and web services, and even well after a site or software has been in use. What is important to know though, is that all the usability work that would normally be done, whether needs assessment, user profiling, interviews of one sort or another, or led discussion focus groups, has to be done on the usability side, and reporting and documentation is still necessary. But after that, extreme usability or pair programming with engineers is very effective, just as engineers will spend time coding and developing before they get to the pair programming session with a usability person.

    This fall, I worked with several engineers, and I just insisted we sit down, and pick through the problems side-by-side. Wow, they said. This is fantastic, we are making really good progress and users are responding quickly and favorably to the changes!

    By the time we got to the Usability Sprint in February, where we did this for three days, and named it as extreme usability, I have become fully convinced that this style of usability and engineering partnership is really key to the next generation of interface and information architecture development. It's pair programming. And I highly recommend it.

    Posted by yatta at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)
    Berners-Lee: Web Design Hampers Mobile Internet
    Speaking at a seminar in Finland, WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee attributed delays in adoption of the mobile web to a lack of site designs aimed at mobile users. "Everyone was supposed to be browsing the Web with their mobile phone, but the problem is that it has not happened," he said. Once designers get it, the mobile internet "will be a huge enabler for the industry ... and for big profits."

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)
    Blog reader survey
    The results from Blogads' very unscientific survey of about 30,000 blog readers are in:
    Last year, 61% of responding blog readers were over 30 years old. This year, 75% are over 30 years old.

    Last year, 40% had family incomes greater than $90,000. This year, 43% exceed that figure.

    Year over year, some figures are remarkably stable. One reader in five is a blogger. As was the case last year, exactly 1.7% are CEOs. Almost the same number (44%) spend more than $500 for air tickets. 86% purchased music online, last year and this. Last year, 79% were men. This year, 75% are men.
    Posted by yatta at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)
    2005-2006 Rhizome.org Net Art Commission
    Calling All Net Artists!. Are you an artist looking for fine financial fertilizer this growing season? Time is running out to apply for a 2005-2006 Rhizome.org Net Art Commission. Construct a web-based proposal explaining your project and submit it to Rhizome by 2005 March 23. Winners will be selected by May 1 by a jury of new media experts (Rachel Greene, Francis Hwang, Eduardo Kac, Melinda Rackham, and Jemima Rellie), as well as by the Rhizome.org community through a democratic, online voting system. Visit http://Rhizome.org/ to learn more about how to assemble a proposal, submit it, and view the recently completed 2004-2005 commissions! http://rhizome.org/commissions/ [Rhizome.org Net Art News]
    Posted by yatta at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)

    March 17, 2005

    The Long Tail: The real meaning of 80/20
    The general articulation of the principle is: "for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes."
    Posted by yatta at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
    Glossary of TV downloading terms

    Setting up your BitTorrent client to scour RSS feeds for new episodes of your favorite TV shows (as described in Philip Torrone’s great Broadcatching How-To) is a great way to break free from the shackes of TV executives’ scheduling whims and put off buying a Tivo, but the jargon can be a little challenging to the beginner. To remedy this, Slyck News has put up a quick guide called Lingo of the TV Downloading Scene. Do you want HR-HDTV or PDTV? What’s a LOKi? Now you know.

    Via The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 11:37 PM | Comments (1)
    Tail wagging the dog
    I’m seeing a lot of write-ups about The Long Tail these days. Has anyone else noticed that this is just a refinement and extension of Content is Not King?...
    Posted by yatta at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)
    Digital Content Everywhere and The Flag Will Soon Fly
    The following article is written by an industry insider, anonymously referred to here as Steve Sanders.

    Sometimes it's tough to separate fact from fiction from wishful thinking at IDF (Intel Developer Forum) but you have to try or you'd swear that tomorrow you're going to go out and buy an ultralite notebook with a battery life of days that you could use just everywhere. Intel unveiled their new dual and multicore processors that made yesteryear's Big Blue iron pale by comparison. It was pure coincidence that AMD also announced their technology the same week.

    But the new notebooks have big screens to die for. They have wireless connectivity to your home, office, neighbor and beyond. You can put it into your car - think MTV's Pimp My Ride - or your rented spaceship. You have the power to multitask to your heart content at the office and then still go home and make movies, watch TV or go visually online to talk to friends around the globe.

    The new processors are great but something is missing. Oh yes, an operating system and applications. Longhorn is "coming." Applications are "coming."vBarrett and his team probably spend more time pushing and encouraging partners to step up to the plate than they do to keeping pace with Gordon Moore's 40-year-old transistor law (doubling the number of transistors on the chip every 12-18 months). Today we've got web commerce, messaging, video, audio, wireless computing and implementation in every phase of life and commerce. While IDF sessions spent a lot of time talking about the enterprise, everyone's heart is set on mobile computing and the digital home.
    Posted by yatta at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)
    Philips introduces wireless LAN semiconductor solution for mobile phones
    Dutch electronics firm Philips has introduced a low-power 802.11g wireless LAN semiconductor system-in-a-package (SiP) solution for the mobile phone market. The solution is to enable consumers to access voice, data and multimedia content through WLAN networks up to five times faster than current 802.11b products on the market without compromising the battery life of the mobile phone. The solution reduces receive and transmit operating power consumption. The low-power 802.11g WLAN SiP is pin- and software-compatible with Philips' existing low-power 802.11b SiP, enabling mobile phone manufacturers to upgrade existing WLAN-capable mobile phone designs.
    Posted by yatta at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)
    Record Every Phone Call on your Nokia Series 60

    Israeli company, Natural Widget, has launched Natural Recorder, an application that automatically records every phone call you make or receive.

    If you have a Nokia Series 60 phone, you can download and install the software for $11.95. Thereafter, all your calls are recorded until you choose to delete them.

    While recording a phone call isn't that difficult, what's actually clever about this is the memory management system. It claims that you'll never run out of memory, as the phone automatically deletes the oldest messages to free up more space - unless you've specifically saved them.

    This is a great app for say, clarifying a previous conversation you've forgotten the details of. But, it's one more reason to get a shag phone if you don't want your partner listening to all those calls that you've forgotten to delete.

    It also means that we'll have to assume that, like email and sms, voice calls will potentially live forever and be able to listened to by everyone else in the world.

    So be careful with those endearments and indiscretions. They may well come back to haunt you.

    Story source: Israel 21 C

    Via The Mobile Technology Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
    Fanscription
    Here's what I ask of you: I'd like you each to volunteer to transcribe one episode every three months. In exchange, I will credit you with a link of your choice in the transcript, and thank you in the following show.
    Posted by yatta at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
    Radio joins the "tagging" phenomenon

    Yesterday, a team from BBC Radio showed how it allowed listeners to "tag" songs using their cell phones - thanks to Phonetags - and they pointed out how this information helps to organize songs in different ways -- suggesting new playlists for DJs, but also helping people find other songs, albums, or shows of interest. In their own words: With Phonetags you can 'bookmark' any song you hear on BBC 6 Music. Just text X to 64046 when you hear the song. Then rate, tag and share your songs online.
    This is the kind of next-gen thinking I was talking about in my Vertical Listening essay. [via SmartMobs]

    Via Tod Maffin's I Love Radio .org

    Posted by yatta at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)
    Samsung to launch monitors for color blind

    Samsung will launch this year an LCD monitor with color correction technology for people with dyschromatopsia or color blindness.



    The color correction technology, named Magic Vision, allows users to control red, green, and blue at 10 levels so viewers with impaired color vision can adjust the intensity of colors that give them difficulty.

    Via Digital Chosunibo.

    Via we make money not art

    Posted by yatta at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Emerging Technology Conference on Folksonomy

    Tim Finin reports "Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess was a panel [yesterday] at the O'Reilly

    Emerging Technology Conference
    in San Diego that included Clay Shirky, Stewart Butterfield (of Flickr) , Joshua Schachter (of del.icio.us), and Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia).

    Cory Doctorow has an 'impressionistic transcript' (I'm not sure what that means -- I guess he's not promising word-for-word accuracy.)

    It's pretty interesting, as panels go, and includes some discussion of RDF and the semantic web".

    thank you Tim !

    Via Smart Mobs

    Posted by yatta at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)
    +he Future Beautiful: 10 Lessons for First-time Documentary Filmmakers.
    watch the movie (this is a windows media file, a quicktime file can be found below)

    I stopped updating this site for a little while and consequently got something done. The result is a little documentary about two NYC street artists and their global guerilla project: fake sneakers. I think they’re the future. Spend 12 minutes (QT, WMV) with them and make up your own mind. Then go to IndTV (a new cable channel set to lauch in late summer) and vote for your favorite video, by which I mean vote for our video, +he future beautiful :: skewvile (5 minute cut). It’s been selected by IndTV as a finalist for best short video. But the public picks the winner; like an American Idol for documentary filmmakers. So show us the love, America.

    When you’re back from voting, here are some important and umimportant notes for first-time documentary filmmakers....


    (Good stuff in there. Go check out the rest of the list at octomoto.com -kc. )

    Posted by yatta at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)
    Lessig Revises Book With Public Wiki
    "Always wanted to see your words in print? The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Lawrence Lessig is revising his book 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace' using a wiki-based, public discussion. The proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated. . All royalties are going to Creative Commons, plus the advance. "

    Via Slashdot

    Posted by yatta at 10:19 PM | Comments (0)
    My (Videoblogging) Phone Bill

    So.. I finally received my phone bill which reflects all of these vlog posts from my phone.

    Here is the breakdown from my bill:
    ADDL DATA $0.03/KB 986 KB(S) 29.58
    MULTIMEDIA SNT 5 EVT(S) 2.00
    >100KB MLTIMEDIA SNT 12 EVT(S) 9.60

    So, deciphering this, I got charged almost $30.00 for data usage, $2 for 5 MMS messages that were less than 100KB and almost $10 for MMS messages that were greater than 100KB. Setting aside the data usage for now (because I think that is from some streaming tests that I was doing), the MMS messages are either $.40 or $.80 per message. Considering that I am using this for video blogging, almost all of these messages are going to be greater than 100KB (my phone/ATTWireless has a 300KB sending limit) and therefore will cost $.80 each.

    Now for the rant: I attempted to change my wireless plan with ATTWireless online. Unfortunately, in order to change my plan, I have to "migrate" to Cingular who recently been bought ATTWireless. This in itself isn't so bad but low and behold, I would have to get a new phone, pay an activation fee for the privilege and signup for an another year of service. Yeah!!!!!!!! I love wireless providers (not).

    Ok, so after calling the wonderful 611 number they provide, I talked to someone who had no idea what MMS is. In any case, I found that I could change the optional services on my account and for $2 more than what I am paying for text messages already I could add 20 "picture messages" to the service. So I went for it..

    Now, I still have some concerns:
    The main one is: Will I still get charged more for MMS messages that are greater than 100KB?

    In any case, as Jay brought up to me, first, I need a WiFi phone with Skype and second, micropayments suck since I need to decide whether or not I actually want to pay for posting a video to my blog each and every time I shoot one.

    Posted by yatta at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
    iDive digital video shoebox


    iDive, the "digital video shoebox" is a media management application. Designed to sit alongside Digital Video editing applications, and to integrate seamlessly with your digital hub, iDive promises to eliminate the frustration and time-wasting in locating and viewing clips hidden amongst hours of footage, by simplifying visualisation, tagging, storage, organisation and retrieval of digital video clips and photos. [Mac OS X Downloads - Video]

    RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)
    Why haven't the news media mobilized to advocate journalism?

    Researchers from the University of Connecticut recently released the results of "The Future of the First Amendment," a two-year, $1 million research project commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. After questioning more than 100,000 high school students, nearly 8,000 teachers, and more than 500 administrators and principals, they came to the conclusion that America's high schools are leaving the First Amendment behind, that educators are failing to give high school students an appreciation of the First Amendment's guarantees.

    Well, duh. Public schools systems have long been grappling with tight finances and now must divert funds, time and effort to fulfill the requirements of No Child Left Behind. It's no surprise that civics lessons are no longer standard curriculum. So if school boards aren't going to take responsibility for teaching the First Amendment, who is?

    At the Whose News symposium at Harvard, we spent a lot of time collecting ideas on how to save journalism. The discussion was very newsroom-focused, very "What can we do?" to win back credibility and public trust and to save journalism values. Someone - I believe it was Merrill Brown - pointed out that it was not all about newsrooms, that it was also very much an external problem: Public understanding of the role of the journalism in a democratic society has eroded, and no matter what changes news media make, they are unlikely to bring back audiences who just don't care. This begged the question of why the news media have let this happen, which, unfortunately, no one asked.

    The news media, as individual professionals and as corporate entities, continue to devote substantial resources to supporting local, state and regional press organizations and to maintaining powerful associations like the Newspaper Association of America and the National Association of Broadcasters, which address career and business interests. But if news is more than a job and more than a business, and public apathy or ignorance is part of the reason news businesses are losing audiences, why aren't there institutionalized, industry-wide and industry-supported initiatives that work with school systems, government institutions and civic groups to raise public awareness and understanding of speech and press freedoms and to educate younger generations? Why haven't the news media mobilized to advocate journalism?

    Via morph

    Posted by yatta at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)
    U. S. Digital Media Consumers Rights Act of 2005

    The Digital Media Consumers Rights Act of 2005 (DMCA) attempts to restore the historical balance in copyright law, to re-establish the Betamax standard, and to restore valid scientific research. The text of the bill will be available soon at http://thomas.loc.gov. [INDUCE Act (IICA)]

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)
    iChat at 60 MPH
    LR tipster Brett J. points us to this fascinating and successful experiment: iChat 2-way video at 60 mph. Before you say "so what?" imagine using this cheap and easy technology for your reporters to go live while en route to a big story - or even from the scene. (Use the "Pitch Box" to the left if you want to let us know about a great story.)

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)
    Comcast Chairman/CEO on the future of TV
    In a Lost Remote exclusive, Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts clarifies this week's announcement of a partnership with TiVo. The DVR's interface and functionality will come to Comcast customers, but TiVo hardware won't be required. "We have about a year's worth of work before we hit the ground and have it integrated."

    Roberts also comments on the possibility that Viacom will split into two companies, one broadcast and one cable. "This is probably [Sumner Redstone's] way of saying, 'I’m not so sure I want to be in broadcast television long term.'"

    Read the entire interview for comments about Blockbuster, a la carte cable pricing and the Internet's role in the future of television.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 10:10 PM | Comments (2)
    Drupal module : Creative Commons license
    We have just released the first version of our Creative Commons licensing module for the open-source CMS Drupal (which powers the DigitalBicycle community). This module allows users to assign a Creative Commons license to their content when they post to the community or upload files. It also allows a site administrator to assign a license to the entire web site.

    The module uses the Creative Commons API and can automatically update when new Creative Commons licenses are available (for example, the more recent sampling licenses). Admins can restrict the licenses available to users, as well as require specific metadata be included.

    This version is a release for Drupal 4.5.x, and the current CVS is tested and working under Drupal 4.6. If you are using Drupal, then download the latest version from Drupal.org and let us know what you think.


    (All right! Nice job guys! -kc.)

    Via DigitalBicycle

    Posted by yatta at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)
    ETECH Notes: Emerging Massive Media
    Here are my notes from Paula Le Dieu's Emerging Massive Media, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Paula is the outgoing head of the BBC's Creative Archive project, which will turn all the material in the BBC's archive into stuff that can be remixed and reused by Britons. She's now taken on the gig of running the International Creative Commons, though she will still be working on the Archive.
    Audiences are acquiring media under their own terms, or more frighteningly for the incumbents, acquiring it from their own suppliers on the networks. Broadcasters broadcast to active, self-commissioning audiences, who decided on their own the what where when and how.

    Prosumers are becoming the mass media -- but what about the massive media? How do they compete with their audiences for attention?

    For many massive media orgs, the competition is viewed as heavily weighed in their favor. Every time Wikipedia trounces yet another massive media org (e.g. the NYT yesterday) it creates ripples of doubt in the massive orgs.

    Last year Joi Ito gave a keynote at a TV con, to international TV execs: he said: "Re DRM: you will win. You will convince your audiences not to use your content." When Patrick Kennedy VP of Sony Digital Networks said, "Get your stuff out there any way you can, youngsters don't even know who you are anymore. Worry about the business model later." Massive media orgs aren't comfortable anymore.

    Via Boing Boing

    Posted by yatta at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
    iPodder 2.0 Release Elevates Podcasting

    internetnews.com: "iPodder 2.0 Release Elevates Podcasting". Update: a Japanese language version of the same article.

    Via Andrew Grumet's Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)
    MMS Launched Too Early?

    Cellular News carries a story about a recent mobile (un-named) event in which a panel of experts concluded that perhaps (very tentatively) MMS was launched too early and that's the reason it hasn't taken off. The panel consisted of senior people in operators and analysts.

    What they actually mean is that they launched it (backed by many millions of wasted advertising dollars) before it worked. You couldn't send MMS across networks and very often the settings on new phones didn't work as they left the shops.

    This is like a fizzy drinks manufacturer launching a new fizzy drink which doesn't have any carbonation and where the cans can't be opened without a tin opener and a sledge hammer.

    So, yes, they may well admit sheepishly to launching too early.

    There's also no mention that MMS is too highly priced, the end-user benefit is unclear, the marketing is still poor (what are the benefits? where are the trial offers?) and the usability is pretty poor too. It should be template driven, with loads of content available for free.

    Posted by yatta at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)
    Welcome to Goombah - Music Discovery
    Music recommender for iTunes/OS X that uses BitTorrent for the transport

    Posted by yatta at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)
    ISEA 2006 - Interactive City Early Call For Proposals -- DUE 23 APRIL 2005

    ISEA 2006
    Interactive City
    San Jose, California, USA
    1-14 August 2006

    EARLY CALL DUE: 22 April 2005

    ISEA INTERACTIVE CITY CFP:
    http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/



    GENERAL INFO ABOUT ISEA 2006:
    http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/

    ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) is a large, international, two week long, conference and festival situated at the critical intersection of art and technology (see http://www.isea2004.net for last year's festival details). In August 2006 the 13th ISEA will be held in San Jose, California. ISEA spans a broad range of work from critical theory and application papers, interactive demonstrations, videos, installations, performances, and emerging music to name a few. In 2006 ISEA will feature four themes: Interactive City, Community Domain, Transvergence, and Pacific Rim. Each theme will of course manifest itself at ISEA in the form of papers, demos, performances, etc. Each of these topics will also feature a 2 day event immediately preceding ISEA to further focus the topic and go into more critical depth. This announcement is for the early call for proposals within the scope of the Interactive City.

    Via USC Interactive Media Division Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)
    CeBIT 2005: 'Wearable Hub' for Communications in the Home
    The day isn’t far off when it will be possible to control all home communications and automation systems by using a single wearable device that recognizes voice commands. Siemens developed such a small multi-talented communications device. It can be worn like a badge or pin on an article of clothing. The commands are transmitted via the Bluetooth short-range digital radio standard to a central home communications server. The server is equipped with voice recognition software, which converts the words into unambiguous commands for the hooked-up systems.

    Posted by yatta at 12:03 AM | Comments (0)
    'Folksonomies' to Organize the News
    This morning, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference looked at "folksonomies," a term used to describe how large groups of people can organize information by adding freely chosen keywords. Picture site Flickr, for instance, lets users add "tags" to their own pictures. These tags' main purpose is to help people organize their own pictures, but they also serve as a way to organize the vast ocean of public pictures. (As an example, see pictures of the O'Reilly event itself under the "etech" tag.) Most people also allow others to add tags to their own pictures, so to a degree (...)

    Entry continued...
    Posted by yatta at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

    March 16, 2005

    Napster's CEO on the future of music delivery

    While I was out of town yesterday, Engadget ran my interview with Napster CEO Chris Gorog. Lots of reaction so far:

    61 comments attached to the interview;

    • MacDailyNews dissects the interview, with 60 or so readers chiming in;

    a dozen or more blogs

    Gorog was fun to interview -- smart and savvy about the music business (an impression you'd miss if you skipped the interview and went directly to the comments posted beneath the article). Excerpt:

    Gorog: The point is simply that people are going to value instantaneous access to anything they can think of anywhere anytime. That’s what they’ll place value in rather than ownership — I own this CD, I own this track I downloaded. Because in the digital world, everything is available.

    So it’s really a paradigm shift for people to recognize that the music collections they’ve carried around with them on their back, all of this stuff doesn’t matter anymore. Because for a monthly fee they can have access not only to everything they’ve collected in the past, but everything they don’t even know about yet that they can still discover. It’s a very different model and extremely attractive, once you get used to it. ...

    Via New Media Musings

    Posted by yatta at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
    The Buddha of Blogging Speaks

    iMedia Connection has posted oodles of Jeff Jarvis' blogging wisdom in two parts. Go read it if you're interested in citizen marketing/journalism and blogging. You wont be sorry.

    Posted by yatta at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)
    Pepsi ad campaign nixes TV
    Something of a first here: to reintroduce Pepsi One, the cola company is planning on an ad blitz without spending a penny on TV. Pepsi has set up a Flash website for the drink, and deliberately avoided advertising during the Super Bowl. Pepsi is targeting 20-30 somethings - and has decided the web is the best place to get them. (NYT sub. req., via Mediapost.)

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
    Games * Design * Art * Culture > Doing something about it
    read comments for discussion on alternative models for indie game designers (and thus all the rest of us too!)
    Posted by yatta at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)
    Human Blackbox
    blackbox.jpgLive from ETech: Rick Rashid, Microsoft Research talked about the Human black box, the ultimate blogging tool. A person mounted camera that takes thousands of photos throughout the day. A wide angle lenses captures more information, accelerometers tell the camera when it's a good time to take a picture. Some uses: Memory-loss individuals, tourism, reflective practice...Kinda reminds me of the version I made for my car (and dog). I think we can all make our own versions of these.

    Via MAKE: Blog

    Posted by yatta at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
    SMS Server Tools
    The SMS Server Tools is a package of programs that are useful to send and receive short messages using a simple file-based interface and one or more GSM modems.
    Posted by yatta at 11:48 PM | Comments (0)
    Thoughts on Hardware Design and Interaction
    Russell has recently posted a few interesting posts this one and this one on the function and design of hardware. I've been enjoying thinking about these issues again, because inherently many of the problems mobile interaction designers have, is how to design things which integrate into extremely disparate hardware form factors.

    Today Russ posted this:
    Mobiles are the ultimate consumer computer. They are meant to be used by 12 year olds, teens, college kids, business people and your mother in law. But right now, the design of the interface is still way too confusing. Even Nokias which rank high on the usability scale have problems when it comes to using their phones. I was just talking to someone today about the "overloading" problem with Nokia. The re-use the same button for different, completely disparate tasks: like your power button to change audio profiles. What?! And the fact that if you click the menu button once, you go back to the home screen, and if you click it again you go to the menu, and if you hold it down, you get a list of running apps. On other phones, they have a tendency to do things like combine the power and hang up keys. Huh?
    The problem he is describing here, is a classic problem of modal interfaces. As Jef Raskin so clearly coined: "Modes can change the effects of habitual actions they can cause errors or draw away the user’s
    locus of attention from the intended task."

    In summary:
    In his book, Jef argues that all modes are evil, whether we are talking modal dialog boxes, different selection modes in graphical editors, or even having different applications that behave differently. Since humans are creatures of habit, we have a hard time remembering which mode the computer is, because we want to focus on the task at hand; modes divert our attention to keeping track of the mode, and hence slow us down.
    Often too much functionality will be crammed into one button or object, with the intent of space saving. It seems that manufactures have been revisiting the multi-modal interface. The problem, however, as Russ points out is pattern recognition and recall. We think the button means one thing, but then it means something different. Moreover it brings up a questions of language. Trying to use the same term to mean two different modes creates errors. For example, back meaning clear. "The problem with overloading the clear and back buttons is that if you get into a text entry screen and change your mind half way through? If you don't have a back button, you can't escape without deleting all your text character by character first." But I bet a lot of people try to do it, thinking that they will go "back" to their previous state.

    As 3rd party developers it's challenging to decide to follow similar interaction patterns to their native software or to create a new interaction paradigm for the user to learn. Users have often already learned (or perhaps created) how to use their devices, recognizing that there are problems with them, do we try to recreate the interface or choose to accept the principles and design in accord to what the user already knows?

    When I was at Yahoo! we thought about this a lot. Building a brand... do you a. create a new interaction that remains consistent across devices or b. make it easier on the user by customizing each interaction mechanism, per device. The second is obviously better to the end user. Building on mechanisms which they already understand, customize each experience per handset. However, that becomes outrageously costly. Porting each application is one thing, but customizing the entire interface is another altogether. What we decided then, and I've stuck with, is to find the common hardware elements that are mostly consistent across devices and utilize those to be the main controls and interaction controls into your app. The question then is what are those hardware elements? At one point I had suggested that we survey old phones and try to ascertain which hardware interfaces are sticking around and which have gone by way of the roadside. Remember the side direction buttons instead of the joystick for directional navigation? Trying to find patterns in the hardware interaction features can then help us guess which ones may be present in the future and thus help drive the software interaction models.

