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.)

I've been taking notes on yesterday's viral video posting from BoingBoing on Prodigem of the Berkeley Laptop Thief rant. It shot to the number one spot (past the tsunami downloads) within 6 hours for most complete downloads. Even at this moment, it sports greater than 400 seeders and has been seeing a steady average of 10-20 "leechers" at any given time. A leecher in BitTorrent parlance is just the name given to someone that hasn't completed the download of the content. People with completed downloads are called "seeders" (seeders who stick around to help seed the torrent are the people that make bit torrent work).

Though, I've never quite cared for the term leecher. As it turns out, on the day prior to the BoingBoinging, I completed some upgrades to Prodigem which provide insights into the upload/download status of torrenters at the point at which they complete their download. To that end, at this very moment, with 8171 complete downloads, "leechers" (the people who themselves haven't even finished getting the whole video) have just past 1 GB of donated aggregate bandwidth to the laptop rant cause.

Still, some may scoff at this number in comparison to the total amount of bandwidth consumed (4.9MB * 8171 downloads =~ 40 GB), but I'm still impressed by this 1/40th effort. Considering that at any given time you join the torrent, there are roughly 20 times more people with the entire content available, I would say it's a rather valiant showing for the lowly leecher. Moreover, over 35% of all leechers provided at least 1 Byte of upload before completing their download.

So, why give a name with such negative connotation to those who haven't completed their downloads? After all, we all start out this way. Such is how it is. Perhaps leeches (and maggots) just need a PR makeover.

Ed Felten on the Family Movie Act, discussed at length below: "Let's review. The FMA prevents no speech. The FMA allows more speech. The FMA prevents private parties from suing to stop speech they don't like. The FMA is not censorship. The FMA prevents censorship."

Via Copyfight

Lots happening over at the Online Journalism Review:

- Virtual roundtable: Grassroots journalism leaders discuss the nitty-gritty. OJR editor Robert Niles gathers innovators of grassroots journalism to discuss what works and even what to call what they do.

(I've been using grassroots media and citizens media interchangeably, though Robert has now persuaded me that grassroots journalism/media is the superior term.)

- Washingtonpost.com might offer local, national home pages. Mark Glaser talks in depth to new washingtonpost.com chiefs Caroline Little and Jim Brady about their new roles and about the challenges of serving both local and national/international audiences online.

I met Jim Brady in Austin on April 8 and was impressed by his online savvy.

- OJR is also experimenting with wikis -- collaborative online work spaces -- such as this one on Ethics. Very cool.

Sprint sees advertising in the future for mobile data services, reports InfoWorld.

"It's inescapable that that's a great opportunity over the long term," said Paul Reddick, vice president of business development, strategy and planning at Sprint PCS.

Sprint offers games, TV and other mobile content today that is fully supported by customer fees. It's not clear yet what form advertising might take, whether commercials inserted into shows and games or some other delivery method, Reddick said. He spoke on a panel discussion at the Wireless Ventures conference in Redwood Shores, Calif.

The ability to locate a subscriber's handset clears the way for practical applications such as finding friends, tracking family members or a fleet of company vehicles or locating a misplaced device, Reddick said. Nextel, an early provider of location-based services, excels in this area, he said.

Sprint also is interested in "near field communications," and in particular RFID (radio frequency identification), to let subscribers use handsets like credit cards, he said. An RFID reader can collect information from RFID chips in phones or other objects from a distance of several feet. Ultimately, consumers could load their credit card information into their handsets and easily pay bills at stores and restaurants, Reddick said.

Data services and advanced applications such as payment by phone could eventually draw customers to a mobile operator and keep them from switching carriers. In fact, some MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) on Sprint's network, such as sports cable network ESPN's ESPN Mobile, are counting on that effect, he said.

as more on Near Field Communications by Sony and Philips.

Via Daily Wireless

Current, the new cable network being launched by former Vice President Al Gore, has begun soliciting contributions and launched a contest that will award the winner a development deal, including $3,000, to produce three short-form segments for the station. More information at www.current.tv

Via CyberJournalist.net

McKinsey's consultants estimate that newspapers' could ultimately cost newspapers about 9 percent of its total ad revenues by 2007, due to erosion in classifieds...

Processing 1.0 (BETA)

Via sLop

One scientist who observes the way people use mobile phones suspects "mobile telephone communication seems to be better at developing the social fabric than does PC-based Internet interaction." But, he cautions, the new fabric might be too tightly knit in some ways.

Yet another Torrent website has closed under entertainment industry pressure. TVTorrents, considered by many to be one of the top television torrent sites, has closed its doors. A message to the site front-page is scarce on details, simply noting closure "became necessary". The site urges users to donate to aid a "pending settlement" (not advisable, after the LokiTorrent Fiasco).

Bill Brown has uncovered some interesting Slashdot comments by an Apple employee about Spotlight and future Apple's future plans. (Ed note: it's unclear whether As Seen On TV (ASOT) is indeed an Apple employee, but even if he/she isn't, the thoughts are still interesting.) In this comment, ASOT talks about the future direction for Spotlight, Apple's new finder (not Finder, but it seems clear that as Spotlight matures, it will become the de-facto way people use OS X), specifically about text-to-speech capabilities:

Example: You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose.

and "anything" relationships:

Take two files, any two files. Say it's a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don't, you don't have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.

Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter's birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.

Sounds like there's more than a little Quicksilver and Spring in there. And then here, ASOT talks about adding GPS data into the mix:

What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.

Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.

Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.

S/he also notes that "It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks...but it's on the drawing board." And you thought that gestural control of applications with the Powerbook's accelerometer was fun.

Wirehog isn't a "file-sharing" program in the standard sense.

Wirehog is a social application. Instead of searching a network of anonymous users for a specific file, Wirehog makes it easy to access files on your friends' computers, highlighting relevant content like the videos your friends have watched recently and the pictures your friends think are the funniest.

The media you see on your friends' Wirehogs is more social too. Unlike most file-sharing networks which are chock-full of popular music and pornography, Wirehog is geared toward finding pictures of friends, songs by local artists, and quirky files passed around by friends.

Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, told an audience:

"The fact that cutting costs makes papers less appealing hasn't occurred to corporate managers," he said. "But despite the real challenges facing them, newspapers aren't dying. They're struggling to adapt."

The quotes appeared in an article in the Kentucky Herald-Leader. He also said most of what is sold as news is gossip and opinion, adding:

"Unfortunately, this trend is appealing to Americans rather than being challenged by independent reporting," he said. "This is the time when we need more editors, reporters and readers to step forward and make a difference."

Thanks to Romenesko for the pointer.

I was virtually part of a panel on blogs and TV at the Radio-Television News Directors Association confab in Vegas (they were in Vegas and I was on the blogcast in New York but the sound was bad and I couldn't hear so I no doubt looked duh dumb and issued some non sequitors.... ah, technology). Anyway, I said I'd post some useful links for the crowd there. Here they are:

: A list of links to blogs of interest to media folks (done for the Aspen Institute last summer but not too out-of-date).

: My PowerPoint on citizens media and the newsroom for that Aspen gabfest.

: A few good directories of blogs.

: I suggested having reporters to go Technorati.com and Pubsub as well as A9.com (as suggested by Steve Rubel here to have them find what bloggers are saying about the topics of their stories. I said I use these tools to find blogs for MSNBC blog reports.

: I recommend reading Rupert Murdoch's speech on newspapers and online (the same holds for broadcast); Merrill Brown's Carnegie report on newspapers and youth (the same holds for broadcast); and Bob Garfield's report on the coming chaos in marketing and media.

: The demo vlog I made for the panel today.

: A few of my media posts: a Q&A on media's future at Corante... a new model for local citizens' journalism.... an email/blog exchange with NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller... an argument that anyone can do journalism... two pieces on Dan Rather... two posts about challenges facing news media and ways to attack them... a post about blogcasting on MSNBC... too damned many posts about exploding TV, media, weblogs, and censorship and Howard Stern...

No, I don't expect anybody to read much from that last bullet; I've just been meaning to compile them in one place so I can find them (ah, if only Flickr had popularized tags when I started this blog).

In our recent interview Scott Rafer made it clear that Feedster is basing their business model on ad sales. As a search engine / content aggregator / reader they certainly have many ad opportunities, many of which Scott already indicated in the interview. It so doesn’t come as a shock that Feedster just partnered with AdBrite to, in their own words, “offer [a] robust ad marketplace for blogs”.

Direct and Related Links for 'Feedster Moves Deeper in to Advertising Waters'

Netvideo publishes its recent interview with a group of leading Australian television broadcast executives in the commercial free-to-air sector about drastic changes besetting the traditional broadcasting industry.

Via del.icio.us/filmstreet

As MMORPGs have grown in popularity, so has the practice of paying cold, hard cash to other players for virtual items, despite it being against the games' EULA. Sony plans to legitimize the practice by opening an auction site for EverQuest II players.

"We often argue that blogs are conversations and that blogs in aggregate work as platforms for online community, but they really are less conversational than dedicated discussion forums, so if you focus on blogs alone, it's harder to get the sense of community that you have in more traditional virtual spaces"

public domain news footage from 30-60s

The blogging session delivered. Heavyweights with well thought out ideas. One of the best ideas is Terry Heaton's: creating a blogger meetup at your TV station.Session Recap: "Are We Becoming Irrelevant?

Mobile 3G/WiFi/Honda Router Project

"These web pages are about a project I've been working on. Put briefly, it's a WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) router. In more human terms, it's a compact little box that gets data from cellular towers and re-shares it for multiple computers to use."

From the lightbulb, to the internal combustion engine to velcro, innovation (more important than invention) has been driven largely in part by individual tinkerers. However, in recent years, the resources and know-how required behind technically complex innovations such as the artificial heart and GPS mean that corporate inventors have an edge in some industries. Even so, the best innovations continue to come from "lead users" instead of from companies trying to figure out what the users actually want. That is, it's not about someone recognizing a market, but rather someone needing something addressed, right now -- and doing it themselves for themselves. Google Maps was a great innovation, but Google Maps + Craigslist, and Google Maps + GreaseMonkey, made it even better. As the tools for innovation become more accessible, the pace of individual innovation should begin to accelerate. The recent proliferation of web APIs embraces this concept of user innovation and has already led to some wonderful developments. By letting the users stand on the shoulders of existing developments, companies benefit by being able to fulfill many user needs more closely since the users themselves are able to innovate and customize the tools for their own personal needs. It's not about making products anymore. It's about making platforms upon which people can develop their own products to solve their own needs.

Via Techdirt

(many thanks John!)

The Community Wiki has a great and link-rich discussion about some ideas about online collaboration and conversation spaces. Their conversation is exploring blogs, wikis, and brainstorming new ways to create online conversation. Definitely worth a read.

(see also: HiveMind)

Via Smart Mobs

Glasgow is set to become the first city in the UK to launch a 24-hour internet-based television channel.

From 27 April, Glasgow.tv will screen round-the-clock video footage of events from the city, such as sporting fixtures and festivals.

Users will be able to access clips on demand through a browser-based media player.

Glasgow.tv is being funded by Glasgow City Council in a venture with broadband TV firm Narrowstep, which launched a similar community channel for the Dutch city of Nuenen last month.

Web-based aggregation network Rojo came out of Beta today. Been playing with a preview version and have to say it’s a nice re-design and a simpler way to share while reading. In effect, they are trying to blur the line between blog writer and reader — emphasizing a social network of readers that tag and share.

Therein lies the strength and weakness, as it is trying to be many things to many people. Some bloggers will note that they engage openly in the same activities as readers in the course of writing and linking — contrast with blogging and del.icio.us as more open infrastructure.. Some readers still view it as a entirely private activity. On the other hand, Rojo may introduce more people to sharing on the web — just as social networking did get more people to express at least a facet of their identity and Flickr for photo sharing.

Wherein lies the threat and opportunity. The threat is that more accessible models from an ecosystem of tools may gain faster traction. The opportunity is that this is a well implmented tool that is a great fit for distribution by established media companies. The prospect for a branded aggregator with modest viral atrtributes to engage readers with purposeful sharing activities while accreting metadata is pretty interesting.

A Firefox extension to show RDF information about photos... scene is set for a distributed Flickr.

Chris Nolan: "(Bloggers) understand that the barrier to entry in this new business isn't getting published; anyone can do that. The barrier to entry is finding an audience. That's why their editorial product is consistent, reliable and known."

Analysts say that mobile games appeal more to the "casual gamer", who is looking to play for short periods of time, than to dedicated gamers.

" The emergence of distributed storage, machine intelligence and cheap communications has given rise to the networked product. These are products that can evolve even after versions of the product have been put into the hands of consumers. The most interesting consumer products of the day are networked products. This includes the natural successor to the VCR - whether the plain digital video recorder or the TiVo favored by the digerati - and the ubiquitous iPod and its less chic cousin MP3 players. This category also includes peer-to-peer software in its various forms, whether as Napster, Aimster or Grokster. "

"What Sony is doing actually sounds more exciting than another online movie service: the studio is trying to change the way its movies can be distributed by services online to methods that make more sense for the consumer."

Some wiki notes and pointers to code for dealing with .torrent files (which is a simple metadata format using a custom encoding).

Imagine a computer system that can automatically search through videos of football matches and pull out all the shots on goal or all the fouls. Creating the elements that make such a system possible is a key result from the IST BUSMAN project. The current generation of computer systems is excellent at searching for and manipulating text: as the spectacular success of Google has shown. However, computers are now routinely used to store and process more than just text - videos of football matches for example. Handling multimedia content such as video footage is far harder than text where particular words and phrases can be searched for.

Via Physics Org

A story is circulating about a Finnish company called Viralg, which claims to have a product that "blocks out all illegal swapping of your data". There is also a press release from Viralg.

This shows all the signs of being a scam or hoax. The company's website offers virtually nothing beyond claims to be able to totally eradicate file swapping of targeted files. The "Company" page has no information about the company or who works for it. The "Customers" page does not mention any specific customers. The "Testimonials" page has no actual testimonials from customers or anybody else. The "Services" page refers to independent testing but gives no information about who did the testing or what specifically they found. The "Contacts" page lists only an email address. There is no description of the company's technology, except to say that it is a "virtual algorithm", whatever that means. Neither the website nor the Viralg press release nor any of the press coverage mentions the name of any person affiliated with Viralg. The press release uses nonsense technobabble like "super randomized corruption".

The only real technical information available is in a patent application from Viralg, which describes standard, well-known methods for spoofing content in Kazaa and other filesharing networks. If this is the Viralg technology, it certainly doesn't provide what the website and press release claim.

My strong suspicion is that the headline on the Slashdot story -- "Finnish Firm Claims Fake P2P Hash Technology" -- is correct. But it's not the hashes that look fake, it's the technology.

"reetag is an easy tagging and folksonomy-enabled plugin for use with MySQL-PHP applications. It allows you to create tags on existing database schemas, and access and manage your tags through a robust API."

After years of toil the free music encyclopedia MusicBrainz is now backed by a nonprofit foundation with a fantastic best-of-the-usual-suspects board.

MusicBrainz has taken an innovative approach to open data: core factual information (artist, album, track) is appropriately dedicated to the public domain, while community generated information is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

Also check out MetaBrainz's exemplary practice of keeping transparent finances.

Via Creative Commons Blog - rss

The blog world is starting to produce some really interesting thought pieces.

A case in point is Seth Goldstein's five part treatise on Media Futures.

We are waiting for the finale, to be titled Arbitrage.  I suspect it will be a fitting conclusion.

But the leadup is really quite brilliant and alliterative too.

Starting with Automata, Seth lays the foundation for his vision of a world of participatory media.

Then with Algorithm, Seth starts hitting his stride, laying out the essential ingredients for his vision.

In API, we get to the glue that stitches the vision together.

And in the truly "must read" Alchemy, we understand that this new world is fundamentally differnet and building companies in it requires a new apprpoach.  I must share with you this Pierre Omidyar quote from Alchemy because it says it so well.

So people often say to me - "when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day." Well… nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn't my business - it was my hobby. I had to build a system that was self-sustaining… …Because I had a real job to go to every morning.

I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback -- even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat.

If I had had a blank check from a big VC, and a big staff running around - things might have gone much worse. I would have probably put together a very complex, elaborate system - something that justified all the investment. But because I had to operate on a tight budget - tight in terms of money and tight in terms of time - necessity focused me on simplicity: So I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.

Seth leaves us in the hands of market speculators at the end of Alchemy and looking forward to how his vision reveals itself in a world of Arbitrage.  I can't wait to read it.
tp://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/AVc?a=t6bO1j">

Via A VC

Say what you will about the quality of the 1,055,114,644 pieces of writing that Technorati is tracking on the 8,950,672 Weblogs they are watching, that's a boatload of content. How much of it is really worthwhile? Depends on your standards and interests I guess, and I know a lot of them are simply links. But I think anyone who reads blogs regularly knows that there is a lot of really great original thinking and valuable information being published these days by people who just a couple of years ago never would have been able to enter the discussion. I find it to be an amazing statistic and an inspiring turn of events.

I have no clue what the statistics actually are, but the trends are clear. The ratio of readers to writers on the web is getting smaller. More people are getting it, realizing that the barriers to entry have dropped, and that it doesn't matter as much if you know how to put words together in coherent sentences, you can "write" and share your ideas in many new ways. And that most likely, those ideas will find an audience. It's powerful stuff.

