unmediated

Screen/process capturer for windows.

"Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users."

American (Ad) Idol

: Craig Newmark has a change-the-rules idea the new Connect.TV: Let the audience vote off the worst commercials.

I like that: Sponsors would know the rules when they advertise and would operate under fear of being voted off, so they would improve their commercials.

But it's so, well, negative. How about a more aggressive scheme:

How about having a contest for the best commercials, products, and brands on the network. Make it a game. Hire the Simon Cowell (or Bob Garfield) of the people to slam the spam. Have the sponsors compete for our affection.

Everybody wins:

: Suddenly, consumers have a reason to pay attention to commercials. Wow, that is revolutionary. So if the sponsors have decent commercials, they win.

: The network becomes a better environment for advertising. Advertisers will line up to give them money. The network wins.

: The sponsors improve their commercials and consumers can get rid of the worst of them and encourage better ones. The audience wins.

The audience is in control.

This follows my first law of media (and life): Give people control of media and they will use it. Don't give the people control and you will lose them.

That's all Craig is doing. That's all Craig ever does: He empowers the people. Good thinking, Craig.

: This also deals with a problem of marketing and media in this era when media is paid on performance: That is, if you are a publisher or blogger, you get paid only when the consumer clicks on an ad you run. But if the ad is crappy (or the ad targeting is off) then no one will click and you lose; you used up your space, your ad avail, to no avail.

So what if you got to pick the ad creative you put on your site or network... or recreate it? That scares ad agencies that make money on making that creative. But, hey, it's a new era: You win when you give up control, not keep it. So the wise advertiser and ad agency would take Craig's idea (and my add) and run with it.

If you're in NYC, you definitely won't want to miss the Bent festival of circuit-bending music at The Tank on 42nd Street. Each day of the festival this week features workshops on how to warp common electronics from Walkmans to Game Boys into new musical instruments, and concerts of many of the leading musical practitioners of this art form.

By the way, signs I'm getting bogged down by writing work and a book that's months overdue? How about when the UK-based MusicThing is on top of the Bent Circuit Bending festival before the (cough, cough!) NYC-based CDM that's had this sitting in my inbox for a week. When MusicThing has a photo of my friend Patrick McCarthy (guitarist) right on the homepage, I know I'm behind!

That said, I will engineer a jailbreak soon to get out there and check some of this out, especially since is The Tank's swansong before the space gets hit with a wrecking ball. (Ah, NYC progress.) What are deadlines, anyway?

For more information on circuit bending if you're in the rest of the world that's not New York, check out Reed Ghazala's excellent Anti-Theory site..

Via createdigitalmusic.com

Here's a DIY teleprompter for the folks out there who are using web cams to do videoblogging or recording themselves speaking. It's pretty simple, a couple CD cases and some HTML and you're good to go. I think as we start using video conferencing more it might be a neat project to put all sorts of things on there, like instant messages, widgets, slides or maybe a RSS ticker, maybe not. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

Tom Martin and his colleagues in the Virginia Tech E-Textiles Lab are attempting to develop clothes that appear and feel normal but provide sensing and computing capabilities. Because the wires and sensors in e-textiles are woven into the fabric, wearable computers can be constructed as shirts, pants, hats, gloves or any clothing items to monitor factors ranging from how fast and far a jogger is running to the blood pressure and heart rate of a cardiac patient.



These e-textiles will be able to sense their own shapes, the wearer's motions, and the positions of the sensing elements.

According to the researcher, current e-textiles present problems associated with the placement and movement of sensors. Some sensors work well only if they are placed a certain distance apart on a garment. If shirt sleeves or pants legs are rolled up or other changes occur while an e-textile garment is being worn, the network of sensors needs to be able to "sense" the reconfiguration in order to perform effectively.

The ultimate goal of this research is therefore to create a complete design framework that will enable novel applications that are not possible with existing e-textiles technology.

Via Clippings - PhysOrg.

Via we make money not art

: Phoenix Sun player Paul Shirley's well-written travel journal with an eye for small details hit the top of the NBA charts during its brief March stint, largely because it got noticed by ESPN.com's Bill Simmons and spread across the media world. You'd think anything that drew 100,000-plus visitors would have a future but not so: Shirley says, "It was more tiring than I thought, and it was difficult for me to keep things within the bounds of what was appropriate for the Suns' Web site."
It also runs against the grain of the NBA blogs as a whole. David Roth writes about the poor fit of an acerbic "white guy" blog in the NBA world for the Online Journal: "Its blogs are too on-message and too dull to connect with any audience."

We predicted its failure when Disney's "Moviebeam" launched. Now, the Mouse is putting the project on hold while they "retool" and look for partners. "Moviebeam" is a set-top box that plays Disney-only movies on a pay-per-view basis. In September, Disney "reassigned" the guy who was in charge of the project and disbanded the department.

Via Lost Remote

Telcos' IPTV Subscribers Will Barely Surpass 2 Million By 2009

Forrester research released a report that offers a less ambitious viewpoint on IPTV in the coming years. The report states that telephone companies have a difficult migration ahead of them and it‘s going to cost a lot to catch up to cable companies. Despite all the recent excitement, Maribel Lopez writes "it is a long road from today's flashy Consumer Electronics Show (CES) demos to mass adoption of telco IPTV."

SBC has plans of laying a fiber-to-the-promises network later this year. Verizon has already begun to lay their FiOS network and build data centers to support it. The report notes that it will be much more difficult to offer IPTV than simply laying a better infrastructure. "Listening to telco pitches, you would think that it was simply a matter of flipping a switch to deliver TV to any consumer anywhere," writes Maribel Lopez. "But before telcos can launch a widespread TV offering, they must replace part of the copper plant with fiber, update the billing and provisioning system to support video, and bulletproof the equipment that will go into the home."