    I still wish someone would do this survey.

    Currently, what I go on as common features are: 5-way joystick. If necessary a secondary, 2 softkeys. If I can design things which only utilize those hardware features, I’m pretty confident that the experience will a. work in almost the same manner across all phones b. be easily portable (ie save time and money) c. not break any current models the user has for how those hardware features work. Directional navigation, select, back. That's it! (Sometimes that means that there are two back keys. I believe that's better than none.)

    It sure would be nice, though, if some people decided to start converging on things like back, home, and clear! Duplication within our apps then wouldn't have to exist. We can change the language of our apps to be consistent across devices, but why should we have to?

    The first step, I think, to recognizing which hardware mechanisms on the device really do make sense is abstracting all the things we want to do. I think we may just be getting to this point. Then obviously think about the common interactions and keep abstracting. When a common pattern can't be found put another element! The iPod is such a great example at an abstracted interface. Navigation and select... that's it! (Yes, back would be nice). What would a phone look like with just a directional navigation and select? The problem is that we have already decided that there needs to be dedicated hardware to specific functions. It's when we start to pull these specific functions out and give them each a new button that things get crowded. We already decided that 9 numeric keys are necessary. But who's to say that's true. Mfoundry has an awesome text entry interface, that is perhaps faster then T9 and only uses directional navigation and select. Two buttons. Maybe it's a problem of too many shortcuts. Or perhaps not understanding enough which ones are really essential.

    "So wait, am I just recreating the web browser on my mobile phone? Sorta... and even if I am, that may not be a bad thing." That makes sense, Russ, cause after all aren't we in the browser war of the mobile revolution? ... and just beginning to really understand what users are doing with their mobiles?

    Anita
    Posted by yatta at 11:48 PM | Comments (1)
    MSN Attacks the Web-based RSS Aggregator Market

    MSN just started testing their own standalone web-based RSS aggregator, in addition to the already existing RSS functionality within the main MSN portal.

    Available at Start.com, the new aggregator takes a lean approach to RSS feed aggregation, which in fact might be welcomed by many users looking for simple ways of aggregating RSS content through web-based services. There isn’t much to say yet, except that I like the fact that no registration is required to start adding your own feeds.

    On the other hand, adding “one more aggregator” to the mix is sure to add to the confusion many people new to RSS are already experiencing.

    Posted by yatta at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
    Media Art Net
    very good resource for texts on media art
    Posted by yatta at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)
    Fiona Apple Teaching Sony A Lesson About The Long Tail
    Fiona Apple was a musical sensation half a decade ago, but has dropped out of the spotlight since then. Apparently, that was supposed to have changed two years ago when she delivered a new album to Sony -- who immediately shelved it, claiming they "didn't hear a single," which probably means the computers over at Hit Song Science didn't appreciate the songs. However, in the last few weeks, a DJ got his hands on the album and has been playing the tracks, which fans seem to really like quite a bit. It's a lesson in the long tail for Sony. Rather than focusing on just "the hits," they should at least be willing to put out other albums that have niche supporters. Of course, considering Sony's recent statements, it's really no surprise that they really don't understand how to handle this new market. Of course, it's probably only a matter of time before they try to shut down those who are offering up this music that they refuse to release.

    Via Techdirt

    Posted by yatta at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
    Kevin Martin, the new FCC head

    Kevin Martin has been named the new head of FCC by President Bush. “I am deeply honored to have been designated as the next Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and I thank President Bush for this distinct privilege,” he said in a statement. “I thank Chairman Powell for his excellent stewardship of this agency, and I look forward to continuing his efforts in bringing the communications industry into the 21st Century.”

    The good news is that he is going to push hard for broadband deployment and VoIP and other new technologies. The bad news is that he is going to be watching the television guys with a hawkeye and will be the digital nanny who is tougher than the outgoing FCC chairman, Michael Powell. The murky news is that he is going take sides with the incumbents and push for a rewrite of the Telecom Act of 1996. “He will soon take a front seat at the technology revolution. Ultimately, everything the FCC does must serve the public interest and benefit consumers, and I am confident he will be vigilant in pursuing these goals,” Chairman Powell said.

    Via Om Malik on Broadband

    Posted by yatta at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)
    Eye-controlled video camera
    Eye-controlled camera

    Here’s a last-minute gem from CeBIT — a video camera controlled by the eyes. We’ve seen stuff like this years ago with eye-scanning viewfinders that track focal points, but this working prototype developed at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians University does full camera movement. It is expected to have applications for psychology and market research — not to mention the obvious fashion uptake we can expect from it.

    Via Engadget

    Posted by yatta at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)
    Mobility is the next Big Story: Los Angeles, CA - April 26-29, 2005

    Last year’s Big Story was blogs. The next big story is mobility, which is unfolding at lightning speed. So of course, The Media Center is all over it, and I hope you'll think about joining us.

    Media Opportunities and Strategies for the Mobile, Broadband Generation will take place in Los Angeles, April 26 to 29, 2005.

    This executive program will demystify mobile and wireless broadband, exploring the business opportunities, emerging technologies and new consumer behavior quickly evolving at the crossroads of media, technology and society.

    And if you're a Trekkie, please note that we'll be visiting the Integrated Media Systems Center, part of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, where researchers will lead our group in a look at what's next in a world of ubiquitous broadband communications. I was told to seriously think Enterprise holodeck...

    So far, the following people have confirmed they will serve as discussion leaders:
    o Gilles Babinet, CEO, Musiwave
    o Steve Cistulli, Panasonic Mobile Communications
    o Rob Enderle, Columnist and President of the Enderle Group
    o Scott Fox, CEO, Global View Partners
    o Brian Gratch, Principal, Gratch & Associates
    o Dewayne Hendricks, CEO, Dandin Group, Inc.; Member of the FCC Technological Advisory Council
    o Susan Kaup, aka "Sooz"
    o Susan Mernit, Senior Vice President, 5ive
    o Andrew Nachison, Director, The Media Center
    o Dean Newton, Vice President, Entertainment Media, Infospace Mobile
    o Scott Rafer, CEO, Feedster
    o Scott Smyers,Chairman & President,Digital Living Network Alliance; Vice President,Network and Systems Architecture Division, Platform Technology Center of America,Sony Electronics
    o William Weiss, Chairman & CEO, The Promar Group

    If you want to know more, go here.

    Via editorsweblog.org

    Posted by yatta at 10:45 PM | Comments (0)
    Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software

    bbcradio.gif

    Many-to-Many Radio



    Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software byTom Coates, Matt Biddulph, Paul Hammond, and Matt Webb:

    How could you enhance a one-to-many national radio station by building in the many-to-many-style interactions of Flickr or the weblog community? How might lessons from social software further blur the distinction between listeners and broadcasters by pushing interactivity beyond the phone-in or the online poll?

    (1) The "Ten-Hour Takeover" used SMS technology, pattern matching, and statistical analysis to give the British public control of BBC Radio 1's musical output. For ten hours, there was no planned playlist--every track was chosen by listeners via text messages. We turned these messages into a navigable information space of artists, tracks, and listeners that the DJs could interact with directly. Moreover, the loosely coupled component-based infrastructure has allowed us to deploy new mobile-based products (SMS and MMS) quickly and easily.

    (2) A component-based architecture also allows us to hook together SMS, track now-playing, and show scheduling systems with each other and with third-party services. BBC R&Mi are using this as a basis for exploring social software models of interactivity: the potential of Flickr/del.icio.us-style tagging for radio; the possibilities of combining buddy lists with media players; new applications for SMS; and concepts like "100 Composers"--DABJava applications on PDAs that can have data trickled to them over broadcast radio.

    The session presents work from BBC Radio & Music Interactive's Technical Architecture and R&D teams, including demonstrations of existing software and working prototypes of new projects. [from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference] [Related]

    Posted by yatta at 10:28 PM | Comments (0)
    The Long Tail of PayPal

    While setting up the contribution mechanism at PayPal, I got to thinking about how PayPal is (or certainly has the potential to be) a Long Tail business. With lots of features, extensive documentation, tons of implementation examples, and no up-front fees, they make it so easy to sell anything to anyone worldwide that the cost of doing business for individuals and small businesses is almost nothing. My friends Tamara and Julie make soap in their apartment and sell it online for a few bucks a bar, with PayPal handling the checkout process and some of the order fulfillment stuff as well. And there are millions of little cottage industries like this scattered across the web, businesses enabled by PayPal each selling maybe a few items a week or month.

    However, there are a couple of issues with PayPal's attempt to harness the Long Tail of online retail. Shipping costs are proportionally more expensive for less expensive items...it's roughly the same price to ship a $350 iPod as it is to ship a $20 book or tshirt. PayPal's fees are a bigger percentage of the total sale for cheaper items as well; they take $0.30 right off the top. That doesn't sound like a lot but for a merchant selling $3.00 items, that's 10% less profit, which could be a bit of a deterrent in wanting to sell cheap items through PayPal. It'll be interesting to see if PayPal sees a Long Tail effect benefiting their bottom line and tinkers with the fees to encourage more cheap offerings.

    Posted by yatta at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)
    US Frequency Allocations: The Radio Spectrum
    Posted by yatta at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)
    Interactive TV Advertising conference: London, May 24-25, 2005
    The second annual Interactive TV Advertising Show takes place on 24-25 May at Earl’s Court in London.

    The first day will examine the impact that iTV advertising will have on branding, how campaigns are being benchmarked worldwide, and the impact that personal video recorders and video-on-demand services will have on advertising strategies.

    The second day will focus on creativity, direct response and research, looking at how the medium is measured and how to create accountable advertising.

    Speakers will include representatives of leading global brands, commercial television channels, airtime sales houses and platform operators, as well as those involved in the creation and production of interactive television adverts.

    Via informitv news

    Posted by yatta at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)
    Who's Investing for the Future? Plenty of Us

    UPDATED

    The Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual media report is online and loaded with fascinating data and conclusions. I want to point to one item -- a section called "News Investment" -- and this paragraph:

    It is part of a larger trend in American journalism: much of the investment and effort is in repackaging and presenting information, not in gathering it. For all that the number of outlets has grown, the number of people engaged in collecting original information has not. Americans are frankly more likely to see the same pictures across multiple TV channels or read the same wire story in different venues than they were a generation ago.
    I share the concern that news organizations are cutting their investments. An informed citizenry is crucial to the functioning of the republic and of society as a whole.

    I don't see much hope that commercial journalism organizations will invest more. They are conservative to a fault when it comes to adapting to change. (I hope I am wrong on this, and suspect I'm not.)

    But there is a great movement beginning to form. We're calling it things like "citizen journalism" or "grassroots media" and other names. It is the mass movement of telling each other our stories, via blogs and other media, and exposing our neighbors to news they can't get other ways.

    People are already investing enormous amounts of time in the bottom-up arena. The majority of them are voting via clicks, seeking out better information -- or at least different perspectives -- to get a better report than the one dropped on their doorstep or on the evening TV show. A subset, a minority but still a lot of people, are folks who want to have their say and want to be part of a conversation, not talked down to in lecture mode by an industry that sees news as just another widget on an assembly line.

    It will be absolutely essential that we try to do this new kind of journalism in a good way -- not throwing out the best practices and principles of the past but using them to inform and improve that fervor and knowledge from the edge. We can do it together.

    Update: Alan Mutter noticed something I missed -- profits are rising much faster than sales. There are several ways to make this happen, but one of the obvious ones is to squeeze the journalism expenses, which is precisely what is happening.

    And Merrill Brown, in this essay about online journalism's progress, sums up this way:
    So, while business might appear prosperous, beneath the success lies a perplexing reality. Many of the news organizations that make most Web site journalism possible, either through their dollars or the work of the journalists reporting for their traditional products, are in some combination of strategic, journalistic and financial peril. It is those organizations that make large-scale Internet news sites viable. In a world of dwindling resources, a world of falling daily newspaper readership and fragmented television news audiences, who will produce the journalism of scale and importance that informs citizens about national political campaigns and international conflict? Bloggers? Citizen journalists? The software developers who produce RSS readers?


    ge over this decade to those questions are certain to impact the future not just of Internet news but of journalism itself.

    Posted by yatta at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)
    ViewSonic Xtreme ClearMotive LCD Displays with 4ms Response
    "ViewSonic has announced the new Xtreme ClearMotive LCD monitors, two flat-panel displays with an astounding 4-millisecond response time. The 19-inch VX924 will be available in May, while the 17-inch VX724 will be available in June. I can’t wait to see one of these in action. I bet it looks great."

    Via Digital Media Thoughts

    Posted by yatta at 09:26 PM | Comments (0)
    Compro VideoMateTV DVB-T USB Stick HDTV Tuner



    Photo: Digitimes EverythingUSB reports about a DVB-T HDTV Tuner on a USB Stick from Compro.

    Quote:

    "Taiwanese company Compro plans to squeeze a DVB-T TV tuner into a size of a large USB stick form factor. Called VideoMateTV DVB-T, the stick could easily be mistaken as a first generation USB flash drive, but it is actually a bus-powered HDTV tuner, which requires at least a 2.4Ghz for just viewing. There's also another version that supports analog, which requires just 600Mhz for TV viewing."

    More details on EverythingUSB.

    Posted by yatta at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)
    Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls

    Excerpt from a Gamespot interview with Sheri Graner Ray:


    SGR: Men play female characters. I don't have the exact numbers, but a huge percentage of males play female characters. The number of females playing male characters is so small as to be not worth counting. And they'll tell you, "I don't play a male character because it's not comfortable."

    When you're in a stand-alone game, you often don't have a choice--often you are a male character.

    SGR: Right. Or you don't play. On my women's mailing list, you'll find them all the time that say, "I didn't play Fable because there wasn't a female character to play." So it's one of those barriers. It's one of those doors that stops them from ever playing the game.

    Now, if I get the chance, I ALWAYS play female, and usually one that looks like me (given the option): petite, dark-haired, light on the muscle. In D&D, I try to play a version of myself as much as possible... which usually ends up being a Bard/Rogue type character with a high Persuade but negligible combat skills.

    But I also played Fable, and loved it - and had three wives in three cities, including the dark Lady Grey. I played Prince of Persia and loved it. I suppose you could say, perhaps, that there is a difference between the action/adventure and the rpg. The rpg really asks you to put yourself in the character's shoes. But then, Final Fantasy 7 and 8 have a large female cult following. I don't think it's a problem to experience a story from someone else's point of view.

    I read books with male narrators and male protagonists. I watch movies with male heroes, told from a male point of view. The important things are character, story, and emotional depth, and those can belong to anyone, any sex or any color.

    I think the problem is just that there isn't enough diversity. What if all books we had on shelves were written by John Updike or Phillip Roth? I love their writing, but I'd be bored out of my mind sifting through so many pages of self-reflective upper-middle class male-ness. It's good to have a Richard Wright in there, a Virginia Woolf, a Zora Neale Hurston. I'd like that for videogames, too, obviously.

    But what Graner Ray says is interesting. Is it really true that women vastly prefer to play women, while men are more fluid in their gender-identity? I've wanted to conduct a study on this for years, but I lack the social science research skills. Maybe someone out there wants to help out.

    Via game girl advance

    Posted by yatta at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)
    Looking at the Subscription Model Value Proposition
    Music Buffet: Loading Up for Takeout
    But the commercial raises a good question: Will you rent albums the way you rent TV programming? If it makes financial sense - and if, armed with that knowledge, you can avoid the competing allure of iPod style and the Apple brand - you just might.

    […] Parents with children ages 10 to 20 know how costly the digital music revolution can be. If you look the other way as they download music using … let’s call them gray-market techniques, your PC becomes irreversibly crippled by spyware. But when you try to encourage them to pay for music instead of stealing it, you quickly discover that even a two-album-a-month allowance adds up.

    When used to its fullest extent, Napster to Go lays iTunes flat, financially speaking. For the $15 monthly fee, you’re allowed unlimited downloads. You can put them on up to three compatible portable players, and log in and listen on up to three PC’s. (Napster to Go does charge by the song, however, to burn music to a CD.) Sure, there’s an initial investment, and in homes with more than three listeners they’ll have to share, but for a low fixed price they can all download as many songs as they want, most of which they will soon forget about anyway.

    The value proposition is in place. I know I can get tons of music, but can I get tons of good music? There are bands not yet online at all, like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. But with Napster to Go there is a new discrepancy: songs you must purchase outright, ones that aren’t part of the all-you-can-have subscription deal.

    I hit Napster thinking that maybe half of the tracks I’d want would be “buy only.” To my amazement, it was less than a tenth. […]

    {…] For the most part, however, the software and the players do their jobs. So let me ask a question that some may consider heresy: How necessary is the iPod?

    […] Though it seems like a lopsided deal - paying less than what Target charges for a CD and getting almost any musical wish granted instantly - the record industry is lobbying hard to make subscription services the next phase in the digital revolution. The labels are using them to get the attention of 15- to 25-year-olds, the group most responsible for the sharp decline in CD sales over the last few years (not to mention the rise of illegal file sharing).
    Posted by yatta at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)
    Hollywood's p2p PR blitz
    With a landmark Supreme Court hearing on online file sharing slated for March 29, Hollywood is stepping up its multimillion-dollar, international PR blitz to keep peer-to-peer networks in the public eye and to characterize men, women and children who share music and other files online as hardened criminals.
    Posted by yatta at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)
    Content Providers Vs Telcos: Who Holds The Leverage?
    A good story on who holds the advantage in the new telco TV services being launched later this year by the likes of SBC and Verizon. The programmers/content providers that find themselves in the enviable position of having multiple distribution opportunities, and definitely have the upper hand. That has some telcos, especially the smaller ones, worried that they may not get the fairest deal in licensing negotiations...
    But content companies won't always hold all the cards..."If the [fiber] network is helping the content company create new applications, then power shifts some in the direction of the platform. ... Right now the content providers have all the leverage," he says.
    For content providers, the trend with telcos may be that they would license their whole bouquet, instead of negotiating piecemeal deals, mainly because there would be so much licensing to do in the first place. Discovery Communications is an example, with its all-encompassing deals with the likes of Verizon, Adelphia and Comcast.

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)
    I want my MTVlog
    An experimental, participatory music videoblog project.

    Let's all come up with our own interpretation of a song, through video.
    I would love if we can use any song... but if we did, i would not suggest openly distributing it and violating copyright...
    Unless privately traded.

    But, I do suggest we dig into the creative commons and public domain music resources. One such music pool is at http://opsound.org and also you can refer to http://ccmixter.org or http://remixreading.org/. Of course, there are other resources... a friend helps run http://mp34u.com which is decent source.

    Know of any others worth mentioning?

    Posted by yatta at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
    Virtual moblogging with Second Life and TypePad: markpasc.org
    how to blog events in Second Life.
    Posted by yatta at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
    High.tv
    Streaming on demand Internet TV, through a very user friendly interface. I am not so much into watching sports on the computer but I was very impressed with how advanced webcasting has become. Check it out at -> High.tv

    Via Edibletv Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)
    Vloggers take over the world
    Here are amazing instructions on how to build your own teleprompter.

    : I'm installing the latest version of Serious Magic this weekend (I used the earlier version for my now more-than two-year-old primitive vlogs.)

    Via BuzzMachine

    Posted by yatta at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)
    music production games

    I love the term media games. As media production becomes a social activity, and becomes something we all do as part of our day to day lives, games will become places where we make new things, express ourselves, and share ideas. Check out the new Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. The game comes with a set of bongos that are the controller. Nintendo says, "Sure it uses the DK Bongos Controller, but Donkey Kong Jungle Beat isn't a musical game at all, tap the right bongo to make DK stroll right, tap faster and he'll run, whack the left bongo to go left, beat his chest or send out an enormous, landscape-rattling shockwave. Cool combos have DK swinging from vine to vine, climbing chasms by leaping from wall to wall and pounding remorselessly on enemies." Sounds like you'll be playing drums to me. I wonder if the DK Bongos Controller is available for third parties to develop games with?

    I have this music and media production game I'm making where kids compete to mix and mash songs and videos. I pitched it to MTV2 in November. Their concern was how fast and cheap could we make a pilot. It's interesting. The ability to rapidly prototype large scale community interaction and multiplayer situations is going to be essential in this next phase of media and entertainment. (Social networking cycles on-demand maybe?) Either way, media games are going to be driving force of news, TV, and film in the 21st century- games where participants can make, watch, or do just about anything. And if you're working on things like this, or know of anything new out there, please let me know.

    Posted by yatta at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
    Gear for guerrilla filmmakers

    Stephen Olmstead of Vigilant Studios sends links for more gear for Guerrilla Filmmakers (is there any other kind?) including a Camera Stabilizer and Guide Book for Guerrilla Filmmakers. Ron Dexter has a great site with tons of advice and plans. It looks like DV Moves is now the reseller for Dexter's equipment designs. DV Moves also sells proprietary equipment. Cinekinetic also has budget dollies, mounts, jibs and accessories. They're a bit pricey but worth it. Why do I keep writing about budget equipment? Because I get so sick of "TALKING HEADS" Independent Film. Do your audience a favor, move the camera!

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
    User Based Innovation
    While many people think of marketing as the process by which you convince someone to buy something, traditionally, it's really supposed to be about figuring out what the customer wants, and then providing it for them. However, perhaps that definition needs to be updated. As Future Now points out, the Economist is running an article about how many companies are letting their customers do the innovating themselves. It's sort of an outgrowth of the hacker/open source/DIY mentality -- except that the company embraces it, and uses these customer-built improvements to improve the product for everyone. For example, a gaming company could take user mods and post them online for everyone, or include them in future shipments of the game. This goes well beyond focus groups and just asking people what they want. It even goes beyond just encouraging them to modify and improve products to their liking. It reaches the point where the company actively looks to those improvements to be offered to others. Of course, while this is catching on with some companies -- it's still pretty rare. It's likely that the opposite is still true more often -- where companies freak out whenever anyone dares to modify the product as sold. For example, it wasn't that long ago that Sony forced a site about hacking the Aibo robot dog offline, because they said it violated the DMCA. Smart companies, however, recognize that these customer-built innovations not only make their products more valuable, but they build up customer loyalty as well.

    Via Techdirt

    Posted by yatta at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
    EFF opposed Apple in case of bloggers and secrets

    The EFF has come out against Apple's pursuit of two blogs for their publication of corporate secrets.



    EFF opposes Apple's discovery because the confidentiality of the media's sources and unpublished information are critical means for journalists of all stripes to acquire information and communicate it to the public. Because today's online journalists frequently depend on confidential sources to gather material, their ability to promise confidentiality is essential to maintaining the strength of independent media. Furthermore, the protections required by the First Amendment are necessary regardless of whether the journalist uses a third party for communications.

    There's more here:



    Online journalism, whether in the form of blogs, email newsletters, or websites, is a growing part of our national discourse. The democratization of media inherent in the Internet allows any individual to reach out to a vast audience, without the constraints of traditional media. Blogs gain in importance and readership by the content and currency of their news, not their affiliations with the media of old...



    If Apple's subpoenas to Apple Insider, PowerPage and Think Secret are allowed to proceed and the Apple news sites EFF is representing are forced to disclose the confidences gained by their reporters, potential confidential sources will be deterred from providing information to the online media, and the public will lose a vital outlet for independent news, analysis, and commentary. We can't let that happen.

    Via Smart Mobs

    Posted by yatta at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
    ATI Introduces New IMAGEON

    imageon_2282.jpg

    ATI announced their new media processors, the IMAGEON 2282 and 2182. The chips offer something of a package deal to cell phone manufacturers with 3 megapixel camera support, hi-fi digital audio, and a digital camcorder with streaming video and video conferencing capabilities. Although nothing spectacular from an individual feature standpoint, the chips act as media processors for the phone, taking the load almost entirely off the host processor. The ATI press release goes on to mention that the 2282 (the higher-end model) offers picture-in-picture support to help with video conferencing. I'm not using PIP on my 32" living room television, so the chances of me using it on a 2" screen are slim, but it's innovative nonetheless.

    Press Release [ATI via HardOCP]

    Via Gizmodo

    Posted by yatta at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
    Yahoo 360 Fuses Social Networking and Blogs

    AP reports that Yahoo is preparing to introduce a new service that blends several of its Web site's popular features with blogging and social networking. The hybrid service, called Yahoo! 360°, won't be available until March 29, but the promotional web site is live now. I was able to log in to a page with more info using my Yahoo! ID, but was unable to actually try the service. Mike Liedke from AP writes...