At my school, our quarter ends this week, and I know what that means. New classes, new books, new content for teachers to disseminate, old content for students to throw away. I'm going to make some assumptions, but if our 3,000 or so students each create just 2 pieces of content each day, that's 1,080,000 pieces over the course of the year. I'm going to be generous and say that via the hallways, the Website, and various other outlets, a typical student or teacher at my school may run across 250 of those artifacts in a year in any "published" form. That's somewhere around .0002 of what our students produced. (If that's wrong, remember, I'm an English teacher by trade...you get my point.) Even if we assume only five percent of the total content our students produce is really quality stuff, worthy of being added to the knowledge base, that's 54,000 nuggets of information, 53,750 of which I'll never have the chance of seeing.

One more step. Bear with me. As of 2003, about 61 million kids were out there creating content in public schools. If my assumptions hold up and each student creates about 18 pieces of publishable content per year, one every two weeks, that's 1,098,000,000 artifacts that our kids could be contributing to our knowledge base each year.

We've been treating students as consumers for over 100 years. We supply them with all sorts of content that we think they should know. By and large, our students are asked to take it all in, pass the test, and leave with very little to show for their efforts save a grade that once they graduate high school and enter the workforce or go to college has little or no meaning or relevance. And I understand that up until now, we haven't had the means or the technologies to archive our students learning in meaningful ways for them to reflect upon and for others to learn from.

But now we do.

This is the big shift that the system is going to have to come to terms with. We have to stop seeing our kids as consumers and start supporting them as creators that can all contribute meaningfully to our collective body of knowledge. And we have to give every kid access to the tools to do so. I know there are many things that we have to make sure they know, and many literacies that we have to help them master. But any more, not to find 18 or 10 or even 5 quality things that each of our students creates in the course of a school year and not share them with the world does us all a disservice.

1,098,000,000 student posts a year. That should be our goal...

The WB is calling it a television first. At the end of the April 19th episode of One Tree Hill, viewers can vote via text messaging on their Cingular cell phones whether or not a character should kiss his sister-in-law. The outcome of the vote will determine the storyline for the April 26th episode of the show.

Via Lost Remote

GameSpy has a great article about Spore and the new way to think about games. Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims talks about his latest game where you become a cosmic creator. Here's a great quote..."At the same time, what he calls the "value to gamers" levels off after a while. A game with 22,000 animations isn't twice as good as a game with 11,000 animations. But fortunately, Wright learned another lesson from The Sims: People love to make their own content. They love to customize their experience...Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user's contribution". I need this game.

Via MAKE: Blog

Capitalist Spin on the Town Crier

"Inspired by the recent bodyadvertising craze (the concept of auctioning advertising space on your body to the highest bidder) Floyd Hayes - a Brooklyn resident - came up with a new ad-dimension called Voicevertising. Floyd Hayes put his voice up for sale on eBay, promising to shout out a brand name as loud as possible every fifteen minutes for an entire week, no matter what location or situation. Quite fittingly, the highest bidder turned out to be 'HALLS Fruit and Breezers' - a company selling throat drops." [blogged on guerrilla-innovation]

Via networked_performance

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism

More Bad Behavior by 'Journalists'

Wall Street Journal (subscription)How Companies Pay TV Experts For On-Air Product Mentions. Plugs Come Amid News Shows And Appear Impartial; Pacts Are Rarely Disclosed

Once again, we read a story of improper activities by people who appear to be journalists.

The most depressing part of this story isn't the individual behavior, though that's bad enough. It's the way these commentators' big-network employers -- maybe that should be enablers -- go through such contortions of logic to defend what's going on.

This is depressing. How can these people shake their fingers at us about our lack of blogging ethics. Would any blogger get away with secretly taking money for mentions?/joi.ito.com/archives/2005/04/20/more_bad_behavior_by_journalists.html#comments" title="Comment">Comment - TrackBack

Via Joi Ito's Web

Sony lost out in the 1980s with Betamax. Is history about to repeat itself over the next generation of consumer video?

Blockies allow camera phone users to post pictures on any public surface, using special stickers.

See something cool on the street? Take a picture and a Blockies sticker. Each sticker has a unique code on it, so any place you put the sticker gets tagged with that code. Whenever you send pictures to Blockies.com from your cameraphone, you put the code in a message to nyc@blockies.com, and they link your picture to that location.

Other people can see your picture on their phones by texting Blockies the sticker code, or they can add photos to any sticker, making a photo album of that spot, and all pictures are archived on Blockies.com.

To retrieve a photo message, just send an SMS to nyc@blockies.com that says "get UNIQUE CODE." Your phone will receive a picture message that someone else left on that sticker, or a link if your phone cannot receive picture messages.

Via del.icio.us.

Via Smart Mobs

"After rolling out prototype holographic drives last year, ExtremeTech reports that InPhase has announced they intend to ship drives to commercial customers in 2006. InPhase originally intended on shipping the 200GB version of their media this year. Another article on Engadget mentions that 1TB discs will be available in 2009."

Via Slashdot

PVP4U reports about the Diffe DM-AV20 1GB Flash Portable Video Player that has digital camera and TV Tuner accessories.

The PMP has a 3.5 inch screen and can also record from AV sources. FM Tuner and MP3 player functionality is available as well.
More details on PVP4U

Via I4U Future Technology News

One of Verizon's top PR men, Tom Tauke, tells Marketwatch that the Telecom Act of 1996 is likely going to see a rewrite before the end of the year, with the thrust being further deregulation of the broadband industry. "Both cable and us should be relieved of some of the obligations that were designed for monopoly providers," insists Tauke.

Via Broadbandreports

: Viacom is interested in buying cable networks aimed at older audiences and Internet companies focusing on video games and community sites, according to Tom Freston, co-COO of Viacom told analysts at the Q1 earnings conference call...
"We're also looking at acquisitions [in] smaller, largely Web-based companies that would enhance our existing Web businesses in the demographics we appeal to. Those would be things around video games, community sites and things of that like."
The VC/M&A channel is sponsored by DeSilva & Phillips

Via PaidContent.org

ISP Planet offers an interesting look at IPTV deployments both here in the States, as well as world-wide. The article claims most of the current TV over DSL customers here in the States are served by smaller, independent phone companies, whose networks are smaller and easier to upgrade. For IPTV from your local bell, analysts still think it will be 3-5 years before the ball truly gets rolling.

Via Broadbandreports

: A good roundup of the micropayments market, and the example of how ABC.com cashed in on a hot new video game it was promoting called Alias Underground..
Among the companies mentioned: Webpay, Peppercoin, Paypal, and Bitpass...
Some interesting figures as well: Visa estimates that online micropayments totaled $3 billion in 2004, about half of it for music...

Via PaidContent.org

The main purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement but to change consumer expectations about what they are entitled to do with digital content.

This document will show you the tools you need to create a standalone version of your python program.

Being able to see what your friends were watching on television would remind you of programmes that you also wanted to see, it would help you spot programmes that your social circle thought were interesting and it could start to give you a shared social context for conversations about the media that you and your friends had both enjoyed

"In the age of Google Adsense, running your own advertising on a blog can be a minefield for the new blogger or experienced blogger alike."

"After years of anticipation and a somewhat painful labor, Intel today announced the delivery of their WiMax Rosedale chip (now called the more ungainly PRO/Wireless 5116 ).

Previously codenamed "Rosedale," the Intel® PRO/Wireless 5116 broadband interface device is based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, giving carriers and end-users the confidence that equipment from different vendors will work together. WiMAX solutions based on 802.16-2004 enable the creation of high-speed, fixed wireless broadband networks, providing Internet connectivity, Internet Protocol (IP) and TDM Voice capabilities and IP-based real-time video at high speeds."

hires ascent

This one day workshop on Multimedia and the Semantic Web aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the multimedia and Semantic Web domains in order to assist in forming bridges between the communities for mutual benefit.

"DemoTV is a TV-like experience for viewing predelivered video on the Internet based on open protocols including RSS, BitTorrent, and HTTP."

(Very early project, but maybe another one to watch. -kc.)

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web %u2013 utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'.

Jeff Jarvis: ''It would be a big mistake (for the AP) to pull out of GoogleNews. The reason: In this new world of distributed media, if you're not aggregated, you're nowhere."

Great tip over at Orbitcast (a super blog for satellite radio fans) — XM has received patent for time-shifting technologies.

A receiver in a digital broadcast system is provided for storing broadcast content files for on-demand playback purposes. The content files are transmitted in a partitioned format. Users can select which content files are to be captured in a memory device following reception. The receiver is operable to monitor the reception of content file segments and, when a selected on-demand content file has been completely received, to generate an alert message to notify a user that the content is available for retrieval from the memory device and playback via an output device.

Via Tod Maffin's I Love Radio .org

Part of MRG’s IPTV Tracking Service, the new IP TV Market Leader Report--March 2005 measures the competitive position of 62 suppliers for 223 service providers (an increase of 30% over the previous report), serving over 2 million subscribers. The global report ranks these 62 hardware/software suppliers for their “market position” and “growth opportunity” in Asia, Europe, North America, and the “ROW” in each of six market sectors, including analysis of which service providers buy the most products within each sector.

“The IPTV market is still in early development,” states Bob Larribeau, MRG Sr. Analyst, “so it is prone to unpredictable market dynamics.” Some of the sector highlights include surprises: In the Middleware sector, Microsoft joined forces with Alcatel, winning long-term contracts with SBC in the US. In Set-top Boxes, while competition remains balanced among multiple suppliers, such as Motorola, Pace, Amino, Kreatel, i3 and others, Yuxing gained strength in Asia based on its deployment in PCCW/Hong Kong. In VOD Servers, while Kasenna and Bitband maintained leadership in North America and Europe, respectively, Entone won a big contract with PCCW (Hong Kong), which strengthened its position in China.

In Video Headend systems, Tut and Harmonic both maintained strong positions in North America and other markets, while Optibase and Tandberg captured increasing shares in Europe, Asia and North America. However, the Video Headend selections by SBC and BellSouth in the US, expected in 2005, can greatly impact leadership in this segment as well.

In Access Hardware, while Motorola maintained dominance in small U.S. independent telcos, its global market position slipped due in part to the industry trend towards Gigabit Ethernet/IP and away from its ATM technology. In the Content Protection sector, Widevine has taken a strong position in Asia and North America, while Via Access is doing well with its deployment in France Telecom.

The full IP TV Market Leader Report--March 2005 is available for $3,040 (single printed version) and for $3,995 (Departmental PDF License); or is included at no cost as part of the IPTV Tracking Service Subscription. For more information about a Corporate License or IPTV Subscription, contact rsmith@mrgco.com, or call Rob Smith, 408-524-9767 at MRG (Multimedia Research Group, Inc.) in Sunnyvale, CA, USA.

Eric Burns and the Fox News Watch panel of Jim Pinkerton, Neal Gabler, Cal Thomas and Jane Hall discuss Citizen Journalism and how newspapers are beginning to turn to bloggers for stories. WMA download available.

I have been holding back on this for awhile, but it's now time for me to unload. I'm sorry, but I believe character blogs are a complete waste. Maybe this is why the infamous Captain Morgan Blog, as of tonight, as of now has been taken down. Jason Dowdell predicted this would happen. (Thanks to Jud Branam for letting me know it's 404. Hopefully someone talked some sense into them and it won't be back.)

Earlier this month I incorrectly called the Gourmet Station blog a fake blog. My readers criticized me in comments and it even sparked a broader debate. Ok, they are right. Maybe I went too far in calling a character blog a fake blog – but it's darn close. And this does not change the fact that character blogs are a waste of time, server space and bandwidth. I am not alone here. Ask Hugh Macleod and Shel Israel what they think.

Character blogs are a waste of time because a character is not and never will be human - unless it's Pinocchio. Jason even noted that the Captain, who blogged about basketball, couldn't possibly play the sport. Ugh. A character blog is a giant missed opportunity to have real humans – whether they be employees, customers, or even distillers and bottlers - engaging in a real dialogue with consumers. I am all for using characters in TV commercials and even micro-sites, but having them blog is just a lame, lazy idea. In fact, it's an insult to blogging and bloggers everywhere.

When you go to Walt Disney World and try to talk to Mickey Mouse, does he talk back? Uh, no. In fact, the guy in the suit (which I can tell you from having worked there is usually a woman) never engages in conversation. If Mickey did, I bet he would tell us what his real name is, how many kids stepped on his foot, how hot it is in the mouse suit and how he is dying to take a bio-break. Characters don't talk in real life so there’s no reason why they should talk on a blog.

The Captain Morgan blog is just another example that shows how some advertisers just don't get the blogosphere. They haven't studied it enough to know that blogging is a conversation. It's about being real and transparent. The good news is that if advertisers continue to play ignorant, the lionshare of corporate blog dollars will flow into the PR industry because we get it. I can sleep easier at night knowing that Captain Morgan and other characters are blogging.

(I'm glad I'm not the only one who has found these things an embarassingly bad idea. -kc.)

[Staci D. Kramer] One of the side benefits of my recent trip to LA for Digital Hollywood was the chance to sit down with Larry Shapiro, EVP business development and operations and GM, North American Mobile, Walt Disney Internet Group. It took some twists and turns -- the e-mail message with directions never made it to my phone -- but, on the last Tuesday in March, we finally settled at a table in his fourth-floor North Hollywood office carved out of the Walt Disney Internet Group's loft-like space. (The building only has four floors.) Disney PR staffer Kim Kerscher sat in.
Shapiro and I first spoke for a Wired News story about the mobile content revolution en route to the U.S.; nearly a year later, the sounds of the drums are louder but still in the distance. Shapiro approaches mobile pragmatically, as befits a veteran of the internet bubble and Disney's failed attempt to create a major portal. (Although, as I'm reminded, Go.com actually is profitable in its present state.)

That pragmatism doesn't preclude enthusiasm; Shapiro believes in mobile content's present and future, just not to the point of oversell or over promise.Our wide-ranging hour-long conversation covered, among other topics, Disney Mobile's move into third-party licensing; the company's current policy against Bluetooth-enabled handsets; the need for an industry solution to mobile DRM; MVNOs; and mobile's strategic role within Disney.

Third-party licensing:During the past year, Disney Mobile branched out from providing only its own content to representing other content providers. The first batch includes Trivial Pursuit (U.S.), Consumer Reports and urban line Homies; Shapiro says others are in the works as Disney looks to fill in its own content lineup and demographic range. "Why shouldn't we be in the business of obtaining third-party ntellectual property just like a Jamdat or an Airborne or any of those people in the space? We have no capital constraints; we're not subject to a VC wanting us to report some sort of immediate return or liquidity ... As a company we're very experienced in brand building and how to treat a brand effectively and we think that message should resonate or does resonate with third parties looking for someone to develop their wireless content."

Shapiro explained that Disney wants strong brands -- and "certainly edgier brands that are more relevant to a young demographic. That's a pretty strong focus of ours and you'll see a lot of that coming from us throughout the next year."

CNET is reporting that TiVo is courting the top two search engines, Google and Yahoo!. One possible use would be allowing people to schedule recordings for shows they find in the search engines.

Then there's the fact that both Yahoo! and Google offer video services now, which fit in with TiVo's Video Publisher. This would give TiVo access to a whole lotta Long Tail video. This would be especially powerful if TiVo opened up scheduling via web services. As this weekend's Ajax hacks showed, there's a lot of people who want their TiVo to do more. Speaking of the Long Tail—and who isn't using that buzzword these days?—the Long Tail blog shows how this could be done.

For the benefit of the deathwatch crowd, there's also talk of investment or even a buyout:

A second person familiar with the talks said TiVo has held talks with both Google and Yahoo about a potential equity investment, including the possibility of an outright acquisition. Any deal would likely be exclusive, this source said, Nothing has been finalized, however, and the talks could yet fall apart.

"A deal to cooperate could happen quickly, but then the details would have to be worked out," the first source said. "The search companies need to work with companies like TiVo because they have access to the living room, and they own a television interface."

Via PVRblog

RE:activism

RE:activism: Re-drawing the boundaries of activism in a new media environment

e in Budapest, October 14-15, 2005

Re:activism will focus on two closely connected subjects. On the first day, we gather to discuss the new dynamics of culture production. Digital networks allow the large scale cooperation of individuals with diverse motivational backgrounds. This cooperation often results in globally competitive ideas, (software) products, (social) services. Ad-hoc activist, expert networks can only consolidate themselves if the necessary legal, economic and technological frameworks are created or emerge from local interactions. We research into the political economy of peer production networks and examine how regulation in a post-Westphalian order can integrate these networks. We also discuss the potential conflicts between peer networks and contemporary social, economic, and legal institutions and examine how tradition emerges through open archives documenting these conflicts.

On the second day we offer a layered approach to activism when we examine activist practices and civic action groups in urban, local and global contexts. The general title of the day: Local and global activism in the context of new media covers the analysis of anti-globalization activist networks who often use the urban fabric as a battleground for their causes. We also try to grasp the conceptual framework that helps describing the emergence of local civic engagement and the civic uses of new media technologies. The special case of democratic elections also provide us the opportunity to dive into the forces that change contemporary political systems.

The conference is organized around altogether eight topics. Each day we have a morning session of keynote lecture by a lead researcher, we have three sessions of academic discourse, where distinguished researchers can present their work and have four panels in the afternoon with academic researchers, activists, artist who work in the field to share their values, evaluations, findings and proposals to each other.

