unmediated

SIMAC is about music metadata, about what you can say of a piece of music, on what is hidden in a music file, in a collection of music files, and in the collective knowledge of a community of music lovers.

SIMAC's main task is the development of prototypes for the automatic generation of semantic descriptors and development of prototypes for exploration, recommendation, and retrieval.

Peffisaur is a free, multiuser MMS weblog. People can send MMS with their mobile phones containing photos and texts and it will be presented on the web page. Each user is also given their own page with only their postings on. It's all about sharing your daily life with others - at least the part of your life that you want to share and feel you can squeeze into your mobile phone.

Mbuni is a fully-fledged Open Source MMS gateway (MMSC) suitable for operators and MMS VAS providers.

In a speech Dan Gillmor has prepared for the World Editor's Forum annual conference in Seoul this week, Gillmor says competition between mainstream mass media and with people in the emerging citizen journalism sphere can make all journalists better at what they do. "We have a lot we can -- and must -- learn from each other....

"News organizations should be inviting the former audience not just into the process of commenting on the news, but also creating news reports. For that to happen, professionals need to open up -- in a number of ways."

Some of his advice:

• Offer respect for the good things citizen journalists do
• Help citizen journalists understand those best practices and principles of traditional journalism
• Point people to resources where they can learn more about how journalism works.

Tambur Messaging Gateway is an open source SMS/MMS messaging gateway platform. Tambur is used to integrate into SMSC and MMSC infrastructure provided by network operators, exposing their functionalities through an uniform, easy-to-implement HTTP based API. Tambur is written in the Java language, and uses the JBoss application server as its foundation.

"While I do think it's possible to 'move the people' with commercial products, the mass commodification of radical ideas and marginal practices is not without consequence."

VJIMAGEBANK...VJIB is an open “source” content community database of multimedia VJ artists. The audio, images and video clips (“contents”) on VJIB can be everything from nature to the most abstract video creations. All uploaded contents will b

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

As we mentioned last week, the VDSL2 standard (100Mbps, 12,000 feet) has been ratified by the International Telecommunications Union. Tom's Hardware takes a brief look at Infineon's Vinax ADSL2+/VDSL2 solution, which they say is the first chipset to fully comply with the new standard (probably not the only ones claiming that, either). The VDSL2 frequency spectrum has been increased from 12 MHz to 30 MHz to boost VDSL's range, and increase speeds from 70/30Mbps, to symmetrical 100Mbps. Infineon says the chips should be available in volume by Q3; whether anyone deploys the tech is another matter entirely.

Via Broadbandreports

In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple risks that a percentage of their users will cast off the shackles of prepackaged free or commercial software and start working on their own inventions. Spotlight, Automator and Widgets all involve aspects of programming, and provide a clear set of stepping stones for someone to develop more of an interest.

Free Internet TV is an Internet television tuner program that can receive over 750 online channels of daily and live broadcasts from around the world. There is no need for a PC TV card because the TV channels are streamed through your Internet connection.

(Free Internet TV! Only $19.95! ;) -kc.)

Via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service

Jeff Jarvis: " The essential difference - newspapers are institutional and blogs are personal, newspapers try to be dispassionate while blogs are passionate."

"...I speak not of the swarthy camera pirate with his heavy lens and professional press pass, but of the mild mannered college professor with the brand new camera-phone, the smiley housewife with the shiny Sure-Shot, the cocksure columnist with a thesis already brewing in the laptop. They are more than erstwhile tourists. They are the rabid bloggers, the plugged-in pundits, the citizen press corps - whip-smart individuals whose very nature drives them to post pictures, links and commentary."

Blogviz is a flash driven visualization model for mapping the transmission and internal structure of top links across the blogosphere.

It explores the idea of meme propagation by assuming a parallel with the spreading of most cited URLs in daily weblog entries.

Blogviz is currently a portrait of blogosphere’s topic activity during the first 64 days of 2005. Nevertheless, the model was developed to easily incorporate different timeframes. Blogviz will continue to expand in the future, to the possible point of including real-time data.

The interface displays each topic as a diagonal line from the first appearance of the topic to the last, charting the time in which each blog posted about the topic.

Will the current launch of mobile TV services hinder the uptake when the carriers launch the full service? The Register thinks so. “Despite these uncertainties, such is urgency of the 3G operators’ need to increase revenues and ROI from its network, that many are leaping into the market at the earliest stage and with inadequate technology. This risks disappointment with the results of the trials and a tougher job to convince consumers to test the full-blown mobile TV services when they emerge.”

Via MocoNews.net

Rodi or Rodia (Ρόδι or Ροδιά) means pomegranate in Greek. The Rodi program is a tiny P2P client/host (under 300K of binary code) implemented in pure Java. It's network use is similar to the bitTorrent concept. The program will serve the filesharing community with fast data delivery and serve the Open Source community by facilitating faster software deployment.

A quick rundown of Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman's great citizen journalism resource, 'We Media.

So last we heard, some high-tech honchos had gotten together to press Congress on the issue of the official digital TV switchover date. That legislation is now drafted, and sets a December 31, 2008 date by which broadcasters who’re still hogging those analog airwaves have got to give it up. One of the issues still unresolved is what to do about the nagging problem of the 20+ million American households that are still using antenna-based TVs, who are gonna be understandably disgruntled at the prospect of needing to go in on some new gear just to keep the tube a-pumpin’. Lawmakers are (this just in!) split down party lines, with Republicans favoring a subsidy for low-income households and Democrats favoring a subsidy for anyone who buys a set-top box.

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Via Engadget

You probably read somewhere about the troubles the Ventura County Star has had with unruly readers of its website posting naughty stuff in the user comments attached to articles. The website staff shut down the feedback mechanism for a while to take control of the problem; now it's back, under tighter control.

I hope people in the news business don't take this as an excuse not to open up articles to reader feedback. That would be a big mistake. This is a matter of implementation; get the system for dealing with bad behavior right and you can have a healthy, (...)

Entry continued...

Bravo to the students at Free Culture, who have just reached an important milestone: incorporation. As part of the process, they're asking the Internet community for advice on a number of key organizational decisions, while explaining the important role the student movement plays in the battle for a culture in which we can all be active participants:

Only a handful of students want to be activists, but millions of young people want to know more about why Napster got shut down, why their friends are getting sued, why they can share and remix some things and not others, why the TV news talks about celebrity trials rather than the issues in their own communities, how new technologies offer people new ways to participate in their culture and society (and why some people want to stop it), how this process has played out historically, why people can't afford medicines even though they’re cheaply produced, and so on.

in the news, and in our conversations, every day. We, as a generation, want to know about them. And inevitably, once we learn a bit, we want to stand up for what we see as right, and stand up against what we see as wrong. To bring young people into these discussions, I'm convinced, is at the heart of our mission.

We're incredibly lucky to have these smart, energetic, inspired young people talking face-to-face with other students about these issues. Check out Gavin Baker's post and lend a hand.

Younger US Users Ready For Mobile Multimedia
By Carlo Longino, Thu May 26 23:00:00 GMT 2005

More than a third of phone users age 13-34 are interested in mobile music, a new survey says.
By Carlo Longino

Music is the most interesting potential content service, according to a consulting firm's new survey, with 40 percent of the 1,000 mobile users between 13 and 34 that were surveyed saying they're very interested in receiving commercial-free radio over their handsets, with 35 percent interested in downloads to their device. Another 40 percent said they were interested in ad-supported video content, while under 20 percent said they'd pay $4 per month or 30 cents a clip for video content.

There are a few interesting takeaways here: first, mobile music is an area of interest, though that's no surprise to operators and service providers, who are working feverishly to get mobile download services going. Second, there does appear to be interest in mobile video -- but people don't want to pay for it. That means there's an opportunity here for mobile marketers to step in and seize some eyeballs. But respondents' price-consciousness could make one believe they're value conscious as well, and won't accept intrusive or gratuitous advertising. If users don't see mobile video (on a very general level) as being worth $4 per month, how much advertising will they accept to make up for it?

Nearly a quarter of those surveyed also said they'd be likely to switch carriers if their current one didn't offer "advanced, multimedia wireless content and services", meaning such content could become a powerful competitive metric.

So what to make of these numbers when taken alongside earlier figures from the UK showing somewhat disappointing data usage? For one thing, there's the implication that advanced multimedia content will attract a large number of new mobile data users, emphasizing the opportunity for revenue growth in this area.

Of course, it's easy to say that you'd love to have some service on your phone when it's just a survey, but it's another matter when it comes to paying for things. This relatively high level of interest doesn't mean operators can be complacent and lazy in their offerings. How many of these users can be converted into buyers if the failure rate remains as high as the 50 percent cited in the UK study?

Choice of content is one issue, and it would appear that users have an interest in multimedia content.But implmentation is another matter, and one operators will ignore at their peril.

Here's the latest audio from MAKE Magazine In this Make audio show- we interview Andrew Baron, the fellow behind RocketBoom- a daily 3 minute news show produced each day for the web, PSPs, phones and more. Want to make your own news show? Here's how. Right click or Control + click to download this MP3 to you local system or add the MAKE Audio feed to your podcasting application and get the show automatically! Show notes after the jump...

p>Cingular Wireless announced today it has set a new record for wireless text messaging in the fourth season of "American Idol." The company recorded more than 41.5 million text messages throughout the show's 12-week voting period, which is believed to represent the largest volume of text messaging in a single campaign in the history of the U.S. wireless industry.

The number of text messages in the fourth season of "American Idol" more than tripled the amount of text messages recorded in the 2004 season.