    The service is designed to enable Yahoo's 165 million registered users to pull content from the Web site's discussion groups, online photo albums and review section to plug into their own Web logs, or blogs, the Internet shorthand used to describe online personal journals.


    According to the Yahoo 360 splash page...
    With Yahoo! 360°, you'll have one place to keep the important people in your life connected to you. And one place for you to stay connected to them.

    Easily invite your friends and family

    It's very easy to plug all of your people in. With just a few clicks you can invite any -- or everyone from you Yahoo! Messenger friends list, you Yahoo! Address Book or (after beta) from Microsoft Outlook to connect to you.
    This all sounds good. The only downside is that the service is invitation only - much like Gmail, Orkut and Google's services. Nevertheless, I imagine it won't be that hard to snag an invite. Also, I am wondering out loud if this launch means that Yahoo!'s rumored acquisitions of either Six Apart and/or Flickr are far from imminent? Here's a rundown of the core features that I pulled from the Yahoo 360 site. Wither GeoCities? Charlene Li has more analysis.

    Yahoo360

    Posted by yatta at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)
    Brave New Box Office

    Several new online startups are trying to provide innovative ways for people to view movies.  Akimbo Systems allows customers to buy movie downloads for playback on TVs (via an Akimbo set-top box) or PCs.  EZTakes users will be able to download movies to PCs and burn them to disc. (Service is currently available only as part of a test.) ObjectCube lets you rent or buy movies for playback on TVs (via a set-top box), PCs or Xboxes. Movies can be downloaded, streamed or delivered via disc. For now, only "adult" films are available.  Finally, Peerflix allows surfers to trade used DVDs via the Web.

    Via HOLLYWOOD LIBERATION ARMY

    Posted by yatta at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
    "The Office" debuts online
    Correction:The American version of the BBC hit "The Office" debuts online tonight, more than a week before its TV debut. (Earlier, I mistakenly reported the debut would be online and on TV simultaneously.) MySpace.com will have it in streaming video at 8 tonight. This means, among other things, that the West Coast can watch it at 5 p.m. while still in - that's right - the office.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
    Video Cameras In Iraq
    Abu Ghraib demonstrated the power of the modern digital camera. Although digital video cameras have yet to have a similar electrifying effect, it's probably only a matter of time. [fark]

    Via Futurismic

    Posted by yatta at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
    Daily Show Clip Listing Parser
    This is the future of television, although it needs an RSS feed

    Posted by yatta at 10:38 AM | Comments (2)
    CiteULike
    CitULike is del.icio.us for academics. It saves citation details and exports them in a couple of standard formats. It aggregates journal articles for your posting pleasure/
    Posted by yatta at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
    Boku Communications
    BoKu is in the process of expanding its podcasting system into a network that is enabling thousands of producers to cost-effectively create compelling content to fit the needs and desires of millions of users, with marketers benefiting from the connection
    Posted by yatta at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
    newzBin :: The Ultimate in Usenet Indexing
    "Newzbin is a service that is dedicated to indexing the ever-changing contents of Usenet, also known as Newsgroups.Think of it as a TV guide, but we're a guide that applies to Usenet."
    Posted by yatta at 10:34 AM | Comments (1)
    Bloggies >> Fifth Annual Weblog Awards >> Winners
    List of Bloggie winners for 2005.
    Posted by yatta at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

    March 15, 2005

    4000 CD sales funds one year of East Village music club

    via DigitalMediaWire and the the New York Times comes word of a new model for musical and economic sustainability. The Stone, a new live music venue in New York City being launched by composer John Zorn, that will provide 100% of ticket sales to artists, and support itself through the sale of exclusive CDs online. The Stone, which will open at Avenue C and Second Street in the East Village in April, plans to pay its rent and insurance through limited-edition CDs released and sold online by Zorn's Tzadik record label -- the first of which will likely feature Zorn, Mike Patton and Bill Laswell. "We can sell 4,000 copies at $20 and run the place on $80,000 a year," Zorn told The Times. "This is about a community coming together. The downtown scene is so diverse that it eludes classification, but it functions as a community, with people helping each other."

    Posted by Eli Chapman at 04:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
    SUNSHINE Week: On The Importance of Open Government - March 13-19, 2005
    Celebrating open government
    "Opening a dialogue about the public’s right of access to government information is the focus of Sunshine Sunday and Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know, which kick off March 13, 2005 and continue through the following week.

    Participating daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, online sites, and radio and television broadcasters will feature editorials, op-eds, editorial cartoons, and news and feature stories that drive public discussion about why open government is important to everyone, not just to journalists.

    “This is not just an issue for the press. It’s an issue for the public,” said Andy Alexander, ASNE Freedom of Information chair, who is chief of the Cox Newspapers’ Washington bureau. “An alarming amount of public information is being kept secret from citizens and the problem is increasing by the month. Not only do citizens have a right to know, they have a need to know."
    Posted by yatta at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)
    Collective Action Games Embedded in Social Networks

    Draft of a paper by Yen-Sheng Chiang (2004) of the Department of Sociology on the University of Washington.

    Abstract: The paper presents a model that synthetically incorporates several paradigms of collective action theories to bring up conditions when different types of collective action games would occur. Different from past literatures, the paper focuses on the analysis when various types of actors are allowed to play games interactively. The designation of game-playing partners follows the three mechanisms of network formation incorporated in the paper. A computational simulation is adopted to show how some parameters such as network density and heterogeneity influence the final contribution of collective goods.

    (..) "I propose different conditions when a collective action can be presented as a privileged game, prisoner dilemma game or assurance game. The existence of different types of games, especially assurance game, inspires me to explore the possibility what if different types of players play the game interactively. It turns out the theoretical insight is quite consistent with empirical research about the competition between social movements and countermovements. Some theories of network formation provide mechanisms determining how people decide their game-playing partners".

    another study by Chiang, Yen-Sheng is, "The heterogeneity in collective action and social networks"

    Via Clippings.reblog

    Posted by yatta at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)
    The FCC Opens the 3650MHz band

    The FCC says in this letter (pdf), that the 3650Mhz band (3650-3700Mhz) is being opened for nationwide, non-exclusive licencing. The licencing is a new approach to open-spectrum - a mix between licenced an unlicenced spectrum. The band is specifically for the delivery of wireless "broadband" data networking. The use of "contention-based" protocols, including Wi-Max, are explicitly allowed.

    All base stations operating in this band must be registered with the FCC and there is no limit to the number of licences that will be issued. Mobile stations must be within range of a registered base station before transmitting in order to avoid interference with grandfathered use of this frequency. This implies that only mobile-to-base-station communication is allowed and not mobile-to-mobile communication. Fixed stations have a power limit of "25 watts per 25 mhz of bandwith" and mobile stations have a limit of "one watt per 25 mhz of bandwith."

    Posted by yatta at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)
    CeBIT Video Coverage with Archos PMA430 and Head Camera

    Nicolas Charbonnier (Charbax) from Archosfans walked around CeBIT 2005 with a Archos PMA430 and a headmounted mini video camera connected to the Archos PMP.

    He recorded about 3 hours of video footage and published them here via bitorrent. The Videos show products from Siemens, KISS, DivX, Sony, JVC and much more.

    This is a great use of the PMA430. The comvu webcasting software for the Axia Smartphones could make this task live and without less effort in publishing the video footage.

    Posted by yatta at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)
    Video Webcasting from an Axia A108 Windows Smartphone

    We reported about the Axia A108 tiny (Axia says Worlds Smallest) (110x48x22mm) Windows Smartphone last November.

    At the CeBIT Fifth Media announces the availabilty of a service that lets users webcast video from the Axia smartphone. Axia licenses the ComVu PocketCaster, which leverages AXIA’s onboard 1.3 Megapixel CMOS camera, and Freescale i.MX21 processor, to transmit real-time MPEG 4 video to ComVu’s automated server network. With ComVu’s PocketCaster, the AXIA A108 is an active live streaming transmission device, rather than solely a passive receiver of video content.

    I think this is pretty cool. Enabling anybody to transmit live video to a large audience from anywhere. Question remains how much the service will cost.

    More details on myaxia.com and comvu.

    Posted by yatta at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)

    March 14, 2005

    TVForUs: online tv broadcasting for broadband users
    "Tvforus is a portal to free live online tv broadcasting and other streaming content for broadband users.

    Since the 4th of February, Tvforus provides you with links to more than 200 broadband channels a big selection of the best quality online television streams found on the net. In the "Sites" section you will find links to broadcasters that stream live tv exclusively on their site."

    Via del.icio.us/tag/broadcasting

    Posted by yatta at 11:39 PM | Comments (1)
    Web Sites Try Offering TV Shows
    Web Sites Try Offering TV Shows. Some Web sites are producing TV-type shows and showing them around the clock, a contrast to video-on-demand.

    Via Broadcasting

    Posted by yatta at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
    Biting the media in the ass

    Here's the latest wonderful missive from George Simpson:

    Before the Internet enabled private citizens to do the kind of research that only academics and journalists had the time (or inclination) to do, big media news lived in an impenetrable castle with only sources and reporters allowed inside. Outside the walls were the great unwashed masses, otherwise known as their audiences.

    Although those inside the castle said the formula for what they did was very simply outlined by who, what, where, when, and how, wrapped in a foil of objectivity, the people outside the castle often smelled a rat. When they said, "We thinks we smells a rat, we do," the people inside the castle said, "That is because you do not understand our business."

    Now the rat is biting those in the castle on their arses.


    Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

    Via The Pomo Blog

    Posted by yatta at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)
    From commercial message to public talking point

    South London based art activists CutUp tries to disrupt and raise awareness of the colonisation of public space by reconfiguring billboards, by turning these commercial message bearers into public talking points. Street adverts are a privileged form of address and the space they commandeer is disproportionate. Advertisements and the mass media depict life and how we should live it in a spectacular way. We find it increasingly difficult to know how to express our inner thoughts and feelings, which seem mundane in contrast to the emotional saturation in the plethora of advertising surrounding us.

    CutUpShoimg104.jpg

    CutUp's billboard are created by slicing up a billboard and then collaging all the pieces into a newly ordered image. The results are portraits of people who are suffering or have suffered under the strain of this spectacular society. They are accompanied by slogans expressing thoughts that are not usually articulated aloud.

    First exhibition of CutUp at Kemistry Gallery, 43 Charlotte Rd, Shoreditch. on 5 April - 30 April 05 (via Artshole and Design Week, March 3 edition)

    Via we make money not art

    Posted by yatta at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
    Lanovision - Share Your Video Library
    Lanovision works like iTunes shared music libraries* only for videos. You can instantly watch any video shared by other Lanovision users on the same local area network.

    Posted by yatta at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)
    Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2005
    The State of the News Media 2005 is the second in our annual effort to provide a comprehensive look each year at the state of American journalism.

    Our goal is to put in one place as much original and aggregated data as possible about each of the major journalism sectors.

    The study is the work of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institute affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The study is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, and was produced with a number of partners, including Rick Edmonds, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Michigan State University, the University of Alabama, and Princeton Survey Research Associates International.
    Posted by yatta at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
    BitTorrent May Prove Too Good to Quash (washingtonpost.com)
    BitTorrent May Prove Too Good to Quash (washingtonpost.com)

    Let's hope so.

    BitTorrent May Prove Too Good to Quash

    By Rob Pegoraro
    Sunday, March 13, 2005; Page F07

    Most file-sharing programs aren't the most upstanding citizens of the computing world. Yes, the entertainment industry hates them for the way they're used to download movies and albums without paying -- but many of these programs also fail to treat their own users well, often installing an unadvertised, unwanted load of advertising and spyware.

    BitTorrent is different. This free, open-source program offers a spyware- and nuisance-free installation. And while it is certainly handy for downloading movies and other copyrighted material for free, it's also increasingly used to distribute software and entertainment legally.

    This makes BitTorrent (www.bittorrent.com) not only a fascinating test case for legal experts, but it also looks a lot like the logical fusion of peer-to-peer file-sharing and traditional downloading. It's too robust to stamp out with lawsuits, but too effective not to adopt for commercial use.

    BitTorrent works by enlisting everybody into the file-distribution process. A BitTorrent download starts when you click on a ".torrent" link on a Web page, in an e-mail or some other document. That link gets handed off to your BitTorrent program, which follows that link to a "tracker" computer. (BitTorrent doesn't have any file-search capability built in; you must find these .torrent links yourself.)

    The tracker, in turn, points your copy of BitTorrent to a random grouping of other BitTorrent users who have the file you want. Your copy then starts downloading, assembling all these disparate chunks into a perfect copy of the original. But once you have part of the file on your computer, BitTorrent also begins uploading that to other people who come looking for it.

    This uploading continues until you close the BitTorrent program.

    The net effect of this is a vast increase in the resources available to distribute a file -- instead of the limit being one Web site's own Internet connection, you can theoretically put the entire bandwidth of the Internet to work. The original distributor of the file needs to upload it only once, after which everybody else takes care of the work -- and as more people download it, the torrent picks up speed.

    This approach is overkill for a three-minute song, but for a 30-minute sitcom or a two-hour movie, it's highly effective.

    As a result, the Motion Picture Association of America is less than thrilled about that particular use. It has taken tracker sites to court for their role in pointing users to movie downloads. As part of one settlement, it took over one such site, LokiTorrent.com, and turned it into an online billboard warning users of the legal risks they faced.

    But the Washington-based lobby hasn't sued BitTorrent's developer, Bram Cohen of Bellevue, Wash., nor has it gone after individual BitTorrent users. (Full disclosure: For research purposes, I've used BitTorrent to grab two episodes of "The Simpsons" and Jon Stewart's famously combative "Crossfire" appearance.)

    There are good and bad uses for this technology," said David Green, the MPAA's vice president for technology and new media. The association is instead focusing on the people who have gone out of their way to help others download movies -- "the people who are bringing together the people who want infringing material," as he put it.

    This represents a shift from previous practices, in which the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America and other groups have tried to have entire products -- for example, the first Diamond Rio MP3 player or the networked ReplayTV video recorder -- taken off the market.


    One reason for this change of heart may be that in BitTorrent, unlike many other file-sharing programs, legitimate use doesn't amount to a token minority. It's central to this program's existence.

    Developers of versions of the Linux operating system were some of the first to jump on BitTorrent as a way to ship out vast amounts of data. A Linux distribution can easily span four CD-ROMs; instead, companies such as Red Hat offer BitTorrent downloads of their work.

    Independent musicians can also use BitTorrent to provide free samples. The Web site of the South by Southwest music festival

    Via DigitalBicycle

    Posted by yatta at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)
    Steven Levy: "Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?"
    Posted by yatta at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
    NATPE: Using the Internet to Predict (TV) Programming Success
    tv buzz tracking -- Trendum
    "

    Drawing a standing-room-only crowd to its NATPE 2005 seminar Predicting the Next Big Hit, TVtracker.com, the online resource for television programming development and information, along with Initiative, one of the country’s leading independent media service companies, and Trendum, an Internet monitoring and analysis software developer, unveiled PropheSEE™ , the latest tool in the growing arsenal of research created to help producers, networks and advertisers understand today’s discerning television viewer…"

    Posted by yatta at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)
    SXSW Report: Ben Walker on 'Net Censorship in China

    Yesterday at SXSW: a presentation on blogging and censorship, with Hossain Derakhshan, prominent Iranian-Canadian blogger, and Benjamin Walker, radio host and Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow, who just got back from China last week. Hot on the heels of this March 4 New York Times article on censorship of blogs in China, he refuted what he defined as several misconceptions of the western media on how the Internet is being used there.

    Misconception 1: We in the west assume that millions of Chinese are searching for information to aid their revolutionary struggles.
    Truth: Most Internet users in China are looking for the same thing most Western users are looking for. Porn.

    Misconception 2: Information from the outside gets blocked at the national level, especially on oppressed movements such as Falun Gong.
    Truth: Chinese get flooded with unwanted email about this and a lot of other things, and just like users in the west, they consider it spam.

    Misconception 3: There are 30,000 to 50,000 "Internet police" who do nothing but monitor people's email, web surfing, etc.
    Truth: This is a number invented by officials for official propaganda missives, aimed at the national media, not Western reporters, who nonetheless take up information ministry press releases as legitimate and use them as source material.

    Misconception 4: Only the most tech-sophisticated kids know how to use proxies to get beyond the firewall and onto "banned sites."
    Truth: Lots and lots of users regularly use proxies to not only get to more content, but to avoid extra pay-per-service charges. (Although, apparently even this does not manage to evade the highly effective national censoring of porn content.)

    Misconception 5: Censorship is all happening at the government level.
    Truth: Censorship is more prevalent at the personal level, with bloggers omitting or removing references to certain ideas or issues in order to avoid trouble with the authorities. Service providers in China also must cooperate with the authorities on screening for certain words and phrases and intervening with those who post them, but the active hand of the government with individuals is rare.

    According to bloggers Walker interviewed, the Chinese blogosphere is evolving, with bloggers carefully testing the openness of the system. There are different levels of censorship--new tools might help users move towards freer use of blogs for more sensitive topics. For example, on Google China, blogs are starting to rank higher than official web sites on searches about "city reconstruction," a phrase that signifies development in the countryside. It's a significant shift in information resources, that points at the potential for bloggers to reveal more of the truth about life in China to each other.

    All very interesting to me -- I've been reserved in my trust in the "blogosphere" to foment social revolution in places like China, where it seems like it was too easy to stop up the pipe -- a view definitely influenced by what I've read in papers like the Times. Walker's POV is that we need to look a lot deeper than what mainstream press is reporting about blogs, the Internet and China.

    (Posted by Emily Gertz in Global Culture – Art, Music, Fashion, and Travel at 04:11 PM)

    Posted by yatta at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
    That’s Inter-tainment

    By Douglas Rushkoff
    How mobile can -- and should -- change the way we think about entertaining ourselves and each other.
    Posted by dan at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
    Social networks: All around the Net, but underused by news sites
    By Daithí Ó hAnluain: Social networks continue to blossom online by appealing to people's deepest needs for connection. What promise do these technologies offer for news sites?

    (Interesting overview of how social software can change journalism - dm)

    Posted by dan at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)
    The Future of Camera Phones - Josh Spear
    Hiroshi Nakaizumi, thinks there might be a future for smaller camera phones (maybe in the shape as the one shown) that project images instead of showing them on a small and worthless pixelated screen.
    Posted by yatta at 08:02 AM | Comments (0)
    Ted Leung on the air : Power laws and plugins
    "Let's say that you want to build an application that has a potentially broad market. How do you decide what features should be included? I bet that the graph of application features versus users of a feature follows something shaped like a power law curve. At the "short head", you have all the "basic features", which all people are likely to use, which makes them uncontroversial and therefore in the product. In the "long tail", you have features that each are of interest to some small constituency. If you can't decide which of these constituencies you will support, you either include no features from the tail, or you try to include all of them."
    Posted by yatta at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)
    BrainStream: TIVO: Listening to Podcasts on your Tivo
    Podcasting on TiVo would be a killer app
    "Until Tivo has software to use and record from a USB AM/FM tuner, why not create a Podcast application that, in addition to downloading shows for someone's iTunes player, also queues them up to the Tivo Home Media Environment for listening to."
    Posted by yatta at 07:59 AM | Comments (1)
    intercasting launches rabble

    Via PaidContent's MocoNews, Derrick Oien's Intercasting Corp. just launched their product/service, called Rabble. Congrats from the unmediated crew Derrick! From their press release:


    Rabble is one of the first enhanced mobile blogging applications built on QUALCOMM's BREW solution. The application takes web-based blogging's simple approach to content publication and adds location awareness, proximity and camera phone integration to create a truly mobile-specific tool to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for user-generated content and community. With Rabble, mobile content is tagged with location information and other descriptive data that enables users to find each other based on the media they create and where they create it. Users can create their own channels, where they collect and store content to inform, entertain, interact and connect with the surrounding environment.

    Posted by Eli Chapman at 03:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

    March 12, 2005

    Gallup: Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues

    I think this provides some interesting statistics, but I don't really know how important they are. I also hesitate to jump to any conclusions that my worldview might come, to a large extent, from living in a sort of bloggers' bubble.

    The effects of blogs can be more subtle than, say, those of TV; the Gallup poll refers to "direct impacts" but these might be of limited importance. Blog-type media serves a valuable role as a media feeder and people don't necessarily need to read them directly, or even know what a blog is, to be affected by reports from the blogosphere. I'm also curious as to how many people happen to read blogs from time to time, but don't know that some people call them "blogs" and not something like "websites"...

    According to a recent Gallup poll:

    The apparent effect that blogging is having within media and political circles is far ahead of its direct impact on the American public. Relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon, and fewer still are reading blogs with any frequency. Even among the most blog-conscious demographic -- 18- to 29-year-olds -- frequent blog reading is the exception.

    It's also interesting that the poll was sponsored by 2 old-media organizations - USA Today and CNN. I'm not saying the poll is necessarily suspect because of this, but we must take into account where the poll is coming from.

    Posted by dan at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

    March 11, 2005

    Cinequest, a P2P Movie Fest
    Cinequest, the Silicon Valley movie festival is open to one and all, even to film buffs nowhere near California. Thanks to a peer-to-peer movie-delivery system, many of the flicks can be watched online in near-DVD quality. [Wired News: DAT's Entertainment]

    RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

    Posted by dan at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)

    March 10, 2005

    TV needs link-love, too

    I've been doing these MSNBC Connected blog reports for a few weeks now and I've noticed something interesting happening: Folks who get mentioned are mentioning it on their blogs... but only if they have something to link to. Trey Jackson, Crooks & Liars, and Ian Schwartz put up the video or I put up links and then people have something to link to and they do, giving this new show the publicity it wants. The moral to the story: TV needs permalinks, too. TV news operations should be putting up every story -- not show, story -- with text and links so they can join in the conversation.

    Posted by yatta at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)
    The Daily Whim: TextDrive, or How To Raise $40,000 In 4 Days
    "200 people paid $200 in about 75 hours, an average rate of over $500 per hour. Dean ends up with $40,000 to start his business, and 200 “mini-VC’s” (now known as the “VC200”) get web hosting for the life of TextDrive."
    Posted by yatta at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)
    AMD's answer to the Centrino, the Turion launched
    AMD Turion 64 logo

    Anyone reasonably well versed in AMD’s current mobile chip lineup knows what an awful mess it is. They’ve got the Athlon XP-M, Mobile Sempron, and Mobile Athlon 64—three totally distinct processor classes that are totally mind boggling for the average consumer. And now, despite their decision to phase out some of these products before introducing new ones, they’ve officially launched their new Turion 64 processor lineup, which they intend to give Intel’s Pentium-M (aka href="http://www.engadget.com/search/?q=centrino&submit=Go">Centrino) a run for its money. Their chips, which are clocked between 1.6 and 2.0GHz (compared to Intel’s 1.5 to 2.13 GHz chip lineup) will undercut Intel’s wholesale prices by between 10 and 45%, a very substantial margin. But will they be successful? Well, we hope so, but seriously AMD, you’ve got to pull it together!

    Posted by yatta at 08:24 PM | Comments (0)
    New Models for Sustainable Cinema
    Avid's Manager of New Market Development, Eli Chapman, will speak at the International Institute for Film Financing San Francisco Chapter Meeting 2005 March 16. Eli will discuss how emerging technology helps filmmakers and financiers identify the good, the bad, and the blockbusters in a world where anyone can make a movie. This can be accomplished by including the audience early on in the filmmaking process. Other speakers will treat:
    • Hollywood Profits: The Big Picture — and the Small: Hollywood's continuing struggle with profitability is a systemic problem deeply rooted in the studios' legacy business model. This presents independent filmmakers and financiers alike with new entrepreneurial opportunities
    • Frontiers of Film Financing: New Tax Incentives and Creative Financing Strategies. Glenn will explain new federal and state tax incentives and creative financing structures for independent filmmakers and their investors, as well as developing trends in film distribution
    • The Filmmaker as Startup Entrepreneur: Key Lessons from Silicon Valley. What can a filmmaker learn from a successful entrepreneur? What are the compelling qualities a venture investor looks for in an investment opportunity?
    [ RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)
    Website to profile media/democracy innovators

    Know of a media/democarcy project worthy of more attention? This from Bill Densmore at Newshare:

    The Media Giraffe Project, hosted by the journalism faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and funded by private donations, will be spotlighting individuals making innovative use of media to foster participatory democracy and community.