The aim of the conference is to open up an open field of communication between academics and practitioners, eastern and western, European and North-American, groups and individuals all immersed in the field of activism.

See also call for papers.

Via Smart Mobs

IDC has forecast a strong growth in people watching video (TV and films) on mobiles, despite listing some obvious obstacles (lack of handsets in the market, DRM considerations). “Although there are substantial challenges facing the commercial video and television marketplace from a network, handset, and content perspective, which will serve to keep penetration levels relatively low, IDC anticipates that annual revenue will still top the $3 billion mark by 2009,” said Lewis Ward, senior research analyst in IDC’s Wireless and Mobile Communications program. “With an ARPU approaching $10 per subscriber per month by that point, commercial video and television may well emerge as the single largest cell phone-oriented ARPU driver among consumers outside of voice.”

The analysts said that mid-2006 will see the introduction and adoption of specialized TV networks DVB-H and MediaFLO. The report also claims the number of minutes of mobile TV watched will double every year until 2009.

Via DigitalBicycle

Very cool way to encourage remixes (of course without a CC license you can do jack-all with what you create)

The Wall Street Journal points out that publishing reader submissions or "citizen journalism" raises legal concerns, particularly since they are reviewed before they are posted online.

"It's not like a blog or a bulletin board where people just throw things up and the publisher has no control," says Marc Gorelnik, an attorney at Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP in San Francisco. "They're editing it, and they're choosing to place it there, so there's potential for liability."

Gary Bostwick, an attorney with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in Los Angeles who defends media companies against libel claims, added: "It seems to me that it's fraught with dangers."

Via CyberJournalist.net

It's amazing how much effort some companies are going through to make their products less useful to customers. The latest is an effort by IBM and Fox Entertainment Group (patent pending, of course...) to take the broadcast flag (which might not be legal) one step further and add the ability to block transfers outside of a local viewing area. Now, there is some good in hearing that this is happening -- because it shows that the industry at least admits that there are some cases in which sending a TV show over the internet makes sense, even if it's very limited. In fact, the main reason they're working on this is because some were afraid that the all out "no copying over the internet" broadcast flag would prevent people from sending a TV show from their DVR to their computer, or from one TV to another, or some other similar local area transfer. Of course, an easier way to handle that is to just remove the broadcast flag altogether, saving not only the time and the money, but the annoyance from viewers who are trying to do something legitimate and are stymied by restrictive technology. Once again, though, it's worth pointing out that the TV they're talking about is broadcast TV which is (oh yeah!) already being sent out for free over the airwaves and which is supported by commercials. In other words, this is TV that the companies should want to make as easy to share as possible because it drives more people to watch, more people to see the commercials, and, thus, more advertisers interested in buying ad space.

Via Techdirt

sLop: QuickTime Latency
Soooo.. Following the various instructions in my posting from March 21 QuickTime Latency, I am able to reduce the delay from encoder to server to client to near zero...!

Here are the configuration changes from the QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server streamingserver.xml file:

From: 10
To:
0

From: >false
To: >true

and

From: >2.0
To: >1.0

Via sLop

Here in Las Vegas, Apple unveiled Final Cut Studio: upgraded versions of Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and Motion -- and they're all HD compatible. "Now the moment [HD] takes off, every Macintosh is ready," said Apple VP Rob Schoeben. "We are not just talking about HD in Final Cut Pro -- it's a complete solution." We're looking forward to a demo...

Plus: Apple showcases "Tiger" and Quicktime 7

Via Lost Remote

WOW. This news just broke at midnight! The tools that most of us use in one way or another to make stuff are about to be from one company. Adobe announced they're going to buy up Macromedia. I'm excited and curious about what's going to happen, the little vector hamsters in my head are thinking of all the interesting things that this means for content creation, mobile devices and publishing! Make friend Mike Chambers from Macromedia has a post on this too.

Via MAKE: Blog

Last week, specifications were released for AACS, an encryption-based system that may be used on next-generation DVDs. You may recall that CSS, which is currently used on DVDs, is badly misdesigned, to the point that I sometimes use it in teaching as an example of how not to use crypto. It's still a mystery how CSS was bungled so badly. But whatever went wrong last time wasn't repeated this time -- AACS seems to be very competently designed.

The design of AACS seems aimed at limiting entry to the market for next-gen DVD players. It will probably succeed at that goal. What it won't do is prevent unauthorized filesharing of movies.

To understand why it meets one goal and not the other, let's look more closely at how AACS manages cryptographic keys. The details are complicated, so I'll simplify things a bit. (For full details see Chapter 3 of the AACS spec, or the description of the Subset Difference Method by Naor, Naor, and Lotspiech.) Each player device is assigned a DeviceID (which might not be unique to that device), and is given decryption keys that correspond to its DeviceID. When a disc is made, a random "disc key" is generated and the video content on the disc is encrypted under the disc key. The disc key is encrypted in a special way and is then written onto the disc.

When a player device wants to read a disc, the player first uses its own decryption keys (which, remember, are specific to the player's DeviceID) to unlock the disc key; then it uses the disc key to unlock the content.

This scheme limits entry to the market for players, because you can't build a player without getting a valid DeviceID and the corresponding secret keys. This allows the central licensing authority, which hands out DeviceIDs and keys, to control who can make players. But there's another way to get that information -- you could reverse-engineer another player device and extract its DeviceID and keys, and then you could make your own players, without permission from the licensing authority.

To stop this, the licensing authority will maintain a blacklist of "compromised" DeviceIDs. Newly manufactured discs will be made so that their disc keys can be unlocked only by DeviceIDs that aren't on the blacklist. If a DeviceID is added to the blacklist today, then players with that DeviceID won't be able to play discs that are manufactured in the future; but they will still be able to play discs manufactured in the past.

CSS used a scheme rather like this, but there were only a few distinct DeviceIDs. A large number of devices shared a DeviceID, and so blacklisting a DeviceID would have caused lots of player devices in the field to break. This made blacklisting essentially useless in CSS. AACS, by contrast, uses some fancy cryptography to increase the number of distinct DeviceIDs to about two billion (2 to the 31st power). Because of this, a DeviceID will belong to one device, or at most a few devices, making blacklisting practical.

This looks like a good plan for controlling entry to the market. Suppose I want to go into the player market, without signing a license with the licensing authority. I can reverse-engineer a few players to get their DeviceIDs and keys, and then build those into my product. The licensing authority will respond by figuring out which DeviceIDs I'm using, and revoking them. Then the players I have sold won't be able to play new discs anymore, and customers will shun me.

This plan won't stop filesharing, though. If somebody, somewhere makes his own player using a reverse-engineered DeviceID, and doesn't release that player to the public, then he will be able to use it with impunity to play or rip discs. His DeviceID can only be blacklisted if the licensing authority learns what it is, and the authority can't do that without getting a copy of the player. Even if a player is released to the public, it will still make all existing discs rippable. New discs may not be rippable, at least for a while, but we can expect new reverse-engineered DeviceIDs to pop up from time to time, with each one making all existing discs rippable. And, of course, none of this stops other means of ripping or capturing content, such as capturing the output of a player or infiltrating the production process.

Once again, DRM will limit competition without reducing infringement. Companies are welcome to try tactics like these. But why should our public policy support them?

UPDATE (11:30 AM): Eric Rescorla has two nice posts about AACS, making similar arguments.

Panic Struck Productions released Star Wars Revelations today. It's a 47-minute fan-made film and an effort that indicates that Hollywood no longer holds the monopoly on producing films with significant amounts of, and often beautiful, special effects.

Quality is now often limited less by budget than by talent, time, and the will to learn.

Really entertaining - I suggest checking it out.

main site (getting hit hard today - about, trailer, download) | download via bittorrent

LiveSupport is a Campware project that aims to create a free and open source automation software package for radio stations. While maintaining a wide set of features, the project places special emphasis on ease of use. LiveSupport is intended for use by many different types of radio stations, and includes features found in high-end commercial radio automation packages.

Remove everything from N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton album except for the curse words. It's like a reverse censored version of the album I'm calling "Explicit Content Only".

[chuckle] -kc.

Announcing the world's first Contagious Media Showdown. Do you have what it takes to corral enough traffic to win the cash prizes? Can you make the next Dancing Baby, All Your Base, or Star Wars Kid and ride into the sunset with the bounty? This is your chance to prove you are the best in the West.

Info on the Router that the MIT Roofnet project will be using this summer. Lots of good info.

"The wgt634u has a 200MHz MIPS32-like CPU (Broadcom BCM947XX), 32MB RAM, 8M flash, an Atheros AR5213-based 802.11b/g card, two Ethernet interfaces (one of them has 4 ports on it) and a USB 2.0 host port. The shipping router is already running Linux 2.4.20, so this page just explains how to install sshd and compile binaries for the system. Each router costs between $80-$100, including the radio card, which makes them the cheapest Roofnet nodes so far."

Ian Clarke has a new project that competes with iRate. Its a collaborative filtering music player that learns what music you like.

All your personal information are belong to us

Sync your music, movies and photos and back up your game saves with ease using PSPWare. You specify what you want synced and PSPWare takes care of the rest automatically, day-to-day, syncing optimally as you would expect, without taking up your precious time!

"One crucial component of the BitTorrent structure is the tracker. This is a small program which is hosted by someone who wants to share a file using BitTorrent. Anyone that wants to download that file needs to connect to the tracker to receive a list of other peers already participating in the download of the file. The tracker is a standalone program. If the tracker goes offline, new peers will not be able to join the download. This makes the tracker the weak link of the BitTorrent solution.

What if the tracker were able to share its peer list with other trackers? This would create a redundant network of trackers, all aware of all peers participating in the download. Peak load would be reduced, and if one tracker goes offline new peers would still be able to contact one of the other trackers and join the download."

A white paper that provides advice to marketers and business professionals about the blogging phenomenon and introuduces a directory of influential bloggers, segmented by industry.

Aims to provide students with a understanding for the role of modelling multimedia information in a variety of information retrieval and browsing applications, including personal media collections, organisation-wide media archives, and web-search engines.

July 30, Santa Clara. Open to both men and women, the conference will offer chance to talk about blogging and related social media tools - from a different perspective

Transana is designed to facilitate the transcription and qualitative analysis of video and audio data. It provides a way to view video or play audio recordings, create a transcript, and link places in the transcript to frames in the video.

I was doing research around tracking torrent distribution of video material via hash signatures. In FAQ for "common users" from bittorrent.com we can read that: BitTorrent does cryptographic hashing (SHA1) of all data. When you see "Download succeeded!" you can be sure that BitTorrent has already verified the integrity of the data. So, in other words hash is a digital signature for the data file...

The first experiment is Google search

791b2f5d95a54d1381b85f271b51f71e73964185 ,

for a hash signature of the famous John Stewart's CNN appearance on Crossfire. The result gives the addresses of (almost all) trackers carrying the clip...

Next test was to use filetype:torrent directive in Google search. For example, the search for

Sin City

gives the extensive list of sites carrying the torrent for the movie. I downloaded couple of listed torrents (not the film!!!), extracted hash signature from the torrents and then searched for that. The results show couple of strains of the video file, repeated and re-seeded over and over ...

The conclusion is that Google and hash signature in torrents present a solid base to build noninvasive protection against piracy and finding the source the material originates from ...

More ideas, results, and links welcome ...

"In the name of fame, fortune, and of course art, we challenge you to fuse form and function through the cell phone medium. So start snapping and send us your phonecam images because the Grand Prize Winner gets 500 bucks in cold, hard Canadian cash."

Why we need tools like Gnomoradio, a filesharing application which only carries files under a Creative Commons license:

Most file-sharing says to the RIAA you are a necessary part of our lives; without you we are powerless and our tools are useless.

Via the weblog of Lucas Gonze

"Spiderdance's core technology is a fully scalable, massively multi-user gaming system, designed to manage the deployment of millions of events simultaneously. It handles everything from delivering dynamic content to scripting, scheduling, ad insertion, response tracking, and report generation."

Steve Outing: "By completing courses or seminars, a citizen reporter could then receive some sort of elevated status when posting."

"The 'danger' is that corporations might not 'understand the culture of blogging' and produce content that contains carefully vetted material instead of spontaneous writings that appeal to blog fans." (CNet News)

Apparently at the Musikmesse show Numark was showing off this prototype iPod DJ mixer, but didn't want people to take photos. Unfortunately, they hadn't bothered to mention that until a few days after the show started, so German hip-hop site WebBeatz has some basic information. There's not a lot to know off hand, but it's sort of self-explanatory.

Analysis: Prototype Numark iPod DJ Mixer [CreateDigitalMusic via Engadget]

Via Clippings.reblog

The U. S. Federal Communications Commission versus Brand X Internet Services is not about cable companies defending the ISP model; it's about them defending the television model. The big U. S. Supreme Court case these days, tech-wise, is Grokster. But the Brand X case is likely to have a bigger impact on everyday consumers. Right now, for example, if you have Cox Communications' cable-TV service, you get both your connection and your programming through Cox. It chooses the networks, the channels, and the pricing structure. The cable companies use this as they argue before the Court -- that because they provide programming as well as the cable, they should be unregulated information providers. You can't get programming from anywhere else; your cable-TV is directly connected to Cox. And Cox is getting feeds from all networks, which it packages and retails to you. That's the model we're all used to, at least when it comes to TV.

The Internet, of course, is different. You get your Net connection from your cable company or your phone company or a local ISP. But you aren't limited to that provider's content -- you have the whole Internet at your fingertips. In other words, you'll be cutting out the middleman. Your data provider will give you the pipe, but then you'll use that connection to go directly to whatever content you want: TV networks, music stations, Web pages, photos etc.

The channel model will be gone. [Yahoo Search: Grokster]

Via Cinema Minima

I finally posted the Models for Sustainable Cinema presentation (link: PDF 2.6 MB) I gave at the San Francisco IIFF meeting. The meeting was great (thanks for the invite Thomas and the intro Carl!). Lots of excited and enthusiastic filmmakers, entrepreneurs, and financiers. The presentation was created to be given in person, so it won't have the same effect. But just imagine me waving my arms, getting all amped up, and saying things like this:

In general, filmmakers have been very slow to effectively use the web. The main problem is that we don't think of the web as an integral part of the filmmaking process. Today, a filmmaker might have a website, a Quicktime trailer of the film, some press clippings, a mailing list, and maybe even a blog. That needs to change.

I believe films need to be produced from inception with the web- and therefore the audience- in mind. I mean, if the goal is to sell your movie, then by all means don't just make your movie. What you need to do is create buzz, fans, AND a movie. And you can't expect to create buzz after the fact. The current filmmaking process is like hiding in a box for months and popping out with some new thing that no one's heard of or wants. My presentation points out ways to avoid that and make content *with* the web rather than *for* the web. 'Cause the web is people. And you just might have to include me in the creative process if you want me to watch your movie, love your movie, and tell all my friends and family to go see your movie. Heck, if you do your job right, I'll be telling everyone to come see my movie.

NOTE: By no means am I saying every independent filmmaker needs to be doing these things and that every independent film needs to focus on things like the web and buzz and fans. But if you want to make money from your film, that's what you need to do. At some point there will be services that do these things for you. Until then, if you want to make money making your own movies, start learning how to use the web.

Via ChapmanLogic

Paul Bass sent me a good synopsis of various citizens/hyperlocal projects. The list at The Media Center is also comprehensive, but this one (in the continuation) provides some detail on the varying business and content models for newcomers to the whole concept.

Aron sent in this important story: Reuters is reporting that Amazon Eyeing DVD Rental Partnership in U.S.

Amazon.com Inc. has approached online DVD rental service companies, including Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc., to explore a partnership rather than launching its own U.S. DVD rental service, an industry source said on Thursday.

Amazon can dramatically alter the playing field within months of entering the market. Amazon owns the Interent Movie Database with more than 20 million active visitors (imagine a "Buy or Add to Queue" button), and Amazon.com has 47 million paying customers. They are also one of the best online marketers, and a scary company to compete with.

Aron commented on the news:

Holy smokes is all I can say. Will reports of the rumor drive out the official news (much like the TiVo/Netflix deal?) You can bet ppl are placing phone calls.

Blockbuster + Amazon must be a scary thought for Netflix (and its investors. read: me). Blockbuster's only real weakness right now is website execution and reputation. The store advantage is solid and tangible. The big problem I see with that relationship is that both companies are seeking to grow via DVD sales. There could be dispute on that much like how Amazon/ToysRUs ended up having a dispute over the selling of toys.

Netflix's interest don't lie in retail, so there is no conflict there. It also clearly has the current size leadership. Also, I would think that Netflix is more desperate (or should be) to find terms to make this happen simply because of the dangerous combination that Blockbuster + Amazon would pose. Also, Netflix might be a better takeover target later because of their lean operating structure.

you think of the news? Who do you think Amazon will partner with?

Via Hacking NetFlix

With more and more evidence cropping up around the internet, it seems that the newly discovered ARG "The Art of the Heist" is most likely sponsored by Audi of America. Heist began with a bang on April 1st, with the supposed theft of a 2006 Audi A3

Podcast content object for Plone

"Plodcasting is a Podcasting product for Plone. This tool will allow a radio station or community audio project to publish audio files for users of iPodder to automatically download. The initial version of Plodcasting has been released on Plone Collective's SVN server."