Our take: While it will be a long road before telcos’ IPTV offerings are as bulletproof as cable is now, we have seen very promising momentum made by Verizon in securing relationships with media partners and building out a network to support media delivery. SBC may have been the first to announce their ambitions for an IPTV offering, but Verizon is on the fast track to actually bringing it to life.

Telcos' IPTV Reality Check Executive Summary
Telcos have jumped on the TV bandwagon, but it won't be an easy ride. Entering the market means spending billions in network upgrades, rolling out services with unproven IPTV platforms, and navigating the difficult content acquisition process. IPTV promises great content selection, more interactivity, and enhanced TV features, such as faster channel changing. But given telcos' lame track record with selling new services like DSL, we expect their TV efforts to get off to a slow start. With limited consumer interest in triple play and difficulty in creating product differentiation, telcos will remove profit from the TV services market as they launch price wars to grab consumers.

Here’s some great commentary on the Japanese Giant's tendency to keep things nice and closed. The Librie, which we love, is a beautiful tablet/e-reader/etc. However, it only supports MemoryStick, has an unsupported DRM system, and isn't sold outside of Edo. So, what you have is another great Sony idea that will soon be copied by every OEM from here to Taiwan and after a few geeks get together and create an open, monetized Ebook format. But then again, that requires organization on the part of everyone else.

The Sony Librie [Kottke]

Dana Blankenhorn: "To say a blog is journalism is like saying web pages are journalism."

Via Micro Persuasion

Mention this country's broadband coverage gaps, and a debate springs forth like well water: In a growing role as primary communications pipe and economic incubator, is broadband a utility? Is it a right? Is it simply a luxury? That's the debate currently underway in NYC, where the government is exploring how to fill broadband black-holes, and whether or not city money should be used to do so (Gotham Gazette).

Via Broadbandreports

Art on the move. Computers have become integral to expression. Change and energy are tools. In this kinetic landscape, artists, museums and collectors all scramble to adjust. Naimark is mentioned. Full article here.

Via USC Interactive Media Division Weblog

This ties into the Ypsilanti grassroots journalism project I'm working with.

"A few years from now; maybe quite a few years from now admittedly, but one or more of my neighbors is going to start blogging about what.s happening in our neighborhood. Seeing him or her do that might actually motivate me to post a few myself that are tied to things going on in the neighborhood. Easy enough to do, but what’s missing right now is an easy way to find them."

What Can Evolutionary Science Teach Us About Designing Online Commons? is David Bollier's blog post about a workshop held yesterday at Harvard, From Personal to Impersonal Trusted Exchange in The Physical and Digital Domains: An Evolutionary Perspective. This effort is very close to the work we are doing with The Cooperation Project. I'm going to see if the parallel efforts can harmonize. (The Cooperation Project is looking for funding for our next phase -- contact me if you have any tips):

Professor Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, the great pioneer of commons scholarship (or in academese, “common-pool resources”), gave a rich overview of the principles that define the commons. I was struck by her observation that the existence of the commons depends upon “the shared understanding of symbols." To illustrate her point, Ostrom showed a photo of a snow-bound street in Boston with a folding chair placed on a shoveled-out parking spot. This commons, she explained, consisted of the shared understanding in the neighborhood that anyone who shovels out a parking spot is entitled to “own” the spot for the duration of the snow.

The chair symbolizes the power of informal, community-originated rules. The mayor of Boston didn’t want to recognize the vernacular symbols of property rights – chairs and ladders in parking spots – and had them hauled away, inciting huge protests. The commons fights back against the state!

Ostrom noted that traditional economics singularly fails to explain how property rights are assigned in the first place; it just assumes that law and order and fully rational individuals are there. In addition, economics presumes that order originates from a central source, like government, which is supposed to apply uniform “scientific” policies based on aggregate data to large and diverse terrains, largely ignoring local knowledge and citizen participation in fulfilling policies. (Citizens are presumed to be ineffectual.)

The lesson of much commons scholarship, however, shows that sustainable order frequently arises from the self-organization of people in local contexts. While property rights can be handled in many ways (private property, government-owned property, etc.), the specific property regime is less important than establishing clear property boundaries and effective monitoring of them.

Via Clippings.reblog

David Pescovitz: Researchers say that the chaotic, distracting mess of multiple information streams that is CNN and many other channels today isn't working. (Surprise!) From Kansas State University:

"We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," (journalism/mass comm. professor Tom) Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen -- the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast -- are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."

For their research, Bergen, Grimes and Potter conducted a series of four experiments that examined people's attention spans regarding complex and simple cognitive processes.

"The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content," Grimes said.

Link

Via Boing Boing

Interactive TV - or "Participation TV" takes on a new meaning with video phones.

Monique Van Dusseldorp has written an interesting post for E-Media Tidbits on Italy's success with video phones and their high penetration rate in this country (almost 1 million people own a 3G mobile video phone). Monique gives somes examples of how they are being used:

"Telecom Italia's broadband portal, Rosso Alice, includes a 24-hour video chat community, with local heroes broadcasting their own shows, but also offers eight hours of live television per day.

e with a video phone or webcam can interact with the TV hosts, sing songs, tell jokes, provide cinema reviews, etc. The caller's video image is visible on screen, next to or behind the hosts, who sit in a Flash-produced digital studio.

And the system is now making it to mainstream TV as well. From April 27 onward, public broadcaster RAI Uno's morning show, Mattina, is using it to invite the audience to call in and respond to the day's issues and studio guests".

Via Smart Mobs

MobuzzTV wants to make video blogs a commercial success. Their entertaining daily clips are accessible online and formatted for use on a mobile phone.

The slick, vlog draws from a healthy pool of talent producting interviews and short clips. Their Buzz Magazine has short (2 minute) clips.