[via mobiledia.com]

GameDaily.biz has up a discussion they had earlier in the week with Frank Gibeau, EA's Senior Vice President of Marketing, North America. Mr. Gibeau holds forth on where EA is going (and therefore, where the industry is going) as regards next-generation platforms, the prices of future game titles, and the cost of making games. He also comments on Nintendo's position in the market right now. From the article: "I think the Nintendo customer is so entrenched and loyal that the company knows that they have a base of customers that they are building off of. Is it the same size that it was on 8-bit? Certainly not. They definitely have seen their market position erode in the face of market introductions by Sony and Microsoft."

Yes, this has been covered heavily. Not nearly enough noise has been made about how easy hacking this device is. Nokia has opened up almost everything even placing the graphics under a Creative Commons license. Nokia has also constructed a firm foundation to develop on. Underneath everything is a Debian based system with a 2.6.11 kernel. Debian is one of the largest binary distributions mainly because of its apt package management system. Apt will make it really easy to get new software and keep the installed software updated. A modern kernel means the device will be able to keep up with developing technologies like bluetooth and usb. The next layer is an Xserver. This is not a pda and Nokia has decided not to use technologies like Qtopia or Opie for  the application layer. This will make porting graphical apps much easier and with the addition of Gtk they will also have a consistent look. If you’re worried about the ARM processor support, just check out all of the programs that people ported for the Zaurus.

The best news for you is that Nokia has set up a comprehensive development site. It describes the underlying software layers and how to set up the development environment to emulate the device. It even has a walkthrough for how to port applications to the device. As an example they show how to port Gaim, which is funny because most places have reported that IM support won’t be released until 2006. If Nokia does a good job building in support for Microsoft htpcs, iTunes control, and Tivo control I think this device will be certain to take off. I’d like to see someone make an electronic programming guide that you could use to change the channels on the tv and schedule recordings instead of the intrusive on-screen-displays used by most cable boxes. If anything it will be nice to hang out on the couch reading news and ebooks without having to use my genital scorching Dell.

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Gail Nakada at Wireless Watch Japan, goes inside NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, at the NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories open house yesterday.

The annual event is open to the public, this year's show focused once again on digital TV broadcasting with three floors of cameras, servers, receivers and handheld devices. She checks out mobile phones receiving digital terrestrial broadcasting using MPEG-4, H.264, scheduled to begin in Japan by spring 2006. Both Vodafone and KDDI had demonstration models.

Mobile receivers drew packed crowds herded into Disneyland-style long lines waiting their turn to handle an 801SH Vodafone/Sharp CDMA Qualcomm handset. No bigger than a conventional cell phone, the 801SH has a hybrid split-screen displaying images on the upper half with the bottom reserved for scrolling data feeds and Web links to programming, etc.

Don't you just love those reports from Wireless Watch Japan!

Via Daily Wireless

MacMerc.com has a sneak peak preview of iPodderX 3.0.
Now you'll be able to subscribe to vlogs, podcasts and blogs with the same client!


Wizards of Technology - PodCast 44 - 2005.05.26
Interview with August Trometer and Ray Slakinsky discussing the new iPodderX 3.0

iPodderX Version 3.0 will be available for download today at 7:00 PM.

iPodderX - Official Site.

Via Off On A Tangent

Over at the Media Center's morph blog, Dewayne Hendricks, who is on the FCC’s Technology Advisory Board, is starting a conversation on wireless technology and the future.

Via New Media Musings

I was intrigued by this extract from the Headshift weblog:

"The new Web 2.0 tools and services help create an ecosystem of connected people and information - as David Weinberger put it this week: The cure to information overload is more information, only it should become more ambient.

We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links."

(emphasis mine)

This reminded me of Ambient music. I used to be a bit of a Brian Eno fan - he was the guy who 'invented' Ambient music.

Time to coin a new phrase (I haven't done that in a while). Applied to RSS and blogging, Aggregator Ambience is when information envelops us but doesn't require our complete attention. We let Web 2.0 tools and services, along with our social network and serendipity, pick out the bits and pieces we want to pay attention to. It's what all RSS Aggregator developers should be aiming for, Aggregator Ambience. This is one of the strong points of Rojo btw.

Not unrelated is this discussion of the 'River of News' style of reading RSS feeds. As Dave Winer puts it: "...you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal."

The Ambience and River of News metaphors appeal to me because they are laid-back, almost Zen, ways of approaching the issue of Information Overload. No more anxiety, no need to pore over every single piece of microcontent that flows through your RSS Aggregator. Just chill out and let the information wash over you like a Brian Eno record.

Ahhhhhhhh..... now, if only I could live my life that way! Hmmm, maybe I just need to go listen to some Eno music :-)

/feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb?g=94"/>

Via Read/Write Web

The New York Times publishes yet another piece on the shifting entertainment habits that are having a major effect on our entertainment-industrial-complex (With Popcorn, DVD's and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home). Amazingly enough, with more entertainment options available to them, people are spending less time with older forms of entertainment.

Via The Importance of...

Jenny Levine reports on the good times had by librarians at the "Gaming@YourLibrary" presentation. I've always thought that videogames have a place in libraries, and The Shifted Librarian is making it happen (Gaming @ Your Library Sessions Blogged!). See also, Gaming Photos Up on Flickr.

Several people told me that they hadn't expected to enjoy themselves so much, and that you truly don't understand gaming until you experience it yourself. You haven't lived until you've seen a roomful of librarians competing against each other in Mario Kart and DDR! In fact, several people stayed after the second session ended just to keep playing (and I think Dan B. probably stopped to purchase a PlayStation and DDR package on his way home!). We even had a few extra minutes to let some of our staff play, including our executive director, Alice Calabrese!

Via The Importance of...

Wade Roush, senior editor for Technology Review, has created a blog for an article he is writing on on continuous social computing. The full article is now posted on the Continuous Computing Blog and readers are commenting on the article to help shape and inform what is eventually published in the magazine. He's using pop-up boxes to annotate changes and identify sources and comments throughout the text.

In thinking about Cynthia Miller's contention that newsrooms would be better off with more women in positions of decisionmaking, I wonder if the movement towards participatory, collaborative, open-source journalism -- as represented by Roush's experiment -- might create spaces for women to contribute in ways that weren't as accessible in older forms of journalism.

Carol Gilligan's take on feminist ethics contends that women's moral voice ..."speaks a language of care stressing relationships and responsibilities," whereas men stress a "language of justice emphasizing rights and rules."

The ability to collaborate, listen, and engage in conversation clearly isn't the sole domain of either gender. But if women historically have tended toward a way of relating to the world that exercises these qualities, then employing more women in newsrooms that want to develop news ways of doing journalism might be just one of the catalysts needed to propel us forward.

Cycling ‘74 offered a glimpse into digital music’s future last night at the San Francisco Apple Store, with one of the first public appearances of the JazzMutant Lemur programmable touchscreen controller working in concert with its software editor. Unlike conventional touchscreen tablets, the Lemur can support multiple simultaneous finger taps, making it, at least theoretically, possible to even play piano on the thing.

Product Specialist Gregory Taylor showed how easy it is to create customized control surfaces merely by dragging intelligent user interface objects onto a layout of the Lemur’s screen. The software ships with some 16 of these widgets, including the expected sliders and knobs, along with more experimental ones like bouncing balls that react to friction.

Once the interface is constructed, it can be downloaded in seconds to the Lemur over an Ethernet connection using Open Sound Control. The Lemur can communicate in both directions with the computer it is connected to and used to control anything in Max/MSP or Jitter that you’d like. The possibilities are literally endless.

Taylor explained that the Lemur was designed for “idiosyncratic interface control, because nobody wants to perform all the time on a laptop.” In fact, the Lemur should probably have been called the Chameleon due to its ability to transform itself from a mixing board to a drum machine to video controller, to a way to convert incoming email into MIDI data (gee, I wonder what my SPAM would sound like?).

Ed: The Lemur is now weeks away from shipping, with a price of US$2495. Much has been made of how expensive it is, but keep in mind this isn't just any old LCD touchscreen: anything cheaper lacks the ability to tap more than one place at once. Of course, I still can't afford one, but if you can, let us know -- and what's really exciting is thinking a couple of years down the road as these get cheaper. -PK

Photos by Lee Sherman..

Via createdigitalmusic.com

Greasemonkey script to play mp3s linked from a page.

: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says cable, telecom, and satellite companies just don't get the business model of the Internet, and that "the future of video is web television, not what companies are now calling IPTV." I would say he's a bit delusional on that one...
Anyway, Hastings said Netflix will start offering direct Internet service [in association with Tivo] this year, and will dedicate 1 to 2 percent of its annual revenue to the service over the next five years. With $506 million in annual revenue last year, that's roughly $5 million to $10 million for the offering each year.

Via PaidContent.org

Two weeks ago when I reviewed the Sony PSP for its movie and music prowess I was stunned by the clarity of Spider-Man 2 as I viewed it on that unit's small, but sharp, widescreen display. The movie was delivered on Sony's Universal Media Disc (UMD), a new proprietary format that in several weeks Sony put into the hands of 1.2 million users. I said this in the review:

If UMD proves to be a smash hit one area it can affect is the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD battle going on it Hollywood right now as it would force the studios to commit resources to the smaller UMD format while they hedge on the two larger formats…if UMD movie and album sales achieve Sony's wildest dreams as a market force it will increase the risk of success for all later formats and delivery schemes.

Well, the numbers are starting to come in on UMD movie sales and the results are excellent.