"You hear all the buzz about OurMedia? Podcasting? All that democratization of content stuff that gets everyone all hot and bothered?

MySpace is doing it RIGHT now. They are aggregating the Long Tail of little music bands, playing their music, connecting them with audiences, etc. It's just a matter of time before they figure out the economics, maybe through 1) a micropayments strategy, or 2) a way to get a transaction fee on merchandise and concert tickets, or 3) integrated ad targeting."

SMIL Scripting Guide for QuickTime

Via sLop

Jason Freeman - Quicktime for Java

Via sLop

"I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.

Via Slashdot

From the Google Video Upload Page: "Whether you produce hundreds of titles a year or just a few, you can give your videos the recognition and visibility they deserve by promoting them on Google - for free. Signing up for the Google Video Upload Program will connect your work with users who are most likely to want to view them."

Why are they doing this, especially since they are not offering up a video search (yet)?? "The world of video is very complex and we recognize that," said Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video. "This project is to understand how people have authored their video" so that Google can gain experience with the myriad formats before providing a search capability..." More...

In an effort to up the ante on how serious blogs can be, Highbeam Research has recently released their newest tool: The HighBeam Research Blog Enhancer (Herbe for short??) allows any blogger to quickly and easily add citations or provide access to the full text of articles from the HighBeam database to their blog. HighBeam currently provides full text material from more that 3000 sources. Press Release

Motorola has revealed further details of its newly revised Linux-based MP3 player and cameraphone. The E680i adds support for stereo bluetooth audio connectivity, an improved interface with full HTML browser, and user-upgradable storage, Motorola says.

Despite the many new features, many US phone customers will probably rue the ongoing lack of support for the 850MHz band -- the E680i, like the E680, remains a tri-band GSM phone that operates on the 900/1800/1900MHz bands. The E680i may be usable with some US GSM networks, however, such as Cingular's. More...

GenderIT.org Global and regional highlights on gender and ICT policy -- "Changing the way you see ICT"

This site is a great resource on things NGO, tech, and ICT. I especially like how it doesn't assume you are a policy person and so offers up not one but two sections for the uninitiated: - Jargon and Beginners

From the people, by the people, for the people.

APC just launched a new program which sets out to train people to build, maintain and use wireless computing on a community scale in a number of locations in Africa.

The APC's "Community Wireless Connectivity" project is ambitious. It's looking to connect unconnected communities by skilling them to build their own wireless networks. The project covers the development of training materials and workshops that will be localised for different environmental, regulatory, language and climatic conditions. With four regional workshops in Africa this year, APC looks to be training up to 100 possible future trainers, and producing materials in at least three languages that can be used by anyone to do training.

The first workshop took place in March this year in Mtoni, Zanzibar. A range of East African electronic networkers -- telecentre workers, civil society systems administrators, technical staff from existing internet service providers, and other IT skills-sharers -- attended a week-long hands-on training. They covered everything needed to plan, budget, set up, manage, maintain and develop a fully-functioning wireless network, that can be used by a local community. More...

From ArtsJournal: About Last Night: ...If you’re an artist, ask yourself this: how are you using the new media to interact with your audience and spread the word about your work?

Specifically:
• Do you have a Web site? If so, do you update it regularly with fresh news of your activities, including links to stories about you that are published or broadcast in the mainstream media, or on other Web sites?

• Is your performance calendar up to date?

• Do you have an e-mailbox on your site? How often do you check it?

• Does your site contain a wide-ranging assortment of downloadable print-quality photographs of you and/or your work?

There's more... And it's all coming on the tail of Rupert Murdoch's speech (audio, filtered text) yesterday, and Jeff Jarvis tearing apart tradition to create a new kind of conversation.

From the USC Interactive Media Division comes Sims 2 University Movie Contest - meet Burnie Burns, win $5000: USC Interactive Media Division Weblog.

What is Transana?: Transana is designed to facilitate the transcription and qualitative analysis of video and audio data. It provides a way to view video or play audio recordings, create a transcript, and link places in the transcript to frames in the video. It provides tools for identifying and organizing analytically interesting portions of video or audio files, as well as for attaching keywords to those video or audio clips. It also features database and file manipulation tools that facilitate the organization and storage of large collections of digitized video.

via del.icio.us/rybesh

Some nice stats on ZeD, from Wired News: Gore's TV Seeks Northern Insights, by Niall McKay: ZeD receives between 200 and 300 viewer-produced videos per day, has a production staff of 45 people and still finds it a challenge to find about eight minutes of viewer-submitted content for each 40-minute program.



ZeD allows viewers to shoot, edit and upload their own short-form videos to the show's website. If the editors like the films -- and they often do -- they buy them, and include them on the program, which airs on CBC five nights a week. Many more videos are published on the ZeD website.



The program calls itself "open-source television" because it not only encourages artists, bands, graphic artists, animators and filmmakers to use the ZeD website to submit content, but also invites them to use the site as an online portfolio.



In return, the site streams about 5,000 short-form videos gathered for the show's 300 episodes.



In the coming months, the site plans to launch a new function allowing users to stream a continuous random shuffle of music, art, animations and short videos to their desktops. The site claims 45,000 registered users.

365 or so days ago we formalized unmediated.org as an outlet for all the links we'd individually been aggregating. We slowly morphed into a research group- exploring ideas, having regular meetings, and helping each other with projects. Now that we're a year old, we're going to change it up a little. First of all, we're planning a Fall 2005 New York City conference/workshop/festival. More info on that soon. Secondly, we are forming a media technology consultancy in response to the many proposals, RFPs, and inquiries we've been receiving from non-profits, NGOs, corporations, and startups. We will make a formal announcement once we iron out the details.

Thanks to everyone for a great year- especially everyone throwing down the unmediated tag and leaving comments. And a big shout out to Kenyatta for making this train run on time.

Here's a partial list of things the individuals behind Unmediated have been working on the past year:

ANT
unmediated.org
DV Guide
MassiveMedia
ITJ
Konscious Convention
Yahoo Video Blogging Group
Vloggercon
Drazen's Talks
Kenyatta's Talks
Jay and Josh go to TED
Jay goes to Northern Voice
Eli talks at the IIFF
Dan talks at Digital Hollywood and in South Korea
The Weekly Show
The Grass Roots Media Conference
Changing Avid from the inside
MSMDX
WiFi TV
Socialight

Take a look at the neat millimeter article titled Tool Time at Pixar:

If you were in the Pixar screening room where director Brad Bird regularly reviewed images for The Incredibles, you would have seen a cool, new tool in action — the Review Sketch tool. This tool literally allowed Bird to draw on top of a projected image using a digitizing pen. The drawings were then accessible online by other members of his team.

If you're in San Francisco, go check out Unmediated's Ryan Shaw's new work...

Organum: The Game is a collaborative video game in which three or more players sing into different microphones to control the three axes of movement (x, y, and z) on the game screen. Together, the players represent a grey sphere “character,” which they must navigate through an increasingly complicated path, hitting a series of targets as they travel through a luminous digital representation of the inside of the voice box.

More info here

Times:
Tuesday, 19 Apr 2005 to Saturday, 23 Apr 2005
12-6 pm, Admission Free
Reception: Saturday April 23, 6-8 pm
Admission Free

Location:
New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom Street (between 8th and 9th streets)
San Francisco, CA 94103-3817
415 626 5416

Tim Armstrong has written a great synopsis of Tuesday’s Supreme Court proceedings in MGM vs. Grokster. He goes far more in-depth than most articles on the subject, so if you’re interested in the case it’s a must-read.

I’m a big fan of the TV show Lost, and am waiting with great anticipation for whatever big secrets will be revealed in the season finale. But if I lived in Australia, I wouldn’t get to see that finale for four months after the finale airs. A four-month lag time means those secrets getting spoiled becomes a near-certainty, at least if you spend any time online.

That’s why I’m not the least bit surprised by this CNet report about how more and more impatient Aussies are turning to BitTorrent to download copies of shows that won’t air on Australian TV for months to come. There’s no practical reason to delay a show’s airing overseas, and there’s no practical reason for an Australian fan of a show not to download an episode that Americans have had Tivoe’d for months.

US Mobile Subscriber Consumption of Content and Applications in Previous Month
	Projected Reach (000s)	Percent
Sent or Received Text Message	65,041	37.4%
Received Text Message Alert	14,538	8.4%
Sent Photo Message to Phone or Email	11,761	6.8%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger	14,633	8.4%
Used Mobile Email	24,175	13.9%
Downloaded Mobile Game	5,720	3.3%
Downloaded Ringtone	22,393	12.9%
Downloaded Display Graphic	10,860	6.2%
Accessed News and Information via Browser	22,053	12.7%

Source: M:Metrics, Inc. Survey of US mobile subscribers, quarter ending January 31st 2005, n=35,381. Data for photo messaging, ringtones and graphics downloads for two months ending January 31st 2005, n=23,209.

This is pretty cool, and that's just from their press release. I like being able to see hard numbers (to repeat ad-nauseum to anyone who'll listen to me blather).

:-)

-Russ

"ABC News on Monday said it would launch an expanded suite of video news products that will be available on the Internet, wireless devices, and someday, maybe even on cable television. Now, all the network has to do is find someone actually willing to put it on television. ABC's ambitious plan takes the unusual approach of making its programming available to new media outlets even before it completes a plan to get it on TV. ABC is a unit of the...

Donald, Mickey and company at 3Mbps. Reuters takes a peek at "Playhouse Disney Preschool Time Online" a new broadband learning service from Disney that takes advantage of broadband connections. For $50 a year, parents receive updated lesson plans each week; Disney says it should be a "..

How long before they're targeted?. When Torrent sites like LokiTorrent and Suprnova shut down, many users fled to smaller sites, most of which can be searched via Torrent search engines like ISOHunt. Like Bit Torrent itself, ISOHunt has both illegitimate and legitimate uses. P2P Web..

The Rocky Mountain News is launching YourHub.com, asking for reader contributions. We'll see what the readers do.

Sony Corp. has been granted a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.

The technique could be used to create videogames or TV programmes and would aim ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce "sensory experiences" such as smells, sounds and images.

"The pulsed ultrasonic signal alters the neural timing in the cortex," the patent states. "No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds."

Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, has looked at the Sony patent and "found it plausible." Birbaumer himself has developed a device that enables disabled people to communicate by reading their brain waves.

So far no experiments has been conducted, and the patent is meraly "based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."

Via PSFK and engadget < Reuters. Picture from The Sun.

Dana Karwas' cell.SPACE application allows users to make a short live music video using SMS as lyrics and camera phone pictures as graphics.

Users can send text and picture messages from their mobile phone to the freeSTYLE and have their written text messages show up on the screen with a voice accompanying the text. Simultaneously a hip hop instrumental is creating and guiding the voice and graphics so the text becomes the lyrics and the pictures from the phones form the graphics.

The application has 21 different voices to choose from including male, female, creature, robot, and even human laughter. Instead of just being read back to the user, the voice is controlled by the beat of the music.

Video.

The work will be at the Interactive Multimedia Culture expo, on April 14th - 23rd, at the Chelsea Art Museum, in New York.

In the Mixed Reality Project, by StopAntPlay and Rene Serrano, the visitor is filmed in real time and these 3D images are recreated in a 3D virtual world. Users can then choose among several models and interact with them in a mixed reality world using special glasses or a flexible screen.

The system is based on "trackers", black and white marks to which the computer reacts via a video camera. The information acts as a code sent by the camera to the computer that in turn, generates virtual images to be superimposed on the video according to the position and movements of the tracker. Website is in spanish but they have a video of the application.

You can have a go at the Mixed Reality Project during the OFFF festival in Barcelona, on May 12-14.

Via media.teletipos.

Contagious Media Showdown is an open competition to see who can make the most viral website.

Eyebeam set up a special server, found $ thousands in prize money, and recruited the brightest to make this experiment in contagious media possible.

The workshops and panel include the people behind FundRace, BlackPeopleLoveUs, the Rejection Line, Blogdex, Del.icio.us, the Nike Sweatshop Email, etc.

Sign up before April 30th.

The Blair Watch Project is an effort, coordinated by the UK newspaper The Guardian, to keep tabs on the UK's Prime Minister Tony Blair as he goes about campaigning around the country. The project was prompted by the Labour party's decision to limit Blair's media exposure on the trail; now it looks like he'll be covered by more cameras than ever. On one level, it's another example of networked citizens acting as journalists, providing information to other interested citizens, with some help from traditional media; on another level, however, it's a telling example of the growing power of the participatory panopticon in the realm of politics. Although professional photojournalists cover political campaigns, they can't be everywhere, or cover every angle. Now, every citizen with a camphone can be a reporter, capturing the inadvertent gesture, quick glance or private frown. The lack of cameras snapping away can no longer be an opportunity for public figures to relax.

The Guardian is using the digital image site Flickr to host the submitted photos, and will republish the best. It's likely that 99.99% of the images will be (at best) dull, but there's always the slight chance that the right person in the right place at the right time will capture something that can reshape the election. Keep your camphones charged and your signal strong...

(An aside: Whoever came up with the name for the project should be given a hefty bonus, even if they came up with it long ago and held it until the perfect opportunity came along...)

(Via Smart Mobs/Ben Hammersley)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Tech Bloom – Collaborative and Emergent Technologies at 02:52 PM)

Listen Here

All Things Considered, April 8, 2005 - Network television audiences are down as cable, the Internet and a host of other new technologies emerge; and marketers are shifting their dollars accordingly. The media world faces an interim of chaos before a new order is determined. The co-host of On the Media delivers his take.

(includes Drazen Pantic of Unmediated.org, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com, and clips from the videoblogs of Chuck Olsen and Steve Garfield -- jk)

TheFeature :: It's All About The Mobile Internet Why Mobile Advertising Will Be More Important Than TV Advertising
By Mike Masnick, Thu Apr 07 04:30:00 GMT 2005

In a sign that advertisers are finally recognizing that mobile spam doesn't work, one big advertising agency outlines the challenges in making people want to get mobile advertising.

Just as advertisers are realizing that the dream of pushing real-time ads to mobile devices is dying, it appears that a few are recognizing the power of advertising that's pulled by the user, rather than pushed by the advertiser. In fact, some say that user-requested mobile advertising is going to eventually take the place of television advertising.

Andrew Robertson, the recently appointed head of Omnicom's well-known BBDO advertising firm, is talking about how people can now avoid any advertising they don't like -- meaning that any effective advertising has to be something that the user actually wants. "You have no way to interrupt because they can choose what they can do. The opportunity is if you can create some content that they want to engage with, they can do that all of the time from anywhere."

In other words, the whole mindset behind the entire advertising industry needs to change from one that's about getting as many eyeballs on the ad as possible to getting people to actually want to see the ad. It's a huge shift in mentalities, and the mobile Internet is likely to lead the charge. Since mobile devices are something that people carry with them all the time, and are connected to the wider world around them, it's the perfect delivery mechanism -- so long as the ads are requested by the end user.

The mobile device becomes a window onto the the rest of the world for anyone who wants more information. It is not, however, a passive medium to which constant advertising can be pushed, but a tool that people will use
to find specific answer to specific questions. As Robertson says: "we are rapidly getting to the point where the single most important medium that people have is their wireless device. It's with them every single moment of the day." The challenge, which Robertson appears to see clearly, is figuring out a way to include advertising in that context.

It's really not that hard, however. As others struggle to figure out what kind of content people will want to see on their handsets, the answer is often going to be "something that helps them out, right now." That could mean something that's entertaining while there's time to kill or it could mean someone requesting info on the nearest Chinese restaurant (along with any available coupons). Advertising clearly has a place in this medium, but it's in helping the user solve a specific need, rather than trying to alert them to needs they didn't know they had while they're trying to do something else.

There will be forthcoming reports of icebergs in hell after this one. Staci Kramer reports at that CNN is abandoning their premium video service in favor of an ad-supported model. This is a bold move for a company that insisted a few years ago that paid was the only way to meet the bandwidth costs associated with video streaming. Nonsense. Will they be too late? Not likely. Good job, Staci. Good move, CNN.

HOW-TO: PSPcasting on your Mac - Engadget - www.engadget.com.
I might have to get one of these nifty PSP thingamagigs now.. I would like to see a couple more hacks to them first, like the addition of a web browser or a JVM. Anybody know any of those projects are underway?

Jay Dedman just sent this one to the videoblogging mailing list I'm a part of. His friend, Ivettza, started video blogging recently and her father had a bad motorcycle accident that put him in a coma. She made a short video about it. Welcome to the long tail of video. I bet she never expected to have more than a few family and friends watching in on her personal hell. By sharing herself with all of us she's done something more gripping than any TV show I can think of. Unlike the Apprentice this is real reality TV.

You know, spending a week in a hospital makes you more emphathetic toward those who are going through a tough time. I met a Microsoft employee whos wife had a hysterectomy due to a tumor. They are waiting to find out if it's cancerous or not. I don't believe in God, but I'm praying for a good outcome for his family.

Lots of waiting in hospitals like the one I'm writing to you from. Waiting. Waiting. Then some terrifying moments shatter the silence. Mostly of doctors telling you more surgery is needed. Or worse. Thankfully I'm not hearing those bad words like cancer or, worse, "don't know." I hear Peter Jennings just found out that he has lung cancer. A friend of mine died of that in the 1980s. But others are hearing those horrible words all around me. In my room it's not cakewalk. There's constant intrusions. Blood pressure checks. Blood workups. Flowers! Bathroom walks. New IV's. Phone calls. Beeping machines. Even some running Windows! (Can't they make nicer sounding beeps?) Room-mates making weird noises. No privacy for some things that otherwise are very private.