MobuzzTV probably won't compete in the VBlog space of Al Gore's Current.tv (see: Video Blog TV Channel), or the professionally produced and edited Wireless Watch Japan (which largely pioneered the weekly video news form several years ago).

MobuzzTV appears to be going after cell phone users. And why not?

U.S. mobile subscribers will total 200 million by year-end 2006 with cellular subscribers worldwide growing at a 13.6% rate, from 1.1 billion in 2002 to 2 billion total subscribers in 2006. Color screens, Java gaming, digital cameras, picture messaging and digital music are expected to be standard features by 2007. That's two years away.

FOX News is on Sprint phones. Repurposing syndicated broadcast programming seems inevitable. Are cellphones the next cable programming boom? Mike Masnik thinks not.

Of course, there is an alternative. Start Videoblogging. Get thee to the Applery. Picturephoning and VideoBlogging have more.

Today marks the start of TV Turn Off Week for 2005.

TV Turnoff Week is no ordinary social ritual. The goal is simple: to shake up routines and get people questioning the role of TV in their lives.

Get your TV-B-GONE at the ready!

Via Daily Wireless

Nokia's new N Series phones combine MP3 players, 2 megapixel cameras for stills and video, and a web browser. The first Nokia Nseries products, N 70, N 90, and N 91, are expected to become available during the second quarter of 2005 followed by several more by the end of 2005.

Mobile Burn checks out the 2 Megapixel Nokia N90.

Here at Nokia's N Series launch event in Amsterdam, I got the chance to play around with all three of the new handsets. The most interesting to many people is likely to be the N90, the handset that Nokia is positioning as their top of the line camera equipped device.

The N90 makes use of very high quality Carl Zeiss optics and incorporates an auto-focus system. The sample images we saw that were taken by the N90 were quite good, approaching the quality of many consumer 2 megapixel cameras on the market today.

What really amazed me, though, was the quality of the captured video. I saw a clip that one of the Nokia people shot while on a recent trip to Tokyo. The video was of a busy intersection at night, and the quality was amazing. The high-res 352x416 display was really razor sharp, and is likely the best display found yet on a Nokia device...

N90, houses a RS-MMC card and is PictBridge-compatible and Bluetooth-enabled for wireless printing. The N90 also provides on-phone editing capabilities, VHS resolution video capture, two-way video calling and video sharing.

Nokia's new phones are aimed at top-end gadget lovers. All handsets in the new N Series will sport music playing facilities, at least a two mega pixel camera, and web browsing using the Opera browser. All are 3G/GSM compatible and run using the Series 60 Symbian-based interface. The N91 boasts MP3 and AAC (though it isn't compatible with songs downloaded from the iTunes music store).

Nokia expects to sell more than 100 million camera phones this year. The Finnish company also expects to sell more than 25 million smart phones in 2005, as well as shipping 40 million mobile devices with MP3 music players.

Nokia also annonced that Yahoo! Internet Services will be pre-installed on Nokia Series 60 devices. Yahoo's mobile services include e-mail, entertainment such as ring tones and downloadable games, and Yahoo! Search for Mobile.

Nokia plans to make Nseries phones available in North America through multiple channels, although details have yet to be finalized. Phone Scoop (right) has more details.

In three years, perhaps those features will be incorporated in a Mobilized WiMax handset (at 700 MHz) for public safety users, too.

In a his first interview since making the jump from MSN to Yahoo, Scott Moore says he's excited to get to work on storytelling. "I don't think the Internet as a medium has come anywhere close to realizing its potential as a storytelling medium," he said. "Great ideas don't need to be expensive to develop." (Free reg.)

Via Lost Remote

As Dave points out in the comments to this post: sLop: Java wrapper for ffmpeg there is a new open source FFMPEG JNI JMF wrapper: Omnividea FOBS - FFMpeg C & JMF Bindings..

Gotta love those acronyms.. :-) Sorry.

Via sLop

The newly-announced Open Media Network bills itself as the future of public tv and radio, and looks something like OurMedia - producers can upload content and have it hosted for free.

A system that uses the Internet for distribution and allows creative workers to be compensated for their sound and moving image productions could be a good thing. And OMN promises to do this. But the press release shows the kind of schizophrenia that results when “open” and “commercial” get too close to each other:

“Because OMN uses Kontiki’s grid delivery technology, all content is centrally managed.  Programs which violate copyright or are unsuitable for viewing can be removed from the network.  Kontiki’s battle-tested technology has built-in digital rights management (DRM) through support of the Microsoft Windows Rights Manager and allows publishers to choose whether content can be shared, duplicated or viewed a set number of times.  Future versions of OMN, due this summer, will offer producers a secure payment system for premium content.”

“All content is centrally managed” with “battle-tested technology?” “Programs….unsuitable for viewing can be removed from the network?” And it’s all Windows-only?

That doesn’t sound open.

OMN has some smart people behind it, and its p2p approach to media distribution is right. It could even make a good platform for broadcasters like Current.tv and for archives that want to make programming available. But asking everyone to download yet another client app just to view video will be a hard sell, especially if the same material is available elsewhere in genuinely open formats.

"I am intrigued by what forms might emerge from the potential to alter movie content using mobile presence information. Taking location as an example, watching the movie in location X produces a different cut from watching it in location Y. In this regard, I am especially interested in the prospect of co-location shooting. In other words, a movie maker shoots some scenes in the actual location that I watch it from."

Electronic Arts and the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television have announced the Sims 2 Student Life Movie Contest. The competition offers prizes for the best movie made with the simulation game's built-in video creation tools. The grand prize winner will receive either $5,000 or a four-week internship with Maxis Studios at EA's headquarters in Redwood City, Calif.

"Sims 2" enthusiasts hoping to grab the grand prize are encouraged to submit their homegrown films at the official "Sims 2" Web site.

nternship at Maxis? Superb. Encouraging creative use like this - just fantastic.
Full article here.