Since the introduction of the PSP two Sony titles have hit the 100,000 mark in unit sales, Resident Evil 2 and House of the Flying Daggers. Both titles shipped on April 19th, reaching these numbers within a month of release. To put that in perspective the first DVD title to reach 100K was Air Force One and it took 9 months to reach it.

Hollywood has taken notice on these numbers and all but one are jumping in with select titles that they feel will best play to the PSP's target audience of teens and twenty-somethings. The only studio sitting out right now is Warner Brothers and the reason is because they have a competing technology called mini-DVD. With the success of UMD sales Paramount, Fox and Universal, who previously agreed to support mini-DVD, have dropped it.

The first casualty, mini-DVD shows that the movie industry is not going to support too many different formats as multiple formats increase shipping and warehousing costs. This is why twenty years ago the studios dropped support of Sony's Betamax format, leaving only VHS behind. One format is simply more cost effective.

Email, text and Metcalfe's Law (again)...

In essence, email is not person-to-person communication because very often the sender senses - and exploits - that their message is really being posted to an inbox, not directly to a person.

On the other hand, texting is more real-time and more like "talking". The sender has a view that their message is going straight to a person, not to their inbox.

[...] With email, a great deal of emotional emphasis is placed on sending. With texting, the emphasis is on the receiving. The technical reason for this is that texting has always been push-based. Therefore, a sent message is immediately brought to the attention of the recipient who will have their device with them at all times. This immediacy quality is missing with email, which is why the perception remains that emailing is to an "in-tray", not to a person..

Paul Golding goes on to speak about the small success Blackberry had so far - in his eyes. He concludes about the use of mobile email.:

[...] There is also the possibility of reaching a tipping point where the number of active mobile email users creates a shift in usage patterns and our sense of time-sensitivity changes. Suddenly we might expect more rapid reaction to information changes than we currently do. There is no doubt that once exposed to mobile email and the "connectedness" it brings, it is easy to get used to.

I think the big difference between SMS and email is the amount, the size and most importantly the cost. Where SMS is often used for one-to-one personal short messages which are worth 20 Rappen, email is cheap and you can get a lot which is not really necessary. That's also why I think email push is highly problematic.

Push services should always remain expensive for the "pusher" somehow otherwise I think we will be quickly overwhelmed on "always on devices" like the mobile phone. Certainly you should be able to accept a push service, but only for a special purpose and easy to cancel. Somehow SMS and the Pager share the same origin, and I wouldn't want a pager for all the email I get. But if I can chose a push service for some time, why not.

Personnally I believe that push is not that important, and that pull services (RSS is the best example) are still much more friendly to overstressed humans. - Give us a break:)

Via Russell

Via All about Mobile Life

Where will Samsung stop? This is the SPD-50P5HD, a 50" TV PDP with a contrast ratio of 10000:1. It also uses the DNIe (Digital Natural Image Engine) to render the best possible image.

Satellite television viewers in the UK will be able to donate their time with little more than the touch of a button using a new interactive TV service on the Community Channel. The service was launched by James Murdoch, chief executive of BSkyB.

“It’s amazing to see how interactive television can be used to help people get involved in their communities,” said the James Murdoch at a launch event at BAFTA in London.

Created to mark the Year of the Volunteer, the interactive service enables viewers of the Community Channel to press the red button on their remote control and search for volunteering opportunities by simply entering their post code.

Interactive TV company Press Red developed the service. Funding was provided by a government grant from the Home Office.

Take a look at this. What do you see? A personal page, dashboard on an XBox! This is only possible now that the XBox 360 is designed for on-line interaction and digital identity.



I wonder if they have xHTML pages and embed their profile info into the pages? Where's the XFN? I doubt it's there!

This shows why a lower case semantic web approach is too limiting to solve ALL the challenges of DLAs.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm all into search engines spider the web and collect all sorts of structured data. I'm all into having microformat standards for getting all this structured data into sync.

But to think that this is the ONLY way - is itself a dogma.

We need to make sure that as micro-content evolves - that all forms of structure, devices and usage scenarios are supported. Not just web geeks.

So welcome XBox 360 to the on-line world of digital identity. May the force be with you - and would you PLEASE help save the Planet Earth for us - from those mean aliens?

"Lenslinger," a pseudonymous television news cameraman and author of the Viewfinder Blues blog, contemplates growing competition from the general public (Birth of the Personal Journalist):

Now, a new revolution is about to be televised. Tiny lenses are popping in the most unlikely of devices, powerful editing is just a laptop away and personal websites are racing towards critical mass. How long before my oversized fancy-cam looks like an early 80’s bag phone? About the same time the six o clock news begins looking like it was shot by a hopped-up junkie with a twitchy digital, I‘m guessing. The next ten years promise to feature a rapid breakdown of my chosen craft. Whatever new paradigm takes hold, it’s a safe bet the two-person news crew is an endangered species, driven to oblivion by technology and methods that are faster and cheaper, but not necessarily better. Hopefully by that time, I’ll have found more fulfilling ways to make a difference and a paycheck. Until then, I’ll be here in the media pack, one eye buried in a viewfinder, the other one keeping steady watch over a nation of digital interlopers. Now tell the accountant with the handy-cam to get the #&%% out of my shot...

Highly recommended: read the whole thing. via POMO Blog

Plotting the Story and Interactivity

"In this paper, the experience of the videogame, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, is analyzed by comparing two diagrams, one that illustrates the plot of the game's story and another that delineates the stages of interactivity. Performing a close reading of this game from these perspectives enables an exploration of how the game's story relates to the interactive elements of its gameplay...

...This interactive diagram was developed in a previous paper...and outlines the interactive experience of playing a game. Briefly, the experience is posited to have 3 stages: involvement - being initially introduced into the game; immersion--becoming comfortable with the gameplay and the gameworld; and investment--feeling compelled to successfully complete the game." From Plotting the Story and Interactivity in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time by Drew Davidson

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media, exploring narratives and mediums across texts, comics, games and other media. Primarily, he is interested in conceptual interactive design, integrated narrative and interwoven media, collaborative design and development, applied media and game logics. His interdisciplinary theoretical interests focus on the performance of narratives between multiple mediums. He looks to illustrate how we interact with our stories. Davidson is intrigued by the way a medium can shape the creation and the reception of meaning and how a range of media can be utilized in order to communicate ideas. He explores how the juxtaposition of various mediums can be made into an additive methodology that allows for continual (re)presentation and critical analysis. He would like to see more collaborative, dialogic and interactive work between scholars that reflects the interdependence of authors, readers, texts and other media, in establishing value and meaning. It is important to him to discover the possible and myriad applications of interactive media that would compliment and enhance traditionally used mediums, in order to develop pedagogies which inspire newly viable learning, teaching and communication. Davidson brings a diverse and deep educational perspective to his professional endeavors. He is continually looking for new opportunities and challenges in helping to design and develop integrated and engaging high tech, rich media experiences for education and entertainment. He believes his experience, expertise and enthusiasm makes him invaluable in doing such work. Davidson focuses on how to integrate creative content, applied theory and media technology to create engaging and relevant experiences for people.

Drew Davidson is Academic Department Director, Game Art & Design and Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Art Institute Online.

tv show tracker.

After a Georgia high school eliminated its student newspaper and journalism class because the paper highlighted negative stories, the student staff responded by posting their opinions and copies of the newspaper on a blog, Speaking Underground.

"While we understand that the administration wants Pebblebrook portrayed in the best light possible, that does not give them the right to silence the voice of this school," the students wrote. "It shouldn't be a secret that we have students who bring guns on campus or that we have teen mothers trying to juggle family responsibilities and school."

The students have posted PDFs of the newspaper and say, "We invite you to read BrookSpeak and decide for yourself how balanced the coverage was for news and feature stories by these first time student journalists."

What do you think?

Via CyberJournalist.net

Four Japanese TV networks are considering “a combined equity investment of more than 10 billion yen in Index Corp” according to sources. The broadcasters — Fuji Television Network Inc, TV Asahi Corp, Nippon Television Network Corp and Tokyo Broadcasting System Inc — expect to draw on Index’s technology to create their mobile content offerings.
Related stories:
Earnings: Index’s Earnings Jump 150%

Via MocoNews.net

Checking the role-out today of torrent search on bittorrent.com, one thing that definitely got my interest was their torrent rating feature. I'm liking this alot. It would be very cool if Prodigem (and lots of other trackers) could hook into this both to send reviews and to query. Joi Ito has more.

Via Torrentocracy Blog

This is an interesting idea: tagging photos with data from a GPS device, allowing to 'localize photos'.

The software is called Grazer and it is in its first version. Grazer writes GPS-GeoData into the Exif-Information of digital pictures. The tagging is done automatically. Only the time on the digital camera needs to be set correctly.
Future versions should enable to create virtual flights through geo sorted photos.
Grazer can be downloaded here.

Columbia, Northwestern, Berkeley, USC and Harvard along with two major foundations will spend $6 million to "help revitalize" journalism schools. "At a time when technology’s digital revolution is changing the news industry, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative will focus on preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world," reads the press release. Also, Carnegie Corporation is sponsoring an ABC News Summer Institute that will involve 10 students—two from each of the universities involved. More...PRESS RELEASE -- A national initiative led by five of America’s leading research universities with the support of two major foundations will advance the U.S. news business by helping revitalize schools of journalism.

The universities will take advantage of the riches of their institutions by integrating the schools of journalism more closely with the entire campus in an effort to better teach, challenge and prepare the next generation of news industry leaders for an increasingly complex world. The initiative will experiment with curriculum and hands-on experience with the hope of creating a national conversation with other schools across the country.