    Beginning in March, the year-long research effort will seek, identify and profile individuals "sticking their necks out" using media to achieve more citizen involvement and accountability in government.
    Project researchers will chronicle what's working at the local and national level via a website, "how-to" video, a book and training.
    The project is being launched with the collaboration of The Giraffe Hero Project.
    For more information on the project, or to nominate media "giraffes" worthy of profiling, please contact:

    Media Giraffe Project
    108 Bartlett Hall
    Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst
    Amherst MA 01003
    (413) 545-5931
    mediagiraffe (at) journ.umass.edu

    .
    Posted by yatta at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)
    Two front-runners for top FCC job
    Michael Gallagher, an assistant commerce secretary, and Kevin Martin, an FCC commissioner, are the top two candidates to fill Michael Powell's post.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)
    Intellectual Property and Creativity conference in Washington D. C.
    IP (Intellectual Property) and Creativity is a one-day conference (2005 March 16) which examines critical issues affecting the advancement of creativity in the United States. Learn about the complex issues surrounding IP, innovation and creativity and the potential impact on America's business and culture. Engage in the discussion on how to best encourage creativity and ingenuity within the United States by redefining the debate over protecting IP. Connect with the leaders in the intellectual property debate, including policymakers, media, think tanks, academicians and industry executives. Conference site. [Brian Flemming]

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 08:18 PM | Comments (0)
    if this makes sense to you

    Sometimes the best way to find your peers is to start speaking loudly in your native tongue and see who talks back. So here's a diagram I drew after laughing at this post. I've drawn this sort of thing a number of different ways, but never as a Venn diagram. There's tons missing, but I kind of like how vague it is. Feel free to annotate it here on Flickr. Cheers:

    Via ChapmanLogic

    Posted by yatta at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)
    The next Xbox will be one big Live! machine
    Xbox 360 logo

    It’s inevitable that Live! will be a part of the Xbox 360. But according to this piece it looks like it will be as integral to the unit as the GPU. Gamespy continues their coverage of the next Microsoft console, with a look at how Live! is going to be integrated into the tiny silver/round-edged/spherical/whatever console. The gamer’s profile will play a key role in how the machine behaves, online and offline. The “Game Card”, a collection of your stats and preferences, will let the console start up as you want it, as well as hook you up with like-minded gamers.

    The service will actually be built-in to the hardware, and it will include:

    # Friends management
    # Access to recent players
    # Message center
    # Game invite management
    # User notifications
    # Gamer profile
    # One-on-one voice chat
    # Downloads
    # Feedback
    # Sign-in

    Of course, this means that the pressure will be on for you to subscribe to the service, making ownership of a game console that much more like owning a car. When will they start selling insurance for these things?

    [thanks maneatingcow!]

    Via Joystiq

    Posted by yatta at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)
    What's a Downloaded Episode Worth?
    Over the last few days I've been collecting information about what people would shell out for a pay-per-episode (not pay-per-view) series. Compared to four years ago when I last pondered this question, people seem much more willing to spend a little to get good entertainment, which in itself is a massive shift of opinion. But in the process of gathering this data, I think I may have discovered that you can only ever charge $1 for anything online, no matter how much it costs to make...
    Posted by yatta at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)
    Dog Vlogger
    dog with video camera
    dog with video camera,
    originally uploaded by pt.
    Even dogs can make media!

    Via Eric Rice

    Posted by yatta at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)
    Sony Ericsson ROB-1: Bluetooth Camera Robot

    sony_irob.jpg

    Sony is showing off the ROB-1, which starts off on the right foot by naming itself after our favorite dead-end Nintendo product of yore. It's a robot Bluetooth camera, which you can control with the joystick of your phone, and even receive a live broadcast of what the robot is seeing if you use a Sony Ericsson P900/P910. Believe it or not, Sony Ericsson is actually planning on commercializing the ROB-1, so if you need a robot guard that can only work from about 30 feet away, keep an eye out around Q3 '05.

    Posted by yatta at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)
    Making a podcast appliance...
    bluggsm.jpgI'm in the process of making and finding cheap ways to develop a podcast appliance as well as Flickr photo frames. For now I use a Tablet PC in my kitchen to listen to many podcasts. Kosso from Blugg.com has created a very cool XML/Macromedia Flash application that really makes the podcast appliance more interesting. It's all a work in progress but- here are a couple photos of it in action...
    Posted by yatta at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)
    TV is 'declining in importance'
    The broadcast upfront looks "soft" and online advertising is gaining a bigger chunk of the marketing mix, say presenters at Merrill Lynch's Advertising & Marketing Conference. (Free MediaPost reg. req.)

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)
    Institute for Multimedia Literacy
    The ultimate aim of the Institute is to help faculty and students from across the university and beyond to use the time-based, interactive language of sound, image and text that is the basis of multimedia and apply new concepts for analysis and research.
    Posted by yatta at 12:18 AM | Comments (0)
    Aboretum Releases Free Mac Audio/Video/Text Editor
    Aboretum Releases Free Mac Audio/Video/Text Editor. Arboretum has decided to release their (previously commercial) audio, video, and text editor, HyperEngine-AV as a free, open-source program. HyperEngine-AV's free-form document window, lets you quickly and easily combine video, photo, audio and text media for the creation of full dv quality slide shows, family movies, corporate presentations or your own feature films. HyperEngine-AV has a very smooth learning curve and a better efficiency leaving extra headroom for creativity. I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but it looks very robust and it has a non-track-based interface for more freeform editing than you get with traditional video-editing tools. [datacloud]

    Via Cinema Minima

    Posted by yatta at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)

    March 09, 2005

    Flash® Film Festival Finalists

    The 2005 San Francisco Flash® Film Festival finalists have been posted and People’s Choice voting is open. 15 categories including cartoon, art, motion control, 3d, etc.

    murdersa.jpg

    Via Flashforward blog.

    Via we make money not art

    Posted by yatta at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)
    Live from CeBIT: Siemens Prototype DVB-H Phone

    dvb-hsiemens.jpg

    Siemens is also showing off about a half-dozen of these DVB-H prototype phones, which as far as I can tell are just barely working (the DVB satellites aren't up yet for Korea, I've heard, but is Europe even getting DVB? I should start actually talking to these people instead of eating their fish). No plans to commercialize these yet, of course, but they're making a big deal of them. I have this feeling that TV on phones will be much more practical with the DVB solutions instead of trying to stream stuff over the networks.

    Press Release (Third paragraph.) [Siemens]

    Update: Apparently DVB has already launched in Germany. Plus, Janne writes:

    Just to clarify. Europe has DVB in use as S, T and C formats. And at least here in Finland (Helsinki area) we have test broadcasts with the DVB-H. Just this weekend tested the Nokia 7710 phone with DVB-H receiver and it was very impressing.

    Via Gizmodo

    Posted by yatta at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
    Unofficial SXSW Community Podcast
    Podcast listeners heard this first: Unofficial SXSW Community Podcast.

    The short version? Email me or track me down at SXSW Interactive, and you'll be able to podcast with your cell phone to the community podcast blog. Raw and uncut. As it happens. Share a thought or interview someone. All Creative Commons. Here's the open source podcasts' RSS feed.

    Via Eric Rice

    Posted by yatta at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
    Atom Films Short Becoming Vin Diesel Pic

    Most people trying to break into the movie industry still think the film festival route is the way to go. Truth be told, film festivals, as evidenced by the last Sundance, are becoming stale. The new route to enter the movie business will be through the Internet. As an example, Blur Studio, makers of the short film "Rockfish" which has been playing on AtomFilms, have just announced that they are teaming up with Vin Diesel to make a sci-fi action CGI feature film based on the short. Diesel will lend his voice to the lead character. Tim Miller, who wrote and directed the short will direct the feature film.

    Picon_af_rockfish_lrg_1



    Cinescape

    (Fortunately, I don't see a duck in this one. -kc.)

    Via HOLLYWOOD LIBERATION ARMY

    Posted by yatta at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
    Tech Firms Want New FCC Box Rule

    This article by Ted Hearn was passed around my group today. I know there is a consumer advocate in here somewhere ...

    An array of technology firms, including major computer and TV-set manufacturers, is pressing federal regulators to enforce new set-top-box rules against the cable industry.

    Cable operators are resisting implementation of a Federal Communications Commission rule that would ban the deployment of new integrated set-tops after July 1, 2006, effectively meaning that all new boxes would need to function with the CableCARD conditional-access device.

    “The time has come to end consumers’ exclusive reliance on [set-top boxes] provided by their cable company. In fact, it’s long overdue,” Hewlett-Packard Co. executive vice president Shane Robinson said in a Feb. 17 letter to the FCC.

    The CableCARD mandate is designed to establish a retail set-top market, and the technology firms maintained that the creation of such a market requires that cable operators support the CableCARD in all new boxes that they provide their customers.

    Cable insists that the mandate would drive up box costs without creating new value for consumers.

    In a separate letter, H-P joined 11 other companies, including Sharp Electronics Corp. and Dell Inc., in urging the FCC to reject cable’s proposal that the agency should eliminate the ban or postpone its effective date by 18 months.

    “The only way to ensure that consumers enjoy the benefits of a competitive marketplace is to maintain the requirement that devices supplied by cable operators rely on the same CableCARDs for security that must be used by equipment supplied through competitive retail outlets,” the companies told the FCC in a Feb. 18 letter.

    An FCC source said one proposal under review called for retaining the ban but exempting low-cost boxes, but a price level defining “low-cost” was not provided. Earlier this week, a commission source said no decisions had been made.

    On Wednesday, FCC member Jonathan Adelstein said it was important for the agency to move quickly because if the ban is affirmed, cable operators need time to place orders to meet the July 1 deadline.

    Posted by yatta at 11:48 PM | Comments (0)
    Enclosure Extractor 2.0 (Shareware)
    Enclosure Extractor allows you to easily extract and download enclosures from newsfeeds. Very few feed readers support enclosures fully. Enclosure Extractor fills this gap by letting you enter a newsfeed (either a single RSS file or an OPML file) and scans it for enclosures.

    Via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service

    Posted by yatta at 11:46 PM | Comments (2)
    TiVo to DVD via Mac OSX

    Matt Kingston is a TiVo hacker from way back (I use his scripts to show what's on my TiVo) and recently wrote in:

    Not finding any recent info on the web, I put together a guide on how to transfer video from a Series 1 TiVo to the Mac and edit/burn it to DVD (or VCD/SVCD).

    http://www.hitormiss.org/2005/03/07/tivo-to-dvd-via-mac-osx/

    There aren't many tools or guides for working with TiVo files on a mac, and Matt's tracked down all the tools that work on OS X and you can even use iMovie and iDVD at the end to edit and burn.

    Via PVRblog

    Posted by yatta at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
    Grassroots Movie to Star Bloggers

    What will they think of next. TheWeblogProject calls itself is the first open source, free, grassroots movie to support and promote the blogosphere. It is designed to be a completely different movie, because featured stars, producers, fundraisers and actors of TheWeblogProject movie are the bloggers themselves. They are looking for stars via del.icio.us plus wiki...

    With your support, we will in fact fly to visit each one of the selected top 20 and interview them face to face. From now until April 15th you will have the opportunity to send in your personal list of the 20 bloggers you think we should interview, as they are in your opinion, the ones that have best understood the value and potential of blogging, and would be the best ones to evangelize and increase awareness about the blog universe to outsiders.

    Of course, they want us to contribute and pay for this too - surprised?

    Via Micro Persuasion

    Posted by yatta at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)
    OJR introduces wikis on journalism skills

    Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, emails:

    Today OJR introduced a new feature, a series of wikis on journalism skills, designed for bloggers, "grassroots" reporters and others who write online but who haven't formally studied journalism.

    We've started with basic guides on writing, reporting and journalism
    ethics
    . Each also includes a discussion area, where readers can ask specific questions about projects they are working on or debate controversial elements of these topics.

    OJR is making these wikis available under a Creative Commons license,
    the first time we've used these licenses on the site.
    OJR.

    Via New Media Musings

    Posted by yatta at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)
    Perfect use of BitTorrent

    Wired News: SXSW's Torrent of Free Tunes
    Legit and huge, 2.6 GB

    Via sLop

    Posted by yatta at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
    Video telephony and home media via the Internet
    Internet television, video telephony and music from the Internet – the living room of the future will become the communication center for the entire house. Siemens Communications has developed a range of innovative solutions for video telephony and home media – several prototypes of which will be introduced at CeBIT. These include a cordless telephone equipped with a digital camera and wireless local area network (WLAN) for video telephony on TV, as well as a new set top box that enables convenient access to streaming online video and music. An allin- one modem, Internet WLAN router and DECT base station was also developed jointly by Siemens and Telefonica Germany. The device is the basis for so-called triple-play services that will run on the Spanish/German carrier’s technical platform. The router and parallel set top box will enable high-quality TV via ADSL. The first triple-play offering will be introduced in summer 2005 in Europe.
    Posted by yatta at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
    Allard's Speech At GDC: Three Digital trends
    (Read the Xbox news [at PaidContent.org] first) J Allard, VP at Microsoft and cheif Xbox architect, gave a keynote today at GDC, and focused on three digital trends, most of which we cover here. The full transcript is linked above, but some key highlights:

    -- Hi Definition TV: "The trend is more than just resolution;look at what else is happening in the living room with time shifting and TiVo....They're watching their own digital videos, they're watching their own digital photos in the living room, they're even listening to digital music that's stored somewhere else on a PC in the house."
    -- Hi Def Communication: "High def connectivity isn't just changing the way we communicate but it actually is going to change the expectations of our entertainment experiences going forward. We've all seen it in music today and we're going to see it more in television and movies and in games. "
    -- Customization: "How are we going to take advantage of that consumer behavior and that urge to personalize and take that into our games? Well, the answer is simple; I mean, we just go out and build products that reflect the amazing shift that we're experiencing."

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)
    OpenTopics

    So Mary Hodder and I have been discussing "how could you do Technorati tags" = open.

    Apparently it is NOT required to use the Technorati domain in your tags - but that's something people haven't caught onto and since the first generation of tagging 'plug-ins' went out without that feature - needless to say almost everyone IS now directly contributing to Technorati's link flow.

    Now I really don't care about link flow, traffic, or any of that shit - but I can see why others might. I myself really APPRECIATE Technorati's contriobution to teh community - since I'm a folksonomies nut - and it was nice to see Flickr glued in there - but "where's BuzzNet? or Fotolog.net?"

    And before I go on about what OpenTopics could be - here are a few comments from some Technorati peeps on my post on 'Why Tags matter' (responding to the David Weinberger post of the same name):

    From from someone named Seth Russel:

    I totally agree. We should find some way to eliminate the domain name from our tags. A tag is a tag is a tag, is the same tag, regardless if it is tagged at technocarti or del.icio.us or fliker or whatever. There is a simple way to do this actually ... i keep trying to write a white paper about it. But in a nutshell all it requires is that the tagging services share RSS feeds. Thanks for bringing this up !

    Posted by: Seth Russell at March 3, 2005 06:01 AM

    Technorati is a collector of tags, but you are not required to use the Technorati domain in your links to participate.

    You can link to the Apple iPod page, the Wikipedia iPod page, or the Technorati page for the iPod tag. Each link is meant to provide a relevant destination for your categorization link. You choose the destination, Technorati aggregates the conversations, and the topics are open.

    Technorati also treats the category and dc:subject elements within your RSS and Atom feeds as a post tag.

    The rel value of "tag" is a W3C and IETF proposal that predates Technorati's evangelism of the usage in January.

    Placing tags in your posts is decentralized tagging, open to everyone to share on their own servers and their own weblogs, wikis, etc. and open to personal definition. I believe OpenTopics is already here and content publishers are just beginning to find interesting ways to use the feature and create new ways for others to discover related content.

    Posted by: Niall Kennedy at March 3, 2005 08:45 AM

    Thanks, Niall, i learn something every day. But i still think that context servers like Technorati should share tags and items such that items intentionally tagged at one server would also be also tagged at other servers.

    - thank you Seth and Niall - its nice to hear from Technorati peeps what's up with all that. But as I stated above - it's really too late to tell folks about that - if they've already plugged in their plug-ins and are using the system that way.

    Meanwhile - so I was a Matt Mower LiveTopics user, loved what Matt and Paolo did with ENT and also LOVED eVector's k-collector product.

    So how can we take those ideas - get folks using the ENT namespace (instead of some RESTful technique like Technorati nows persues) and create a truely open topic exchange. Well maybe not INSTEAD of a RESTful technique - how 'bout IN ADDITION to the RESTful technique.

    That's one coolio thing about Flickr's APIs - they support XML-RPC, SOAP and REST techniques. So that's TRUELY the open, agnostic approach - support all three.

    Oh yah - let's not forget Mr. Phil "I hacked it up over the weekend' Pearson. Not many people give credit for the 'link' ranking lick - which Phil's blogging ecosystem did six months BEFORE Technorati. But Phil also did something called the Internet Topic Exchange - which was the first blogging aggregator channel around topics.

    So anyway all ego and credit aside - Mary and I have been trying to figure out how to get this to work. If any of you wanna participate in such an effort contact me or Mary.

    So ENT is a namespace specifically designed for RSS - which would enable one to store the tags into the RSS feed. Folks should think about using that.

    Thanks.

    Posted by yatta at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
    Live from CeBIT: Samsung 5.2 Megapixel Anycall Phone with Optical Zoom



    I've been begging and pleading for someone to do it, and I sort of thought it might be Samsung. Here's a new 5.2-megapixel Anycall with optical zoom. Now granted, it's not the first optical zoom cameraphone—Samsung has had at least two others that I can think of—but this Anycall is fast approaching the future where we don't have point-and-shoot cameras at all. Pressing the camera button on the top and watching the zoom lens telescope out made me much more giddy than it should have.


    (Gizmodo has tons more CeBIT porn including naughty shots of Samsung's 7MP Anycall. Look at that zoom lens. Ooooooooooooooooooooh. -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)
    MixCast Live
    Mixcast Live is podcasting mix studio software

    Posted by yatta at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)
    OpenPodcast.org - The ‘Open Mic’ Podcast
    'OpenPodcast.org is a dynamically generated podcast to which anyone at all can contribute. It expects "short" segments (under 5 minutes is suggested) which will be included in the feed as they are received.'
    Posted by yatta at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)
    RSS Screensaver - NuParadigm Systems Inc.
    The RSS Screensaver is a screensaver that lets you select and validate an RSS feed, and select a directory for background images. The Screensaver loops through the list of RSS items and shows the contents of the feed in the right hand side.

    Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

    Posted by yatta at 11:08 PM | Comments (1)
    Online killed the video star
    The obit has been written many times. Tonight we buried the body.

    This was the end of the era of the anchor, of news as a lecture, of one-size-fits-all media, of journalism on a pedestal.

    That's not Dan Rather's fault. Other things are, but that's not. tonight, he's merely a symbol of an era that's over.

    I see no cause for regret. The era of the reporter -- brave, swashbuckling, aggressive, eager -- is not over; there will always be Dan Rathers who will stay on top of the big story and shout about it.

    But the era of one-way news is gone. And in a sense, we have Dan Rather to thank for that. If his last mistake had been a little less obvious, if his response had been a little bit quicker, if his tone had been a little less arrogant, he'd be back on the news tomorrow night.

    What matters isn't that he's gone. And what matters isn't that bloggers got his head.

    What matters is that bloggers have to be listened to. What matters is that the people will be heard.

    Though I was hardly was his greatest fan, I have to admire Rather's dogged energy and I have to feel some sympathy for ending his amazing run with a stumble.

    But no one else would have provided the contrast he did: old v. new, big v. small, controlled v. open. By that contrast, we see the future of news.

    The only problem for Rather was that his last big story was Rather.

    : More reaction...

    : It takes a special breed of balls to end the last broadcast with the word "courage." I honestly don't know whether he is all that hokey or whether he has a wicked sense of humor.

    : Lone Ranger, a broadcast journalist, says:
    Call me sentimental, but I watched the last minute of the CBS news tonight. It was the first time I'd watched Dan Rather in 20 years. But then, I had a box of chicken the day Colonel Sanders died too. Nothing dramatic happened. It was just chicken.


    ramatic happened on the CBS news tonight either. He didn't put a gun to his head, the staff didn't break out in a spontaneous rendition of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead," not so much as a single tear slid down his cheek.:


    (Thanks Mr. Rather. ;) -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)
    How to Create Your Own Podcast - A Step-by-Step Tutorial
    How to Create Your Own Podcast - A Step-by-Step Tutorial. Podcasting. You've heard about it and now you want to do it yourself. Finally: you can have your own talk show or radio program of any sort and distribute it to the world. It's not very hard.

    Via Broadcasting

    Posted by yatta at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)
    Bittorrent 4.0 is out
    The latest version of Bit Torrent (4.0) is now available. Among the changes (from the official website):

  • All new queue-based user interface
  • Many options are now modifiable from the interface, including upload rate
  • Lots of other interface improvements
  • Extra stats are visible, for those who like it
  • Remembers what it was doing across restarts
  • New .torrent maker "btmaketorrentgui" replaces "btcompletedir"
  • Better performance, as always
  • License has changed to the BitTorrent Open Source License
  • Torrent fields are correctly created and interpreted as utf8
  • Via Broadbandreports

    Posted by yatta at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)

    March 08, 2005

    LMNL: Tutorial
    This tutorial introduces you to LMNL, the Layered Markup and Annotation Language. Data is marked up using named and overlapping ranges, which can themselves be annotated. To support collaborative authoring, markup is namespaced and divided into layers, which might reflect different views on the text.
    Posted by yatta at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
    Business podcasts take off

    WebProNews: Business Podcasting Is Taking Off.

    Via Social Media

    Posted by yatta at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
    Personal Tech Pipeline | Lab Rat: Flexible Screen For Phones Just Two Years Away

    Philips Polymer Vision scientists have made dramatic progress on a flexible, 5-inch display for cell phones the company plans to "roll out" in two years.

    Called the Polymer Vision PV-QML5, it's a 5-inch ultra-thin and very light 320 x 240 pixel active-matrix display. You use it by grabbing a part of the phone and pulling it like a scroll.

    The display has four gray levels, the monochrome display and is designed to replicate the look of paper. It uses what the geniuses at Philips call a bi-stable electrophoretic display effect, which is technology from E Ink Corp., and requires very little power.
    Posted by yatta at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
    The Historical Significance of TiVo
    How many times have you read about the threat that digital video recorders (DVRs) pose to traditional television and its business model that relies on commercials? You might think it was only recently that people were using technology to avoid commercials, or that it was only recently that people found commercials so annoying that they wanted to avoid them. It ain't so.

    In the process of preparing a presentation on the evolution of media, I came across Jeff Jarvis' comment that the most revolutionary media invention was not Gutenberg's press, but rather the TV remote control -- because it "enabled (...)

    Entry continued...
    Posted by yatta at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
    Zapping > ZVBI > WebHome
    A C library for getting info from a TV tuner's Vertical Blanking Interval which contains, amongst other info, closed captioning
    Posted by yatta at 11:39 PM | Comments (1)
    Learning Communities in the era of Ubiquitous Computing, Milano, June 13
    From Dr. Monica Divitini, Norway:
    We are organizing a workshop that might be interesting for some of you.

    Learning Communities in the era of Ubiquitous Computing
    http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~divitini/ubilearn2005/
    Milano, 13 June 2005

    in conjunction with the International conference "Communities and Technologies".

    See also:
    Ubiquitous and mobile computing for educational communities: enriching and enlarging community spaces, Amsterdam, 19 September 2003

    Via All about Mobile Life

    Posted by yatta at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)
    The Seattle Times: Paul Andrews: Progressive peek at TV's Web potential
    Article about commonbits.org
    "Although only a few weeks old and still in beta, CommonBits.org is drawing on powerful new downloading, indexing and newsfeed technology under an activist agenda to help independent audio, video and other media find wider distribution and their natural audience. Go to the site and you find all kinds of content, from "The Daily Show" clips of Jon Stewart monologues to "Democracy Now" broadcasts."
    Posted by yatta at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
    Mediated by Thomas De Zengotita

    Great segment yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show -- an interview with Thomas De Zengotita, author of Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It.

    His basic premise is that our lives are mediated (that is, seen through the lens of various media) to such an extent that we experience reality in a completely artificial way. This makes us resemble method actors, he asserts: always immersed in our roles, always "in the moment", always knowing our "motivation".

    To me, some of what he's saying seems like a de-academicized take on the model of "subjectivity" put forth by semiotics: each of us is defined in part by the kinds of discourses in which we participate, be they films, social interactions, or Gawker blurbs. Still, though, it looks like a good read.

    There's also a good interview with the author on Salon.

    Via Stay Free! Daily

    Posted by yatta at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
    oggment: ogg and real encoder

    an ogg vorbis & real audio LIVE encoder for linux!
    it simply encodes the input from your soundcard (Mic/Line/Cd) simultaneously into vorbis & real audio encoded audio data sending it to an icecast2.0 server & real audio server respectively....the idea being to let larger sites offer live content in vorbis & real in order to ween the (ab)users away from addictive commercial codecs and into the LIGHT.