Via Clippings.reblog

InFlow performs network analysis AND network visualization in one integrated product -- no passing files back and forth between different programs like other tools. Version 3.0 provides new metrics, new network layouts, new what-if analysis, and is designed to work with Microsoft Office and the WWW.

Grassroots sites Ourmedia.org and Brightcove and search engines like Singingfish and Google try to bring order to online video chaos -- but big broadcasters are torn between Napsterization and 'The Long Tail.'

The German District Court of Hamburg has prohibited the distribution of the P2P software Cybersky-TV. This program is build on ByteTornado, a sort of BitTorrent on steroids, and allows the anonymous recording of TV streams without being bothered by DRMs. The software cuts the images in strips and puts a time stamp on them before an exchange, after which the receiving end puts uses the time stamps to put the strips back in the right order to create the original image.

WORKSHOP
Call for Participation

Space, Place and Experience in Human-Computer Interaction

Interact 2005
13th September 2005, Rome

As HCI research engages with the new interaction paradigms of mobile, pervasive and ambient computing, new challenges for user-centred interaction design arise. This one-day workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary group of practitioners in order to share experiences, explore foundations, and discuss an agenda for research in space, place and the experience of pervasive and ambient technology.

Issues of interest to the workshop include but are not limited to:

* Theories and conceptual frameworks for analysing space, place and the contextualisation of interaction with embedded systems
* Place, non-place and interaction spaces
* Methods, tools and techniques for the experience-centred design of emplaced technology
* Case studies in the design and use of ambient and pervasive technologies.

We encourage participation from a wide range of disciplines and practitioners including HCI, interaction design, architecture, product design, computer science, psychology, social sciences, cultural and media studies.

All participants are invited to submit a 2-4 page position paper. These will be refereed by a small committee and around 16 participants selected.

The day will be organized to include 10-minute presentations and discussions.

Please submit position papers (as a Word or PDF file) to peter.wright@cs.york.ac.uk by 30th May Participants will be notified by 10th June.

Via Clippings.reblog

Village Mayor Fights Verizon Chumps

"According to the Nassau County Village Officials Association (NCVOA) newsletter Panzarella, who was also serving as President of the association, became “livid” after learning that while Verizon was trying to soft-soak the villages into granting it fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) permits it was simultaneously leading the charge to eliminate franchising authority at both the state and federal level.

I have found over the years that often it is the smaller towns and cities that have no compunction about taking on the behemoths. Maybe because they don’t have so many lawyers on staff or maybe it’s because they’re closer to the accountability of the people. It’s tough to go grocery shopping and have somebody nail you in the frozen food section for being the wimpy mayor that cow-towed to Verizon. No matter, it’s just a huge lesson for all villages, townships, cities and counties, if Panzarella can do it, so can you."

We've all heard the hype about blogs. We know that their numbers are growing exponentially. We've seen them beat the Mainstream Media to a few stories. But we still read contradicting accounts of their future influence: will the blogosphere radically transform the world as we know it or are blogs simply a passing fad? Three reports this week provide varying ideas about what to expect.

Blogs published in traditional media: The Los Angeles Times writes that well known commenator Arianna Huffington has proposed a "group blog," inviting public figures from actors to politicians from both sides of the political spectrum to comment on on anything that suits their fancy. A seven member team will research and post articles that the group will respond to, but the group need not stick to these parameters. Huffington would also like them to write about personal interests. Her novel idea, one that could shake up the news industry, is that some of the unedited blog material will be lightly edited and published in the mainstream media through syndication.

Businesses will embrace blogs: "They're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself," proclaims Business Week's cover story. Being so simple that "any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up," the article, entitled "Blogs Will Change Your Business," says "they represent power." Essentially giving anyone a printing press, a voice to the world traditionally reserved for large organizations, "The divide between publishers and the public is collapsing... (creating) media of the masses." Business wise, the article says that "you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to."

Local news sites don't place importance on blogs: "Make no mistake, blogging is a phenomenon, but there is little evidence from surveys, traffic data, or case studies to support local sites making heavy investments." This quote from a report by Jupiter Research found at Poynter, a researcher of online, information technology and business, contradicts the Business Week article. Instead of consulting blogs, local websurfers prefer to get their news from more traditional elements such as message boards.

Sources: The Los Angeles Times, Business Week and Poynter

activities in the game QuakeIII are used as abstract data to control a real-time audio synthesis environment. bot & player locations, view angle, weapon state & local texture data are transferred to a networked computer to create sounds, so that the game play is treated as a performance & composition environment. [selectparks.net|via turbulence.org]

"One of the more pleasant side effects of the dot com boom was that billions of dollars were spent training indivduals how to design web sites, program, write, etc."

How to implement applications and devices communicating with Skype through the API.

Goal of this workshop is to bring together experts on the semantic web, HCI, human language technologies, info viz, information retrieval, and knowledge-based systems to discuss how to bring the power of the semantic web to end-users.

Commons Music is a grassroots organization that is trying to change the way public and private organizations treat both file-sharing on the whole, and file-sharing on an individual consumer level

Researchers and lab technicians have produced more than 50,000 frame grabs and 1.21 million interpretive annotations. All of this research is available, free of charge, over the Internet through the Knowledge Base and an archival system called the VARS Query system.

"The world's first all-podcast radio station" - wait, the world's first what?

"The world's first all-podcast radio station will be launched on May 16 by Infinity Broadcasting, the radio division of Viacom.

Infinity plans to convert San Francisco's 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content. The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOURadio.

Infinity, one of the country's largest radio operators with more than 183 stations around the country, will invite do-it-yourselfers to upload digital audio files for broadcast consideration by way of the KYOURadio.com website."