But, at least there's wifi. It's the thing keeping me sane. That, and all my friends who keep emailing me and IM'ing me. Appreciate all of that very much.

No cause for alarm for me personally. The one I'm watching over is doing well. Hopefully that story can be told someday too.

Thanks Ivettza. Hope your dad recovers quickly. Thanks for your tale from the Long Tail.

Who said videoblogging is only going to be used for porn? Certainly not anyone who's visited the videoblogging mailing list.

It's getting harder and harder to get me to try things. I'm just snowed under. And not getting any less snowed under. More than 1,000 emails need my attention. But it's worth trying. I do look at every email and try to answer them all. But it's getting tougher.

David James of Blogmatrix kept trying. Sent me a few emails about his new product (BlogMatrix Sparks! 2.0). I didn't answer him. But, I do keep those emails for when I have some time to try out new products. Today I did.

It's a new kind of news aggregator. One that lets you listen to podcasts, watch video blogs, and then make your own!

Nice clean interface. I'm playing with it.

Here's what he emailed me that motivated me to download it: "We've been killing ourselves out here -- we've got a huge BitTorrent infrastructure for delivering data efficiently to auto downloaders, tons of free space, tons of free bandwidth, we've made it easy (almost trivial) to upload and download."

What else did David do well? He got other people to talk about his product. Someone just posted about it to the videoblogging mailing list.

It's the repetition. The persistence. That matters in this new micro-content world.

I highly recommend you check out BlogMatrix. Very nice.

TiVo, the little box that lets you avoid seeing ads, it working hard to make sure you see ads. They have deals with Comcast and DirecTV to make sure you don't forget that a soft drink isn't about sugar, water and CO2 – it's a lifestyle choice that defines you as a person.

The popular, if not profitible, DirecTiVos will being showing those billboard ads and both TiVo and DirecTV will be sharing in the profits. While DirecTV has shied away from adding features like Home Media Option to the DirecTiVos (despite the political backing of an online petition, which is probably the first time in history one of those failed to work) subscribers will be happy to hear that DirecTV is upgrading their boxes with a feature to ram commercials down their ad holes. There must be an online petition for DirecTV to add more commercials from both people who requested that feature.

Not to be outdone, Comcast and TiVo announced that they would be replacing commercials broadcast in recorded shows with updated ads that are more "targeted and relevant." If online advertising is any indication of how targeted and relevant advertising can be, we can't wait to get 50,000 smileys for our TiVo. This also raises questions that the billboard ads raised, like can a relevant Pepsi ad replace a Coke ad? Or, for people living in Detroit and used to being targeted (just not by advertising), a Faygo ad?

None of this ad stuff should be too surprising (well, replacing old ads with new ones kind of is) because TiVo has been saying for a while that they want to make bundles of cash on advertising. It is kind of disheartening, but you can expect to see more advertising in your TiVo as they move their business plan towards earning more and more ad revenue.

Gabe McIntyre teaches vlogging to film students at the Utrecht college of arts.

Now he teaches you how to videoblog online.

You'll learn:
1. What is Vlogging?
2. Editing Technique
3. Helpful Websites with helpful how-to's on how to set up vlogging and media aggregators.
4. Additional information including, how to set up blogger, how to add a photo still, free templates, videoblogging how-to's.
5. HTML Basics
6. Streaming & Downloading video on the internet

Note: You've got to click on his videos to make each page advance.

Go take a look at what his students have done this semester.

I always feel a bit stupid when I purchase a movie on DVD. With networks getting faster and hard drives & flash memory prices dropping, it's only a matter of time until a gigantic catalog of movies is available online or on USB keys sent back and forth in the mail like Netflix rentals. Things are moving in this direction already: Sony wants to create an online movie service like the iTunes Music Store and a huge amount of movies are already available online on Usenet, BitTorrent, and various P2P networks. The upshot is that all those movies I have -- because the technology companies and the media companies are making it so I can't make copies of my movies to move them from the DVDs to whatever the hell device I'm going to play my movies on in the future -- I'm going to end up purchasing them all again (or worse, renting them each time I want to watch them...movie and music ownership may soon be a thing of the past if the media companies have anything to say about it). Which is great if you're a big media company but makes me, like I said before, feel a bit stupid when buying DVDs.

Thanko's new "iCombi Wireless Stereo Headset" is a package deal with headphones and Bluetooth adapter for most modern flavors of iPod (except Shuffle). Compatible with 2nd, 3rd, 4th, photo and mini iterations of "everyone's favorite audio player," the iCombi headphones feature pause, skip and a couple other buttons. The lithium ion battery inside the headphones will last you for about 11 hours, but not that it really matters as you can just recharge them by USB anyway. Thanko didn't mention whether or not the headphones were compatible with the Headset Bluetooth profile (for your phone), but they don't have a mic so I guess not. The range is 10 meters (about 32 feet), and price 15,800 yen.

Press Release [Thanko]

The Sharp Zaurus may no longer be with us, but that might not be all bad, since the hack-ready Archos PMA 430 is getting very decent reviews. It's a portable video device first like the AV420 before, but adding in a touch-screen interface and the same Qtopia Linux-based environment of the Zaurus. That means it's effectively a PDA with a 30GB hard drive with Wi-Fi and USB Host capability. If that doesn't give you some ideas, then I don't know what does.

The downside? Archos wants $800 for all that power, so you'd almost be better off buying a cheap, ultra-portable laptop.

Archos Pocket Media Assistant PMA430 [CNET via DAPreview]

When VLC is outlawed, only outlaws will have VLC

No one has time to read all the millions of blogs. That's the raison d'etre of sites such as Kinja and Memeorandum, along with filtered roundups on Slate and CNN. Here's a roundup of the roundups.

CaptionKit provides subtitling software and management tools to help you in create synchronised text captions (subtitles) for internet video, audio and presentations.

How can you painlessly migrate their requests from your old server/feed to your newly burned FeedBurner feed, so all of your syndication traffic takes advantage of our services?

CoCo blog has what European Digital Rights says is the wish list by the European international versions of the MPAA and RIAA (the MPA and IFPI) for Internet service providers: Movie & Music Industry Proposals ISP Self-Regulation. Evidently, they want ISPs to:

• "remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders"
  
• "require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property infringement by an established right holder defence organisation or by right holder(s) whose intellectual property is being infringed"
  
• terminate contracts of recidivist
  
• implement instant messaging to communicate with infringers
  
• implement filtering technologies to block sites that are "substantially dedicated to illegal file sharing or download services"
  
• voluntarily store data for copyright enforcement
  

t would be "hit list."

Today, I'll be at Harvard's Signal or Noise?, joined, I expect, by a cohort of bloggers. The first installment helped kick off the study of music and the law five years ago. Join us to see what we've learned (and not yet learned) since.

Switch coasts in a few weeks for the Stanford Center for Internet & Society's Cyberlaw in the Supreme Court, to hear how the Supreme Court might change the debate with its ruling in MGM v. Grokster.

The chaos scenario

: Bob Garfield has a major piece of analysis and reporting on the future of media in this week's Ad Age, sadly without links online. He will also have a piece on this in this weekend's On the Media). It is the perfect bookend, from the advertising and business perspective, to Merrill Brown's piece in the Carnegie Report, which explores the media chaos scenario from the audience and content perspective.

Garfield draws a picture of the future -- nearer than you think -- in which audiences shrink severely in broadcast, mass media before new niche media are ready with the content and stuff to serve them and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Yesiree, by George, it's a brave and exciting new world that the near future holds, a democratized, consumer-empowered, bottom-up, pull-not-push, lean forward and lean back universe that will improve the quantity and quality of entertainment options, create hitherto unimaginable marketing opportunities and efficiencies and, not incidentally, generate wealth that will make the current $250 billion domestic ad market seem like pin money.

-- near or not -- doesn't happen until later....

Because revolutions by their nature are neither seamless nor smooth.

Because there is no reason to believe the collapse of the old media model will yield a plug-and-play new oneBob quotes two of the smartest people I know in this arena: Om Malik and Rishad Tobaccowala of Starcom, the giant media buying agency.

I wish I could quote more -- enticing you to go out and buy a copy of Ad Age -- but, alas and damnit, they do not put the story online, even for us subcribers. What were they saying about dinosaur media?

I don't yet know what he thinks about digital TV, but newly appointed FCC chairman Kevin Martin is more cautious than Powell about deregulation and quite zealous about broadcast indecency.

One of the best things about watching TiVoed content is skipping through commercials. TiVo and Comcast have come up with a new feature they hope will keep you from hitting fast-forward.

Moore's Law turns 40 this month, so it's time for a look back at the "law" and the man responsible for it.

Cory Doctorow: The MPA and IFPI (international versions of the MPAA and RIAA, respectively), has produced a report describing the code of conduct they'd like ISPs to embrace -- basically, they want ISPs to act like AOL in the old days. Any ISP that adopts this code of conduct is cutting its own throat -- seriously, this thing is a frigging embarrassment, it really makes the IFPI/MPA people look like they live in Narnia. The MPA/IFPI people I've met on the road are generally lightweights, prone to telling easily countered lies, ignorant of the law, fumble-tongued and ham-fisted. This report tells me that my impression of them was dead on. Here are some callouts from CoCo:

* "remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders".'

* "require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property infringement by an established right holder defence organisation or by right holder(s) whose intellectual property is being infringed"'

* terminate contracts of recidivist'

* implement instant messaging to communicate with infringers'

* implement filtering technologies to block sites that are 'substantially dedicated to illegal file sharing or download services.'

* voluntarily store data for copyright enforcement...

"To enforce terms of service that prohibit a subscriber from operating a server, or from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth where such consumption is a good indicator of infringing activities."

ante.com/copyfight/">Copyfight)

Cory Doctorow: Next Wednesday, as part of the festivities in Seattle's Computers, Freedom and Privacy confernece, EFF will host its Pioneer Awards, at 7PM at the Sci Fi Museum. Today, the org released the list of (very) distinguished winners for the year:

Dr. Patrick Ball is a leading innovator in applying scientific measurement to human rights. He directs the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) at Benetech (www.benetech.org), a nonprofit organization that combines the impact of technological solutions with the social entrepreneurship business model to help disadvantaged communities. He served as the catalyst behind two open source software tools for the human rights community, "Martus" and "Analyzer," which aid in the secure storage and analysis of data on human rights violations. He will be accepting his award from East Timor.

Edward Felten is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton University whose research interests include computer security and technology law and policy. He brings these scholarly interests to his work as an activist. In 2001, Felten and EFF sued the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Felten is also author of "Freedom to Tinker" (www.freedom-to-tinker.com), a highly regarded weblog exploring the ways government and industry attempt to limit technological innovation and what activists can do about it.

Mitch Kapor is President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a nonprofit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer app" that made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980's. In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and served as its chairman until 1994.

Cory Doctorow: The oral argument from last month's Grokster Supreme Court case (where EFF argued that technology companies shouldn't have to imagine all the infringing ways that their customers might use their products and design to prevent them -- otherwise the iPod, Outlook and the Xerox machine would all be illegal) is available online now as a transcript. It's 55 pages long, but the type is big and double-spaced! 144K PDF Link (via Copyfight)

Update: Here it is in HTML (Thanks, Jordan!); and ASCII (Thanks, Sid!).

I'm getting ready for the International Symposium on Online Journalism at U-Texas. Through a combination of dumb luck, perseverance, and outright deception, I find myself on the following panel:

Participatory Journalism in Action: The Cases of ohmynews.com, wikinews.org, and the blogs
Chair and discussant: Lorraine Branham, director, School of Journalism, UT Austin
|| Jean Min, deputy chief, international division of Ohmynews.com
|| J.D. Lasica, journalist and blogger
|| Chuck Olsen, blogger and director of Blogumentary
|| Wayne Saewyc, editor and admin, WikiNews.org

The Symposium should be very educational, and I can't wait to meet some of these smart people. But I'm most looking forward to the "Video presentation on Austin City Limits TV show." I'll pretend I'm watching Guided By Voices drunk onstage, and probably scream inappropriately.

 

iPodlounge's Q&A with Odeo's Evan Williams

"Odeo is a distribution and creation platform for audio content. Our aim is to make it easy to discover, subscribe to, and create podcasts."

The Gotham Gal and I went to the Who Owns the Culture event at the New York Public Libray tonite.

It was fantastic.  The webcast is available here.

Larry Lessig was his usual activist self making incredibly compelling arguments against anything that keeps content from being free to be used in a digital world.

And Jeff Tweedy was just amazing.  He is incredibly honest and humble for a major league big time rock musician.  He honestly believes that music happens between an artist and a listener and both are an equal part of the equation.  He believes that the Internet is a positive force for music appreciation and wants to do everything he can to leverage it for himself, his band, and his listeners.  Plus he's just a really entertaining guy.

Steven Johson did a great job moderating the discussion.

Anyone who attended couldn't come away from it with any other conclusion that lawers, litigation, and labels are bad news and the only thing that matters in the world of culture is the artist and the consumer.  Everything else is just overhead.

As an added bonus, the Gotham Gal sat next to David Byrne.  We talked to David about his internet radio show.  He said its costing him a fair amount of money to host it and pay for all the rights.  I asked him if he was going to podcast it.  He thought about the question for a moment and said, "not if its going to cost me even more".

That's bad.  Here we have a great musician and fan of music who might be enticed into programming my iPod every month.  But he won't do it because it costs him too much to do it.  I sugested he find a sponsor who would cover all the costs.  If you have any ideas, let me know.

Finally, I must say this was a really fantastic event for the NY Public Library to be hosting. They have a new guy in charge of programming whose name is Paul Holdengräber.  He's an amazing guy too and the events he is putting on are really excellent.  He aims to make the lions roar.  He did tonite.

Samsung’s just cut a deal to put Digeo’s Moxi II Media Center software on their new line of Home Media Center set top boxes. The first version of Moxi was pretty tight as far as integrated digital video recorder set top boxes go, but these Samsung Home Media Centers are going to sport four TV tuners (for recording multiple shows at once and/or feeding multiple live TV streams to satellite Moxi Mini boxes around the house), enough storage to record up to 40 hours of high definition programming, support for Voice over IP (both making and receiving calls—Moxi’s current Moxi Telephone app can only manage and receive calls), as well as all the multimedia home networking stuff that Moxi does already. Charter Communications and Adelphia are set to be the first two cable companies to offer the boxes to customers, with delivery planned for fall of this year.

In this brief FT.com article, Andrew Robertson, chief executive of Omnicom's BBDO advertising agency (one of the three largest agencies on earth): “We are rapidly getting to the point where the single most important medium that people have is their wireless device... It's with them every single moment of the day. It's genuinely the convergence box that everyone has been talking about for so many years.”

(Via Drudge)

News Corp has discovered a big disadvantage of enrolling in big online banner ad networks: Your ads end up in embarrassing places. The SMH reports that News Corp subsidiaries and other companies involved in fighting online piracy have discovered that their ads are being shown on notable BitTorrent tracker sites Pirate Bay and TorrentReactor. Whoops.

Silicon Valley Watcher:

Google wants your video At the big cable conference in SF today, Google cofounder Larry Page said the search company plans to put out a call for personal video clips. "We're going to start taking video submissions from people," Reuters quoted Page as saying in his speech. This would be a part of Google Video, a search service that displays stills and closed caption text from broadcast video. The announcement comes on the heels of the launch of OurMedia.org, cofounded by Marc Canter and JD Lasica, a nonprofit organization dedicated to allowing individuals to create, distribute and market their original content. So will OurMedia gain traction if Google is ready to become the free video hosting and search archive?

Gary Lerhaupt and the folks ar Prodigem are gonna give Jeremy Allaire and Brightcove a run for the money - with the opening up of Prodigem Torrents marketplace. Here's Gary's post..

Blog Downloads Torrents Screenshots Documentation Links Suggest A Torrent April 05, 2005

A Call For Long Tailors

Interested in helping to weave together a new marketplace for the independent media producer? Prodigem has just launched a new part of its service that allows you to sell your content. Check out more info for all the details, but the gist is that you will shortly be able to upload your content into Prodigem, name your selling price and then have Prodigem collect your revenue while controlling access to the torrent. We take out 10% + transaction costs (PayPal) and then once a month you get a check in the mail. You're happy, we're happy and your customers are happy because they get stuff they can own with no DRM. If you want to try your hand at the new market, this torrent shows what everything looks like. The content is a 10 minute documentary I put together and as an example is available for $0.99. As it so happens, we are currently looking for a handful of people excited by this opportunity with content that they'd like to sell. Please get in contact with our request address if you are interested. By Gary Lerhaupt

The kids at MTV have launched a beta version of "the ultimate broadband video channel" featuring news, music, live performances, short form shows and music videos. "MTV Overdrive" is a free service with no registration and no required download, although the optional "Overdrive Video Optimizer" helps expedite playback. (Via BoingBoing)

This month's meetup is this Sunday, April 10 at 6:00 pm at Art Bar on 7th Ave

UPDATED Chris Nolan is on the case, and attending the Board of Supervisors meeting. A stand-alone journalist is doing what the big media should be doing -- covering the story. Update: Here's her report from the scene. Also: The National Journal, a Washington-based publication read by government and political folks, is on the larger story -- politicans wondering how to regulate bloggers' political speech. The Journal's Technology Daily has a piece on the San Francisco situation today, but I can't link to the subscribers-only story.