    Posted by yatta at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Wearable Computers That Fit You Well

    In "Wearable Computers You Can Slip Into," BusinessWeek Online reviews several new unobtrusive wearable devices, such as a handbag with embedded chips. When this bag becomes available for about $150 in two or three years, it will remind you to grab your wallet or to pick an umbrella before going out.

    And according to research firm IDC, the clunky wearable computers which required users to be wrapped in wires like Christmas gifts are quickly becoming things of the past. The future of wearable computers is already here, especially for some health-care applications, such as a 'smart band' that collects data on your physical activities and can be used as a weight-loss monitoring tool.

    Read more for other details and several illustrations about these wearable assistants.

    Via Clippings.reblog

    Posted by yatta at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)
    The mistake of convergence
    Richard Harper dismantles the vision of merging multiple communication devices to form meta devices that bundle disjunct streams of revenue, but neglect the relationship between media and platform.

    "For those of us in research, however, particularly those of us who do "user research", the idea of convergence is quixotic. It is a distraction from explorations of things that might be more salient. This is not to say that we doubt whether people in the future will sometimes want technology to combine different functions, it is just that we think that these combinations might need to be thought through more carefully than is typically the case. It is very rare indeed that users want everything combined in a single device. It is much more often the case that the reverse holds true: users want things separated and simpler, not combined and more complex."
    Posted by yatta at 05:56 PM | Comments (2)
    Doctor Who leaked onto internet ahead of premiere
    The episode, downloadable via Bit Torrent distributed P2P networks, is not thought to be a final cut, with fans who have seen the episode complaining of poor audio quality, and the BBC is urging viewers to wait for the finished version, which will be aired at the end of March.


    (Yes, it's Yet Another P2P Leak, but what stirkes me is that people complained about the encode quality. -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)
    Nokia Launches Handset TV Project

    Nokia has launched a pilot project enabling cell phone users to watch TV broadcasts on their handsets in the Helsinki region. Besides Finnish TV programming, 500 test users in the capital region can also watch international television broadcasts, such as BBC World and CNN, and tune into radio programs.
    Release: The mobile TV test uses IP Datacasting (IPDC), which conforms with the DVB-H standard. At the end of 2004, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) adopted DVB-H as the standard for European mobile television services, enabling the simultaneous transmission of several television, radio and video channels to mobile devices.

    Via MocoNews.net

    Posted by yatta at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)
    High Definition and the future of viewing

    Disk and broadcast systems battle it out

    Analysis Over the past 20 years, the potential of high definition (HD) has seen development in a number of interlinked fields - broadcasting, consumer electronics and pre-packaged content.…

    Posted by yatta at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)
    Non-linear TV viewing
    An interesting nugget buried in this story about advertising on new platforms: Forrester Research predicts in five years, 40% of TV viewing will be non-linear.


    (Also check out Terry Heaton's insightful post, "The Unasked Question" -kc.)

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 05:36 PM | Comments (1)
    First GDC keynote transcribed for your morning coffee
    koster

    Wonderland has done a wonderful job of laying out one of the keynotes from GDC. The speaker was Raph Koster, who wrote ‘A Theory of Fun’. It’s a loose transcript but it does the job of catching Koster’s enthusiasm just fine. He seems to believe that games are a lot more than entertainment. In fact, he thinks they hold the key to solutions to everyday problems - past, present and future. His conclusion launches GDC with just the right tone:

    We have to figure out games that don’t have one right answer, and we face our own cognitive challenges here. Otherwise we know what the fate of games will be: they’ll be the thing you stop doing when you’re 25 and you get kids. We’ll be missing out on a chance to improve the human condition.

    So what I want to see: the games about curing cancer. The games about how do we restructure Florida when it’s under water? That’s where we need to go. In the end games stand on their own as the ONLY MEDIUM THAT TEACHES FORMAL SYSTEMS IN THIS WAY. It is the only communicative medium that does this. It is the only fully experiential method of learning abstract concepts.

    Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. If you’ve been falling asleep in the flood of holiday/post-holiday titles, the speech is like a shot of caffeine.

    [via boingboing]

    Via Joystiq

    Posted by yatta at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
    US: blogger given White House press pass

    The New York Times reports that in the wake of the James D. Guckert/Jeff Gannon White House press corps scandal, an individual blogger was granted a day pass to the coveted media room. Garrett M. Graff who blogs about the Washington news media at Mediabistro.com, decided to see just how difficult it was to get into the White House. It turned out to be a lot harder than some had predicted, but once the blogosphere, and eventually major media outlets like USA Today and CNN, picked up on the story they began pressuring the White House to give Mr. Graff a pass, pressure to which they eventually caved. Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, called Mr. Graff's story significant because it "expand(ed) the definition of what constitutes the press, just as radio and television once pushed those boundaries."

    Source: The New York Times through Poynter

    Via editorsweblog.org

    Posted by yatta at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)
    Marginal Revolution: Why are all movies the same price?
    Well, not the same price in all cases. Before 6 p.m. is cheaper, there are numerous dollar theaters, and not all films allow for discount coupons. Nonetheless a multiplex will charge the same ($9.50 in my case) for the number one movie and for a flop. Nor is the price more expensive for Saturday night, or during the summer when demand is higher. Can any economic model predict these results? Here are a few observations....
    Posted by yatta at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)
    Provocative Article on Spectrum
    Into the Great Wide Open [via Copyfight] [pdf]
    "As I looked at pictures of the TEAMBOTICA robot on my computer, the words of Mark McHenry echoed in my ears: “Once you accept the idea of frequency-agile radios, anything becomes possible.” Indeed. Eben Moglen and Dave Hughes had said essentially the same thing. With the exception of heavyweight spectrum incumbents like the broadcasters, who are unable or unwilling to concede the end of interference, most everyone who talks about unlicensed radio uses the same vocabulary, although to radically different ends. For Moglen it is about democracy. For Hughes it is about connectivity. And for McHenry it is about money. His frequency-agile radios have already entered the military-industrial complex; someday soon, this technology will likely enter the civilian realm and forge a path not unlike the Internet, making a few people very rich, producing devices that we might come to see as indispensable, but that in the end may or may not have much to do with freedom, personal or otherwise."
    Posted by yatta at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
    Norwegian TV debuts video-phone reporting
    The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) has aired live video from a mobile phone on national television.

    The video was shot during the Vasaloppet ski race on Sunday. This is the first time in Norway video has been transmitted live from a mobile phone and broadcast to TV.

    NRK reporter Christian Grotnes, who took part in the event, was equipped with a 3G phone and commented on his own video images six times during the race.

    'We decided to test this in order to create a more dynamic broadcast,' said , Øyvind Lund, editor of NRK Sports. 'By using a reporter who was also a competitor, we managed to give the viewers a rather unusual perspective on a ski race.

    The video quality can be compared to that of video via satellite phones, but a 3G phone is much cheaper and easier to use.

    'This enables us to report breaking news live on TV at an earlier stage and keep it going until our normal broadcasting equipment is in place,' said Gunnar Garfors, NRK director of mobile services. The Vasaloppet ski race takes place in Sweden and is the world’s longest cross country ski race.
    Posted by yatta at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)
    Orb's Media On Demand

    Orb Network, a developer of streaming media software and FilmClix, today announced a partnership that will enable mobile access to an on-demand library of independent feature films from the U.S. and around the world.

    FilmClix, said to be a pioneer in the migration of the independent film industry online, through its FilmClix i-Theatre, delivers independent feature films, extreme sports, and documentaries to homes, offices, airports and dorm rooms around the globe.

    The partnership with Orb Networks enables FilmClix to digitally stream video content to any Internet device, including cell phones, PDAs, and notebooks. FilmClix subscribers open a Web browser, log-in, and select what they want to view from their personal library located on a PC.

    Posted by yatta at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)
    How to set up streaming audio using no-cost software

    Shimon Rura has a writeup on how to set up streaming audio for a meeting using no-cost software. I just walked through it, using a single Windows XP machine for the test setup. Works great.

    Via Andrew Grumet's Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 05:02 PM | Comments (0)
    Google Mapping Location-Based Narratives

    walkingtourMy colleague Ken Tompkins recently sent along a link to John Udell’s Walking Tour of Keene. The short video demonstrates how Udell used Google Maps in concert with a bookmarklet to create a walking tour of an area in his hometown that rides on top of the Google Maps UI. Waypoints are marked with GPS data on the Google map and then linked to his content (jpgs and quicktime clips). Udell explains how he did it in a followup post. Other hacks to Google Maps are being posted on a Google Maps Hacking Wiki. Although the current hack is kludgey, it suggests exciting possiblities for location-based narratives that could be delivered in a web browser via the Google Maps interface.

    Posted by yatta at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)
    How to Save the Orphans

    Have you been contemplating sharing your story with the US Copyright Office about obstacles to using orphan works, but haven't been sure about what they want to hear? Check out this FreeCulture.org web page showing how others have done it, and Academic Copyright, a blog where Stanford CIS copyright expert Elizabeth Townsend-Gard lists specific questions the Office is exploring.

    Posted by yatta at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)
    Building a mobile, locative, and collaborative application

    Nicolas Nova writes: My colleague and friend Fabien Girardin wrote a post mortem of our location based project CatchBob. It's here

    The document describes the whole development process, from the technical architecture to the user perception of the game. I talk about the positioning system, the data, the communication tool as well as the user interface. It addresses a large audience.

    is an experimental platform in the form of a mobile game for running psychological experiments. It is designed to elicit collaborative behavior of people working together on a mobile activity.

    Running on a mobile device (iPAQ, TabletPc), it's a collaborative hunt in which groups of three persons have to find and circle a virtual object on our campus.

    Thank you Nicolas !

    Posted by yatta at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)
    Announce: webjay@social-computing
    I am really happy to announce the alpha release of a joint project between Webjay/me and Olivier Nerot of Social-Computing.com. Social Computing makes a web-based map viewer; what Olivier has made in this case is an applet for travelling around the map of Webjay playlists.

    I'm at a loss to describe it, so here is a screen shot: Webjay@Social-Computing

    This applet is integrated with Webjay in three ways. One, there is a link to Olivier's visualizer on each playlist page. (Scroll down to the comments area). Two, there is a link on each related page; these are the pages where relationships between playlists are given, so Olivier's tool is the perfect thing. Three, and most importantly, Social-computing.com has a complete copy of the Webjay database (except for housekeeping and user accounts).

    Links:

    Warning: the app will take a little while to load the first time, and it will take a little while for your eyes to adjust to what you're seeing. Also, things are still buggy on both Olivier's side and mine. Give it a bit of time!

    Posted by yatta at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)
    Media junkie

    I can highly recommend this tongue-in-cheek essay by Wall Street Journal writer Andy Kessler on satellite radio and media company dynamics. For the temporally challenged, here are the juciest bits, and my thoughts:

    What do you call a media company with a million subscribers and $500 million in annual losses? A great start. Sirius Satellite Radio has set Wall Street on fire, commanding a $7.4 billion value by following in the greasy path set out long ago by the cable industry, grow first and ask questions later.
    … Harassed by the FCC over unwritten additions to the seven dirty word list, the King of All Media Howard Stern was ready to escape the public airwaves. A very Sirius $500 million and an encrypted signal was all it really took to shake him (and Mel) out of Viacom’s control.
    Although we colloquially refer to broadcast “networks”, in the mathematical sense they’re rather degenerate hub-and-spoke affairs. However, when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, there is a “network” and a network effect behind this: word of mouth recommendations and discussions between viewers. Similar dynamics appear in other “bit distribution” industries like movie theatres.

    Clayton Christensen suggested that innovators should be impatient for profit but patient for growth, because their disruption to established mainstream players will only grow from “substandard” niches. But for industries with strong network effects, the reverse may be true. He who crosses the prairie fastest gets the most corn in following years.

    Sky TV’s cornering of the broadcast rights to English soccer ensured that to participate in the bar-room discussion of the big match you had to gain entry via their pay-TV system.

    The lesson? Network effects may actually be external to the product itself, and may not be obvious.
    Every successful media company is based on some restriction of trade – TV was a mandated oligopoly, cable has local franchise rights, movies control theaters, music controls retailers, etc.
    The telecom version? The Paradox of the Best Network, and the Rise of the Stupid Un-Network (i.e. mesh) mean that all centralised network profits come from political mandate. The core competence of every telco over time drifts to the legal department.

    Via Telepocalypse

    Posted by yatta at 04:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Wiki Becomes a Way of Life
    More than 16,000 people contribute to the ever-changing Wikipedia, but few are as dedicated as these folks.

    Here are some of these power Wikipedians, and a look at what drives them to give so much to a community of strangers. They are ranked according to Wikipedia's list of the 1,000 Wikipedians who have made the most edits.
    Posted by yatta at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)
    AOL to Launch VoIP Service
    AOL (Quote, Chart) will launch its own brand of software next month that uses the Internet to make phone calls, said Jonathan Miller, AOL chairman and CEO, during his keynote at the VON Spring 2005 show here today.

    AOL Internet Phone Service is expected to have the same look, feel, feature set and functions as its popular Instant Messaging (IM) product. Similar to its rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, AOL already offers voice chat as a free feature of its IM platform.
    Posted by yatta at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)
    Cyberbank's CP-B300, the first DMB Pocket PC Phone
    Cyberbank CP-B300

    DMB, or Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (basically a standard for video broadcasting), isn’t much of a dealy over here, but it’s starting to gain some traction in South Korea, where Cyberbank is introducing the first Pocket PC Phone with a built-in DMB receiver. The CP-B300, which is compatible with EV-DO networks, also has a 2.5-inch LCD touch screen, a 520MHz processor, a built-in 1.3 megapixel digital camera, dual-stereo speakers (which we’re sure sound awesome), and a miniSD memory card slot.

    Via Engadget

    Posted by yatta at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)
    Welcome to CommonBits (beta) - a community directory of progressive media
    Really well done political BitTorrent tracker
    "CommonBits believes in the power of BitTorrent to enable activists and political groups to share and exchange large media files. Upload your files, and we'll create and host them as BitTorrents for you. Visit our Tools page to download a BitTorrent client for your operating system.
    Posted by yatta at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
    Podcasting by public broadcasters

    Mike Janssen, the Associate Editor of the Current Newspaper, passes on this excellent list of broadcasters who podcast:

    • American Public Media: Future Tense
    • American Public Media: Weekend America
    • BBC: Fighting Talk
    • BBC: In Our Time
    • Canadian Broadcasting Corp. - /Nerd
    • Democracy Now! - XML link
    Hearing Voices
    • KBeach, Long Beach, Calif. - Strange Angels
    KCRW, Santa Monica, Calif.
    • KPCC, Los Angeles - Pacific Drift
    • KZSC, Santa Cruz, Calif. - The Sound of Young America
    Northwest Public Radio and Northwest News Network - RSS link
    Public Radio Exchange
    • Benjamen Walker - Theory of Everything
    WBHM, Birmingham, Ala.
    WFMU
    • WGBH, Boston - Morning Stories
    • WNYC, New York - On the Media

    Posted by yatta at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)
    NYC Subway Wi-Fi?
    Corante asks Craig Plunkett, a self-described "New York Wi-Fi guy" and chief of CEDX, what the likelyhood is of seeing the MTA wire the NYC subway and train systems with Wi-Fi. "Wi-Fi in the subway would be a total loser", says Plunkett, "unless it was a comprehensive, vendor-neutral network that could carry both licensed and unlicensed network traffic." "In the three years I've been trying", he adds, "I haven't met a single person that was even willing to champion the idea."


    (A couple of years ago I learned that technologies need to go through a 7-year testing process before the NYC MTA adpots it. That means they should be getting teletypes any day now. -kc.)

    Via Broadbandreports

    Posted by yatta at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)
    YOU ARE THE MEDIA


    Image found in Eric Rice's Flickr photos.

    NowPublic.com shows how we can work together with the MSM to create the news. When the MSM publishes a story, that's only the beginning - not the end. What if you'd like a photo/audio/video clip of a news event? NowPublic acts as a distributed assignment desk. You can see if someone is providing or requesting media related to a story in your area or by topic. If you're so inclined, snap a photo or some video and upload it. Now people wanting to see or hear the local angle to a story have it at their fingertips. Plus, you control the rights to your media. Share with the bloggers, but make money if the MSM or an ad agency wants the hi-res version of your work.

    Quotes from yesteryear:

    "Weblogs have been massively hyped by the media. And they aren't going to change the face of journalism any time soon." — Nick Denton, July 2, 2002 11:56 AM

    "Me with a computer, me with a camera, I use them together and I am the frigging media. We are the frigging media." — Chuck Olsen, January 7, 2004 6:06 PM

    Via Blogumentary

    Posted by yatta at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Premodern America
    Journalism is reverting to partisan coverage, writes Kurt Andersen. Bloggers are "a second-tier journalistic species," but "will be absorbed and then transmuted by larger media entities."
    Posted by yatta at 03:02 AM | Comments (0)
    Nasty business, this music-sharing

    There's a bunch of nasty news in the music-sharing field worldwide.

    In Korea, the site "Bugs Music" (Korean language site) has agreed to sell a majority stake in the company to the Cartel. They claim this will somehow "put the business back on track" but I can't see how the site would stay up under the new management. On the fast track to shutdown seems more likely.

    Speaking of shutdowns, the UK arm of the Cartel are crying victory after forcing 23 of its customers to fork out UKP 50,000 for out-of-court settlements. Thirty-one more lawsuits are apparently in the works.

    And in the main arena the back-and-forth over Altnet/Kazaa/Sharman continues. Last week the entity proposed an ad revenue-sharing plan whereby it would be willing to do business with any part of the Cartel that wanted in. Big shock, the Cartel not only rejected the plan, it has asked a judge to prevent Altnet from distributing those revenues at all.

    I can't tell if this "plan" is an attempt to split the Cartel (won't work - the Cartel had no problems suing itself when BMG bought into Napster), a ploy to show that the Cartel won't play ball no matter what (no kidding - that's why I call it the Content Cartel), or a desperation move by a side that feels it's losing in court and wants a Plan B. My guess is Plan B looks a lot like Bugs Music.

    On the plus side, the court did refuse a request to force Kazaa's directors to disclose assets. Those assets will be targeted in the civil suit planned to follow the criminal case now underway. Maybe the directors should move those assets to the Netherlands, since a courth there has already ruled that Bermeister, Hemming, etc. cannot be held personally liable for misbehavior by users of their company's software. On the other hand, they may not be so popular there right now, as SmoothWall.net is reporting that Dutch military secrets were leaked out on the KaZaa network. (Note, I was not able to second-source this last tidbit.)

    Posted by yatta at 02:59 AM | Comments (0)
    Internet Use Tops Radio for 2004 Election News

    The Pew Internet and American Life Project report on The Internet and Campaign 2004 found:

    49% of all internet users (and 56% of those who get political news online) said “the internet has raised the overall quality of public debate” during the campaign and only 5% said the internet lowered the quality of debate. Some 36% said the internet did not make much of a difference.
    It adds:
    For online Americans, the internet is now a more important source of campaign news and information than radio: 28% of internet users cited the internet as a prime source of campaign news compared to 17% of them who cited radio. For those with broadband at home (a group comprising 27% of the overall U.S. population) the internet rivals newspapers as a major source of campaign news and information: 38% of those with broadband at home cited the internet as a major source of political news, compared to 36% of them who cited newspapers.
    The report also comes with commentary.

    Via PJNet Today

    Posted by yatta at 02:47 AM | Comments (0)
    PopCap Games Releases Open Source Framework
    Released under a BSD-style license
    "PopCap Games today announced the release of the PopCap Games Framework, the in-house development toolset used to create smash-hit titles such as "Bejeweled," "Bookworm," "Zuma," and other wildly popular casual computer games. The PopCap Games Framework is offered under an open source license and can be used free of charge by any developer for commercial or non-commercial use."

    Via del.icio.us/revgeorge

    Posted by yatta at 02:29 AM | Comments (0)
    Big Week for UWB--Maybe

    This week the FCC is expected to rule on the legality of multi-band OFDM, which Intel is pushing as the spec that UWB should be based on. If Intel loses, this could pave the way for either Pulse~Link’s or Freescale’s specs to take the lead in the standards sweepstakes. In any case, the next few days should give us a much clearer picture of when UWB will finally take hold. Or not.

    Via The Ultra Wideband Weblog

    Posted by yatta at 02:13 AM | Comments (0)
    Flows of Moments>>Shared Presence

    jill.gif

    "Last night I was reading danah boyd's post about how some people log on to IM to mark presence, while others only log on when they want to chat, and how the cultural difference causes tension, especially since it’s entirely invisible to those who log on simply to chat and assume everyone else does too.

    Watching IN Network a similar thought occurred to me. There's a stream of communication, but even when we can look at every single bit of communication and contact between two lovers (because it is all electronic and therefore accessible) the meaning of it evades us anyway. A conversation between lovers is uninteresting to others ("Tell me about your day?" "What kind of dinner did you get?" "Italian") - but its mere presence is crucial to the couple themselves. [blogged by Jill Walker on jill/txt]

    Howard Rheingold observes a similar shift from communication of messages to the communication of presence in the way cameraphones are used in Japan:

    "The social role of the cameraphone is distinctly different from both the camera and the phone. And although these devices transmit images through the Internet, they are also turning out, rather unexpectedly, to be face-to-face media. It looks like this newly ubiquitous device could be more about flows of moments than stocks of images, more about sharing presence than transporting messages, and ultimately, more about personal narrative than factual communication. […] cameraphones represent a new opportunity to tell the story of our lives to ourselves as well as to others, and to share a sense of continuous, multisensory, social presence with people who are geographically distant. Cameraphones represent a new opportunity to tell the story of our lives to ourselves as well as to others, and to share a sense of continuous, multisensory, social presence with people who are geographically distant. […] Surveys in 2003 indicated that 90% of the people who responded viewed their cameraphone pictures on their handsets, 60% used them as wallpaper for the phone screens, over 50% e-mailed them to…[link]""

    Posted by yatta at 02:01 AM | Comments (0)
    Dino blogs

    From today's Non Sequitur:

    Dinoblog

    Via New Media Musings

    Posted by yatta at 01:58 AM | Comments (0)
    Video camera for risky sports

    British designer Ben Wilson has designed the Inflate video camera (picture on the left) for snowboarders and skateboarders. The camera is placed inside an inflatable structure that acts as an airbag, protecting the device from damage and elements. Another camera structure, the Fig-Rig (on the right), has handgrips shoulder width apart to ensure a steadier shot.

    inflate11.jpg nonflate.jpg

    Wilson's portfolio is surprising and eclectic, don't miss the Swarowski version of his Downlow Lowrider Bike nor the Tilting Trike that can be reconfigured from a foot pedal-powered vehicle to one pedalled by hand.

    Via we make money not art

    Posted by yatta at 01:55 AM | Comments (0)
    Entertainment Weekly's EW.com | Feature: EW's David Browne names 2004's 10 best albums
    The cultural impact of The Grey Album
    Posted by yatta at 01:54 AM | Comments (0)
    Philips enables high-definition video with Nexperia PNX1700 media processor
    Royal Philips Electronics today introduced the PNX1700, the newest member of the company’s NexperiaTM family of media processors with high-definition (HD) capabilities. Combining media processing, network connectivity and display enhancement on a single chip, the PNX1700 is designed to deliver unprecedented picture quality of streaming movies, news, digital photos and TV programs.

    It doubles the performance of previous generations while maintaining both hardware and software compatibility. Digital Connected Consumer devices enabled by the PNX1700 include IP set-top boxes, digital media adapters, personal video recorders, videophones and TVs.

    The PNX1700 is supported by a complete development package including hardware reference design, C-compiler, debugger, and extensive software codecs and applications software. The PNX1700 will sample to select customers in June, with volume production scheduled for Q3 2005. The PNX1700 is priced at US$39 in volume.
    Posted by yatta at 01:45 AM | Comments (0)
    Introducing 802.11s - Wireless Mesh Networking
    "Intel has introduced a new wireless networking standard called 802.11s. This standard utilizes a mesh topology, allowing for fully self-configuring networks where each node can relay messages on behalf of others, thus increasing the range and available bandwidth with the number of nodes active within the system, versus the point-to-point structure of existing WiFi networks. This will radically transform WiFi hotspots, allowing the geographical area and available bandwidth on the network to scale with the number of participants."

    Via Slashdot

    Posted by yatta at 01:42 AM | Comments (0)
    New Entrant In The Never-Ending Search For Meaningful Metrics
    AdRelevance co-founder Will Hodgman and mobile data analyst Seamus McAteer are launching m:Metrics, the latest entrant in the nascent mobile metrics category. Nielsen Entertainment announced Nielsen Mobile earlier this month. The two plan to come up with every potentially meaningful mobile metric by tracking devices, channels and markets.