"The media module serves as both a meta-data collector for audio and video files and a playlist builder for audio files:" - host your own poor man's WebJay

- uses getId3 [1] to read and store the metadata from any audio or video file that is uploaded to a Drupal site via the upload.module - presents the metadata from all audio and video files in a sortable table - supports downloading and streaming of media - introduces a new node type, the media-playlist

like delicious, but with images. yeah.

It’s a moving picture, so you’ve gotta move the camera, right? You don’t have a lot of money, but there’s stuff around the house. Start building! Here’s a new wrinkle in grip equip — The Incredible Ironing Board Dolly! [Sam Longoria Filmmaking Blog]

Via Cinema Minima

The semantic Web, autonomous agents, sensor networks, and RFID are among the emerging technologies that will radically change the future of manufacturing. ...

TBS is launching an innovative broadband network called GameTap that will mix video game downloads with original programming. "We designed it to be as easy as TV," said Blake Lewin, VP product invention at TBS. "It's about getting people exposed to different games and letting them experience them in new ways." GameTap is scheduled to go live in the fall with 300 games and original shows called "Tapped In" and "Space Ghost Coast to Coast." Monthly fees will run $10-$20 for unlimited access. A side benefit to GameTap: It will help drive subscribers to Time Warner's high-speed service.

Via Lost Remote

Netscape veterans Mike Homer and Marc Andreessen are back together again, this time launching what is proving to be a hot area of activity: open digital media distribution systems. The new site/system, "Open Media Network" has been floating around in an alpha version for some time now, and is being officially launched in beta today...
I spoke to Homer earlier today, in detail, about the new service. The focus of the service is to democratize the publishing of digital media, as well as the consumption of it, and as part of that, the non-profit company has tied up with public TV and radio broadcasters. WGBH, KQED, and KWSU are among the initial public TV and radio stations offering content. It is also going to focus on independent films, and has signed up with Cinequest for it...
And anyone else can also upload and use it, much like what the much-written about OurMedia.org offers. Some newer yet-unlaunched offering like ParticipatoryCulture.org are also cropping up...the main difference with OMN is in delivery.
The service is powered by Kontiki, a company which Homer was the CEO of previously, and is now the chairman...Kontiki has been called as the BitTorrent for legal content, with a similar grid technology, at least in intent. According to Homer, the delivery costs are about 1/20th of the usual online content delivery networks, using Kontiki's technology (well, at least the new version which will be launched this summer)...and the management of the service is also central, unlike BitTorrent, making for a more reliable service, according to Homer.
In terms of an interface, it is trying to model a simple TV-style program guide and automatic background deliveries of favorite scheduled programming (using RSS and technology concepts like podcasting). With OMN, content producers can add/upload their programming to the network, with unlimited free delivery of their shows and with digital rights protection, if they so desire. Right now, the service is online/podcasting focused, but OMN has plans to be available on multiple devices, including TV IPGs and mobile phones by this summer.
() The system has an in-built DRM system, and if producers and media companies want to use that system, they will be able to...I asked Homer about this and he replied to it at length...the 5 minute audio clip of this is here...
Of course, the project is a showcase for Kontiki's technology as well, a double-edged sword because if it works, it should be great for the company, but if it doesn't, as independent producers and bloggers want it to, then they will be very vocal about it...
Some of the main features of the service as also listed in detail in company's release...
Futher details are in this News.com story...

Via PaidContent.org

Why Google's tie-up with Al Gore's Current TV channel matters...the story expounds on it..."Google has the means to invent and own the way video bloggers find, publish, and store their content, and apparently it has the will to at least take the first step...What Al Gore and Current have to offer are credibility and legitimacy."

Via PaidContent.org

DTV broadcast standard for handhelds gains momentum
Does it offer any interactive components?
From the site:
Apr. 18, 2005
A number of wireless industry leaders announced support today for the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld) standard, at the National Association of Broadcasters conference. DVB-H is an open standard for delivering broadcast digital TV (DTV) to mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs.DVB-H delivers an improved end user experience over current video streaming services that utilize cellular networks and reduce network capacity for voice services, according to the DVB Project consortium. Trials are underway in the US, Germany, France, UK, Finland, Sweden, and other countries, with more trials expected to launch later in 2005 and throughout 2006

Via sLop

SPRINT TO BUNDLE ORB MEDIA ACCESS WITH DSL Sprint will offer its broadband customers a remote media access service from Orb Networks, the two companies plan to announce Monday.

[via David Fox]

Congrats to Ted Shelton and althe ORB homies!

Via Marc's Voice

The important thing to take away from this is the way that he is making the game. He's sidestepped the whole idea of massive teams of content creators in favor of a system of building games based on player-content and emergence.

"The idea is not just to let people watch old TV programs and films, but to encourage anyone to use the old footage to make entirely new works."

I admire Skype. Predicable? Yessir - that’s me! It is successful because it solves the user’s problem. And that problem is a lot more than getting someone’s current IP address and creating a session and duplex audio channel

Microsoft is set to release the 64 bit version of Windows on Monday, reports Information Week. One of the things keep our users (see our recent poll) from upgrading is weak 64-bit driver support, something EWeek explores. According to a Microsoft exec, 16,000 devices will support the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition at launch.

Via Broadbandreports

A Freeport, Pennsylvania Area High School student has been arrested following threats he made on against US President George W. Bush, other government officials and classmates on a Xanga Blog.

16-year-old Jeff Neely, a 10th-grader, has been detained in the Butler County Juvenile Center on charges of making terrorist threats.

The Valley News Dispatch reports that the US Secret Service initiated the criminal investigation when it came across a message Neely posted on a blog at Xanga.com. The paper reports that it was unable to dtermine what had exactly been written.