Mark Cuban is fast approaching alpha-geek status. Check out his recent post on why he can't and won't buy CDs anymore:

MP3 players are changing peoples listening habits. We don’t carry folders filled with CDs anymore. We carry our library in our MP3 players. We don’t listen to CDs. We listen to playlists that we adjust all the time. We don’t burn CDs anymore, it’s too time consuming. We copy all our music to our MP3 players so it’s all available at our fingertips.

$16.5 billion all cash offer for cable company. The Wall Street Journal this morning reported that Cablevision has made a $16.5 billion all cash offer for the assets of Adelphia communications. Cablevision, if they can't win the network, could at least irritate Time Warner Cable and Comcast, who ..

Yet another torrent site folds under pressure. EZTorrent, one of dozens of Bit Torrent file trading sites users fled to after the SuprNova shutdown, today called it quits. "We got a call from our provider, they had received a few letters from a couple of lawyers - they requested EZT to be shut d..

When you program web applications in a RESTful style, you tend to use idioms from the HTTP specification. For example you're likely to return a broader variety off HTTP status codes, each one of which you'll have to grab from RFC 2616. Because this is repetitive it lends itself to being automated. I automated it for PHP applications by compiling a template application which contains all my standard idioms and constants. When I'm creating a new script I copy the template file over, delete the bits I don't need, and change application-specific constants like URIs. This saves a lot of time and prevents bugs. My template file has now been used for 10-15 different scripts, so I decided that it is grown-up enough to be useful to other people and took a few minutes to package the source for public release. As well as saving typing, it may also be handy as an illustration of RESTful techniques. Because code always needs a clear purpose, part of the packaging was to invent one. I gave it the purpose of returning the sum of its arguments. If you call the script with the URI /sum/1/1, it will return the value '2'. You can see it in action at http://gonze.com/sum or grab the source at http://gonze.com/resty/resty.php.

Steve Rubel is raving about the Annotated Times. I agree that that's a very cool thing, but I like Memeorandum better because Memeorandum isn't just tied to one media outlet. It's gonna take something really special to get me to give my home page to something else.

What do you think?

With Ineen, the first fully-featured open source and open-standards compliant audio and videoconferencing desktop tool is here. Available for both Mac and PC users, Ineen allows nested conferences allowing unlimited number of people to join in real-time and talk. Ineen......

This Easter Carol takes control of the camera and asks all the relatives if they watch the Carol and Steve Show. Some do and some don't.

It's funny to see them say they do, when obviously, they don't.


Watch the video over on my video blog.

PSP Vault has some photos of what looks like a PSP developer kit. The unit looks like a tower PC with what appears to be a UMD drive in one of the bays. The included PSP unit has both a USB cable and what looks like perhaps a VGA cable, as well. We’ve got no other details on this, but we know these kits exist, they’re very expensive, and good luck getting your hands on one even if you’ve got the dough to shell out. Click on for a photo of the tower unit. [Thanks, Anuj]

It’s no secret that in recent months there’s been some, um, strain in TiVo’s relationship with DirecTV, the satellite TV provider that accounts for TiVo’s subscriber base, but why did this once happy partnership go south? Phillip Swann thinks it has a lot to do with Rubert Murdoch, DirecTV’s mack daddy, and his failure to buy a controlling interest in TiVo back in late 2003/early 2004. Why did TiVo resist closer integration with the company they so closely relied on for customers? Swann says it’s because they were concerned that striking a deal with DirecTV (and its 14 million subscribers) would prevent them from ever being able to work with any of the cable companies (which have access to nearly 70 million homes). In highsight it was probably the right move on their part given their recent deal with Comcast, but TiVo saying no to Rupert did result in a series of events that put the company on shaky financial ground, events which culminated in January with DirecTV’s announcement at CES that they’re were going to offer their own in-house digital video recorder to their customers that would cost less than TiVo’s offering. That move has left of people guessing that DirecTV isn’t going to renew their current marketing arrangement with TiVo when it expires, which means that TiVo better have cut a sweet enough deal with Comcast to make up for any projected loss of revenue.< [Via Slashdot]

Almost a million Koreans now do their banking via 3G cellphones, according to CNN. The service was first offered by Koomkin, South Korea’s largest bank, about two years ago, and now all of the country’s major banks offer mobile banking services. We hope the banks also offer a zero-liability policy if your phone gets lifted; according to CNN, transactions can be enabled via one button, bypassing a login screen.

Current.tv : Al Gore and Joel Hyatt announced their new network and new name at last. It's Current.tv. It's supposed to be TV by, about, and for the people and if it turns out to be that, it could be exciting and new. We'll see... this fall. You can see samples of the people's videos on the home page (I liked the second prize better than the first). Here's my brief report after I met Hyatt at his HQ a year ago.

Google video to accept submissions "In the next few days we're actually going to start taking video submissions from people, and we're not quite sure what we're going to get, but we decided we'd try this experiment," said Larry Page.

! But it's not easy for a consumer to insert closed-captioning into a video feed, so don't count on your home videos or video blogs being listed in Google's video search service just yet. They could create captioning with voice recognition software, but I don't think they'd do that for free beyond this experimental stage.

INdTV renamed Current.tv Think of it as a big video blog that you don't need a computer to watch. Gore said he is aiming to bring interactivity to the TV set.

- did Al Gore just ask us to think of his new TV network as a video blog? I haven't taken much time to explore Current TV but it seems to represent the ideals we were excited about as INdTV digital correspondent applicants. If they can help create a generation of citizen journalists and indie mediamakers, they have my full-blooded support. I hope Current TV and the videoblogging community will find a symbiotic relationship.

Check out HKU TV, a new videoblog by some Dutch film students.

Almost a year ago, I wrote the orginal It's The Feed Stupid post. Since then I've seen ever more evidence that the bigger audience for blogs is via RSS instead of the web.  But it's always been anecdotal until this week. Early this week the Feedburner guys gave me a preview look at their Total Stats Pro offering.  They've always offered the best RSS stats reporting and its been a big reason why I run a Feedburner feed in the first place.  But now, they are preparing a premium offering which takes it to a new level.  They don't have the pricing worked out yet and it won't be broadly available for another week or two. I also turned on Feedburner's Overture service this week.  It allows you to run contextual ads from Overture in your RSS feed.  If you subscribe to my Feedburner feed, you are seeing those ads in my feed now instead of the old Amazon ads. I can tell you this. If you run AdSense on your blog, you should sign up for Feedburner and get the Overture ads.  Also, if you care about your traffic on your blog, you should sign up for Feeburner and get the Total Stats Pro package when they make it available in the next couple weeks. Here's why.

• The past three days, my web pageviews were 2650, 2700, and 2100.  On those days the RSS views on my Feedburner feed were 2500, 2550, and 1800.  But my Feedburner feed is only used by 30% of my 3200 RSS subscribers.  If you assume that the views are the same across all three of my feeds, my RSS views are three times my web page views.
• The past three days, my Adsense clickthrus were 36.  My Overture clickthrus were 10 on just my Feedburner feed, which is 1/3 of my total feed.  If I was running Overture on all my feeds, it would be about the same as AdSense.  And this is for a service that hasn't even begun to be optimized.
• For the first time, I can see what is actually being "viewed" in RSS.  This is a really big deal.  I've got 3200 RSS subscribers.  I had no idea if they actually read anything.  Now I know exactly how many of them are viewing my feed daily and I also know what posts they are viewing.  For example 355 RSS subscribers to my Feedburner feed viewed my Shake Shack post yesterday.  This concept is similar to the "open rate" in email.  It's a critical stat in a push/pull medium.

This is complicated stuff and I am just beginning to figure it all out.  But I can say the following without equivocation.

• Most bloggers will have way more RSS readers than web readers.  Knowing the real size of this audience and what they read is critical.
• The revenue opportunity for blog related PPC advertising in RSS is equal or greater than the opportunity for web-based advertising.  I assume the same will be true for large media properties once RSS becomes mainstream.
• Feedburner is ahead of the curve in providing critical RSS services.  They are delivering what RSS publishers need.  Kudos to them.

Andrew and Tim told me that this was on boingboing, but I just saw it via http://www.siliconvalley.com/:

For an industry under dire threat from piracy, DVD vendors are doing quite well financially. According to a slide presentation posted, mistakenly I presume, to a publicly accessible portion of Metro Goldwyn Mayer's Web server, the DVD market is quite robust. Between 2002 and 2003, MGM saw a 40 percent increased in DVD shipments in North America, and a corresponding 53 percent increase worldwide. And get a load of the proft margins. MGM's margins on DVD sales are 50-60 percent.

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Japanese Nikkei.Net reports aboout Scalar Corp. introducing a wearable LCD screeen that only weighs 7g.

The Scalar Teleglasses can be mounted on ordinary eye-glasses. The 0.24" 180,000 pixel LCD chip creates a 14" TV screen viewed in 1m distance.

The weight of just 7g is just amazing. The price for the LCD HMD is set at 50,000 yen (~$459.62).

More details on Nikkei.Net (subscription).

We have a quick look at Samsung's VP-X110L, a ruggedized version of the VP-M110 tapeless camcorder featuring a tethered lens that'll go in the oddest of places.

The Annotated New York Times
Interesting site that tracks blog entries that cite the NY Times.

Via sLop

Once structured blogging is in place, you can start building applications on top of it. Because it’s an XML format and embedded in both the HTML blog and the syndicated feed, applications can run in web browsers (like a firefox plugin for comparison sho

Finally, I can spray a hose on my widescreen television!

Here's one for you folks that live in your outdoor pool: SunBriteTV All-Weather Outdoor LCD:

Designed for permanent outdoor residential and commercial installation, SunBriteTV allows you to enjoy TV and video entertainment in the comfort of your own backyard and at other outdoor venues, regardless of the weather!

Super-bright high-resolution 20.1" LCD display

All-weather enclosure protects internal components from extreme weather conditions, rain, dirt, insects, and scratches

protect it from my darn kids! [fake laughter, followed by applause] [via TV Snob]

Via Digital Television Blog

Want to know who's running for mayor? Where to buy a house on the ski slopes? How 'bout the best place to grab a burger and a beer? Information like this is all provided in Jonathan Weber's new citizens journalism project for the US's Rocky Mountain region, NewWest.net. Weber, former editor in chief of the online tech magazine The Industry Standard, launched the site in February opening up Rocky Mountain news to the region's population who discuss topics from regional business and politics to cultural and outdoor events. Based in Missoula, Montana, the site has so far branched out into local participatory pages for two other major cities, Boulder, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Northern Idaho region. Weber recently answered five questions for the Editors Weblog to help us better understand how he is including everyday people in his news site and where he sees the future of citizens journalism going.

1. What are Newwest's main uses for the community? Are readers tending to stick to their own community sites or are they curious as to what's going on in other Rocky Mountain towns as well?

In general peoples' interests tend to be local. But the communities of the Rocky Mountain West have a lot in common, they are facing very similar sets of issues and their residents tend to have very similar demographic and psychographic profiles. So we think there is a larger community here that people want to be engaged with, and we're providing a means of doing that.

2. Are you readers regular contributors, or are most of the postings done by your staff of journalists?

It's a mix. Our full-time editorial staff is tiny (2 people) but we have a number of contributors on contracts of various kinds (currently around 8 people). On top of that we have a growing number of readers and others who are contributing. It's a mix of professional journalists, aspiring journalists, and people who just like to write.

3. Do you feel that you are still in the nascent stages of participatory journalism? Where do yo see the future of the medium going? Do you see innovations like citizens journalism as permanently moving the enitre news industry online, or will there always be room for print?

We're very much in the nascent stages. Nobody knows yet how to build this new kind of media and these new methods of practicing journalism. I do think that a lot of what online & blogs have brought to the conversation -
participation, linking, immediacy, point of view - will become permanent fixtures of how journalism is done in the future. There will always be room for print, but print will occupy a smaller part of the media universe. Old
media don't die, they just become less powerful...

(Go read the rest of the interview at editorsweblog.org. -kc.)

A good write-up in the NY Times describing how the phone companies are aggressively pursuing programming for their IPTV services.

Broadcasting & Cable: Cable braces for telco invasion into TV

Diane Mermigas: Cable facing bundle of competitors

Via Lost Remote

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is today announcing new advancements to a 100-year-old magnetic recording technology that will set the stage for ultra-high capacities such as a 20-gigabyte(a) Microdrive or a one terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive.

To achieve this, Hitachi has demonstrated the industry's highest data density at 230 gigabits per square inch (Gb/in2) on perpendicular recording. Hitachi believes 230 Gb/in2, which represents a doubling of today's highest longitudinal recording densities, will be implemented in commercial hard drive products in 2007.

Academic paper on exploring the hidden relationships in email archives

I’m continuing to compile an online list at Del.icio.us: Localnewsapalooza. If you’re a del.icio.us devotee and know of more sites like these, feel free to add them to the localnewsapalooza tag

Cathy Kirkman, who works at Silicon Valley legal powerhouse Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, has started a Silicon Valley Media Law Blog. The current top item is a brief synopsis of my talk today at Stanford Law School.

Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

Like many people, when the headlines started flying around this morning saying that six million American adults listened to podcasts, it seemed like a questionable number. The folks at the Pew Internet and American Life Project tend to come out with pretty interesting studies that don't often seem overhyped -- but this appears to be an exception that really calls into question what the Pew people were thinking. It didn't take long for many to question the findings, noting that it's quite an extrapolation to go from 60 people answering yes to six million in the US. Amazingly, even the folks at Pew admit they don't believe the 6 million number. They only put out the press release about it -- why should they have to believe it, or even support it with the facts in their survey? In fact, the research director behind the study clarifies (after the fact, of course) that the study actually asked people: "if they had ever downloaded a podcast or radio Internet program." So, out of 200 people, they got 60 to admit that they had maybe at some point downloaded an internet radio program (which is not necessarily the same thing as podcasting) -- and from that they put out a report with the headline that "6 million American adults have listened to podcasts." Why bother doing actual research any more when all the attention is in made up numbers?

Via Techdirt

C/Net reports that a streaming radio service called MSpot Radio is coming from Sprint cellular. The service initially will be available to Sprint PCS Vision customers.

MSpot Radio, which will mainly compete with the likes of Sirius and XM satellite radio, consists of 13 live, on-demand music, news, sports, finance, weather and talk channels. Sprint is offering the service for $5.95 a month.

"Cell coverage may not be universal, but it's a lot better than satellite," said MSpot CEO Daren Tsui. He expects customers will upgrade to unlimited data plans and high-fi handsets such as the Sanyo MM-5600 and MM-7400 which currently offer the service.

The audio content is just the beginning, according to MSpot, which plans to introduce additional wireless streaming services in the coming months, including motion pictures, premium video programming and mobile-exclusive original programming.

"It is absolutely critical that we make sure that as mainstream consumers begin to investigate what the phone holds beyond voice calls, what they find is high-quality, compelling and entertaining," says MSpot co-founder and CEO Daren Tsui.

It's not very clear how long users will want to stare at a small screen, or whether they'll be able to watch anything longer than a few minutes. Wireless providers have asked media companies to produce specialized video clips -- brief news reports and "mobisodes," that run as only a minute or so.

Sprint's MobiTV service, operated by Idetic, costs about $10/month. RealTV, for $5 a month, lets you stream prerecorded RealVideo clips of news and sports.

How can Sprint afford to loose their valuable channels to unlimited data streamers? No doubt they'll move users to a different frequency, either Qualcomm's 700 Mhz mobile video service or Crown Castle's 1.6 Ghz mobile video service.

• Qualcomm also is investing $800 million to launch a national cellular TV service in 2006 over its own spectrum, broadcasting up to 20 channels for wireless carriers to sell their customers.

  Qualcomm's MediaFLO network is capable of carrying up to 100 channels, with as many as 15 of them streaming live video. As a shared resource for U.S. CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) operators, the network will carry content in the nationwide 700 MHz spectrum (UHF TV channel 55) owned by the CDMA pioneer. Qualcomm plans a one-way broadcast service for mobile users.

• Crown Castle, owns 5 MHz of national spectrum in the L band (1670-1675 MHz) and owns, operates and manages over 10,600 wireless communication sites in the U.S.. The have deployed DVB-H technology in a three-site, single-frequency network trial in Pittsburgh. Crown Castle plans to broadcast to millions of mobile users using low powered transmitters on cell towers.

A href="http://www.time.com/time/gadget/20050202/" target=new>

Verizon's V Cast video clips use Microsoft's Windows Media Format software on the handsets, either archived or in a streaming media format. The transmission takes 30 seconds or less, and sometimes the video is a bit shaky or choppy. The NBA has video highlights on Verizon's new V-CAST multimedia service which uses their EV-DO network. Verizon says it's now available in some 30 metropolitan markets covering a potential 75 million people.

The Junxion Box uses a cellular backbone and outputs a Wi-Fi signal. Could it be used for WiFi radio/tv? Not likely, without the approval of Cingular, Sprint or Verizon.