Carnegie Corporation of New York president Vartan Gregorian and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation president Hodding Carter III announced the formation of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education here together with representatives of the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California. Presidents of the five schools have agreed to support this effort financially and institutionally.

The Carnegie-Knight Initiative involves three distinct efforts:

1. Curriculum Enrichment that will integrate the schools of journalism more deeply into the life of the university.

2. News 21 Incubators: annual national investigative reporting projects overseen by campus professors and distributed nationally through both traditional and innovative media.

3. The Carnegie-Knight Task Force, focusing on research and creating a platform for educators to speak on policy and journalism education issues.

At a time when technology’s digital revolution is changing the news industry, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative will focus on preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.

A study based on interviews with 40 of the country’s most prestigious news leaders indicated a need for schools of journalism to help reporters build specialized expertise that will enhance coverage of complex beats ranging from medicine to economics to international conflicts, and to understand the languages and cultures of distant parts of the world.

The report, undertaken for the Corporation by McKinsey & Co., also revealed a desire for journalism schools to help students understand and appreciate the ethical dimensions of their work as well as prepare them for the pressures they will face in a 24/7 competitive news environment. The news leaders voiced a need for the profession to depend on universities to channel the best writers, the most curious-minded reporters and the finest analytic thinkers to the news business. An executive summary is available at www.carnegie.org and www.knightfdn.org.

“This is an explosively creative time to be in journalism—if you are not in search of the past,” said Hodding Carter, president of the Knight Foundation. “These five institutions are proving this by doing something they’ve never done before: agreeing to work collaboratively on a major project for the greater benefit of all journalism educators.”

“Journalism is too important to this nation and our democracy to have the schools that educate its future leaders be anything but central to the universities in which they reside,” said Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. “Our American universities, which offer the most enriching, challenging and academically excellent higher education in the world, can provide journalism schools with an unparalleled opportunity to engage with ideas about subjects such as history, philosophy, economics and culture that will help their students develop a passion for learning and knowledge along with the exemplary skills they will need to be at the forefront of the journalism profession in the 21st century.”

In the first two years, Carnegie Corporation is pledging $2.4 million; Knight Foundation $1.7 million. Henry Bienen, president of Northwestern; Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of UC Berkeley; Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia; Steven Sample, president of USC; and Harvard president Lawrence Summers have all agreed to support the initiative in its third year and there are clear indicators that the initiative is making progress.

Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation see these five highly respected universities as locations for experimentation, research and change. They also expect the Carnegie-Knight Task Force to commission research from other universities in order to spread to other journalism educators at other colleges the innovations that arise from the initiative.

This Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education was crafted by:

Geoffrey Cowan, dean, Annenberg School for Communication, USC
Loren Ghiglione, dean, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern
Alex Jones, director, The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
Nicholas Lemann, dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia
Orville Schell, dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley

As part of the planning for the initiative, the five deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history.

The “deans’ manifesto” clarifies goals for today’s schools of journalism and focuses on the centrality of the university in the preparation of tomorrow’s journalism leaders. That document is available in its entirety at www.carnegie.org and at www.knightfdn.org.

As part of this five-university journalism education launch, Carnegie Corporation is sponsoring an ABC News Summer Institute that will involve 10 students—two from each of the universities involved. The students will have eight-week fellowships under the guidance of ABC News and work with the award-winning ABC News Investigative Unit on a specific project that takes advantage of the students’ experience, learning and research abilities. The students will be trained in ethics, investigative reporting and digital journalism. The summer’s work will feature in a specific project underway at ABC News to mark the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Nicole Gallagher, director, news practices, ABC News, will head the summer institute. The names of the students involved in this initiative can be found on both foundations’ web sites.

Yahoo on Wednesday said it is testing its new PhotoMail service. This feature will be free and it will allow users to share a lot of photos via e-mail.

All the photos will be stored on Yahoo computers, enabling recipients to see a full-resolution image by clicking on any thumbnail. The service will be rolled out in a couple of weeks.

Up to 300 photos can be inserted into a single e-mail and it can be sent to hundreds of recipients. Photos will be stored on Yahoo computers. When the e-mail arrives at its destination, recipients can open the e-mail and see thumbnails. It doesn`;t matter how many pictures you include, an e-mail is unlikely to be rejected by inboxes because each thumbnail is just three to five kilobytes.

More details

Via Physics Org

: PSP is emerging as a good video content platform, with innovation coming mainly from third party providers.
-- VBN: DVD Station, the rental kiosk company, will introduce a new service in June allowing DVD kiosk customers to download films onto personal media players including PlayStation Portable (PSP). The company says it is closing deals with two major studios to service films to DVD Station on a VOD basis.
-- NMA: In UK, PSP has created a video blogging Web site, playstationfreedom.co.uk, as part of its Summer of Freedom marketing campaign. The site is based around a competition that gives users the chance to win a year's all-expenses-paid trip around the world.

The Seattle Times put out an article on Videoblogging.
Read it here.
Here is a standard complaint in this and other articles:

Amateur vlogs (if that isn't a redundancy), like their blog cousins, suffer too much from "vlogghorea" (aimless rambling face-on into a camera).

This statement is ridiculous. Most videoblogs are well-edited and engaging AS LONG AS you are not expecting TV shows.
What are you going to say to someone who doesnt understand that blogs are about context?
Ill let Josh Kinberg  answer.
He is a rock in the Videoblogging community. His perpective is smart and to the point.

Its always funny to me to see articles like this because they make one
huge, wrongheaded assumption... the assumption being that mainstream
media is "compelling."

The truth for most people is that much of mainstream media is not
compelling, its just that there's little else to watch.

Just try surfing through your several hundred cable channels and tell
me when you hit a compelling program. My bet is that you could be
channel surfing for hours before you hit anything even slightly
interesting to you.

Mainstream media can only afford to treat us like demographics, when
the truth is that we are actually individuals. Vlogs can afford to be
way more granular than mainstream media could ever hope for, and this
is what makes them compelling.... well, at least to the audience
(however small or large) that the particular videoblogger is trying to
reach.

See, with guys like Josh, everything will be okay.
People just got to see that we have not only the right, but the ability, to show the world through our own eyes. You dont need anyone's permission.

The Current.tv blog is written by Robin Sloan, a member of the Current.tv web team. It’s about developments in the Current Studio, Current’s growth in general, and broader trends in participatory media. Current is a new, independent cable and satellite TV network which presents information about the world in a new way. [The Current.tv blog]

Via Cinema Minima

Despite the fact Adelphia is about to get sold, chopped up, and consumed by Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the company plans to release two speedy new service tiers in the third quarter, CED Magazine reports. Both 15 Mbps/2 Mbps, and 10 Mbps/1 Mbps will be offered. No word on prices, or whether or not the new speeds will migrate with the sale of the cable systems. As we mentioned yesterday, Cox has unveiled a 15Mbps tier in Virginia. Will Comcast and TWC soon follow suit?

A few weeks ago a company in the Netherlands named Nethercomm turned heads by offering broadband in gas-lines (BIG). Jim Baller informs us the company's website has been updated, and offers more detail: ultra-wideband signals travel via the gas line, offering users 40-100Mbps for what they claim is the same installation cost per customer as DSL, or a tenth of what it costs for a fiber to the home install.

Via Broadbandreports

Following the first implementation of Motorola's Mobile Video Enforcer (MVE) system this spring in Wilmington, N.C., municipal police agencies in Toledo, Ohio; Southold, N.Y.; Kernersville and Cary, N.C.; and Bossier Parish, La., are now using it.

"The Motorola MVE system offers great picture quality which is crucial when trying to demonstrate in court what happened at the scene of an incident," said Lt. David Holt, Toledo Police Dept.

Previously, Toledo officers used a VHS system mounted in police vehicles. "Officers had to physically take the videotape out of their vehicles and then it had to be cataloged and filed," said Lt. Holt. "If we wanted to locate something on a tape, we had to search through the entire tape looking for the specific video we needed. It was time-consuming and not very efficient."

The Mobile Video Enforcer ($5000-$7000) consists of a Mobile Digital Video Recorder (MDVR) mounted in an officer's vehicle and a Digital Video Management Solution (DVMS) ($2500) located at the police department. The MDVR captures full-motion, DVD quality video that features pre-event and automatic event-triggered recording capabilities. Each video also stores incident and criminal profile information.

The DVMS automatically uploads, archives, and organizes captured video from the MDVR units. Video clips and still images can be retrieved within seconds from the database in a standard format for training or evidentiary purposes. Key video clips also can be exported to DVD and played back on commercially available DVD players for court cases and evidentiary analysis purposes.

Motorola has a variety of public service infrastructure products, mobile terminals and mobile mesh networking.

SOHOware uses a MIMO antenna for 40Mbps video relays. They can also be used to make a wireless bridge to vehicles, creating automatic connections for uploading or downloading data so officers won't have to initiate a connection.

Their AeroGuard combines True MIMO performance with centralized control and management that simplifies network scaling from 1 to thousands of access points. AeroGuard says their combination of features makes it the choice for VAR’s who must support their customer’s WLAN data needs today and their roaming voice / video applications tomorrow.

As more municipal police departments and other law enforcement agencies turn to realtime video capture to support their officer’s activities, they turn to experts packages like these, designed to meet the unique archiving needs of each agency, says Police Technologies.

x264 is a free library for encoding H.264/AVC video streams. x246 has features such as CABAC and DirectShow encoding. It is released under the terms of the GPL, but this license is incompatible with the MPEG-LA patent licenses in jurisdictions that recognize software patents.