Via The Blog Herald: more blog news more often

Monique van Dusseldorp reports Smartmobs about an interesting television project called Videoletters which is trying to rebuild bonds between former friends and neighbours in the

Starting in 1999, Dutch documentary makers Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek searched and found people willing to send their former friend a 'video letter' which they brought across the border to show; filmed the response of the receiver, who could also send a 'return' video letter - in some cases also resulting in a first meeting since the war.

The resulting heart breaking 25 minute documentaries are presently being broadcast in weekly installments by the public broadcasters of Serbia and Montenegro, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Macedonia. In addition to the TV programme, the Videoletters website offers a social networking website where anyone looking for former contacts can send in a video letter, put out a search request, keep a weblog or add pictures.

Busses equipped with internet connections and webcams and permanent internet counters equipped with webcams are available throughout the
countries involved in the project.

Also the site has a multilingual search engine, allows you to connect to people but also to places (which makes sense), and has an ad hoc jury system - if discussions go out of hand or postings are made that are considered offensive, a random selection of members need to decide what to do.

press clippings

fact sheet

more of Mediametic about connecting people in cyberspace via videoletters

Thank you Monique !

Via Smart Mobs

Del.icio.us has a feature in beta that lets you collect a set of your tags into a “bundle” that then shows up at the top of the your personal page. For example, if you declare the tags “parody,” “sarcasm” and “puns” to be part of a “humor” bundle, all three of those tags will be listed under a big, bold “Humor” on the right hand side of your del.icio.us home page. You can create a bundle by going to http://del.icio.us/settings/YOURUSERID/bundle.

(Thanks to Hanan Cohen who found this at LibraryStuff who found it at BlogDriversWaltz. Very interesting discussions at both those sites.)

Articles on interesting citizen's media initiatives

This is an example where folksonomies would help organization a lot

"This is a dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypical problems, and related definitions. Algorithms include common functions, such as Ackermann's function. Problems include traveling salesman and Byzantine generals. Some entries have links to implementations and more information. Index pages list entries by area and by type. The two-level index has a total download 1/20 as big as this page."

Typo is an absolutely minimal weblogging engine which comes without an admin interface.

"There is a fundamental difference between Google Video and Ourmedia. Ourmedia is not just about publishing your media online, it also aims to develop a community around what people post there. We have forums, blogs, group blog, commenting, buddy lists etc..."

Converged Digest reports that Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) officially launched its 1 Gbps symmetric service for the residential market . Yes,"GigE".

(Found via the excellent summary at Daily Wireless. -kc.)

J2ME Polish
From the site:
J2ME Polish is suite of tools for creating "polished" J2ME applications. Each tool meets a definite need of J2ME developers:
Build-tools with an integrated device-database, a powerful GUI, a framework for building localized applications, a game-engine, a logging framework and a collection of utilities.

Thanks Laura and Dan.

Via sLop

Portable tech gets lighter and smaller all the time, but for vision-impaired people, that's not an advantage.

CopyNight is a monthly social gathering of people interested in restoring balance in copyright law. We meet over drinks once a month in many cities to discuss new developments and build social ties between artists, engineers, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, and many others.

Another trend pioneered by blogs. With most blogs, you can easily get to all the other sections and pages of the site unlike so-called 'normal' websites. And with blogs and increasingly normal web sites, people will arrive via search not via bookmarks.

From The Article Page: New Kingpin of Online News?.:

QUOTE

BOULDER, Colo. (April 22, 2005) -- It's a trend that's been a long time in coming: More and more people bypass news Web sites' home and section pages, instead entering a site at the article-page (or "inside-page") level.

The home page -- where Web designers and editors have for so long poured so much of their effort -- is no longer the be-all, end-all. You have to pay serious attention to the home page, of course, but equally important these days is the template used for article pages.

UNQUOTE

Via Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Last week, during the Salone del Mobile in Milan, I went to see the Greenhouse Effect exhibition that showed the works in progress of IDII students. I made pictures, asked a few questions, but my snaps were so depressing that I couldn't blog anything (apart from the brilliant InstantSoup). Plus, the projects I liked best were not online.

Today, surprise, surprise, I found the brand new website of one of those projects: Giovanni Cannata 's Light Appliances (dubbed Household IP information appliances for low-tech Italians) thesis project.



He made the prototype of a system of information appliances that simplify interaction with internet services, allowing people who don't use computers to access services over the internet (video calls, internet radios, e-mails, etc.)

The system is composed by buttonless appliances, each one dedicated to one specific function like email, voice over internet, video call and internet TV. These appliances are supported by a service and a very simple one-button remote control, called the "dropper" allows the system to be highly flexible.

Light Appliances allows you to browse photos in a digital picture frame by caressing the frame's corner and to call the friend displayed in the photo by dragging and dropping the contact into a phone using the "dropper", or sending him a handwritten e-mail by dragging the contact into an e-mail appliance instead.

Other works by Giovanni Cannata: Creative Collision.

Via we make money not art

Wapedia is Wikipedia for your WAP phone or PDA. Alternatively, why not just download the whole thing and carry it with you?

Via MetaFilter

There’s a crowd of people out there who still think that nothing has changed in our modern media world. They think that the same old newspapers, television, and radio outlets that dominated the media marketplace 30 years ago are still the only media outlets of importance today....

Space.com features an adAstra column by Greg Little about how stories rate in today's newspaper world. His qualm is centered around how a story about singer Kid Rock getting arrested was on the front page of a Nashville paper while another story about the serious possibility of life on Mars was "on about page A9." We know it's all about selling papers, but whether that's right or wrong or even a new happening isn't the big issue here. It's Little's suggestion that "it will take people who have actually practiced what we call "community journalism" to take over these media outlets to begin telling the important stories on page one, as well as restoring credibility to our profession."

So, those who would want to be considered "community journalists," are you ready to stand up and be counted?