    The inaugural Benchmark Report shows:
    -- no gender gap when it comes to playing mobile games but men are much more likelt to download a game
    -- text message use is highest among the under-24 crowd but was used last month by 52 percent of those 25-34 and 37 percent of those 35-44.
    -- 58 percent do more than talk
    -- Weather, maps, sports scores and news are anmong the most sought-after topics.

    Check out the details here.

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 01:41 AM | Comments (0)
    Inside SBC's IP-TV Network
    Light Reading goes inside SBC's IP-TV service (called U-Verse), and provides a tour of SBC Labs.

    SBC said it wants to reach 18 million households with high-speed data, video, and voice services in two to three years, rather than the five years it first predicted (see SBC Speeds Up FTTH Plan).

    This week, the company upgraded its plans to include 19 million homes -- providing each home with connections as fast as 20 Mbit/s or 39 Mbit/s, depending on the location.



    SBC may use their newly aquired AT&T network for IPTV distribution. SBC's video distribution network, says Light Reading, will contains two national content aggregation centers (master headends), one in Los Angeles and one in the Midwest; 40 IP video hubs (regional headends); and 140 IP video serving offices (local distribution points).

    SBC, like Verizon, isn't really stringing fiber to the home. They're using the twisted pair that's already installed in your residence. SBC will use either Microsoft's Windows Media 9 codec, or MPEG-4.


    (Definitely check out the rest of the post at Daily Wireless. Good stuff. -kc.)

    Via Daily Wireless

    Posted by yatta at 01:40 AM | Comments (0)
    Video4Linux Framegrabbing

    Linux.com - Framegrabbing Applications
    Hans and I were just IMing about webcams and Linux and I had to remember some of the apps that I have looked at and played with.. Well, here they are (this site has a good rundown so I don't have to write one).

    Also of note is the Apache plugin mod_video.

    Via sLop

    Posted by yatta at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)
    Teen Convicted For Unauthorized Content... But The Devil's In The Details
    The Associated Press is reporting that a teenager in Arizona is the first person convicted under state laws for downloading unauthorized content online. Of course, it doesn't really matter that much that it's a first under state laws, rather than federal -- but the details of the case still raise some questions. First of all, almost all of the cases so far haven't been about downloading files, but unauthorized distribution of files -- which is a pretty important distinction. However, this article suggests it's for downloading. In fact, some versions of the AP piece go on to claim (without the slightest hint of a snicker) that the FBI found $50 million worth of music and movies on this kids hard drive -- though, it appears that the AP is pushing out changed copy without that $50 million line. Still, it makes you wonder where they came up with such a number. It would certainly be very difficult to defend. Also, the article buries in the final sentence that he was also selling the material he had downloaded. Just a second, here... Isn't the fact that he was selling unauthorized content the real story? He was a counterfeiter. That's a much bigger crime than just downloading some songs and movies for personal use. However, the AP ignores that point to blast out there the entertainment industry's favorite message: that somehow all of you folks downloading music and movies are going to get thrown in jail.

    Via Techdirt

    Posted by yatta at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)
    a few useful video links..
    ... recently discovered through
    http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/video

    thought I'd share them here :-)


    Making your video look more like a movie.
    - Getting a proffesional look with consumer cameras -
    http://scs.student.virginia.edu/~fms-uva/professional

    tutorials for various dvd to video to dvd etc
    http://webpages.charter.net/ernsta/macvideo.html

    and the classic -
    build your own $14 steadicam...
    http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam

    good overview of video software for mac
    http://www.pure-mac.com/video.html
    Posted by yatta at 01:30 AM | Comments (0)

    March 07, 2005

    Streaming servers & metadata: How it's done
    Description of how music-streaming servers provide metadata about MP3 streams via inline tags. perhaps adaptable to podcasts?
    Posted by yatta at 07:02 PM | Comments (0)
    The Long Tail: Exploding Radio
    "All media is getting Long Tailed at breathtaking speed these days. Music, TV, film, news and even advertising are being transformed by an explosion of variety and availability as the traditional bottlenecks of distribution fall. This month in Wired we focused on radio, where the combination of satellite, streaming, digital broadcast, radio TiVo, and podcasting is doing the same."
    Posted by yatta at 07:00 PM | Comments (1)
    Interplay: Computer Games Meet TV and Film - Wednesday 27 April 2005, London
    Topics to be covered include Computer Games, Digital media production, use of Computer Game Engines in film/TV production, linear and non-linear narratives and formats, realistic computer Graphics.
    Posted by yatta at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)
    Video Blog Blasts Google Autolink

    BetterbadnewsBetter Bad News has created a hilarious 12-minute video that shows a panel of actors reading a script off a teleprompter that blasts the Google Toolbar's controversial new Autolink feature. Better Bad News is a fascinating use of video blogs. According to their FAQ, the site "uses voice, character and audio visual support to extend and recontextualize the conversation." Similar to E!'s daily Michael Jackson trial re-enactment show, Better Bad News is a great example of the new power consumers possess now that the cost of video tools has come way down. I only hope they can maintain the site if they get Slashdotted.

    Via Micro Persuasion

    Posted by yatta at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)
    VIDEO: A Videoblog circa 2006

    Cokeisbullshit


    (Jay just induced my first honest to god spittake in weeks. Thanks! :) -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
    Journalism, Restoring Trust Conference Program
    *This is a tentative program for the Conference. Please look it over and contact me at lwitt(at)kennesaw.edu with any additional information, corrections, or suggestions. Or better yet, post a public comment below. It is still a work in progress you can help make it even stronger.

    Oh yes, mark your calendar for August 9--see you in San Antonio. This interactive conference is open to journalists, academics, citizen journalists, bloggers and interested members of the public.

    The conference is one part of a larger Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust project.
    Posted by yatta at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
    Jeff Jarvis imagines the future of news
    The future of news:
    So imagine that a local news organization -- one of the incumbents or a new competitor -- becomes an aggregator of: News -- Staff still reports, writes, and edits what they do best. But we also link to, syndicate, promote, and support the work of citizen journalists. To the public, we provide a means to get all the news we can find (a new slogan in the About.com era). We are the starting point (for some), the organizer (for some). But we no longer pretend to do it all. It's distributed news. We even help citizen journalists to join together to report stories: The one tangible suggestion out of this confab came from Jay Rosen, who said that one reporter somewhere will show how open-source journalism will work, bringing together the effort and expertise of the crowd. We can provide support to these "information entrepreneurs," as one of the group called them: advertising revenue (see below), tools, training (the BBC is starting a journalism school for the people; shouldn't and couldn't any local newspaper be that?). And they need not only write stories. Their reporting could be videotaping the board of ed meetings; it could be getting a senior citizens' club to report on prices in every grocery store; it could be pulling together Little League scores.
    Posted by yatta at 06:33 PM | Comments (1)
    Program to edit already build DVD's
    Program to edit already build DVD's
    Posted by yatta at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
    New Technorati tag feature (David Weinberger)

    At the beginning of this week, Technorati will launch a new tag aggregation feature: When you search on a tag, you’ll be shown a list of “related” tags. The relationships are automatically discerned by the software, analyzing the other tags used by people tagging the same set of pages and photos. Dave Sifry let me play with a beta of it, and the suggested tags were generally quite relevant.

    There are two types of relationships the “related” tags help with. First, they suggest slightly divergent topics so you can browse off the path you were heading down. Second, they help get over the problem that people use different words to flag the same ideas; the “related” tags can help you find more sources that are directly on the path you were heading down. So they help with both digression and focus. [Disclosure: I’m on technorati’s board of advisors. And yes, I have permission to blog this.]

    Posted by yatta at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
    WiFi and Cameras
    On the telescopic end of video, so to speak, Kodak has come out with the first wireless, digital camera that uploads photos to the web when it is in range of a wireless network.





    Kodak EasyShare One has a 3-inch LCD screen, 256MB of onboard memory, and a 4-megapixel CCD sensor



    The only wifi movies that I've seen posted automatically to the web still come from cellphones. Shawn Every posts them automatically to his MT blog.

    Via Mobile Video on the Go

    Posted by yatta at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)
    Shooting Web Video: How to Put Your Readers at the Scene
    Freelance writers, bloggers and independent journalists yearning to use video on the Internet can use these tips to help you begin shooting and editing your own Web video stories.
    Posted by yatta at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)
    Reporter, report thyself
    Jeff Jarvis: "But now the press is a story because of all the controversy about it, because of the upheaval in the medium, and because bloggers have made the press the story. So it is time for the press to criticize itself."
    Posted by yatta at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
    Craig mulls citizen journalism
    Last week we mentioned Craig from Craigslist may be thinking about getting into citizen journalism. Now an interview with him offers a few more details.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
    Receiver #12 - Seamless Mobility?

    receiver12.gif

    Receiver 12 is now available. This issues includes Mobile Movies – Taking Film to the Public Space, by Heinz Hermanns; Beyond Just Getting There – The Interactive Road by Oskar Juhlin; Visions of Culture in the Era of Mobility by Ranjit Makkuni; and The City Shaman Dances with Virtual Wolves – Researching Pervasive Mobile Gaming by Frans Mäyrä.

    Posted by yatta at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
    SXSW music as a torrent
    Jeremy sez, "The folks over at SXSW have just published a BitTorrent file of all the available songs provided by many of the artists that will be performing at the Music Festival this year." Link

    (Thanks, Jeremy and Munkee!)

    Update: Justin sez, "The torrent is meant for use with the way super cool SXSW4Pod (by our friends at citizenPod), which allows you to keep the entire SXSW schedule on your iPod. Downloading the torrent enables you to listen to the associated audio while browsing the schedule on your 'pod. Killer, no?"
    Posted by yatta at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)
    T2Me
    T2Me is a kind of push-to-talk voice chat software for mobile phones using GPRS.

    Via textually.org

    Posted by yatta at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)
    A Need for Multimedia Literacy

    Fascinating article at the NYT today about how film schools are seeing more and more students who are studying film not because they want a future in Hollywood, but because they see media literacy and the ability to communicate through audio and video as critical skills in our media-saturated world:

    At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of “snitches” and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

    Via Ryan Shaw

    Posted by yatta at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)
    Prix Ars Electronica Deadline Extended

    The deadline for applying for the Digital Communities award of Prix Ars Electronica has been extended to March 18. Real money involved!

    For the second time in 2005, Prix Ars Electronica will honor important achievements by digital communities. This category focuses attention on the wide-ranging social impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in the fields of social software, mobile communications and wireless networks.

    The "Digital Communities" category is open to political, social, and cultural projects, initiatives, groups, and scenes from all over the world utilizing digital technology to better society and assume social responsibility. It is meant to recognize the initiators and propagators of these communities as well as the developers of the relevant technologies, and to honor those whose work contributes to the establishment and proliferation of Digital Communities as well as provide understanding and research into them.

    The prizes in this category will total 20,000 Euros: one Golden Nica (10,000 Euro), two Awards of Distinction (5,000 Euros each) and up to 12 Honorary Mentions.
Online submission
    here

    Via Smart Mobs

    Posted by yatta at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
    Vegging Out in Front of the Phone
    You might have only just gotten your head around your camera phone. Perhaps you've had a bit of fun playing with video clips. What mobile companies want you to do next is to see it as a mini TV.

    Operators worldwide are already selling short video clips. Two of the biggest phone companies -- Verizon and Vodafone -- are partnering with Twentieth Century Fox Television to create specially made-for-mobile dramas, or "mobisodes," that last only a minute.
    Posted by yatta at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
    3D Scalable Integrated Displays
    Until now 3D displays have been developed for only one viewer. Christian Moller a research student here at the Department is working on a 3D display where the viewing zone is equal to that of any television allowing an unlimited number of people to view at any one time. The display is very easy to scale and is flat panel. Part of the success of this new display is being able to use the Wedge technology developed by Dr Adrian Travis here at the Department to make this display flat panel.
    Posted by yatta at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)
    Mobile Video on the Go

    Mobile Video on the Go
    Nice Blog about wearable, geo-located video production and consumption..

    Via sLop

    Posted by yatta at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)
    Olivelink's person-to-person video and audio streaming

    OlivelinkOlivelink is a new product that looks pretty impressive. It's a bit of video server software that you can run from your computer (with a broadband connection) to any number of people you specify. This allows for a sort of podcasting of video, right from your desktop to outsiders.

    What's most interesting is that this builds on technology like Sling Media, which allows you to watch TV  you have at home from anywhere, by letting you broadcast your own video out to anyone on earth, either to specific private users or to the world. What's also cool about this idea is that it uses your home broadband connection to transmit video, so instead of users having to upload huge video files and worry about their website bandwidth, they can provide the media from their unmetered home broadband connections.

    I believe technology like this could really be the thing to give video blogging a shot in the arm and I can't wait to see what bloggers do with this technology. [via rootburn]

    Via PVRblog

    Posted by yatta at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)
    Lions Gate Licenses Movies To Sony PSP
    : Lions Gate Entertainment plans to format movies for the PlayStation Portable, a move that makes it the first outside film studio to support Sony's new UMD media format.
    Sony also has signed up a number of Japanese content partners that plan to sell anime-style cartoons and music videos on UMD discs.
    WSJ: Sony declines to say whether other Hollywood studios have agreed to release movies for the PSP...

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)
    Ten To Watch in Mobile Content

    This is not a definitive list, just a list of smart young blood in the mobile content sector. Notice that except for one, none of them are CEOs (yet), but you’ll hear a lot from and about them in the next few years (that was the criteria). Just a way of recognizing the people in the second wave of mobile content (in no particular order):
    »  Greg Clayman, Vice President, Wireless Strategy and Operations, MTV Networks
    »  Rio Caraeff, mobile head at Universal Music
    »  Thomas Ryan, Senior VP, Mobile Development, EMI Music
    »  Mark Levy, VP content at InfoSpace Mobile
    »  Lucy Hood, VP, Content, News Corp
    »  Shawn Conahan (end of page), CEO, Intercasting Corp
    »  Adam Flick, Chief Marketing Officer, Airborne Entertainment
    »  Robert Tercek, Chief Strategy Office, mForma
    »  Manish Jha, Senior VP, ESPN Mobile
    »  Russell Beattie, Yahoo Mobile

    I realize this is a US-centric list, and if you want to add to my list of the people influencing our fast growing sector, post them in the comments below

    Posted by yatta at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)
    civiblog.org - A free blogging service for global civil society
    Welcome to Civiblog, a one-stop-site for global civil society. We are tapping into two explosive movements at once: 1) the growth of the citizen sector and 2) blogging, which is an increasingly popular tool with the potential to empower citizens the world.


    (civiblog is a citizenlab project.)

    Posted by yatta at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)
    The gathering storms over speech

    Dan Gillmor blogs on The Gathering Storms Over Speech. Dan echoes the concerns several of us have been raising over the past several days. Excerpt:

    Apple Computer's disgusting attack on three online journalism sites, in a witch hunt to find out who (if anyone) inside the company leaked information about allegedly upcoming products, has taken a nasty turn. Too bad it's not surprising -- and journalists of all kinds should be paying attention.

    A judge in California has decided that the sites don't qualify as "journalism" (AP) under state law and/or the First Amendment. By his bizarre and dangerous standard, I apparently stopped being a journalist the day I left my newspaper job after a quarter-century of writing for newspapers. (Note: At the request of lawyers for the sites, I've filed declarations -- here (104k PDF) and here (1MB PDF) -- saying that in my opinion these sites are performing a journalistic function. I haven't been paid to do so.) ...

    We're moving toward a system under which only the folks who are deemed to be professionals will be granted the status of journalists, and thereby more rights than the rest of us. This is pernicious in every way.

    Mass media journalists and their bosses should be leading the fight against what's happening to bloggers. I fear they won't, because old media typically refuses to defend the rights of new entrants until the threats against the new folks directly threaten everyone. But my former colleagues in Big Media should understand that when we distinguish among kinds of journalists, discriminating against some because they're not working for organizations deemed worthy (or powerful) enough, trouble will arrive soon enough for everyone.

    In a world where anyone can be a journalist, we can't let government or Big Media decide who has the right to inform the public about matters of interest or urgency. The priesthood should be dissolving, not gaining strength -- yet rulings and legislation like these move things in precisely the wrong direction.

    Via New Media Musings

    Posted by yatta at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)
    Locative media and the Future of Urban Life
    Book: "Envisioning the ubiquitous city"
    [...] The rapid convergence of mobile communications, automated positioning technologies, and geographic information systems (GIS) into “locative media” is raising the possibility of a dramatic transformation of the way we perceive and move about the urban environment, and how we interact with each other in urban spaces. Endless possibilities for locative media are being proposed that promise increased convenience, awareness, transparency, and access to information and social opportunities that break traditional power structures.

    [...] A growing number of urbanists believe that locative media have the potential to disrupt urban activity and consumption patterns in the 21st century city to an equal or greater degree as the automobile shaped the 20th century city.

    [...] The discussion about locative media and the future of urban life needs to start today.
    See also:
    Anthony Townsend : “les médias localisés vont avoir un impact considérable sur notre manière de percevoir les villes” (french)
    Anthony Townsend on "Korea: The Broadband Republic"
    and
    Les médias localisés : point de contact entre le réel et le virtuel (french)

    Via All about Mobile Life

    Posted by yatta at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)
    MediaStorm: A Multimedia Production Studio
    MediaStorm is a multimedia production studio whose principal aim is to usher in this next generation of multimedia storytelling. We provide collaborative production support and an arc of distribution in print, broadcast and online.

    Posted by yatta at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)
    WIPO Shutting Out Public Interest Voices

    Here's the scoop on what's happening at WIPO with regard to the April meetings on the Development Agenda [EFF]. It's unpretty.

    Previous relevant Copyfight coverage here, here, and here.

    Via Copyfight

    Posted by yatta at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)
    Utilities Weigh in on BPL
    Despite cheery industry Astroturf and rampant optimism from outgoing FCC chief Powell, the actual people deploying broadband over power-line (BPL) technology still aren't sold. The Newark Star Ledger notes how many believe it's a no-go for rural areas, and discusses how many trials are being run simply so Utilities can have a better understanding of utility control. "We could, for example, reach into a number of homes on a hot day and flip off air conditioners for 15 or 20 minutes," a Con-Ed exec suggests.

    Via Broadbandreports

    Posted by yatta at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)

    March 04, 2005

    Bored on your subway commute? Try TV!
    Subway TV

    Atlanta will be the first city in North America to roll out TV and radio programming in its subway rail cars. Each of 230 cars will be fitted with 15-inch flat screens showing local news loops and radio transmitters offering music in three formats: top 40, jazz and R&B. Content stays fresh (so fresh!) via software on the trains that downloads new programming when the trains pass through ‘wireless clouds’ en route. Any FM receiver will be able to pick up the TV and radio audio feeds inside the cars. In partnership with New York-based media firm The Rail Network, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) stands to rake in about $20 million over the next decade by taking a cut of the ad revenue. And no wonder — it’s hard to find a more captive audience.

    Posted by yatta at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
    Readers ask newspaper why stories on blogs aren't in publication

    Porland Oregonian Public Editor Michael Arrieta-Walden says readers routinely call or write "to cite stories they've seen blazing the Web but that are missing or downplayed on the newspaper's news pages."

    While they often blame right-wing or left-wing conspiracies, in fact "whether those stories gain traction in the news pages of The Oregonian often depends on whether wire services, including those of the major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post or Los Angeles Times, report on them.

    "The gap goes to the heart of what is journalism. Opinions, commentary or simply rumors dominate many of the blogs. Yet blogs also can break legitimate stories, such as the one that led to the downfall of Dan Rather. Newspaper and wire-service journalists grapple with distinguishing between the rants and the real news, and must confirm the information using standards of accuracy and verification rarely applied to blogs...."

    He does note, though, "Bloggers often recognize potential stories that will spark reader sensibilities that veteran journalists are too blase about."

    The solution, he says, might be for newspapers to find ways to link up with citizen blogging; for reporters and editors to more routinely checking blogs as tip sheets; or for a publication to devote a writer to monitor blogs for a column that could "point readers to the wheat and warn them about the chaff."

    Posted by yatta at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
    Girls Belong in Games

    Girls in Games is a nonprofit organization started by discussions on the IGDA Women-in-Development List, staffed by volunteer teachers and mentors. Their aim is to provide real experience in game development to young women or women from other fields to help them find jobs in the industry - a sort of a experience incubatorm if you will. Sande Chen and Michelle Sorger, affiliated with Girls in Games, will be speaking at GDC this year. I'll be interviewing them next week, so stay tuned for more details.

    In the meantime, if you want to check them out or volunteer some services, visit the website!

    Via game girl advance

    Posted by yatta at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
    2005 is to be the year of the music phone

    icellphonemusic.gif Sharpshooting phones are passé. Music is the new imaging, as far as the mobile industry is concerned. A sentiment previously echoed at 3GSM when Sony Ericsson comitted to music phones and claimed 2005 would be the year of MP3 phones (as 2004 was for camera phones).

    Senior tech journalist, Aloysius Choog reports for c/net Asia in a must-read report to understand where the cell-phone-music industry is heading. cf Fine-tuning the music strategy.

    This is also a reminder to all Textually.org readers, if you don't already subscribe to Ringtonia.com's RSS feed, now is the time to do it. The music industry's interest in mobile phones is not abetting and many new business models and innovativing marketing campaigns are emerging, which should be covered by anyone following cell phones news; the new music phones, satellite and/or regular radio broadcasts onto cell phones, hypertag campaigns used to promote album releases, music remixing, p2p on mobile phones - are just some of the posts published recently. And on a lighter side, where does one go online to find orgasm ringtones? Don't be left out, sign up today.

    Posted by yatta at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
    NYC Event: New York Underground Film Festival - March 5-12, 2005

    DickcheneyYou locals should check out the 12th Annual New York Underground Film Festival, from March 5-12 at Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave., at 2nd Street). I've gone the past three years now and always manage to find something weird and engaging. Fans of copyright infringement should take special note of these screenings:

    PUTTIN' ON THE HITS
    Sat 3/12 at 7 pm and Mon 3/14 at 5:45 pm - Includes several shorts: America's Biggest Dick (Brian Boyce, pictured, who we know and love), Manager's Corner (Skizz Cyzyk), PYT (Tara Mateik), Boxes Jesus and Sandwiches (Jennifer Matotek), 5 Video Hits (Kent Lambert), El Moro (Jim Finn) and Sans Simon (Cory Arcangel).

    VIDEO WOW
    Sat 3/12 at 9:30 pm and Mon 3/14 at 7:30 pm - More shorts. Lots of shorts. Includes: Big Screen Version (Aaron Valdez) and Set-4 (Jan Van Neunen)

    JK!!!
    Fri 3/11 at 9:15pm and Mon 3/14 at 11 pm - Features selections from the Found Footage Film Festival, including a racy short in which Arnold Schwarzenegger fondles a Brazilian escort, plus the Xtina parody Don't You Bring Me Down Today

    Posted by yatta at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
    Glimpsing ubicomp in 2010

    DoCoMo has published a video imagining everyday life in ubiquitous computing, circa 2010. It's a fascinating narrative, knitting a variety of mobile, networked devices and practices into the fabric of daily existence.



    It's also poignant, with an eye towards memory - a fairly emotional document. It's called "Vision 2010" on the Web, but "Old School Friends" within the video itself.
    DoCoMo_Vision2010wrist.jpg

    (thanks to Brian Lewis!)

    Via Smart Mobs

    Posted by yatta at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
    Blogging, Journalism & Credibility - Conference Report
    Rebecca MacKinnon has posted a draft conference report in HTML and PDF formats.
    Posted by yatta at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
    Russ dreams of a streaming media company dedicated to user generated content for mobile devices and...
    Russ, February 14
    This of course brings me back to Podcasting, which some people still think I'm down on which is not true. I'm down on the dedicated music player, I think PodCasting - or really, time shifted personal broadcasting on mobile devices - is going to continue to grow into a phenomenon. [...] To me the key will be when you can get that stuff on demand. If I had the know-how right now, I'd drop everything and start creating automatic conversion tools online for every phone that can play media files out there and start a streaming media company tomorrow dedicated to user generated content. I think it's going to be that big.
    Russ, March 3
    I'm getting on-demand radio on my mobile right now. This is an awesome example of what sort of cool new mobile media services are coming soon. Think back to my Podcast Radio idea. Imagine if instead of getting Virgin's canned music, you got your personal podcast list instead, all organized as a long radio show? This is all *so* close to happening, I love it.
    See also: Music Messenger, the mobile version of the Potato System

    Via All about Mobile Life

    Posted by yatta at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)
    Make Way for The Mobiles
    Keitaimania
    Photo: Mitsubishi

    Make way for The Mobiles (3.6 MB PDF) via Mediacenter
    I am not sure if it is worth to download this. Nothing new here and I ask myself, if I should repeat it.
    Three tumblers are falling into place unlocking the promise of a mobile, connected society:
    • Global access now connecting one billion people
    • Mobile technologies with high-bandwidth capabilities for a dizzying array of services;
    • The emergence of a mobile lifestyle in which communication devices integrate into consumers’ lives.
    Posted by yatta at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
    Transparent transistors could mean cheaper, smaller electronics

    TransistorA new class of materials in development at Oregon State University and HP will soon be used to create transparent transistors which, besides dripping with the sci-fi factor, are cheaper to produce than their silicon counterparts. The new material is created by mixing zinc oxide (the same stuff that provides UV protection in sunscreen) and tin oxide (found in food cans), and was originally intended as a cheap replacement for the expensive transparent transistors currently used in solar cells. However, the consumer electronics industry already has other ideas in mind for the technology and is driving demand to bring these materials to market.