Via Daily Wireless

MAGpie 2.01 is a tool for creating closed captions and audio (video) descriptions. Authors can add captions and audio descriptions to QuickTime, Real, Windows Media Player, or Flash.

Josh Marshall has been an early leader in what I called "distributed journalism" a few weeks ago. Now he's gearing up to do it in a more organized way. Good...

Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

More than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players and 29% of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web so that they could listen to audio files at a time of their choosing.

According to Jupiter Research, 58% of web surfers deleted cookies from their system in 2004. This has sent a loud message to marketers in regard to consumer's preference as to tracking their online activities. The marketers have responded with PIE. Persistent Identification Element (PIE) is a technology that uses Macromedia's Flash MX to track you even without using cookies. Macromedia has created a page to instruct users on how to disable this.

Via Slashdot

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore expounds on the power of the mix tape, from cassettes blasting through boomboxes to celebrity iTunes playlists. From Wired magazine.

FMC's Kristin Thomson (via email): "On Tuesday, April 12, the Future of Music Coalition is hosting a one-day DC Policy Day, where we will apply a laser-beam focus on four critical topics emerging in the courts, Congress, and at the Copyright Office: (1) digital audio broadcasting and the future of radio, (2) low power FM and community voices, (3) health insurance and musicians, and (4) copyright in the courts and Congress, including discussions about the Grokster case and orphan works."

Via Copyfight

Videocue is a unique new application to help you create striking movies of you reading your words aloud.

The cable industry will gather this week to discuss a number of things, like DOCSIS 3.0, and how best to counter the bell fiber, VDSL, and IPTV plans. The consensus among the carriers (so says Reuters) seems to be that after the Adelphia sale there will be a new wave of consolidation, followed by a new wave of tougher regulation. Of course the biggest thing on cable's mind is the Brand-X decision, which is supported by the bells and could open their networks to competitors.

Via Broadbandreports

Articles at LawMeme discussing the law and policy issues surrounding automated video editing and intermediation systems.

...should be fun. At New School University. April 9-10. Here are the details. We'll be selling magazines and other stuff in the tabling area so come out and say hi....

(Make sure to check out Jay Dedman's workshop on Videoblogging Saturday afternoon. -kc.)

Via Stay Free! Daily

Media Magazine: The upending of the long-familiar paradigm, in which consumers drool at the laps of corpulent, ad-laden content-casters, is just about dead; a new citizen-centric media, a sort of me-to-you "minimedia," will soon rule. That's the vision of the youthful brigade driving this movement. And for now, the wind is definitely at their back.

Via Micro Persuasion

James Seng reports on MPlayer - an open source all formats media player - has been shut down.

MPlayer is rift with all sorts of reverse engineered, nonlicensed versions of copyrighted, proprietary software - so it doesn't surprise me. But it's official - you can't use other people's lock-in technology for unlocking.

Yah gotta start over from scratch.

Via Marc's Voice

Google co-founder Larry Page says the company is getting ready to launch a test of personal video submissions, reports PaidContent from the National Show. While there are few details, the idea that Google is getting into user-generated video should get your attention. As I've mentioned before, sites that aggregate citizen video are on the leading edge of creating the TV networks of tomorrow.

Plus: See similar stories on our new citizen media channel

Via Lost Remote

An attempt to create an online video editing webapp.

Doug Kaye, founder of the terrific daily interview show IT Conversations, announces the next phase of the site, which involves open-source audio production involving more volunteers:

The soft drink brand Mountain Dew is making a foray into movies by launching a new film division to produce action sports movies

As per a research done by PQ Media of Stamford, the brand marketers are expected to spend $4.25 billion on product placements this year which marks an increase of 23 per cent over 2004's estimated $3.5 billion in placements. The brand placements in TV are expected to contribute 57 percent to it.

Current is an independent media company led by former Vice President Al Gore, entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, and a growing team of industry professionals and young creatives. In May 2004, Current acquired a cable network that reaches nearly 20 million homes.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen spoke on a panel at the National Show examining how cable TV and Silicon Valley can collaborate. "There are many things you can do by combining the set-top with broadband content," Allen said. Meanwhile, Yahoo is still trying to establish a presence on cable's pipes despite its relationships with SBC and Verizon.

Via Lost Remote

This guide gives media content producers, directors, and photographers the information necessary to develop high quality multimedia content for delivery over wireless handheld devices.

Papers are solicited in all areas of Internet multimedia management systems.

Optics East is a new multidisciplinary East Coast event made up of 31 conferences in three technical symposia. Optical sensors have been incorporated into a vast array of technologies and applications.

Papers are solicited in all areas of Internet multimedia management systems including, but not limited to:

• image, video, and audio database management
• content-based searching and query processing
• video and audio parsing, segmentation, and analysis
• multi-modal analysis (text, audio, image, and video)
• multimedia data modeling and representation
• multimedia content description standards, such as MPEG-7, MPEG-21, DICOM
• languages for describing/exchanging media content
• multimedia indexing and archiving techniques
• lossless and near-lossless compression
• image/video transmission and distribution over the Internet and intranets
• media adaptation and Universal Multimedia Access
• 3D representation and display techniques on the Web
• performance evaluation measures
• video on demand (VoD) and media servers
• experimental prototypes embodying the state-of-the-art in multimedia information systems
• security and integrity of multimedia databases
• applications: E-commerce, entertainment, education, homeland security, health care, telemedicine, remote sensing, GIS, Interactive TV, CAD, digital libraries
• audio/video browsing and thumbnailing
• wireless media communication
• digital rights management
• audio and video enhancement.

bookmart submits simultaneously to furl, delicious, frassle, connotea, bag of urls, citeUlike, simpy, linkroll, spurl, and delirious or any combination thereof

The MIT Media Lab is launching a new program to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children.

"What is the $100 Laptop, really? The $100 Laptop will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop, which initially is achieved either by rear projecting the image on a flat screen or by using electronic ink (developed at the MIT Media Lab). In addition, it will be rugged, use innovative power (including wind-up), be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel. The cost of materials for each laptop is estimated to be approximately $90, which includes the display, as well as the processor and memory, and allows for $10 for contingency or profit."

Ruth Kikkin-Gil’s masters thesis seems nice. It’s about “mediating social relationship through mobile communication within groups of teenage girls". [via pasta and vinegar]

The Buddy Beads project suggests alternative ways for communication among teenagers, ways which emphasize their social structures, behaviors and needs.

-jewelry items that facilitate non-verbal and emotional communication among group members, through codes and signals which the group decided upon together.

Each group member has a matching jewelry piece and can use it to communicate her emotional state to the other group members. Messages are decided by the group in advance and construct a secret private code among its members.

Via Smart Mobs

Technology enables wireless, cable-connection-free high-definition TV setsNEC Corporation today announced the successful development of a highly compact 60-GHz-band (*1) wireless transceiver that transmits uncompressed high-definition television (HDTV) signals (*2), realizing HDTV sets and displays without cable connections.

It took just minutes for the Vatican to alert the world's media of Pope John Paul's death -- using text messages and email so the 2,000-year-old Church could meet the new demands of real-time news, according to Reuters.

"Just a quarter of an hour after the Pope was pronounced dead on Saturday at 9:37 p.m. (8.37 p.m. British time), the Vatican sent journalists an SMS message alerting them to a pending statement.

Television networks across the globe were already on standby a minute later when the email communique was beamed to a sea of state-of-the-art handheld computers, purchased by journalists at the suggestion of the Vatican.

"The Holy father died this evening at 21:37 in his private apartment," it said, in a simple Word document.

Via textually.org

A collaborative research team led by Carnegie Mellon University's Jose M.F. Moura has developed a new set of software tools that may revolutionize the way computer code is written. The team involves Moura and Markus Pueschel, professors with Carnegie Mellon's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Maria Manuela Veloso, a professor with the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, as well as David Padua, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jeremy Johnson, a professor of computer science at Drexel University. Moura said they have created a new breed of software called "SPIRAL" that automatically generates code for signal-processing applications - applications that help make computers run faster and cheaper.

Via Physics Org

What kind of TV shows are best suited to be ported to mobiles? Well, Fox is trying with mobisodes of the hit show "24". Seems like mystery/action shows would be a good genre, if put together cleverly in a series.
At a mobile video panel at Digital Hollywood, Nicholas Lehman, SVP, Strategy and Operations, for the Digital Music and Media Group at MTV, talked about how various Viacom network TV shows are best suited for mobile phones and are doing well: among them, the Daily Show by Jon Stewart (on Comedy Central), which is easily "bite-sizable", so to speak. Another one from the family: Best Week Ever, on VH1, which I think could easily be a huge hit on mobile phones. In fact, the whole lineup of VH1, which has become the pop-culture "List Channel" in the latest incarnation, could be ported to mobiles very easily.
He also talked about how mobisodes are a test bed for the TV networks: test out a show in short form on the mobiles, and if it is a hit, bring it on to the TV network. For the full audio from the panel, go here...
Related:
-- The Simple Life Mobisodes
-- 3G Mobisodes for Verizon and Vodafone Live
-- New 24 series goes mobile in UK
The Digital Hollywood Coverage is sponsored by Maven Networks.

Via PaidContent.org

A number of announcements from the maker of Moxi, the award-winning DVR and media center. First, Digeo is coming out with the Mini Moxi, a low-cost digital set-top box. Then Moxi is adding a software development kit. And finally, the Moxi PC Link will allow subscribers to share photos and music from PCs to their TV sets.

Via Lost Remote

Aren't we good little consumers? Yes, yes we are.

Consumer Electronics Association press release:

Nearly half of all consumers plan to make their next television purchase a high-definition (HDTV) television set, according to a new consumer survey released by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) today. The survey results reinforce CEA's market research projection that total digital television (DTV) unit shipments will surpass analog television sales for the first time in 2005, based on the "digital tuner mandate" issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

So, you lustful HD-geeks, check out the CNet reviews of hot new televisions debuted at CES. Hide your daughters from the Samsung HPR8072 80-inch plasma screen. I don't even have a wall that wide.

Possibly more exciting is the LG 60PY2DR 60-inch plasma TV with a built-in 160GB DVR for recording high-definition content and CableCard, eliminating a couple of settop boxes. (CableCard F.A.Q. and why you might not want this) If a generic DVR isn't good enough, you'll probably be wanting the new High-Definition, Digital Cable Ready TiVo.

Via Digital Television Blog

"Japanese company Sharp has designed a camera that allows you to zoom in simply by partially closing your eyelid. Sharp's automatic zoom technology, developed at its US lab in Washington state, uses an optical sensor just below the viewfinder to detect how much of the white of your eye, the sclera, is visible. Partially closing your eye for longer than the time it takes to blink activates the zoom, and doing this again zooms back out"

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

"There is tremendous opportunity between where we are now and when the media giants finally make their move onto the Internet, when they will do their best, as the music industry has, to make it their next mode of distribution."

(A good list. Scroll to the bottom of the page. -kc.)

Videoblogging wiki

"While predominantly a collection of external links right now, this section of the Voxmedia Wiki will ultimately grow to include a variety of information useful to vloggers, vidcasters, amateur filmmakers, digital video producers, and other artists and professionals who work with video."

(Also check out the Voxmedia main page. -kc.)

What If They Built A Muni Wi-Fi Network And No One Came?

"When not designed with some specific purpose in mind and not well advertised or understood, [municipal Wi-Fi networks are] not being used. Furthermore, the technology involved is looking like it may be a mistake. Despite continued efforts to turn Wi-Fi into a wider-area technology using mesh technologies, Wi-Fi was and is a local wireless technology. It's also an evolving one. Many of these muni-Wi-Fi efforts are quite ambitious and won't be completed for some time, at which point there will be many other options out there for wireless technologies, and the municipal offering may seem quite out of date. This isn't to say that it should never be done. However, cities that are rushing to go Wi-Fi just because it's the hot thing need to think past the momentary publicity boost to figure out what the real goals are for a municipal Wi-Fi project, and whether or not it really makes sense at this time with this technology."

Nice to see someone point out that just because we can do it doesn't mean we should. And this reminds me of another dodgy assumption: that technology can or will create a commons. I've done my fair share of consulting work that very quickly demonstrated that no collaborative technology can work where there is no collective will.

Via Purse Lip Square Jaw

A really fascinating result from Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly, per CNet:

"The fundamental fallacy underlying Metcalfe's (Law) is in the assumption that all connections or all groups are equally valuable," the researchers report. [...] The researchers propose a less dramatic rule of thumb: the value of a network with n members is not n squared, but rather n times the logarithm of n. That means, for example, that the total value of two networks with 1,048,576 members each is only 5 percent more valuable together compared to separate. Metcalfe's Law predicts a 100 percent increase in value by merging the networks.

This is most immediately useful conclusion:

When two networks merge, "the smaller network gains considerably more than the larger one. This produces an incentive for larger networks to refuse to interconnect without payment, a very common phenomenon in the real economy," the researchers conclude.

That could be applied to peer-to-peer networks in this way -- when a member of an established cluster has a request for a new connection, it should evaluate the relative size of the cluster that the new connection is in. New nodes would be forced to join small clusters at first, and small clusters would be forced to join other small clusters.

Via the weblog of Lucas Gonze

Bloglines the Portal? [Threadwatch.org - Marketing and Technology Discussed]

I've been thinking about the news that Bloglines have incorporated package tracking since it broke yesterday. The thing is, i just can't make up my mind on it...

I just noticed John Battelle talking about it and i presume that a rough translation of "i can't quite grok this" would mean he doesn't get it either? Probably.

I can't find anything negative to say about it, but then i can't find anything particularly positive about it, and it's for that reason that im going to go out on a limb say that ultimately, the portalization of bloglines, and that must be what this is leading to, just wont work.

I can't say why, call it a feeling, but it's like it's losing something, not gaining....."

There's evidence that kids are using Bluetooth to share content - Happy Slapping videos have spread throughout the UK via this method, supplemented via the web, admittedly. And I think this is a trend that is going to grow like crazy.

Mobile Weblog reader, Floris, left a comment on a post recently asking about passing data from phone to phone to bypass the networks. I think this is an interesting idea, worth exploring further.

Floris suggests adapting Cabir, the Bluetooth transmitted virus for this purpose. So, if I want to send a message from me in Munich to Floris in Belgium, I load it into the Cabir Messaging App (CMA) and forget all about it.

Meanwhile, my phone looks for others with the Bluetooth in "discoverable" mode and asks them if they're willing to act as a carrier for the message. If they say YES, they install the CMA, with the message. The new host then looks for more phones to pass the message on to, together with my original phone, which is still transmitting.

Of course, the CMA would need to be accepted by enough people to make this possible - maybe it could come with some kind of certificate? Any ideas anyone?

But assuming enough people agreed to accept it, I wonder if it would ever get to Floris and if so, how long it would take to get there. It's the digital equivalent to a message in a bottle. There's no guarantee that it'll ever get delivered. There's no guarantee when it'll be delivered. And everyone en route could read it (unless there was some form of encryption).

Therefore, I'm not quite sure what kind of message this would be applicable for. But it would be a really interesting thing to do, with exactly the same motivation as putting a message in a bottle and flinging it out to sea.

The big hurdle obviously is the willingness of the intermediaries to download potentially dodgy apps onto their phones. But if we were to reconsider this idea in a micro community, like a school, it may actually work. If everyone knew about the project and that the CMA was safe, it gets round the major stumbling block.

In a closed community environment, I wonder how long a message sent between 2 people would take to arrive? I reckon it would be quicker than we might think intuitively.

I think this would be a really interesting project for someone to try in the wild - though probably solely for academic purposes. Although, there may be commercial applications too, I guess....

What do you think? Please leave a comment - or since we're continuing to have problems with comments, drop me an email russell AT mobhappy DOT com and I'll put it up for you.

This afternoon I participated in a well-spent hourlong IRC chat with some of the leading video bloggers on the videoblogging mailing list, now at 450 members strong on Yahoo Groups.

It's funny how the intimacy and informality of being in a virtual room with a dozen or so folks feels different than seeing your words out there in cold digits on the Web. In any event, here's the pointer to mediacasting, and the transcript is here.

Via New Media Musings

Anatomic P2P tries to rid BitTorrent of its perennial weakness, its reliance on central trackers to keep files available. It is at least the third such attempt to decentralize BitTorrent, and here’s hoping it sticks. Respect P2P has interviewed the creator of Anatomic, which reveals a bit more for the layman than does the Anatomic P2P web site. The developer seems to have married a half-dozen different technologies, and has eschewed the Kazaa-alike search-based approach of eXeem. Anatomic P2P is also open-source, which makes it all the more attractive to me.

Via The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

The NAB2005 media show will take place April 16 - 21, 2005 in Las Vegas (exhibits open April 18). It is the world's largest electronic media show covering the development, delivery and management of professional video and audio content across all mediums such as HD and IPTV. IPTV will be a headliner and is sure to gather a lot of attention.

Keynote speakers include Verizon’s CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, Clear Channel’s Chairman, Lowry Mays, Chairman and CEO of AMD, Hector Ruiz, and CNN/U.S. President, Jonathan Klein.

You can find complete NAB2005(R) details at www.nabshow.com.

Via TVover.net

RE:vlogging is the remixing of videoblogposts

"the only way i can flirt with her is with a re-vlog mix of her original post with some nice ice cream pastel color and streak fx with a bit of rgb delay -- to spice up the stark whiteness of what appears to be her living room -- all added with real time sound synch to her original track using GRIDPRO."