It's good to see them get on board. The feeds are kind of weird, the obfuscated kind, where the content is hidden. Once you do a view-source, there are some strange elements and redirects. But the content is interesting, like the New York Times best sellers list. I don't think the Times itself publishes it.

Via Really Simple Syndication weblog

Business Week: Blogs Will Change Your Business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later.

Via Social Media

Deadline: EXTENDED to April 25

How can traditional performance strategies blend with cutting-edge new media to create artistic forms reflecting today’s dynamic global culture? Join The Kitchen and the Summer Institute’s first invited international Artistic Director, Ong Keng Sen, for a multidisciplinary program exploring the relationships between ancient technologies, dramaturgy and game. Fully accredited by Sarah Lawrence College, this intensive three-week laboratory offers emerging artists the unique opportunity to develop work integrating video, theatre, performance, dance, sound, and text.

Through daily interaction with a select group of professional artists from Asia and the U.S., participants explore ritualistic techniques from ancient cultures within the rich landscape of interactive systems, game design and rules of play. Artist talks and mentoring sessions with industry professionals as well as access to The Kitchen’s extraordinary video archive of performance documentation enrich the curriculum.

Ancient Technologies, Dramaturgy, and Game

July 11 - 29, 2005
Application Deadline: EXTENDED to April 25

Artistic Director: Ong Keng Sen, THEATREWORKS AND
THE FLYING CIRCUS PROJECT, SINGAPORE

Fully accredited by Sarah Lawrence College.

Tuition: $2,800 (includes meal plan and laptop computer)
Partial scholarships available.
For more information please visit our website: www.thekitchen.org

Here's an update to my post from yesterday. Major League Baseball is now empowering consumers to launch their own Six Apart-powered blogs. The MLBlogs site is live. Users can sign up for $49.95 per year. Tommy Lasorda's even blogging. The former LA Dodgers manager has comments turned on. Excellent! Let's ask Tommy why they lost the 1978 series.

In all seriousness, this is a downright brilliant, yet risky marketing strategy that utilizes the power of customer evangelists to spread word of mouse. In particular I love how MLBlogs is already linking to all kinds of bloggers - fans, former pros and even groundskeepers. This is similar to what Jones Soda does.


At our agency we are now working with companies to develop blogging strategies that employ four disciplines - find, listen, engage and empower. In other words we help clients find their vocal online evangelists and vigilantes, listen actively to them, engage these people in a transparent dialogue and even empower the individuals to shepherd the message for the company. The MLBlogs program utilizes all four of these disciplines and it's brilliant.

The only downside is that you will definitely find vigilantes signing up for blogs as well. Could you imagine what they will say if there's another baseball strike? But overall baseball always perseveres and it seems to have more fans than detractors. Collectively, those who do blog, will build the MLB brand and that's smart marketing. (via Om Malik)

This may be a first for local TV news. WBBM aired a video clip recorded on a cell phone that shows an alleged case of police brutality. Sure, the video quality is lousy, but it's a glimmer of what the future will hold. In the next few years, everyone will have a video camera and just about everything will get shot. Here's the WBBM story with the video included. (Thanks, Michael!)

January: ABC News Now airs video clips from Sprint phones

Via Lost Remote

While Europe and the US are still wondering about QR codes, those square-like "barcodes" that contains the URL of a website, ColorZip has developed ColorCode to allow mobile phone users to download anything, from text to music, to video, to drinks in vending machines.

This time, the information is not in the barcode itself, but on a remote server accessible through the code. So when you scan a ColorCode with your mobile phone, it connects to a server and downloads information, then presents it to you. The little code could "contain" an URL, a ringtone, or an mp3 for instance.

ColorCode are apparently a success in South Korea, and are about to be introduced in Japan.

Via Wireless 3Yen > Usability in the News and engadget.

Via we make money not art

"Not so long ago, the business model for television networks around the world was simple: produce programs, broadcast them across a national network of owned and affiliated stations to a mass audience, and sell access to that audience to advertisers based on viewership."

"A strategic partnership between Fox Broadcasting Co. and Visible World Inc. announced Thursday makes Fox the first TV network to offer ads that can change according to context, time of day, audience demographics or any other rules established by the advertiser"

The same proprietary technology could be used for other content besides advertising, he said, though it has not been applied any other way yet.

It’s mobile, immediate, visual, interactive, participatory and trusted. Make way for a generation of storytellers who totally get it. This briefing summarizes key findings from Media, Technology and Society, a multi-disciplinary research project on the media landscape conducted for professionals engaged in strategies, research, thinking, education, policy and philanthropy related to the future of journalism and media.

Light Reading offers up some light Q&A with SBC executives concerning their IPTV plans. $4-6 billion will be spent to wire 18 million homes with 25-30Mbps VDSL. Why not fiber? "Because we don’t have to take fiber all the way to the house to enable video into the house, rather than spending $40 billion dollars, we can spend four, five, or six billion dollars," promises an executive. The website recently offered an interesting inside look at SBC's IPTV labs.

Via Broadbandreports

Earlier this week, the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held the first oversight hearing on the issue of patent reform. In his opening statement, Chairman Lamar Smith flatly stated that a reform bill will be introduced soon, possibly this Spring.

The hearing was designed to gauge the level of support for a Committee Print of a working draft bill and included witnesses representing a cross-section of patent system users (biotech, software, patent owners generally, and attorneys).

Visit this Promote the Progress post for an analysis of the hearing.

Via INDUCE Act Blog

Well, I hate the term, but what can you do...it defines somethings which other phrases cannot. Anyway, a few links/essay below, worth reading over the weekend:
-- The New Gatekeepers: On bloggers as the new gatekeepers...the essay argues that gatekeepers are inherently needed by the architecture of the blogosphere...
-- Media Futures: A five part essay by Seth Goldstein on, well, media's future...difficult to summarize, really, so go read...
-- 'Stand alone' journalism and the trade press: This one is close to my heart, for obvious reason: we are the new trade press...
-- The Truth About Online Canibalization: Online does not canibalize offline, it turbocharges it. Enough said...