    Potential consumer applications include electronic glass displays (think information displayed in shop windows or car windshields), improved LCD technologies, foldable electronics, better solar cell technologies, and a broad range of entirely new consumer products. Also look for devices incorporating glass to become smaller, due to the transparent transistors’ ability to embed mechanical support systems into areas of glass that currently go unused. If these transistors eventually replace the traditional silicon transistors in your computer monitor, TV, or CPU, it would accompany a drop in consumer electronics prices. These transistors can be produced so cheaply they may even find their way into one-time-use disposable electronics, like the constantly updating foldable plastic newspaper as envisioned in everybody’s favorite movie (yeah), Back to the Future II. We’ll leave the 80’s fashion behind, thanks, but we’ll gladly take this vision of a transparent sci-fi world on the horizon.

    Posted by yatta at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
    Talking Lights
    This new communications technology takes an essential part of every building -- lighting -- and uses it to communicate information that can be heard through an earpiece, seen on a hand-held computer screen, or processed as data or control signals by a computer.
    Posted by yatta at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
    Government to regulate blogs?

    Mark Tapscott: FEC Commissioner Says Court Decision Means Uncle Sam May Have to Regulate Political Speech on the Internet's Blogs. Federal Elections Commissioner Bradley Smith claims in a CNET interview that his panel is ony a few months away from officially beginning the process of regulating political speech on the Internet, including blogs.

    Mark points to this CNET article on The coming crackdown on blogging.

    Bradley Smith: The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.

    Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don't give bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to online-only journals like CNET? ...

    How about a hyperlink? Is it worth a penny, or a dollar, to a campaign?

    I don't know. But I'll tell you this. One thing the commission has argued over, debated, wrestled with, is how to value assistance to a campaign.
    libertarians on this one. This is nuts.

    Via New Media Musings

    Posted by yatta at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
    QuickTime; screenbroadcasting

    ScreenBroadcasting
    Nice.. Works as a QT source for any application.

    Via sLop

    Posted by yatta at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
    Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good
    : Some great coverage of this conference at Harvard [yesterday]...download the audios of the panels, etc..
    More coverage by David Weinberger here...

    Via PaidContent.org

    Posted by yatta at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
    Response to Jay @ Northern Voice

    Response to Jay @ Northern Voice







    Posted by yatta at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
    Dude, Where's My Blog?

    Porland Oregonian Public Editor Michael Arrieta-Walden tells Cyberjournalist his readers routinely call or write "to cite stories they've seen blazing the Web but that are missing or downplayed on the newspaper's news pages."

    "The gap goes to the heart of what is journalism. Opinions, commentary or simply rumors dominate many of the blogs. Yet blogs also can break legitimate stories, such as the one that led to the downfall of Dan Rather. Newspaper and wire-service journalists grapple with distinguishing between the rants and the real news, and must confirm the information using standards of accuracy and verification rarely applied to blogs...."

    Get enough readers calling in and newspapers will turn their Web sites into blogs.

    Via Micro Persuasion

    Posted by yatta at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
    media production games as adverstising

    Front page of yahoo, Pontiac car advertisement with image of camera phone and car: "SNAP A PICTURE OF ANY PONTIAC G6 ANYWHERE AND YOU COULD WIN $1 MILLION." Here's the contest page. Email your photo to win@catchag6.com


    Things are getting interesting :)

    Posted by Eli Chapman at 11:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
    Cameraphones as Personal Storytelling Media

    Distributed Co-Presence

    "...Ito and Okabe's previous observations of Japanese mobile phone users led them to adopt a conceptual framework of "technosocial situations" in which people "assemble social situations as a hybrid of virtual and physically co-present relations and encounters." For example, the people they observed used streams of text messages to "inscribe a space of shared awareness of one another" -- an explanation for the preponderance of messages that conveyed no information other than what the sender was doing at the moment: "I'm sitting on the bus," or "I'm bored" or "I'm walking up the hill." The cameraphone study extends this framework by revealing how people's choices of images to share enables intimate social networks to share ambient information; but, "on the other hand, we are finding that users tend not to e-mail messages to one another, and prefer to share images by showing pictures on a handset screen." Hence, the communication device that used to transmit messages across distances is now also used to capture a flow of experience in order to add a visual element to face-to-face story-telling..." From Cameraphones as Personal Storytelling Media by Howard Rheingold, TheFeature, March 3, 2005.

    Via networked_performance

    Posted by yatta at 02:13 AM | Comments (0)
    'We're starting to pay attention to each other'

    David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, speaks about his curiosity with the conversational nature of blogs and how big media responds to the changing reader-author relationship. (Video, Flash 7 required)

    Download audio in MP3 format.

    Via morph

    Posted by yatta at 02:13 AM | Comments (0)
    Microsoft to launch child-watching teddy robots
    tedd0305.jpg Robots to Watch Children and Even Co-Workers Among Technology at Microsoft TechFest. The teddy bear sitting in the corner of the child's room might look normal, until his head starts following the kid around using a face recognition program, perhaps also allowing a parent talk to the child through a special phone, or monitor the child via a camera and wireless Internet connection.

    The plush prototype, on display at Microsoft Corp.'s annual gadget showcase Wednesday, is one of several ideas researchers have for robots. The idea is to create a virtual being that can visit the neighboring cubicle for a live telephone chat even as its owner is traveling thousands of miles away, or let the plumber into the house while its owner enjoys a pleasant afternoon in the sun. (ABC NEWS)

    Posted by yatta at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)
    CBS to ramp up interactive TV
    In a partnership with GoldPacket, CBS is creating custom designed interactive content for some of its top shows, beginning with Survivor. Viewers with iTV-equipped set-top boxes will be able to interact in ways that are "timed not to distract from the show but to enhance it," said CBS' David Katz.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)
    Anything Is Possible

    How many times did you want to be a DJ?

    Now you can podcast.

    How many times did you want to be a movie maker?

    Now you can Vimeo.

    How many times did you want to be a rock star?

    Now you can garageband.

    How many times did you want to write music for TV shows?

    Now you can Freeplay.

    How many times did you want to be a journalist?

    Now you can blog.

    Anything is possible in this world we are living in.

    It's an incredible time with the barriers to entry coming down for so many things.

    The revolution of the ants is upon us.

    Enjoy it.

    Posted by yatta at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)
    Floatables for privacy

    Space for privacy (1)

    The floatable jellyfish-like vessels project, by Usman Haque (the author of Sky Ear), drift around cities to create ephemeral zones of truly private space: an absence of phone calls, emails, access of GPS devices, TV broadcasts, wireless networks and other microwave emissions. They can also provide shielding from the gaze surveillance systems.

    floatable1[1].jpg

    The spaces of absence created are left to be filled with people's own sounds, alpha-waves, smells and laughters...

    The vessels are powered mainly by sunlight and wind but are supplemented by inducted electricity from mobile phones and 802.11 networks.

    Posted by yatta at 02:09 AM | Comments (0)

    March 03, 2005

    The Incentive for Keeping P2P Illegal

    Ernie Miller, examining the Jonathan Zittrain/John Palfrey/Terry Fisher brief in the Grokster case [PDF], observes that "the secondary liability standard that Hollywood promotes has perverse incentives" (emphasis, mine):

    If, as they argue, technologies should be liable based on the prevalence of infringing activity using the technologies, the incentive is for Hollywood to passively encourage infringing content in order to gain control over the infringing technology.
    What if Hollywood had, as they originally did, continued to price pre-recorded videotapes at well over $100 a piece (instead of < $20 as they do now)? Well, there would be a lot more videotape piracy as people would be unable to easily afford to purchase them.

    Now consider P2P. What if there were no iTunes? What if there were no Napster 2.0? Or what if there were, but they charged outrageous rates such as $50 per downloaded album (and you could only download albums)? Wouldn't there be even more copyright infringement on the Internet than there is currently? If Hollywood has its way in Grokster, wouldn't their incentives be to resist new technologies until they had a court determine the technology was primarily used for infringement and thus subject to their control?

    Seems logical to me. The more people infringe, the louder that Holywood and the record companies can yell "thief," and the bigger the club that Congress and the courts will hand them to beat down any copying technology they wish.

    Posted by yatta at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)
    Google Calendar
    With Shareholders to please, a week can't pass without rumors of some new Google effort. Bloggers are a'flutter over the possible release of a Google on-line calendar, noting that Googlebots have been "pinging the heck out of" the php pages rendering some iCal calendars. Likely it's part of their effort to offer a suite of new tools (IM, mail, Calendar) that will either integrate into existing browsers, or be part of a new Google themed Mozilla based browser.
    Posted by yatta at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)
    Why Tags matter

    David Weinberger has an excellent post on "Why Tags matter". At the end he puts in the Technorati Tags on the subject (taxonomy tags berkman )

    I wonder if Dave cares that those tags are controlled and rendered by a proprietary company. Not that Technorati is THAT proprietary - but calling something a 'Technorati Tag' sure sounds pretty branded to me.

    I can't help think that some sort of OpenTopics is needed. I don't think anybody should control the Topics of the blogosphere and Web 2.0.

    I wonder if Dave agrees with me or not?

    Via Marc's Voice

    Posted by yatta at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)
    Cinequest, a P2P Movie Fest
    Running March 2 though March 13, the Cinequest event is an independent film festival with a digital twist.

    Commercial-free, DVD-quality downloads of many of the festival's feature films are available for online viewing, powered by a video-sharing system from Kontiki that uses peer-to-peer technology to deliver movies to desktops.
    Posted by yatta at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)
    NewsForge | Podcasting from Linux
    Podcasts are reinventing talk radio on the Web. These homemade audio downloads have become popular since they were introduced last year. Pontificate on your political opinions, praise your favorite bands, interview your hero -- the possibilities are limitless.

    Podcasts were created by fans of the Apple iPod, but you don't need an iPod or a Mac to make your own. Properly configured, the average Linux distribution can podcast with the best of them. Here's how.
    Posted by yatta at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)
    New Jersey's Cameraphone PR Nightmare

    Brickscholl2Picturephoning reports that The Board of Education in Jersey has a major PR nightmare on their hands thanks to a student with a cameraphone. The state may toughen its policy on use of cameraphones in schools, after a videotape showing a high school teacher screaming at his students to show respect for the national anthem — and then pulling the chair from underneath one student who refused to stand — was posted on several Web sites. Nothing is sacred anymore from making it to the Web. What's inside is outside. Get used to it. There will be more to come. Someone will start leaking corporate trade secrets soon. You can view the video here.


    (That's funny. I read this story differently. This kind of behavior happens in schools all the time. But where a teacher can send a student to detention or the vice principal's office, unprofessional teacher behavior often goes unchecked b/c young peoples' stories often go unheard. Ignoring the fact that the kids were acting like asses, personal media - cameraphones - allowed a story to be told that would otherwise go ignored.

    I guess one person's nightmare makes another person's night. ;) -kc.)

    Via Micro Persuasion

    Posted by yatta at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)
    Quick Online Tips That Work: Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection
    such a long list!
    Posted by yatta at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)
    Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick)
    "What if we could tag not just photos, but also other tags? We could start to build a tagweb. When a tagweb is created from your tags, that tagweb works perfectly within the realm of what makes sense to you. The reason nobody came up with this before Flickr was because we didn't have Flickr as a visible reference point. You can't just imagine something out of the blue without first thinking about related things."
    Posted by yatta at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

    March 02, 2005

    MediaStorm seeks to innovate the storytelling process

    Brian Storm was a speaker at the 11th World Editors Forum when he still was vice president of News, Multimedia & Assignment Services for Corbis and director of multimedia for MSNBC.com. He is now heading Mediastorm, a multimedia production studio with the principal aim of ushering in a new era of multimedia storytelling.

    What I appreciate with Brian Storm is his analysis of the media landscape: "Consolidation in the media industry has put new financial pressures on newsrooms, which are reducing staff and emphasizing dissemination rather than newsgathering, according to a recent report published by Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism."

    "Network news, news magazines, and newspaper front pages carry an ever-widening range of topics, but much of the new diversity is in lighter fare - lifestyle, entertainment, and consumer news. Some outlets are thriving as they reject the trend toward lighter content and surface coverage. The report asserts, "the success of NPR in radio, The Economist among magazines and The New York Times among newspapers suggests a growing elite niche across media sectors,' one that demands in-depth reporting on globally relevant stories.

    According to Storm, this environment creates not only an advancement in quality storytelling, but also a new economic opportunity for the next-generation storyteller. "Combining animation, audio, interactivity, photography, text and video allows multimedia storytellers to distribute their work across multiple media platforms simultaneously to reach the largest audience and widest economic markets," said Storm. "I founded MediaStorm to support this revolution by providing collaborative post-production support and an arc of distribution outlets."

    Good luck Brian. In anticipation of great things.

    Source: Mediastorm

    Via editorsweblog.org

    Posted by yatta at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)
    IPTV Revenue Predictions or Hype

    A recent article on Techweb.com reports:

    Revenues from video, which includes Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and video on demand (VOD), music downloads, games, gambling and adult entertainment are expected to increase to $36 billion in 2009 from $12.3 billion last year, telecom analyst firm RHK said. This year, online entertainment is expected to reach $15.8 billion.

    IPTV is expected to be the biggest driver behind the 24 percent annual growth in online entertainment, RHK analyst Josette Bonte said. "It's very embryonic right now, but it's growing at a compound annual growth rate above 100 percent," Bonte said.

    The article goes on to summarize the most obvious reasons why a telco would want or need to get into the video distribution business. It all sounds great! But, how many households have a 10 megabit or better connections to their local telco? And, assuming that fibre-to-the-home or curb is "job one," how long will it take and how much will it cost to deploy?

    It that doesn't make you stop and think, spice up your future of telco fantasy with the daunting issues relating to the licensing, transmission and re-transmission of content. Throw in union and guild payments and you have a formidable recipe for a pipe dream!

    You may think, from reading this, that I am down on the concept of IPTV. You'd be absolutely wrong! I think that IPTV is the most probable future of television. It (and other switched delivery technologies) are the next logical step for telcos, cable operators, consumers, everyone! I just think that the hype machine is in full gear and that people schooled-in-the-art owe it to the industry not to make outlandish predictions about trends and revenue.

    TV, VOD and game delivery over IP is not fantasy, it is just a few years away - but, they are not printing any more money at the mint just yet - and, as far as I can tell, we are not expecting a huge increase in the number of US households. Which means, IPTV or any future distribution system will have to live in a "zero sum" world with the rest of us. So which technology or platform will disappear to make room for this new topline revenue? We'll, you don't hear as much Morse Code as you used to.

    Posted by yatta at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Wednesday: The revolution will cost people jobs

    Jeff Jarvis appears to have the ear of Craig Newmark (of CraigsList fame). Craig's getting involved in the citizen's media movement, and Jeff is giving him his thoughts. This is an excellent combination, by the way, and fully expect to see this collaboration continue.

    But Newmark's enthusiasm comes with a threat to those involved in the news industry.

    I just want to remind everyone that people's jobs are involved, writers, editors, delivery people, PR people, and more.

    When an industry goes through a major shift, sometimes people lose jobs.

    I don't have anything smart to suggest, except that news professionals starting looking hard at the blogging phenomenon, and try to get ready.
    It's hard to say if this is fully warranted, but I tend to agree that the communications revolution will end up costing a great many people their jobs. I also think retraining IS the answer. Remember, this is the guy who has — single-handedly — almost destroyed the newspaper industry's classifieds business.

    Posted by yatta at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
    The Future of Videogames

    Sid at the office sent this video around. It's an absolutely amazing demonstration of reality augmentation technologies. Sure beats wearing a stupid helmet in a cage.

    Via game girl advance

    Posted by yatta at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)
    Yahoo studying blogs, user content
    AP: Yahoo CEO Terry Semel says he thinks Yahoo can provide more compelling material by developing ways for its 345 million users to create and share more of their own content.

    (Mercury News login ahead. -kc.)

    Posted by yatta at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)
    New Media Ecosystem Flowchart
    Kent Bye: "This is an ideal ecosystem in the sense that it is somewhat dependent upon a "gift culture" where the revenue streams are uncertain."

    Posted by yatta at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
    Five Thoughts on Blogging
    Guillermo Franco, editor of ElTiempo.com and a professor of new media in Colombia, has conducted an e-mail interview with five authors and journalists who specialize in the topics of blogging and citizen journalism -- Shayne Bowman, Dan Gillmor, JD Lasica, Chris Willis, and me -- with the aim of providing an introduction to blogging to the Latin American market.

    There's an English as well as a Spanish version of the article available.

    Here's an excerpt from Lasica: "People are tired of journalism as lecture; they want a conversation. Blogs present an opportunity for newspapers to reconnect with their readers and (...)

    Entry continued...

    Via Poynter E-Media Tidbits

    Posted by yatta at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)
    MGM v. Grokster: Here's Why P2P is Valuable
    Briefs defending Grokster's right to exist were filed yesterday in MGM v. Grokster, from Intel, Creative Commons [PDF], and many others. Among them, 17 computer science professors laid out the case for P2P, beginning with principles: "First, the United States' description of the Internet's design is wrong. P2P networks are not new developments in network design, but rather the design on which the Internet itself is based." Pointedly, the EFF compares this case's arguments to those made over 20 years ago in the Betamax case, which established the public's right to use video-copying technology, because of its "substantial non-infringing uses," even though many used videotape to infringe copyright. We'll soon see whether that right will extend to peer-to-peer software: the Supreme Court takes this up on March 29th.
    Posted by yatta at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)
    Torrentocracy 0.0.11

    You can now pick up Torrentocracy version 0.0.10 (tgz):

    * John Miller's patch to make DB changes for Myth version 0.17 compatibility

    * The exit button on your remote now acts just like the left button (though the exit button will eventually exit out of the program).

    I've also started a torrentocracy mailing list so bring your discussion there.

    Via Torrentocracy Blog

    Posted by yatta at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)
    iHollywood's Mobile Entertainment Summit at CTIA - March 13, 2005
    "Welcome to Mobile Entertainment Summit, the industry's leading conference and showcase of mobile entertainment from games to music to multimedia to messaging and marketing."

    "Take advantage of the opportunity to meet and network with leading industry players making money in delivering wireless entertainment and mobile applications."
    Posted by yatta at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)
    Siemens, Main Concept to enable video downloads on TV
    Researchers at Siemens and Main Concept have developed a system that converts video images into data packets with a new compression standard, sends these packets over a DSL line and converts them back into a video image on television.
    Posted by yatta at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)
    Aesthetics of Play - October 14-15 2005

    Aesthetics of Play is a conference to be held at the University of Bergen 14-15 October 2005, hosted by the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. The conference is arranged in collaboration with Norway’s first game-art exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall.

    Via Diablog

    Posted by yatta at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
    Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

    "Anyone who wonders how the Internet will die will find one possible scenario in the recent decision by the Internet2 consortium to bring Hollywood into the design process for our next-generation Internet.

    Hollywood is on a roll. In a fraction of the time that it took the music industry to emasculate Napster, the Motion Picture Association of America has managed to shut down the highest profile file-sharing sites (Suprnova and LokiTorrent) and begun to sue its own share of college students. More importantly, the MPAA recently persuaded Congress to legislate something their fellow lobbyists in the music industry never managed to achieve: a copyright control device in every player. By this July, every DVD player and TiVo box will sniff for a "broadcast flag" that prevents it from copying digital TV broadcasts. This hardware intervention effectively destroys even the possibility of fair use, since artists and educators cannot transform, parody, or criticize what they cannot record. [via Rhizome]

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is mounting a noble campaign to grandfather a compliant tuner before the legislation takes effect [1]--but in the meantime the MPAA has set its sights on its next acquisition: the ultra-high bandwidth Internet2, which runs on the 10 gigabit per second Abilene backbone:

    "We've been working with Internet2 for a while to explore ways we can take advantage of delivering content at these extremely high speeds, and basically manage illegitimate content distribution at the same time," said Chris Russell, the MPAA's vice president of Internet standards and technology. "Those would go hand in hand." [2]

    To judge from the statements of Internet2 bigwigs, their technologists have already capitulated before the battle has even begun:

    "This wraps together the broad interest we have in working with our members and potential members on advanced content delivery," said Internet2 Vice President Gary Bachula. "Obviously we're interested in making sure that's legal and safe." [2]

    The presentations I've seen to date from the Internet2 consortium, from music classes taught by "master" conductors [3] to biometric and authentication applications for "managing identity" [4], suggest that Internet2 is a broadcast organization in network clothing. While it's doubtful that everyone at work on Internet2 shares this vision, the consortium's choice to "collaborate" with the MPAA could give media conglomerates a chokehold on the 21st-century Internet.

    The stated goal of this collaboration--to investigate new business models for streaming movies--sounds reasonable until you read that Internet2 is already capable of transmitting a DVD movie from Switzerland to Tokyo in under 5 seconds. (Cut to Jack Valenti choking on a bagel as he reads this in the morning paper. [5])

    No Hollywood exec is going to sanction a business model that lets Joe User download a movie onto a hard drive faster than the time it takes to launch his Web browser. Forget streaming video on demand. Hell, that isn't even enough time to watch a BMW ad.

    The technology behind Internet2 *breaks* anything remotely resembling a broadcast business model, which is why the MPAA will do its best to disarm the technology by installing Digital Rights Management directly in its routers to stop interesting content from ever getting into the pipeline.

    Now, the idea of "intelligent routers" may sound appealing to the average Congressperson, but the technologists of Internet2 should know better. Internet 1 was able to adapt so quickly to new uses--from email to the Web to IM--because its routers are fundamentally *dumb*. As engineer David Reed and others argued in the late 1970s [6], an indiscriminate "end-to-end" network would allow its users to hook up ever faster and more capable computers to its endpoints, without locking out uses that the network's architects could not have foreseen. Broadway was built for horse-drawn carriages, but since then its level pavement and wide footprint has accommodated Model Ts and Toyotas--precisely because its architecture was not optimized for carriages. Even companies like Disney and Microsoft have publicly recognized the importance of e2e to technological innovation. [7]

    Yet David Reed already smelled a threat to the e2e paradigm back in 2000, citing among other threats Hollywood's interest in streaming movies. In "The End of the End-To-End Argument?," Reed imagined uses that could not be foreseen by intelligent routers, including "collaborative creative spaces":

    "With broadband networks we are reaching the point where 'pickup' creation is possible--where a group of people can create and work in a 'shared workspace' that lets them communicate and interact in a rich environment where each participant can observe and use the work of others, just as if they were in the same physical space." [8]

    Reed's description of emergent collaborations bubbling across the network like so many games of pickup basketball is a world apart from the stuffy master classes of the Internet2 consortium. But it reads a lot like Internet2's stepsister, the MARCEL network of Access Grid communities [9]. If the "official" Internet2 consortium is a symphony orchestra in tails, the MARCEL network is a makeshift performance troupe. Internet2 has 200 university and corporate sponsors; MARCEL has a motley crew of artsy scientists, network performers, and Jitter jocks. Internet2 uses stable high-bandwidth videoconferencing for the privileged participants and netcast for everyone else; MARCEL uses the rickety Access Grid platform, which permits all users to participate at the same level.