Netopticon report attempts to display works and actions that reveal, subvert and demystify systems of control in the network and the urban spaces. Works that vary from those taking the aesthetic and poetic approach, treating the systems of control and monitoring as intimate, personal and narrative subject to politically oriented projects inverting the use of technologies and the control means for countersurveillance.

With the development of the new technologies and their adaptation to daily use, the amount of informational traces left by an individual in everyday life is considerably expanded (starting from completion of registration forms for access to free accounts, online or phone payments, personal electronic correspondence, video recordings in closed circuits, etc.). Simultaneously, the ways and means of control, monitoring and storage of the information carried out by the state and commercial corporations have been multiplied and enhanced. The state justifies these practices in the name of self-protection, in attempt to defend the established order, its interests, ideology, and its structures of power to protect itself from the threats of hostile factors. The large corporations practice these methods with similar objectives of protection and expansion of their markets of influence, in the informational war against competition.

a collection of glitch-like visualizations of the web, generated from data collected by online "crawlers". the user decides what data the crawler should accumulate, from which website the crawler should start & how the data (e.g. IP number, domains, http headers, html attributes) should be visualized (by position & color mapping). the crawler follows all links on each web page it encounters, so that repetitive patterns in the visualization reveal the linkage structure of websites that link to each other.

Brough Turner notes that the most common usage of video phones is “see-what-I-see”:

Note that “see-what-I-see” uses full-duplex voice, but usually only requires half-duplex video.

A common scenario for the business market is showing someone back at base info so they can add value to it and send directions for action out into the field.

Unfortunately, all the 3G networks are back-to-front because they make the downlink faster than the uplink (for technical as well as marketing reasons; the uplink is powered by a weeny battery and teeny DSP in a wobbly mobile box facing a number of difficult coding and timing problems I barely understand, whereas the downlink isn’t).

Apparently you’re supposed to be watching expensive football clips and not making your own videos.

Posted by Martin at 11:47 AM

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Comments: (post your comment)

Via Telepocalypse

Scheduled for launch in July by the folks at Squid Labs
"... IFabricate is a documentation and collaboration system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. Documenting is fast and easy because you only have to list the high-level steps. iFabricate helps you link your projects to descriptions of tools, standard materials, and detailed sub-processes created by yourself and the iFabricate community. Incorporate helpful comments from expert-users to make sure your project always uses the best practice. Consumer electronics hacks, engineering prototyping, recipes, fine wood-working, and hobby projects are all equally ideal iFabricate projects..."

See related Worldchanging essay

The Sundance Group, parent company of the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Channel, has announced its intention to create a chain of specialty cinemas. [Movie Marketing Blog, The]

Via Cinema Minima

Bram Cohen's Torrent search has officially gone live. Now to answer the question we asked yesterday: will he be able to avoid lawsuits? If the site is ad-driven, he'll want to include pirated material and the traffic that brings (which it's doing right now). But by including pirated material, he faces the wrath of the entertainment industry and an endless flood of DMCA takedown requests.

Via Broadbandreports

There was rampant speculation a few days ago that Apple and Intel were in talks to bring OS X to the Dark Side which makes sense in a way that's only interesting to Wall Street. When folks realized that it was a story over a thousand years old, alternative theories emerged, like the one from Merrill Lynch, supposing that Apple was building a video iPod.

Apple had just quietly released an update to their iTunes software, allowing for the purchase of music videos. When you pair that with their recent introduction of their highly-scalable H.264 video codec, the idea of an Apple video device starts to make sense.

Only thing is, I don't think it's mobile. Or at least, i don't think it should be. If Apple is going to do something for consumer video, it needs to be big, take advantage of existing consumer behavior, and it needs to be audacious enough to change our definition of what watching video could be.

I've been spending a lot of time transcoding video on the PSP lately. Turns out it's a really nice way to watch short form video but the variety and selection of long form UMD stuff kinda sucks. PSPs are portable, with a nice screen, and I can whip one out and catch up with my favorite videoblogs whenever I want (although lately for me, 'whenever' seems to be standing in line at the DMV.) The whole process works rather well, except for the all important social aspect (unless you count the guy turning in his license plates behind you.) Folks like Justin Hall think that we'll figure that one out soon enough, and I agree, but in the meantime, I can't help but think of Drazen's little gem that politics happen on the couch. I don't watch much TV, but when I do, it's always with someone else in the room.

TV watching is social behavior and that's why I wonder if Apple's next big move isn't a WiFi-enabled, OS X-embedded LCD TV, with a hard drive to cache content. Think iMac G5 starting at 42 inches. Think of something big enough to be a TV, that takes coax in from cable or satellite, but network-enabled to allow for either the caching of HD content to it's hard drive, or the streaming of lower bitrate content from somewhere else on the network. Give it an interface that works either with a traditional "TV" remote for basic functions or with a desktop app for more advanced playlisting capabilities and suddenly Apple could have a dream device for the living room with predictably high margins.

Although the current crop of wireless media gateways and set top boxes are pretty cool, our home entertainment centers are getting kinda cluttered. Who wants yet another box in their living room? Besides -- how are you gonna set a set top box on top of your LCD TV ;) Bringing these functionalities into a single box could turn some heads. Using existing hardware as a hub to sell through your existing content marketplace would turn a tide. (And after a little searching, I wonder if folks are already thinking the same thing.)

I used to joke with broadcast engineers that one day, the TV would be little more than a really big peripheral device. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe TVs could end up being a lot smarter than I think.

Following trouble in Japan, reports are spreading that Cingular is also slowing down next generation network deployments. While each has a different excuse, it's reasonable to wonder if HSDPA technology is really ready for prime time.

Back in March when rumors first started spreading that NTT DoCoMo was delaying its HSDPA rollout, the reason given was that DoCoMo had discovered the technology wasn't working up to the levels DoCoMo expected. Earlier this month, when DoCoMo confirmed the delay rumors, it claimed the delays had nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with a lack of content ready for such high speed connections. That argument rings hollow as there's plenty of content out there. A more reasonable explanation might be that the rest of the HSDPA infrastructure wasn't ready. That is, there weren't any decent phones in production and not enough was being done to build services and applications that could really make use of the higher speed networks.

However, now rumors are spreading that Cingular is delaying its HSDPA rollout -- which the company had decided to move to, leapfrogging UMTS. Again, the reasons given aren't technical. In this case, the argument is that Cingular has too much on its plate, especially with the tremendous effort to merge its network with AT&T Wireless' -- a process that is ongoing and has run into some difficulties. However, with the growing attention Verizon Wireless has received with its EV-DO network, and the pending launch of Sprint's EV-DO network, it seems odd that Cingular would decide to slow down a next generation launch unless the technology wasn't really ready. In fact, with DoCoMo's investment in Cingular, it wouldn't be surprising if Cingular had access to some more detailed information out of Japan concerning the technology. Of course, it's likely that the technology issues will be figured out eventually, but it's a good reminder that new mobile technologies don't spring up in perfect working condition, but often take quite some time to get right.

We've long contended that the entertainment industry just doesn't get it when it comes to new technology. But don't take our word for it -- take theirs. Ed Felten recounts an article about a recent panel discussion, in which News Corp. VP Rick Lane actually said, responding to concerns that a broadcast flag would lead to incompatibility among TVs and other digital devices, "Compatibility is not a goal." Translation: "We are so ossified and resistant to change that we'd rather inconvenience, alienate, and anger consumers and stifle technological innovation than give up some control over our content and figure out new ways to grow our business." The industry is so hell bent on keeping content locked up behind proprietary walls that it can't grasp the idea that open and compatible is good for progress (e.g., the internet). Attempts to keep the content and media proprietary are just asking for trouble. As Felten points out, you don't want to put yourself between Americans and their televisions. Amazingly, the most egregious violations of this premise are being made by television networks.

I was shaving this morning and all of a sudden I understood the Semantic Web. Shit. I hope I don't become of those RDF zealots.

My insight was that it has to do with bringing the level of abstraction expressed in web pages closer to the level of abstraction in the formal sense of hypertext. Hypertext, I have learned over the past couple years, is about connections between ideas rather than connections between things you view in a browser. The Semantic Web is intended to make a closer mapping between ideas and things you view in a browser.

Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Telecom (USA), Inc. announced that Hitachi will demonstrate a broad range of real-world FTTP (Fiber-to-the-Premises) applications at Supercomm 2005, June 6-9 in Chicago, Illinois.

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[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

he European Commission has urged EU member states to accelerate the switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting. The Commission expects the transition to digital to be well advanced by 2010 and has proposed a deadline of early 2012 for phasing out traditional analogue terrestrial broadcasting. The Commission also calls for a co-ordinated approach to making freed-up spectrum available across the EU.

Consultant Vin Crosbie says what happened at VenturaCountyStar.com, which had to disable comments on stories because they became abusive, wasn't surprising because history has shown "unmoderated online discussions naturally degrade into cacophony."

"Any news organization website that publishes anonymous, unmoderated discussion forums will get the risks and results doing so deserves. The organization might not have staff to moderate forums; but, sorry, there is no free lunch. There are very good reasons why the editors of a letter-to-the-editor and Op-Ed pages verify the identities of contributors (even those who want the newspaper to give them anonymity) before printing their letters or comments. And just because sites that aren't owned by news organizations publish anonymous, unmoderated forums doesn't mean news sites should, too. Newspapers, broadcasters, and news magazines have special responsibilities to their readers or users, responsibilities those other sites don't have. Those responsibilities are not just to prevent libel, but to foster high quality discussions."