"The New York Post is reporting that two NYPD officers are being investigated for taking illegal payoffs from the MPAA for busting sellers of pirated DVDs. According to the article, MPAA investigators would tell the cops where pirated movies were being sold, which is perfectly legal, but, after the bust, they'd give them several hundred dollars in gratuities, which is illegal. Naturally, the MPAA denies all of this."

Via Slashdot

Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers, new research has claimed, reports the BBC.

The study for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages.

t at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence.

Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana, said researchers.

Via Smart Mobs

Main Page - Me TV Wiki - CNET News.com
Wow...!
From the site:
Welcome to CNET News.com's Me TV Wiki. Here, you can collaborate with other readers to predict the future of television, collectively writing and editing your own chapter of this special report. A few potential points to address: How do you think people will watch TV in five years? What kind of shows will be available to download, and at what cost? Will 30-second commercials become obsolete? Who will control the TV industry?

Via sLop

Yahoo! News - Plugged in - Next Big Tech Ideas May Be Small Ones
Nice article from Yahoo regarding a couple of interesting topics: POSM (Project for Open Source Media), Asterisk, Odeo, Blogger and more...

"Once you can surf by it, all your content kind of turns into television," says Halle, who once worked on interactive TV projects for a Public Broadcasting System station in Boston but became frustrated by the high cost of available gear.

The Project for Open Source Media (POSM), as Halle calls it, is designed for the era when anyone with a $200 camcorder or a video cameraphone can become a broadcaster. The interactive TV box costs $500 plus a $100 TV turner card.

After competing for your search queries, e-mail patronage and browser homepage, the next internet portal war will likely be for your video viewing time. By Joanna Glasner.

It is true, for instance, that the vast majority of blogs are not worth reading and, in fact, are not read (although the same is true of much in traditional newspapers).

"Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent."

"Press hits" all start from the same document back at the PR firm. Search for a few key phrases and the names of the clients and the experts, and you'll turn up other variants of the story.

So, who's using del.icio.us, where do they come from, how old are they (and more)? Ericka Menchen did a 70 user pilot study (far far far from enough subjects, but interesting nonetheless) and posted her findings. (link via Indefinite Articles)

Via Library Stuff

A very good point: “Phone-based music has tremendous potential but it doesn’t necessarily lie in having Cingular become iTunes. It lies in discovering the unique ways in which mobile connectivity adds real value to people’s love of music. The trick is not is seeing how music adds value to phones, but in showing how phones add value to musical experiences.” Mobile handsets are not a good medium for content — they are not as good at video as TVs, not as good at games as consoles and not as good at applications as computers. What they are is mobile, and if that feature isn’t a core feature of any particular content it’s going to be very hard pressed to succeed.

Not sure about this line though: “According to new In-Stat data, owners of MP3 players spend about $25 a year on music purchases. That’s ARPU the carriers can’t ignore.” It breaks down to just over $2 per month. I think the carriers could ignore that if they tried hard enough…

Via MocoNews.net

Today’s Broadcasting & Cable includes a story about the hearing with the perfect title: “Hill Ponders Regulating Convergence.” That’s exactly what’s going on here with Congress and the FCC considering how to “level the (regulatory) playing field” as everyone tries to get into everyone else’s business. Illinois Republican John Shimkus is quoted in the story and what he said also frames the issue quite nicely: “How do we restructure the FCC to meet the new technological age. How do we justify different regulatory schemes when you are all competing in broadband.”

Sony and Toshiba said they are in negotiations to resolve their competing next-generation optical disk formats, aiming to give consumers a unified video technology.

But both sides played down a report in the business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun that said the Japanese electronics makers were on the verge of agreeing on a compromise "hybrid" next-generation DVD format.

NEC has developed a 2.7" screen for telephones and PDA's with a brightness of 180cd/m2 and a power consumption of 220mW. This QVGA (320x240) screen has a viewing angle of 80 degrees from top to bottom and 70 degrees from left to right, with a 10:1 contrast ratio and 260000 colors."



Wow, that screen looks amazing.

Via Digital Media Thoughts

Any Drupal folks out there?

"The developers of Torrent Searcher has developed a new web based Torrent Searcher. With this Torrent Searcher it is possible to search for torrents on a lot of torrent sites. Now many people don't have to add all the torrent websites to their favourites but only need to go to http://webbased.foogle.be."

SonicState has the scoop on an upcoming M-Audio palm recorder called Flash Tracker shown at MusikMesse, not yet officially announced. (Hint to manufacturers: if you're trying to keep a product secret, don't show it at a trade show.)

The Flash Tracker is Compact Flash powered, like Edirol's R-1 which I've covered here on CDM. Getting an R-1 has been near impossible because of low stock, though, and the Flash Tracker looks from the SonicState report to be half the size, in an iPod-like, curved shell. It also has S/PDIF digital input, which the R-1 significantly lacks. Other than that, all the specs you'd want: two TRS mic/line jack inputs with phantom power (so you can plug in a real mic), a minijack with 5V power (so you can plug in your cheap mic), 24-bit/96kHz recording and USB 2.0.

These look like exactly the specs people want. I love the R-1's built-in stereo mic and integrated effects, and while we know the audio quality is great on the Edirol, here it's unknown. That said, the smaller size and better I/O of this preliminary M-Audio model could make it the one to beat. Now all we have to do is wait for an official announcement. (The UK's SonicState, by the way, is lesser known than the US-based Harmony Central but just as much of a must-read. Go check it out.)