    As MARCEL's Don Foresta has suggested, "efficient use of network resources" will be the argument marshalled by the media conglomerates against creative re-purposing of Internet2, just as the phrase was used justify the commercialization of the airwaves even if it contradicted the physics of electromagnetics. [10] (In Italy fascist apologists vindicated Mussolini by boasting that the trains ran on time.) Again, Reed saw this coming:

    "The architects who would make the network intelligent are structuring the network as if the dominant rich media communications will be fixed bandwidth, isochronous streams, either broadcast from a central 'television station' or point-to-point between a pair of end users. These isochronous streams are implicitly (by the design of the network's 'smart' architecture) granted privileges that less isochronous streams are denied--priority for network resources." [8]

    Privileges and networks don't make good bedfellows. For all its talk of community and access, Internet2 seems to be offering a backwards-thinking hierarchic model of culture, a sort of Great Performances meets Reality TV. To be sure, MARCEL has experimented with broadcast models as well, featuring gigs by luminaries such as fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and Max/MSP inventor Miller Puckette. But these admirable cameos don't reveal MARCEL's true potential; that happens when three students from different continents suddenly realize they are in the same Access Grid "room," and begin trading Max patches or holding pen-and-paper sketches up to the videocamera. In these quotidian, pickup collaborations--as in the beguiling video-composite performances Net Touch and Net Hope organized by Tim Jackson's Synthops lab in Toronto [11]--high-bandwidth networks prove they can be even *more* reciprocal than low-bandwidth networks. [12].

    While MARCEL has for some time seemed a promising platform for the interchange of ideas and networked art, only recently have I come to realize that it can also serve a valuable tactical function. Like the EFF's efforts to make room for legitimate uses of digital TV recordings, MARCEL's creative community can develop and showcase remixable network performances--both for their own sake as well as to provide empirical evidence for future court cases to defend the value of end-to-end networks. [13] In so doing its members can promote the vision of a vibrant future for the Internet--one that lets us all play onstage instead of admiring the players from the balcony."

    Jon Ippolito

    NOTES

    [1] http://eff.org/broadcastflag/

    [2]
    http://news.com.com/MPAA+seeks+Internet2+tests%2C+P2P+monitor+role/2100-1026
    _3-5458537.html

    [3] http://www.nws.edu/NWS_internet2.asp?pg=NWS_internet2.asp

    [4] http://www.campus-technology.com/print.asp?ID=10405

    [5]http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/05122004hearing1265/Valenti1987.htm


    [6]
    http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.html

    [7]
    http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200212/msg0005
    3.html

    [8]
    http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.html

    [9] http://newmedia.umaine.edu/marcel/

    [10] http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Doc_File_143_1.pdf

    [11] http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/synthops/process.htm

    [12] Theorist-gadfly Jean Baudrillard pointed out that reciprocality was the key feature missing from Hans Magnus Enzensberger's definition of emancipatory media.
    http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/mediatheory/essays/19-baudrillard-03.pdf

    [13] Cyberlaw guru Lawrence Lessig laments that a lack of empirical evidence doomed his argument in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
    http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-18.html

    Posted by yatta at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
    Lessig on C-Span

    Lawrence Lessig, fresh off his gig as Christopher Lloyd on West Wing, will be on C-Span Thursday, March 3rd 2005 as part of its Digital Future series. Spread the word.

    Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, is the author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, published by Basic Books. He is an expert on the issues of copyright and "copyleft." He is the inventor of the revolutionary concept and application Creative Commons, which invites the right to use material under specific conditions.

    The series "Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context" will examine how the digital age is changing the most basic ways information is organized and classified. The goal is to educate the public on what the digital age means to their lives. The events will include a featured speaker, followed by a panel discussion, and a question and answer session with the audience at the venue, and C-SPAN television viewers who submit questions to the experts by electronic mail at digital@loc.gov.

    [TiVo Link]

    (If you're a true Lessig groupie, check out the Lessig/Jeff Tweedy event at the NYPL on April 7. -kc.)

    Via 90% Crud

    Posted by yatta at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)
    Allaire launches 'democratic' TV
    LR friend Jeremy Allaire has started a new company that promises to help anyone with video content put it up on TV and the internet. Allaire says his goal for BrightCove is to "democratize" the television and video process.

    Via Lost Remote

    Posted by yatta at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
    Scratch
    Minimalist blogging software. Writing is done over the meta-weblog API, reading is done with RSS and Atom.
    "Scratch is the minimalist's web log. Scratch gives you nothing more than the meta-weblog API for posting. Reading is done via Atom or RSS. That's it. There's no HTML to hack up. You don't have to use the same, tired old web log template that everyone else is using. Break out of that blue, rounded rectangle! Be original! Thumb your nose at those primitive apes still using the web! Use Scratch! Scratch can also serve as a framework for developing your own weblog package."
    Posted by yatta at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
    Slices and Dices, Too...

    I'm happy to report that "Mr. Sun" is offering the "Citizen Journalist Starter Pack" -- "everything you'll need to storm the gates of the mainstream media."

    It even includes a flamethrower that's "extremely effective in neutralizing differing views and providing cover for uninformed opinions." Funny...

    Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

    Posted by yatta at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
    WritTorrent: Steal this program!
    Consider a product like Lazlo, with an RSS producing or XML-RPC sending remote control software (LIRC, or x10 stufF), and mPlayer all XML-ified, then you could have a completely open source HTPC platform glued together completely in XML... a complete software overhaul is just an XSLT away.

    Programming along these lines would be beneficial for anyone creating multimedia kiosks, home media interfaces, and special interactive applications.

    Being completely XML based, and perhaps providing some example stylesheets, would be an incredible goal for HTPC / Videoblogging / RSS media aggregation, etc.
    Posted by yatta at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
    Tales of the Sausage Factory: Last Gasp on Unlicensed Order - Wetmachine
    As those who follow unlicensed proceedings at the FCC here know, the FCC has been considering opening up the 2650-3700 MHz band to unlicensed use. The rumor is that the FCC will vote on the item at its March 10 meeting. I have also heard that the item is not particularly friendly to mesh networks. We have until Wed. March 2, 2005, 5 p.m. Eastern Time to turn this around. Wanna help?

    The 3650-3700 MHz band is relatively open and is under consideration by the FCC for expanded unlicensed use. The FCC proposed to allow fixed “high power” (25 watts EIRP) unlicensed operation and more standard mobile “low power” (1 watt EIRP) operation-- as long as certain incumbent operations are proetcted.

    I have heard that the FCC instead is likely to authorize high power as a “licensed lite” regime in which the first operator is protected against interference and all subsequent operators must seek permission of the first operator to activate their systems. This is known as a “first in time, first in right” scheme.
    Posted by yatta at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

    March 01, 2005

    EtiVo - TiVo add on for Windows Media Center

    Maybe it's because I get 100% of my information about Microsoft from Slashdot, but one of the points that surprised me from Thomas Hawk's interview with Media Center bloggers was that plenty of Media Center people have TiVos too.

    Charlie Owen: Also by the way, You might be surprised to hear me say this, but if you try and like a TiVo, buy a TiVo. If, on the other hand you want something with more power, flexibility, adaptability and upgradeability choose a Media Center PC.

    However, and a big however, I don't believe this is a entirely a Media Center vs. TiVo choice -- I know lots of people with both in their homes, peacefully coexisting (including eHome team members). I believe the market is big enough for both to thrive.

    That point is illustrated perfectly with EtiVo by Shahar Prish (via Matt Goyer). It's a program that takes video files off of a hacked Series 1 TiVo and turns them into WMV files. While it isn't a MCE app, it seems like it could be integrated pretty easily. You can already control EtiVo from a web interface or a WinCE PDA.

    Maybe some enterprising hacker will build an MCE front-end to TiVoToGo for people with MCE and Series 2? Heck, while we're lazywebbing, how about a TiVoToGo interface for Xbox Media Center?

    Posted by shawn at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)
    digging Blogdigger
    on eMediaWire -- Blogdigger and Webjay Announce Partnership for Enhanced Audio/Video Search:
    Blogdigger, Inc., a search engine for blogs and syndicated content, and Webjay, a community playlist site, announced today a strategic partnership. Webjay will utilize Blogdigger's Media Search technology to provide enhanced audio and video search to their users to aid them in quickly finding audio/video content. Blogdigger will utilize Webjay's PlayThisPage technology to enable users of its Media Search to quickly and easily create a playlist to listen or view and save media search results.
    What this means for podcasters, video bloggers and net-friendly musicians is that getting picked up by playlisters improves your position in Blogdigger search results.

    Via the weblog of Lucas Gonze

    Posted by shawn at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)
    Copyrights Keep TV Shows off DVD
    For many TV shows, costs to license the original music for DVD are prohibitively high, so rights owners replace the music with cheaper tunes, much to the irritation of avid fans. And some shows, like WKRP, which is full of music, will probably never make it to DVD because of high licensing costs.
    Posted by shawn at 06:39 PM | Comments (1)
    The Amoeba has done it again..

    Rogue Amoeba - Airfoil for Mac OS X
    From the site:
    Airfoil lets you send any audio to remote speakers attached to your AirPort Express. AirPort Express - It's not just for iTunes anymore.

    Posted by shawn at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)
    Sanyo Xacti C5 : [Akihabaranews] was there
    Totoro and myself were at the HQ of Sanyo Japan (not far from Akihabara) this afternoon where the release of the new Xacti C5 was held.
    As the name indicates, this C5 is a redesigned Xacti with a 5MP sensor. One of the big innovations, besides the dimensions of the video sensor, are the weight and reduced dimensions of this beast. This C5 is only 23mm thick and weighs only 145g! Yes, you read that correctly, only 23mm thick! This is an absolutely razor-sharp design! For your info, the engineers at Sanyo managed to reduce the electronics by 40% compared to a C4 and still there is a remarkable progress when it comes to functionalities on the device.

    The C5 also has a 2" control screen, which is very practical.

    As usual, the Xacti takes pictures and records video. These videos have a maximum resolution of 640x480 at 30fps and 3Mbps.

    (Hey Eli - let's get tape out of the hands of videobloggers ASAP. -kc.)

    Posted by shawn at 06:38 PM | Comments (13)
    Sage HDTV Buying Advice
    Via DigitalMerging.la, Engadget has a nice primer on HDTV and it's many different technologies that might effect your buying decision. It's the first of a multi-part series, but I've already learned an important blogging tip from the article: don't mess...
    Posted by shawn at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
    Creative Commons releases license breakdowns

    CchartCreative Commons has released a breakdown of the types of particular licenses chosen by CC users, when sampled through a search on Yahoo! of CC licenses found through the web.  Roughly 95% of licenses request attribution, 74% are non-commercial, while only 2% contribute to the public domain.  Worth nothing that these were files found through Yahoo! (webpages) so may not reflect a good sample of all works claiming CC licenses.

    Posted by shawn at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)
    Podcasting 101: Audio, Slides, and Transcripts
    I gave a presentation today at Northern Voice about Podcasting 101 and it was great to meet up with everyone doing such great podcasts and writing.
          Some of you have emailed me for the slides of the presentation, so I've posted them here. Apologies to Firefox folks; it seems the rendering is wonky on the slides, so maybe flip into IE just for these.
           The audio of my session is released into the Creative Commons under a Non-Commercial, Attribution licence.
          You can now view the slides, read a rough transcript, or download the session audio.

    Photo credits: KK+ and Karlcow
    Posted by shawn at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)
    Podcast doubles (!) NPR show listenership
    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.  full article
    Posted by shawn at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)
    Announcing: PublicRadioFeeds.com
    I'll have more to say about this later, but for now, have a look at PublicRadioFeeds.com (Yes, it does have its own RSS feed.)
    Posted by shawn at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)
    AirPort Express for Video?

    I just read this article about BlinkX is doing a deal with MovieLink and I thought hey that's great! Just one problem. My computer is in my office and my computer is in my living room. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a version of Apple's AirPort Express that instead of streaming audio, streamed video?

    I'm sure someone (including Apple) has already thought of this. This is probably why the CFO the other day said that Apple wasn't going to do anything on the set top. I've used MovieLink, Starz On Demand and CinemaNow and I have to say there's not a thing wrong with streaming any of them over a decent broadband connection. I think I wrote about it before, the most amazing thing is when the site says "start watching in 30 seconds" they're not kidding. Full-screen videos on demand start playing in 30 seconds! It's just too bad they're playing on the wrong screen.

    TiVo plus NetFlix might be nice if it ever comes about. But honestly, I don't need another hard drive and low-powered computer sitting on my TV, I just need it to play the video that my computer is serving up. Is there a device out there which does this already? Just a WiFi connection, plug and SVideo port? It seems like a no brainer. If Apple isn't working on an "iFlicks" service and accompanying device right now which will do exact this, they're just not thinking.

    Just my thought for the day. Come on future, get here already!

    -Russ

    Update: This would be a great device to have with Jeremy's new Brightcove. :-)

    Posted by shawn at 06:34 PM | Comments (1)
    BBC unveils plans for internet delivered TV programing
    imp3I'm a little slow on the uptake on this one, but it's via wikinews on the 4th of February.

    The BBC today unveiled it's plans for a new iMP player with which people in the UK will be able to download any BBC tv or radio programme for a week after it has been broadcast in the UK. These downloads will have a limited life, becoming inactive a week after the show has been shown live in the UK. The BBC are justifying their proposed decision to restrict the use of the new player to those using a UK Internet service provider on the basis that it is only UK citizens who pay the television licence.

    Also the following is an excerpt from the full anouncement from the BBC.

    iMP is a broadband service the BBC are developing that allows you to use the internet to download and watch programmes from BBC TV and Radio.

    Users can also set iMP to download programmes that they'll miss, which are coming up over the next seven days.

    It's not available yet but soon holidays, family get-togethers and other distractions getting in between you and your favourite TV and radio programmes could be a thing of the past!

    iMP features

    iMP is pretty similar to the bbc.co.uk RadioPlayer which allows you to listen to any BBC radio programme from the last seven days.
    The Office on iMP

    The main difference with iMP is that you'll be able to access TV programmes as well.
    imp4
    I can't figure out for sure wether they're using digitally rights encoded files (DRM), they may just be locking the files to their server by using a streaming system like Real Player or Win Player so the files can never fully leave the server without some sort of hack. Why this is important is because it's from out of these experiments that the future of broadcast television will come. Which is to say when the major players stop using only cable, satelite and the airwaves and start using the internet as a means to reach out to new customers. This future may look nothing like the BBC's trials, but the success of these early trials all important. I hope to hear more on this in the future.
    Posted by shawn at 06:33 PM | Comments (3)
    Keep TV Free - a historic TV advertisement
    keeptvfree_1Right on, I love historic clips... oh the design, the illustration, the orwellian concepts, but especially when they are so right on topic. This is hysterical, though I must admit that perhaps it's because I'm a such a big democratized / decentralized media geek. Anyway, it is my pleasure to bring you "Keep TV Free" a commercial from 1967.

    Watch it: keep-tv-free.mov
    (3.6mb video/quicktime Object)

    Reblogged from: Stay Free! Daily: Keep TV Free?

    Gee, who would have thought that some of the same suits who are now trying to dictate what you can watch and record on television once urged Americans to "Keep TV Free"? Well, here's a PSA from the late 1960s Hollywood that does just that.

    In 1967, when one of the first pay TV services was preparing to launch in California, Hollywood and the networks helped defeat the service because they didn't want the competition. Theater owners organized a KEEP TV FREE campaign, with PSAs like this one running in movie houses before feature films.

    Though this particular campaign was limited to California, the advertising industry and television networks have long argued a similar case. When Vance Packard, Ralph Nader, Peggy Charren, and other critics attacked advertising in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s (respectively), defenders of industry often cited a common refrain: "advertising provides free news and entertainment."

    In other words, the major networks (in conjunction with the ad industry) have promoted the idea that television is free for decades. Now that viewers have taken their word for it by recording and sharing TV shows freely, the industry has only itself to blame.


    Via Free As In...TV?: Corante > Copyfight >
    Posted by shawn at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Worst TV Clips of the Week
    This has to be the oddest use of fairuse I've seen. I guess I don't see a better way to do discuss graphic content without putting it online for all to see, but the Parents Television Council is redistributing clips of the most graphic content on TV each week. Sort of ironic isn't it?

    Here's one to watch. Surprisingly, it's one of the tamest. it's from the January 14th episode of Boston Legal. I love that show, but maybe they have a point. :)

    BostonLegal11405.wmv (550K)

    Link: Worst TV Clips of the Week
    Posted by shawn at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)
    Daily Show on the Jeff Gannon and Eason Jordan media fallout
    ds021605bloggersWell, this is from almost a week ago, but I didn't have time to track it down online sooner. If you haven't seen it, you are in for a treat, if you have it's not hard to skip to the next post.

    Last week the Daily Show hit a homerun, mocking all sides in the blogger vs. traditional media debate and calling it like it is. It's "hysterically accurate".

    Nothing hit it home for me more than Steven Colbert's mocking of reporters who attacked bloggers for lack of credibility and accuesed them of being a lynch mob... "They have no credibility, all they have is facts." Colbet stated.

    In fact some bloggers do have tremendous credibility, not me, but some do. I'm just a spineless hack hiding behind a blog. It's not like I put my name on this blog. Ok, I do, but fine, who needs credibility when you have facts. Facts I tell you.

    Bloggers didn't really stand up on the highly visible primetime news and say, "Fire Eason Jordan", no that was mainstream political pundants with their credibility and credentials. But bloggers aren't innocent in this head rolling. They sat there and spun there tremendous facts all over the place. Facts like lies, except that they were facts. Facts which spread like a virus or a plague. We cannot have that, dirty slanderous facts everywhere... bloggers must be held to some standard of accountability.

    Watch it: ds021605bloggersx.mov
    (9.7mb video/quicktime Object)

    And if that isn't enough check out the Moment of Zen: ds021605zen.mov (436k video/quicktime Object)

    Via: onegoodmove: Bloggers And The Media Thanks onegoodmove!
    Posted by shawn at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)
    The Coming of Personal Media Aggregators: Community-enablers
    Personal Media Aggregators are the road to create instant-vertical-communities by way of becoming fulcrum points around which news, commentary, discussion, and networking opportunities around a very specific topic, brand, celebrity or writer can become a cohesive aggregating force. Somewhere at the crossroad between personalized RSS news aggregators, of which a few have appeared during 2004, and what Marc Canter defined as DLAs or Digital LifeStyle Aggregators, that this new community-enabling technology finds it place….

    Direct and Related Links for 'The Coming of Personal Media Aggregators: Community-enablers'

    Posted by shawn at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
    Mobile Photo RSS Reader
    49PM.com just released a mobile application that enables you to read the RSS feeds and view any associated images formatted exactly to the size of your mobile display.

    Direct and Related Links for 'Mobile Photo RSS Reader'

    Posted by shawn at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
    Vimeo - Automatic Movies
    Video blogging aggregator a la delicios, flickr
    Posted by shawn at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
    Freevlog
    How to set up a Vlog
    Posted by shawn at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
    Videora - BitTorrent RSS Reader
    Posted by shawn at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
    BeyondTV - An “offline” internet TV project
    This is an undercurrents project to create a real alternative to the centralization of media by narrow corporate power. Its not an Indymedia project as quality control is too much of an issues- TV with out quality control is not open to normal people to watch. Most activist media is made for a tiny minority of popule and is un-intelligible/un-whatebal outside this minority.

    The project will work in a number of stages the first being a functional full screen activist TV channel, based on MPG1 and MPG4 content from the current archive of ruffcuts and euro/US Indymedia newsreal CD???s (we have over 20 hour of programming encoded and access to at least another 20 hours). Secondly stage we add ???automatic functionality??? and some user input into viewing choices. Third stage a re-write to create a decentralized user rated P2P universal TV network when we have good experiences of the idea working in a practical way. I feel it is paramount that we start at the beginning using simple, thus reliable, tools and techniques.

    What it looks like
    The first implementation will be a very simple application which can be downloaded from the undercurrents site which when installed looks like a TV screen with a play button.

    User experiences
    The user downloads it and installs it, and then the next day they hit the play button and get an half an hour of alternative news ??? full screen at VHS quality. The format is like a traditional mainstream news experiences with short intros and then longer in-depth reports followed by ???sport???, ???weather??? and ???fluffy dog??? story. They just have to leave their computer on ??? connected to a broadband connection ??? and every day the will be a new half hour of programming which will play back faultlessly in full screen VHS quality.

    How it works
    Fundamentally to keep it simple it uses existing software and technologies and re-packages them in a new way. As the backend of the application the first version could use an existing implementation of bittorrent such as:

    http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin.php

    We have a blog page running an RSS feed - we update with new video everyday (manually to start with).
    The front end is a simple embedded media player, I am tempted to use Microsoft media player in the first version simply because it will work The more open source player would be VideoLAN as this has some additional useful functionality. That is I am very keen to get the first version working and not being purist and ???open sources??? about it all this come in on the 3ed version when we define a ???open future??? for P2P television over IP, if that isn???t a little grandiose (:

    A simple play list generator that scans the torrent down load directory and builds up a playlist (in alphabetical order to start). Then feeds this to the media player. That is it for version one. Stupidly simple.

    Version 1
    BeyondTV


    * Basic Application with embedded media player
    This would have two modules:
    * Playlist generator ??? simple playlist by alphabetical order ??? when the user presses the play button it scans the download directory to create a ???.WPL??? playlist, feeds this list to embedded media player.
    * azureus RSS plugin ??? Azureus downloads the media files to a default directory in the background.

    Version 2
    Functions
    -clear P2P cash to free up space (default download directory)
    -Select interested subject (using media Meta data)
    -best download time (bandwidth conservation issues)
    House Keeping:
    -auto clear cash (clears watched and older files when reserved hard drive space low)
    -media download time out (gets rid of ???failed??? torrents)
    Playlist
    -media meta data parsing (to create TV news look and feel)
    -media watch list history (to stop media repeating)
    -Story (TV news) playlist (template for TV news format play list generation)

    Version 2
    Transparent install runtime - to package and install media playing app and P2P software in an easy to use package.

    TODO list
    Programming:

    Modules (alpha)
    * embedded media player application
    * basic playlist generator
    * setup blog sight
    * setup torrent tracker

    Modules (beta)
    * Playlist generator with media management and media metadata parser and playlist templates.
    * creating a nice installer
    * Simple user database - list online users could possible use webstates package?

    Posted by shawn at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)
    New concept:

     

    New concept: "Multimode" Podcasting 

    Defines the ability to describe more then one podcast in a single item of a feed.  This can be accomplished by defining a RSS 2.0 feed with enclosure(s) (collection of podcasts) as a child enclosure of a parent RSS 2.0. feed.

    This simple solution gets around the problem of not being able to define more then one file in a RSS 2.0 enclosure.

    This attribute is an optional  feature of Audioblogging 2.0.

    The receiving client software for the "multimode" podcasting could be a "multimode podcatcher".  The "multimode" podcatcher would have to know how to identify a "multimode" podcast which can also be thought of as a feed of feeds.

    Posted by shawn at 06:26 PM | Comments (1)
    A day in the life of a Podcasting Feed Producer

     

    A day in the life of a Podcasting Feed Producer

    Lately I have been living the life of a Podcast Feed producer.  Since I am one of the first to perform this process on a daily basis, I get to drive the bus for a while before others begin to join in.   The fruit of my "free" labor can be seen and heard over at "The Daily Podcast Feed".

    Life for me as a sunrising Podcast Feed producer starts at about 4:00AM EST.   I start the day by scouting out all the new, cool and interesting podcasts in the  space.  As I sift through the podcast gems of the day,  I start to compile a new feed for the new day that represents a horizontal representation of what's new in the blogaudsphere.  Eventually I'll probably move toward producing some vertical podcast feeds but right now I'm content on playing with the podcasting feed production process with a variety feed.  At this time on the timeline history of podcasting, there is value in bringing a variety feed to a wide audience (which includes myself) of new potential podcast listeners without all the hassles of having to configure any Podcatcher software.

    My main goal in the morning is to get the Daily Podcast Feed up between 5 and 6 AM EST.  If I was to get the feed up much later then that, I would loose the potential window of opportunity for East Coast Podcatchers to discover and podcatch the feed before their journey to work.

    Once the feed is up on "The Daily Podcast Feed", it's onto testing all the new shows for their streaming ability through the flash media player.  If they fail any of my simple streaming tests they're removed from the feed.  Ability to stream is a potential that Podcasters will need to consider and face soon with their hosting options. 

    The computer I perform the testing with is connected to my home theatre system.  Speakers are placed throughout my home so I can listen and test as I get ready for work.

    As my Broadband network is stream testing all the podcasts in the new feed at the same time I'm using my Podcatcher software to download the same new podcasts directly onto my > $99.00 MP3 flash player to listen to on my ride to work.  

    Posted by shawn at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)
    Personal Art Assistant
    PDA and De Kooning

    In Austria, a PDA serves as a mobile exhibition guide during the De Kooning exhibition at BA-CA Kunstforum. The offical start of the Personal Art Assistant is in April with the René Margritte exhibition.
    Technical infrastructure is by T-Systems, Austria.

    Via pressetext: Multimedialer Ausstellungsguide für mehr Kunstgenuss
    Posted by shawn at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)