Kevin Maney, who has covered technology for 20 years at USA Today, writes that the blog bubble will pop but that the trend of consumers creating content is here to stay - even if it is overhyped right now. Kevin sez...

So, yeah, blogs are cool. Anything that gives people a voice benefits society and makes us all better and smarter - and, as bloggers have proved, makes established information outlets more accountable. But blogs don't seem to be the second coming of the printing press. They're just another turn of the wheel in communications technology.

More likely, a few years from now, after the blog bubble has normalized, we'll look back and say that this technology made a difference and that our total fascination with it seems quaint.

I agree. Consumer generated media will become part of the fabric of the entire media landscape. The one quibble I have with Kevin's article is where Larry Downes, professor of information economics at the University of California-Berkeley, says that reading blogs will go the way of serendipitously surfing the Web. This is where RSS comes in.

As the technology gets easier (keep an eye Microsoft) people will  be able to read more content than they did before. This will lead to an increase in blog readership, but it won't be equally divided among all bloggers.

Janet Murray asked for the answers I would have given to the questions I posed to Warren Spector, Neil Young and Tim Schafer at the recent GDC panel, Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories? I found it useful for myself to write these out, to clarify my own thinking, and to hopefully get feedback from anyone interested.

I’ll try to be succinct and specific. These answers are informed by my experience over the past 13 years developing interactive characters and stories and closely following the industry and academic R&D in the field, helping me identify what I believe is important and what’s not. (Also I’m guessing these would be answers similar to what Michael would have said had he been given more time to participate in the actual panel discussion.) For some background on the panel, you may first want to read what the panelists said: 1 2 3.

Lisa Nakamura is giving the talk Subjects & Objects of Interactivity: Racial Formation and Media Convergence at UC Riverside's Global Interface Mellon Workshop, this Wednesday (May 25) at 5pm. She'll discuss the interface-like logic of Jennifer Lopez's 2000 video "If You Had My Love."

Originally from Wired News, reBlogged by ts

The musical video-game genre gets an infusion of new blood this year, with games that let players sing and dance, spin a turntable or play rock guitar. By Chris Kohler.

A couple of weeks ago, when working on the entry about salaries for bloggers, Tristan Louis did a quick analysis of the entries in a day slice. Many people pointed out that this was a small slice and was not representative of what other blogs where doing.

From there, he ended up with two questions basically bugging him: first, how many entries does the average blog produce on a daily basis? Second, what is the size of those entries?

To answer the question, Tristan analyzed the A-list of the blog world.

Thank you Tristan !

Via Smart Mobs

Rands in Repose has written the best post about web apps I've read this year. I'll pick out the highlights here and finish with some thoughts on re-inventing the page metaphor. Also you may want to check out the Web Apps Compendium v1.0, a great attempt at listing out all the main web apps on the Web today. 

What is a web app? Simply defined, it's a software program that runs in a Web browser (proper definition here). What are they good for? Rands explains that there are two main advantages of web applications: 

1) Zero installation and no upgrades for the user.

2) Access anywhere with an Internet connection (which Rands terms "no baggage")

The main benefits of web apps then are: they're cheap to maintain and they empower users. So why, Rands asks, "aren't they everywhere?"

Good question, but then I've met loads of developers who still think web apps are too limited in functionality, compared to desktop apps (applications you install on your PC). And that really is the main drawback of web apps - they're constrained by the limitations of the browser. But wait, Rands might say - this is where Ajax comes in. 

I like Rands' concise definition of Ajax: "improved interactivity within web pages". He believes that due to Ajax, "the interface of web applications can vastly exceed your expectations." That's certainly true of Gmail and Google Maps, still the two quintessential Ajax apps.

One thing I'm wondering though: with all the current activities around synchronization for desktop apps, is that lessening the gap between desktop apps and web apps in terms of "no baggage"? When I say synchronization, I mean desktop apps that use Internet connectivity to allow users to synch their data over more than one PC or application - which solves the "access anywhere" issue for desktop apps. An example is Newsgator Online. I'd be interested in hearing some developers opinions on that...

We're Not in Pages Anymore, Toto!

The best part of Rands' essay, for me, was this statement:

"Stop thinking of a web application as a collection of pages.

The back button is not a bug in Ajax, it's a flaw in the browser metaphor."

This was one of the themes of the Web 2.0 for Designers article I co-wrote recently with Josh Porter. We wrote that the Web is no longer a collection of "pages", but a flow of “microcontent” units distributed over dozens of domains. Rands refers to "objects" instead of microcontent, because he's talking about web apps in a programmatic sense. I'm looking at it more from an information unit sense. But we're essentially on the same, er... page.

In summary - web apps today are aggregators, remixers, search interfaces, tagging and bookmarking apps, news services, and much more. It's all microcontent and so I have to agree with Rands and say that the back button is less relevant in web apps today. Often we don't want to go back to the previous page - we want to re-aggregate information, or re-contextualize, or do another search, or remix data, etc. In Web 2.0 we need an interaction framework that overcomes the "page" metaphor and recognizes that we're dealing in much smaller and more fluid units of information.

Ernie Miller has some bad news for the public domain, as Eldred continues to bear bitter fruit.

Via Copyfight

One of the most important paper about the use of video games in experimental psychology:

The games psychologists play (and the data they provide) by David Washburn, Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, Vol 35 (3), pp185-193.

The paper provides a brief history of psychological research with computer games (with a peculiar emphasis on psychology/physiological research). It also highlights the problems caused by the use of game-based reasearch:
- difficult to use commercial video games for data capture (not designed for that)
- experimenters have not full control over all the variables
- consequently it requires to modify the game which is non trivial and time consuming
- games can introduce complexity to the experimental situation that has negative consequences (too much context compared to simple psychological tasks)
- there is a perception problem associated with the use of games of computer games in psychological research (because games = entertainment for them), not a problem for people who want to study the effects of game on a psychological process but it’s an issue for researchers who want to use game-like task or technology to understand the basic process that underlie behavior. That is why people speak about “game-like tasks” and not just games (just to show that they’re serious folks and not gamers )

Benefits of game-based research:
- more motivation (also pointed by others) and then better performances
- enjoyment and well-being
- a common platform across researchers
- new opportunities for science

Rumors of this have been floating around for a bit but this looks like an interesting departure for the Finnish giant. This thing is essentially an instant-on Internet browser with some tablet functionality including handwriting recognition and Bluetooth/WiFi connectivity. Running a version of Debian, the 770 is designed to be more of a web-browsing tool than a full fledged PC.

While Joel may be able to comment more once Verizon un-jacks his Internet service, I think this 64MB TI 1710 OMAP ARM mini-PC is a very interesting tool. Designed to cost less than $350, it is more attractive and easier to use—and program for, thanks to open SDKs—than a handheld. Because handhelds are primarily designed as portable business PIMs, the home "quick browsing" market is still wide open. I know what you're going to say—"What about Audrey? WebTV?"—well, both of those technologies didn't played the the strengths of a constantly wired Internet. This, quite clearly, is a wireless tool that stays on the coffee table or near the toilet waiting to be used. It is an incidental but important part of the home network.

At our house we currently use a tablet PC for quick web-browsing in the living room. We never use the tablet to do real work. The 770 could instantly and permanently replace that bulky tablet.

Nokia Launches Linux Based 770 Net Appliance [Mobileburn]

Fortune profiles the "Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy," with a look at some of the people and groups making it possible for home inventors and innovators to design, make and sell unique and novel products. . The article focuses on a guy designing a music player that looks like a Pez Dispenser as well as a few other similarly-quirky ideas. It's a good intro to an up-and-coming movement.

Beginning in the second quarter of 2006, Nielsen will incorporate VOD and DVR viewing in national and local ratings data.

NY Times: New niche channels appearing on VOD

Via Lost Remote

"The Chord project aims to build scalable, robust distributed systems using peer-to-peer ideas. The basis for much of our work is the Chord distributed hash lookup primitive. Chord is completely decentralized and symmetric, and can find data using only log(N) messages, where N is the number of nodes in the system. Chord's lookup mechanism is provably robust in the face of frequent node failures and re-joins."

Just got word from Jakob that his online automatic editing and clip sharing service, Vimeo is now in open beta, allowing current users to invite other users to join. Nice.

Unmediated readers without an account can email us and we'll connect you up.

BW interviews Jeff Jarvis

"Jarvis explained that about 50% of his time will be spent as a consultant on content development at About.com, the service that the New York Times bought in February. But he's also hoping to help mold About's business strategy. He would like to see its 500 guides used as "a platform for distributed media," where the guides develop relationships with blogs. For instance, a travel guide could work together with a host of travel blogs to cover the landscape."

There are always arguments that pop up about what a videoblog is and isn't.
Ultimately it's useless...becasue each os us can create and post whatveer video we want.
that's the beauty of Videoblogging.
Video distribution is truely democratized.

Sometimes, though, a video stands out.
Like this recent Michael Verdi video.
Why is it so good?
Because you can only share this moment in video.

Via Momentshowing

Rare mixes, mastermixes, remixes, bootlegs and pirate radio from the mid 80s.



Via Blography.

Via we make money not art

"I just read on the Blender home page that Ton Roosendaal is going to be creating an open movie project called "Orange", which should kick off development sometime in the fall: "The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, have agreed on producing a 3D Animated Movie Short, to be created with the Open Source 3D suite Blender and other OS tools such as Yafray, Python, Verse, Gimp, and Cinepaint." Moreover: "... the resulting movie - including all the production files and software - will be published under an open public license." Open source entertainment is another step closer to reality!"