Clive Thompson via Techdirt has a fascinating post on Attention Deficit Trait, a related sydrome to Attention Deficit Disorder, according to Dr. Edward Hallowell.

"It has basically the symptoms as ADD -- such as an inability to concentrate on one task at at time -- except it's context dependent.

ADT is caused by the technologies of constant interruption in the modern workplace and the modern home, such as email, instant messaging, SMSes, mobile phones, and endless meetings (or endless preplanned children's sports).

The thing that makes the two conditions different, he says, is that ADD seems to be hardwired, while ADT goes away when you're on vacation or in a relaxing, non-hyper-stimulated place."

Illustration from the cover of a book entitled Women with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Via textually.org

Selection of links to presentations (PDF, audio and posts) from this panel. The leading thinkers on this issue.

"

Thanks to Peter Morville, here are links to info about the panel on folksonomies at the IA Summit:

PDF's of the panelists' slides by Gene Smith Peter Morville, Peter Herholz and Thomas Vander Wal

Seb Paquet's notes on the presentations

An MP3 of Peter Morville on "sorting out social classification" which we're warned crashes Firefox but works on IE.

I'm really sorry I missed attending the Summit. It sounds fascinating: The leading thinkers and what a great time to be talking about these issues. "

Consumerpedia is Wikipedia for products. It’s in .00000001 alpha, the site says, but it seems usable, albeit empty. (I put in a review of Thinkpad X40, just to try it out.) The Help page highlights its tools for constructing a hierchical folksonomy: Anyone can create a category, a sub-category, a re-direct (= synonymn), or a related-to (= reciprocal link). It explicitly has avoided creating a top-down categorization scheme.

Who’s up for a Consumerpedia vs United Nations Standard Products and Services Code System Deathmatch! [Technorati tags: taxonomy consumerpedia wikipedia]

Via Many-to-Many

Bud Gibson says that Newsgator - a popular RSS aggregator - has hired a taxonomist to use its Newgator Online feed archive to create user profiles based on usage patterns. According to the post, this would help Newsgator better target consumers using a sort of collaborative filtering approach. Newsgator is also considering adding folksonomic features. I wonder if Newsgator will also use this data to try to court advertisers via behavioral targeting. (Via del.icio.us/tag/micropersuasion)

Via Micro Persuasion

Among the best level-headed discussion of mobile video I’ve heard till now: a panel at Digital Hollywood on the mobile TV and mobile video opportunity. Among the panelists: the always controversial Ross Levinsohn, SVP & GM of Fox Sports Interactive Media; Dr. Phillip Alvelda, CEO of Idetic (MobiTV); Keith Hindle, VP Integrated Marketing and Interactivity, FremantleMedia North America (American Idol); among others (Other panelists and bios here). Among the topics discussed:
— Importance of sports in mobile video…
— 75 years of TV’s history, and their attitude, versus the emerging paradigm of mobility of TV…
— Importance of porting TV shows: for Viacom, that means Jon Stewart Show (on Comedy Central) and “Best Week Ever”, from VH1
— Mobile as a test platform for mainstream TV…

(Click through to download the mp3. -kc.)

Via MocoNews.net

A convenient utility that simplifies batch uploading your photos and video clips to online services,without losing your own valuable annotations and metadata.

In case you haven't seen it yet, the February/March issue of American Journalism Review has an important article about the Washington Post's print circulation slide and efforts to stem it (by senior writer Rachel Smolkin), "Reversing the Slide." If you care about the future of news, read this.

Here's a significant excerpt about some Post focus groups of people all under 45, who had moved to the region in the last five years but haven't subscribed to the paper:

"An affable session leader from Boston began by asking about their daily routines and news habits. About an hour and 15 (...)

Entry continued...

Read our wall-to-wall Digital Hollywood coverage, going on this week in Santa Monica...audio from panels, interviews, views, rumors, the works...
The Digital Hollywood Coverage is sponsored by Maven Networks...

Via PaidContent.org

"Thinking about building or hosting an online community? Looking for specific tips, tools and ideas? Start here. The following is a collection of articles that may help inform your work. They are all covered by our Creative Commons license which makes the material available with limited restrictions. Check it out."

Announcing an independent mobile gaming special interest group: the spirit of knowledge sharing and cooperation for mobile play developers.

This year's Game Developers Conference covered mobile multiplayer frontiers and aspirations the for mobile media, but perhaps the most promising sign for innovative mobile gaming to come out of the GDC was an emerging methodology of mobile games design. Not only did participants discuss smart techniques for making play on small screens, but they laid the groundwork for future conversations around innovation, demonstrating a fortuitous alignment of mobile media makers around the creation of better mobile play experiences.

Design for Mobile

Proof of deepening mobile game design studies was abounding at the conference. One session examined the "Psychology of Small Screen Game Design," where New York-based researcher and entrepreneur Karthik Swaminathan delved into cognitive psychology to explore the tiny bounded parameters of mobile displays. Swaminthan described the limitations of the medium, and explained strategies for creating potent images and managing pattern recognition, as tracking many details and many moving objects in a small area can be difficult without careful visual composition. His points seemed intuitive, like his advocacy of marked visual contrast, but his words was well-taken after a demonstration of some licensed mobile and GameBoy games where you couldn't discern the main character from the busy background.

Swaminathan's exploration of a mobile media methodology was just one demonstration of increasing specialization: the Game Developers Conference hosted three separate panels considering audio design for mobile games. And the GDC Mobile proceedings included hefty papers, like "Game AI Development of Car Racing on Mobile Phones using Fuzzy Logic." After years of watching stiff-shirted panelists present variations of Tetris and bemoan access to carrier portals, these kinds of geeky discussions showed mobile gaming has reached pre-pubescence, if not adolescence.

In spite of John Carmack's recent enthusiasm, mobile games projects are rapidly outgrowing some of their small-scale development roots. As the scope of games expand in complexity, so budgets, content assets and labor required will expand as well. The game industry will see increasing amounts of marketing, and even more elaborate licensing deals. This growth may not lead to innovation if the game mechanics remain mired in pre-mobile digital play. But now mobile game designers have some homework they can do if they're interested in innovation that suits the empowered handset. And, these conversations will continue after the GDC as mobile game development has a new advocate.

IGDA MGD SIG

The Game Developers Conference has been tightly integrated with the International Game Developer's Association. The IGDA is an independent body charged with spurring conversations across the world of game development. They host conversations online and at the GDC about intellectual property, diversity, quality of life and other areas of interest in game development. Now, mobile technology is on the radar of the IGDA.

To spurn innovation and encourage dialog, the International Game Developers Association started up a Mobile Game Development Special Interest Group (MGD SIG). Playing to the IGDA's status as independent, the Mobile SIG will work with all makers of mobile games. The first public meeting was this month, at the Game Developers Conference. A small crowd of speakers, academics, developers and publishers gathered around Swaminathan and the Mobile SIG's fresh-faced chairperson, Kurt Uhlir, an independent technologist and mapmaker NavTeq's business affairs manager. He explains the Mobile Game Development SIG's unique role: "there's no group that includes every part of the value chain in the [mobile] industry."

Citing continuing evolution in the mobile games space, Uhlir explains that the roles of publisher, distributor and developer are still being codified. There's still a sort of frontier operating mode, where mobile developers often have to be able to do everything: pitch, develop, market and distribute their games. He expects the Mobile SIG to provide independent technology sharing, expertise and business advice for these folks who have to understand both new technologies and new business models.

Starting this year, the SIG will be publishing white papers covering mobile game industry issues, including new technologies like location-based services and using cameras for capture of in-game assets and movement control. Another white paper will explore the mobile gaming ecosystem, helping developers and aspiring developers understand the range of publishing and distribution options, which could be wider than many people suspect with the advent of independent payment mechanisms and increasing numbers of mobile game publishers.

These publications should be useful, if briefly accurate in the quickly evolving mobile space. Establishing a basis for ongoing conversation about mobile game development could be the more important contribution, promoting knowledge sharing between mobile media makers. More basic work remains for the academics and the special interest group: defining mobile play. As Uhlir points out, even the most basic of games, Tetris, is often categorized any one of five different ways on carriers' mobile game portals. If each carrier has a different naming and sorting mechanism for mobile games, how might players know what to expect from a play experience?

Hopefully between publishers better informing players, developers informing themselves and academics informing anybody, a more literate mobile game medium will take shape. With the basics established and agreed upon, work can begin on more advanced concepts -- the more profound potential for truly mobile play.

The Future Music Lab at the University of Plymouth, England, is looking for new modes of interaction with musical systems through bio-signal interfacing, networks and responsive environments.

One of the projects the team is working on is a "brain cap" that can detect and recognize musical ideas in the minds of composers with up to 99 percent accuracy. Project leader Eduardo Reck Miranda reported up to 99 percent accuracy in recognizing specific electroencephalogram patterns for musical ideas using a 128-electrode EEG brain cap with signal-processing algorithms.



"When the technology is more mature we will test it with musician patients at the Royal Hospital of Neuro-Disability in London" said Miranda. "The idea is to let these patients have the opportunity to continue making music, provided that the brain damage did not impair their musical cognition."

Although the musical ideas tested were extremely simplistic, compared with the complexity of musical composition, the team has demonstrated that the idea of interfacing the brain with computers for musical applications is no longer a science fiction fantasy.

Miranda also plans to switch from the 128-electrode brain cap (rather cumbersome and inelegant) to a magnetic encephalogram, which records the magnetic field generated by neural activity. MEGs are less well-developed than EEGs, but they should provide more accurate, localized signals that might not even require a cap.

Via this annoyingly good blog. Further info.

Via we make money not art

Nielsen//NetRatings is creating a ratings system to measure the number of people who are accessing news, entertainment and other services on their mobile phones.

Nielsen//NetRatings will measure audiences for mobile soaps, news and information services and other entertainment offerings for the mobile networks that sign up. It is tracking audiences for Optus’s Optus Zoo content service as well as Hutchison’s 3G mobile service “3″, and is conducting trials to measure Telstra’s i-mode content service, which was launched last month.

(via Picturephoning)

Via Diablog

Engadget has found their way to a beta version of TiVo Desktop 2.1 and they give it a once over.

The good stuff they find includes better support for TiVoToGo on portable devices and a TiVo-branded video player complete with the green playback bar and sounds we're all used to. They also are getting rid of the playback password, which sounds like good news, but...

They're also doing what they can to keep the TiVo files from being seen by unclean eyes software. They block certain programs from playing .tivo files, to keep programs from transcoding the files into a format without DRM.

So this "upgrade" removes my ability to strip the DRM on .tivo files so that I can watch my .tivo files on my mac laptop? Awesome, since I woke up this morning hoping that my stuff would be less useful!

Also, what's up with the UI? The TiVo remote works because my fingers can feel around the rewind/pause/fast-forward buttons. Great physical UIs don't make for great software UIs. Or maybe I'm just bitter over the whole DRM thing and taking it out on a poor, defenseless UI.

Update: Dave Zatz, who reviewed the software for Engadget, has instructions on how to downgrade from TiVo Desktop 2.1 to 2.0 if you installed 2.1 and want to restore your ability to put your media on a device of your choice.

Via PVRblog

Reuters has announced that it would host a debate next Tuesday, April 5 where the topic of discussion will be "the impact of blogs in journalism and the media."

Details as follows:

When: 6.00 pm - 8.30 pm, Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

Where: The Reuters Building, (42ND Street and 7th Avenue), 3 Times Square, 30th Floor, New York NY 10036

Panel convenes at 6.15pm, followed by open audience discussion and a cocktail reception.

Scheduled to participate:

Paul Holmes: Global Editor, General & Political News, Reuters

Stephen Baker: Senior Writer, IT Group, BusinessWeek

Jay Rosen: Author, Pressthink.org, & Associate Professor, NYU Dept. of Journalism

Bryan Keefer: Assistant Managing Editor, Columbia Journalism Review Daily

Garrett Graff: FishbowlDC.com, 1st White House Accredited Blogger

Dave Winer: Editor, Scripting News

John Fund: Columnist, OpinionJournal.com

Most importantly, the topics of discussion:

Are bloggers journalists? Should they be afforded the same rights as journalists?

With blogs central to the recent resignations of top journalists, is anyone holding the bloggers to account?

Do blogs have a vital role in the national debate?

Are they seeking the truth and exposing poor journalism? Or are they being used as campaigning tools to advance particular causes or points of view?

RSVP: Mediafolk wishing to attend should reach out to Sophie Brendel at +1 646 223 4331 or sophie.brendel (at) reuters (dot) com.

Via The Media Drop

As the race between MovableType and WordPress for leadership of the DIY blogware market continues, there is any number other alternatives in the marketplace that offer similar services in a range of programming languages. Looking for something different, or always wanted to know what else was available, well heres a list of ten DIY Blog platforms you may not have not have visited, or even heard of, and in the coming weeks, time permitting, we’ll even review them one by one so you know what to expect.

b2Evolution
developed from the same original code that spawned WordPress, b2Evolution is written in PHP and provides a variety of features. Licenced under the GPL, so is always free to use.

Text Pattern
Described as a flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even blogs!. Textpattern has had a few high profile users over the years and is the creation of Dean Allen. Licensed under a BSD license and is free to use.

Serendipity
Silly URL but strong blogging platform, these guys have been making a fair bit of noise lately and each release seems to bring about even better improvements. BSD license and free.

Blosxom
described as “a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind", Blosxom doesn’t rely on PHP or SQL databases as many other blogging tools do, but uses Perl and flat files. If blogware were a model school, Blodxom would be the resident anorexic, with the smallest sized core files in the pack. Free to use.

Nucleus
Been around for quite a while and currently upto version 3.2, Nucleus is free to use under the GPL and has a reasonable sized user base.

BlogCMS
A Nucleus off-shot described as the “most complete, feature-packed, personal publishing system on the market", BlogcMS comes with lots of little extras and seems to be moving ahead of Nucleus with a bigger user and support base. Free under GPL.

Blojsom
The blogware behind Apple’s OSX Tiger server, Blojsom is fairly unique in being powered by Java and was inspired originally by Blosxom. Free under BSD.

Expression Engine
From the makers of pMachine, Expression Engine in many ways could be described as a Roll Royce surrounded by Toyota’s, if only mainly due to its cost. None the less this powerful blogging tool provides a paid alternative to MovableType that may be better suited to users who don’t mind paying for their support.

Pivot
European based development and an ugly layout on its main page shouldn’t disuade you from keeping Pivot on your list. PHP and free, Pivot maintains a loyal user base and an impressive range of features.

bBlog
another blog tool that grew from the same code as WordPress, bBlog utilises the smarty template system and is free to use.

Via Media Guerrilla

"After years of complaining that the RIAA and MPAA were missing the boat, and should have embraced things like Napster instead of supressing them, we got iTunes and the like. Now, Sony has announced it will 'make its top 500 films available digitally in the next year' according to a report on the BBC, with Sony's iPod replacement being the PSP."

Via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service

It looks like some interesting cameras will be unveiled at this year's NAB. A week back we heard about the JVC GY-HD100U, a three-CCD camera that could record at 720p (progressive scan). Good, but not as crazy as the unconfirmed details of the Panasonic AG-HVX200 DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder, which is being listed as supporting resolutions up to 1080p at 60 frames per second. If that doesn't make you start to salivate, let's just say that it's pretty much as good as it gets, resolution-wise, with current technology. The price will be high, for sure, but it looks like Panasonic has a contender in the top-end HD video space to go up against Sony and Canon. (Thanks, Jeff!)

Wanna peek? Sure you do- AG-HVX200 arrives! [DVXUser]

Via Gizmodo

This site uses BitTorrent and RSS feeds to showcase high quality videos of live video mixing from around the world. You can subscribe to our Bittorrent+RSS feed to have these videos delivered to you automatically.

"Newspaper readers have always had their little "letters to the editor" section, if they can get in. But cheap online tools have given anyone with a Net connection the chance to start a publication, a Weblog, a chat room, a bulletin board. Citizen media sites focused on tiny communities give journalists a role as content shepherds, whipping the chaos of reader-generated content into a manageable morass."

New software called Rabble eases searching and posting on weblogs

" new technology expected to launch in April promises to turn cellular phones into mobile blogging tools.

The application, called ``Rabble,'' streamlines the now-cumbersome process for publishing text or images from a cell phone to a Weblog. It also creates a way to search mobile blogs for items of interest -- from homes for sale in a particular neighborhood to updated tour information for a favorite band.

``This is a personal publishing platform,'' said Shawn Conahan, chief executive of Intercasting, the San Diego start-up that created Rabble."

Via del.icio.us/tag/journalism

"This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to del.icio.us - de.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I'm sure it won't take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature. For those not familiar the meme is social bookmarking, which is basically a service to share bookmarks publicly instead (or in addition to) only within your browser. There are lots of other additional benefits, but that's the gist of it. More details here and here."

Via del.icio.us/dblinks

Television addicts rejoice: Now you can take more shows on the road. Microsoft has launched a $20-a-year service that lets people download TV shows to portable devices.

With the new service, MSN Video Downloads, customers will have access to more content -- some shows from Fox Sports, news and business headlines from MSNBC.com and children's programming.

Free email form to allow bloggers to create grassroots campaigns

The same tools that allow you to easily copy and share music and video also allow you to make your own.