Via Slashdot

A Semanitic Web browser extension for Firefox? holyshitholyshit!

"Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that extracts information from existing web pages and stores it in RDF. If a web page already links to RDF information, extraction simply means retrieving that information. Otherwise, Piggy Bank employs custom software code that untangles the "pure" information from the web page’ formatting.

Having extracted the "pure" information and stored it on your computer, Piggy Bank can now apply its own user interface to let you browse through that information independent of the original web sites. For example, Piggy Bank can call upon Google Maps to display geographical information even if the original web sites do not offer cartographic views of their data."

I'd be interested in seeing how many clickthrough BoingBoing's feed gets to support or contradict Matt's hypothesis

"From my experiences in using Adsense nearly two years on PVRblog, I've noticed a great deal of my traffic comes from search engines. I only have stats on those viewing the site via the web (bloglines says 4k users read it via RSS, but there's no way of knowing the full number), but a random swath of stats will frequently show 75% or more of the web traffic has google.com as their referrer. Here's a screenshot of my Typepad stats, showing a single page of accesses in the past few minutes as I'm writing this. The ones with no referrer listed were reading the site directly."

Engadget says that Pace Micro Technology has what looks like the world’s first H.264-based hardware set-top box, the IP215.

The H.264 codec, the one Apple uses in Tiger can sent standard definition television in 1-2 Mbps and HDTV in 5-8 Mbps.



The IP215 comes with an impressive aggregated 490 MIPs processing power and will support all popular conditional access (pay tv) providers. A full launch of the IP215, with CA and middleware integration, is expected at IBC 2005 in September this year.

Pace says this box could come in at the sub-$100 price level, which would make it attractive to telcos and operators looking to make the convergence leap to broadband TV/HDTV. Engadget says they have deals with Comcast and Time Warner in some markets.

If you lived in England, you'd be home by now with BBC Video On Demand and a FreeView Box.

John Yunker says Intel + Apple = WiMax;

There have been lots of speculation about Apple launching an A/V equivalent of iTunes. Now, connecting the cable or DSL modem to the TV is a hurdle we're seeing lots of companies tackle, with limited success.

Only WiMAX can stream multiple streams of HDTV content in difficult RF environments to all ends of the home. Apple is also rumored to be getting into the smart phone business. But what wireless technology are they going to support if and when they do get into this business? I wouldn't bet on EV-DO and I don't think they want to bother with EDGE or HSDPA either. Apple likes to lead with wireless technology, not follow.

I think Apple sees a lot of opportunities with WiMAX. And I think Intel sees a lot of opportunity in getting Apple to support WiMAX. Perhaps all that Apple and Intel are talking about right now is processors. But I have to believe that there are people on both sides of the room thinking WiMAX.

DailyWireless stories include; BBC's Mobile Video, Interactive TV News, ABC News Now Looks to Future, The Free Triple Play, IP-TV Settops, Mobile TV Expands, Verizon Does Cellular TV, Video Search, Big Media Mobilizes, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, Samsung's Video over DSL and The Man Who Invented Television.

Samsung announces that it has developed the first Solid State Disk (SSD) based on NAND Flash memory technology for consumer and mobile PC applications.

The NAND-based SSD is a low power, lightweight storage media for notebook PCs, sub-notebook PCs and tablet PCs. Using the industry's highest density 8Gb (Gigabit) NAND Flash, Samsung can build SSDs with a capacity of up to 16GB.
The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
We reported about the 176GB military-grade flash drive by M-Systems that has 320MB/s transfer rates, quite a bit faster.
To ensure compatibility, SSDs have been designed to look like HDDs from the outside. Samsung has developed a full line up of SSDs: 2.5-inch type SSDs that carry 16 NAND Flash devices of 4Gbit or 8Gbit density for 8GBytes and 16GByte of storage respectively. Samsung's 1.8 inch type SSDs will offer 4GBytes or 8GBytes of density. They will be available in August.
More details in Samsung press-release.

Besides games, movies, music and books another multimedia mix will hit the Sony PSP.

IGN calls it Sound Novel. The story is told using text, animation and sound. The first title of that type is Jitsuwa Kaidan shin mimi bukuro 1. Available for pre-order at Lik-Sang.

Dave Burstein, the Editor of DSLPrime, told a room full of people about Google's Video service yesterday.  He was not casual in his delivery.  He said, and I paraphrase -- they (Google) will host and serve your video free of charge, the higher the resolution, the better.

I must have been on an other planet when this announcement was made.  Let me apologize to my readers for not being one of the first to show you the following URL: https://upload.video.google.com/

When you go there, this is what you will see:

Your work deserves to be seen.

You've made a great video. Now who will watch it?
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.

Sign up and upload ...

We're accepting digital video files of any length and size. Simply sign up for an account and upload your videos using our Video Uploader (please be sure you own the rights to the works you upload), and, pending our approval process and the launch of this new service, we'll include your video in Google Video, where users will be able to search, preview, purchase and play it.

For major producers ...

If you're from a TV station or production facility, we have a separate process to help you join the Google Video Upload Program.

If you are in the video production business, this is a must visit site.

(Okay, so let's say Google gets the hosting and indexing side down. What happens next? Is a web browser the best way to search and view this stuff? -kc.)

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced the Public Domain Enhancement Act in the 109th Congress as H.R. 2048. The bill is intended to allow abandoned copyrighted works to enter the public domain after 50 years.

The bill would let copyright owners pay a $1 maintenance fee to maintain copyright protection of a work beyond 50 years of the date of publication. It would add section 306 to the Copyright Act:

(a) Fee- The Register of Copyrights shall charge a fee of $1 for maintaining in force the copyright in any published United States work. The fee shall be due 50 years after the date of first publication or on December 31, 2006, whichever occurs later, and every 10 years thereafter until the end of the copyright term. Unless payment of the applicable maintenance fee is received in the Copyright Office on or before the date the fee is due or within a grace period of 6 months thereafter, the copyright shall expire as of the end of that grace period.

This bill was first introduced in the 108th Congress, as H.R. 2601 in 2003 and "didn't go anywhere."

Via INDUCE Act Blog

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, has launched a new blog, "Daily Briefing," that opens the curtain on the newsroom's editorial staff meetings (each weekday morning and afternoon). Online publisher Ken Sands says this is an additional component in the newspaper website's "transparent newsroom" umbrella (which also will include webcasting the news meetings, and now includes an Ask the Editors feature).

It's an interesting read. For example, on Friday blog writer Ken Paulman mused after the 4:30 p.m. news meeting, "We're not sure what to do at this hour with the photo of Saddam in his underwear that appeared (...)

Entry continued...

A-Nerve (accessory nerve): is a sleeve accessory that can be taken on or off over clothing and that changes pattern (creating pleats on the fabric) when receiving SMS messages.

The wearer recognizes the sender from the pattern and, by flattening the pleats with a hand stroke, can send back a message to the other person saying “i call you back”.

By: Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz from CuteCircuits, in collaboration with Line Ulrika Christiansen.

[ reBlogged from near near future ]

DocBug recounts an episode of trying to find authorized Star Wars content and pay for it but failing and settling instead for unauthorized content that wasn't paid for (What Happens When Content Providers Make "Legal" Hard to Do...). I'm not justifying this behavior, but it is to be expected. The original Napster became popular at least in part because it provided something that wasn't readily available from an authorized source.

Via The Importance of...

Wireless Connectivity World (WiCon), May 24-25th in London, will showcase the potential of wireless networking applications from leading technologies such as WiFi, UWB, ZigBee, Bluetooth, NFC, DECT and WiMax.

At the conference, Freescale Semiconductor will demonstrate the industry's longest-range commercial Direct Sequence Ultra-Wideband (DS-UWB) solution in a wireless projector. Leveraging technology gains allowed by a recent Federal Communications Commission ruling, Freescale says their XS110 UWB chip can wirelessly transmit video across a 20-meter distance, double the range of previous UWB solutions.

"The FCC's waiver ruling in March paved the way for Freescale's XS110 chipset to double in range, while still performing at over 110 megabits per second -- a dramatic improvement for our OEM customers," said Martin Rofheart, director of Freescale's Ultra-Wideband Operation. While the FCC waiver affects use only in the US, we believe the prudent testing and measurements behind this decision will be key for other regulatory concerns worldwide."

Longer range wireless applications include surround sound and home entertainment.

In March 2005, the FCC approved a waiver expanding the rules for UWB. Specifically, the waiver removes the requirement to reduce power for gated systems that burst intermittently. Freescale says their DS-UWB approach may be re-certified to achieve up to 30x greater data rate across a network, or deliver a video stream using up to 30x lower power from the battery, or deliver the same data rate across the network but at double the distance and with greater robustness.

With a simple firmware update, Freescale's current UWB chipset, the XS110, was modified to take advantage of the waiver, and has been submitted to the FCC for re-certification under the new

UltaWideBand is expected to replacing wired USB and IEEE 1394 connections, as well as the cables that connect speakers and other audio-visual components. UWB uses little power and can be hundreds of times faster than Bluetooth. In fact, Bluetooth May be merging with UWB.

But members of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group did not give their blessing to either the Freescale-led DS-UWB standard or the Intel-led Multiband OFDM Alliance, says Extreme Tech.

Related DailyWireless articles include; UWB Organizations Merging?, Alereon Gets UWB Recognition, UWB RF-ID, Wireless USB Comes Home Microsoft Joins UWB Battle.

Venture investing is often about fashion, and this clearly the season for television. One marker of that is press coverage. The latest Release 1.0 is all about television, with coverage of eight companies (including Akimbo, Brightcove, and TiVo). Last week, the Associated Press ran a much shorter but similar piece, complete with quotes from Gartner, and this morning Newsweak’s Steven Levy has a similar survey out called Television Reloaded that is worth a read.

Cheap or free distribution, reduced production costs, the replacement of scheduled television with search, direct sales via the net (VOD), and delivery to mobile phones are some of the major themes; any one of them is enough to float the five to ten VC-backed companies that will eventually consolidate into a winner in each category. The promise here is greater choice, disintermediation of unneeded broadcast networks, and great authenticity of production and artistic works; it’d be crazy to hold one’s breath, but investing in the creation of a Google or iTunes for television seems like a reasonable idea.

Archos has introduced the AV 700 Mobile Digital Video Recorder (DVR), with video recording and scheduling features of a digital video recorder. It enables direct video recording onto a 100-gigabyte hard drive, which stores up to 400 hours of video (some 250 movies).

The Archos AV 700 Mobile DVR features a 7" Wide Screen Display and an integrated kick-stand for viewing content. You can digitally record programs directly from your TV, VCR, DVD player, cable box or satellite receiver using the TV Docking Pod.

The AV 700 encodes and plays back MPEG-4 videos and MP3 stereo sound. The AV 700 also allows you to transfer home movies onto the device using the USB Host port connected to a camcorder.

No word on wireless, but can it be far behind?

Archos says that its new device can store up to one million JPEG photos and view several at a time or in slide show mode. Photos can be transferred from computers using USB 2.0 or from digital cameras directly using the USB Host connection.

The new player can synchronize automatically with Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 and is included in the Microsoft PlaysForSure program, enabling you to play purchased, downloaded and subscription content from such services as MSN Music, Musicmatch, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Store and CinemaNow.

For gamers, the AV 700 features popular Mophun games and the ability to purchase additional games from the Archos Web site.

The Archos AV 700 will be available for purchase at retail and from the Archos site beginning in late June 2005. Pricing will be $599.95 for the 40GB version, and $799.95 for the 100GB version. Om Malik says satellite provider Echostar has bought into Archos.

The ultimate remote.

for real?

"phpAdsNew is an open-source ad server, with an integrated banner management interface and tracking system for gathering statistics. With phpAdsNew you can easily rotate paid banners and your own in-house advertisements. You can even integrate banners from third party advertising companies."

Mark Pesce has put up part two of his "Piracy is Good" speech transcript. It contains a couple of whattheheck lines, such as "Because you don't sue your audience. (Just ask Metallica how well that worked out.)" Um, they do and it worked out great for Metallica.

But never mind that. Pesce says the things we want to hear: BitTorrent will take over the world. New day dawning. Audiences asserting control. It's all stuff I'd like to be true, but I don't see it. Mass markets and social changes are not wrought by will and geekitude alone. He also makes some interesting economic assertions but without even a skeleton of numbers to back them up.

Via Copyfight

It's a transformation as significant as when we went from black-and-white to color -- and it's already underway. The promise is that you'll be able to watch anything you want, anywhere -- on a huge high-def screen or on your phone.

Via Clippings.reblog

Typedrawing is a funny tool to you draw with the words. You can try it or just take a look around and see the other works there (there are some cool creations)..........

aww.. so cute! ~mo

BitTorrent plans to launch an ad-supported search engine for Torrent files. The ads and sponsored links displayed on the results page will be served by Ask Jeeves. Already in beta, the website will link to any BT files, legal or not. Wired News saw a demo where the results for a search on “The Interpreter” (film with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman) returned a link to a illegal torrent file located on Pirate Bay.

We anticipate a lot of complains—perhaps legal actions—coming from the entertainment industry. Last week the MPAA accused BitTorrent of “providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith.” According to the Wired article, Stanford law professor Mark Lemley sees potential legal issues related to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

David Berlind is fisking through Microsoft's mono-culture media strategy: "The facts speak for themselves. No single company has circled its technology wagons around the digital media universe the way Microsoft has. It's just a question of when the world finally realizes that Microsoft has already gone in for the kill. This week's announcement from Philips [about embeddding MSFT DRM in its devices] wasn't just a stake in the ground. It was just another part of a foundation -- the forms, rebar, cement and all on which Microsoft's media skyscraper will rest." I think he's hyperventilating...

Via PaidContent.org

"An OpenID-enabled site/blog lets you authenticate using your existing login from your homesite (whether that's on your own server or a hosted service) without giving away your password to the 3rd-party site you're visiting, or making a new account there, or giving away your email address.

And it's secure, and can run entirely in the browser without extensions, without moving between pages."

Now using fear tactics and quotes like these to fight the creative commons: Had he given up his rights to those early hits, he would not have the resources to cover his treatment for AIDS.

(I was at a conference on free culture this weekend where someone made the argument that CC licensing was harmful to indigenous and disenfranchised communities. Any thoughts? -kc. )

Mapamp uses existing structures and systems (architecture of a city, navigation and radio systems) to layer an artificial acoustic space over the original one.



The participant walks the streets wearing a special vest that allows him/her to navigate through different sound data fields. These virtual spaces differ from the geographic city scape. Changing his/her position, the walker can pick up and mix the sounds, which come into connection with the architectural features of the public space: the noise of the surroundings, distant radio stations and abstract sound samples intermingle in the space, depending upon the position, direction and velocity of the visitors.

By Tamás Szakál.

Related: Steve Symons' Aura, Sonic City, Sonic Interface by Akitsugu Maebayashi.

Wow.

"In the Q&A, Jason Calcanis of Weblogs, Inc. asked if there was any possibility of using the iTunes music store for paid podcasting. Jobs replied that for the moment they were only considering it as free content, but that he was open to looking into it."

Failing to get the 75% approval vote needed at an IEEE meeting in Australia, both the TGn Sync and WWiSE proposals for the 802.11n standard must now be reconsidered, notes Eweek. 802.11n is the next flavor of Wi-Fi, which incorporates the MIMO antenna configuration to offer improved range, while hoping to offer speeds well above 100Mbps. See O'Reilly analysis of WWiSE, TGnSync website.

Yahoo is carrying the story about new Bram Cohen's project - search engine (for torrents):

"The goal is to get every single torrent on the Internet indexed," Cohen said.

I've have nominated Cohen for the Pioneer Award this year, but ... So, I use this opportunity to nominate him for 2006 Award.

Feedster is introducing a Tag This widget that blog authors can include in their posts for readers to anonymously tag posts. A volunteer manual way of building a database. After you enter a tag, you get to see the list of tags for the post, but they don’t link anywhere so the reward for the effort is unfulfilling. (Rafer notes: The tags submitted now are “real” and being databased, so give it a shot on your blog or mine. Just due to time constraints, the tags are only displayed once a new tag is submitted. All the tag data will be available via the expected and reasonable mechanisms shortly.) Blog search engines serve readers and with future iterations this hints at a good distributed way to engage them.

Via Many-to-Many

This page provides some info about how to convert a video file into Macromedia's FLV format. FLV is a new format with advanced capabilities including progressive download. FLV requires a Flash Player version 7 (or newer) to be installed in the client browser. SWF format can be used by the player when only an older Flash version is detected to be available.

For FLV encoding I recommend a free tool called Riva FLV Encoder. This tool is downloadable at Riva Web site. Starting from version 2.0 it support FLV version 1.1 which contains the required timing information. Without the timing information, FlowPlayer's scrub bar and progress tracking do not work.

There are also several commercial encoding applications that are capable of producing FLV. This whitepaper describes the FLV format and also lists several tools that can be used to generate FLV video files. Probably the most popular of these encoding applications is called Sorenson Squeeze. More information is available at sorenson.com. SWF Encoding can also be done using Sorenson Squeeze.

"Tens of thousands of "newsgroups" and discussion boards on the Internet have spawned millions of bloggers who speak in both whispers and shouts. Combined with the low cost of Web site and even crude advertising design, inhabitants of the Web can achieve wonders in creating and broadcasting a wide range of messages. These range from campaigns for or against public figures to ads highlighting the high cost of replacing iPod batteries (since corrected). The newsgroups, discussion boards, and blogs may contain the seeds of ideas and notions about cutting-edge behaviors suggestive of everything from future business opportunities to social and political trends."

"For as long as computers have been used for practical tasks, software designers have tried to match their systems to the situations in which they are used. This problem is perhaps nowhere more important than in designing software to support groups of people working together"

"This paper describes a series of tests of the generality of a "radically tailorable" tool for cooperative work. Users of this system can create applications by combining and modifying four kinds of building blocks: objects, views, agents, and links. We found that user-level tailoring of these primitives can provide most of the functionality found in well-known cooperative work systems such as gIBIS, Coordinator, Lotus Notes, and Information Lens. These primitives, therefore, appear to provide an elementary "tailoring language" out of which a wide variety of integrated information management and collaboration applications can be constructed by end users."

Roadcasting is a system that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among cars in an ad-hoc network. It plays the songs that people want to hear and it transforms car radio into an interactive medium.

Roadcasting combines the good things about listening to the radio and the good things about being a radio DJ while eliminating the bad things to form a new type of radio service. It's incredibly easy to have your own radio station heard by others in their cars within a 30-mile radius. Roadcasting matches you to radio stations that play the music you want to hear.

We have made the source code for the Roadcasting system available in order to encourage development of this novel service so that it may one day become the preferred radio delivery method.

Patrick and his students did a pretty good job to visualize blogposts. They wrote a script that parsed my RDF file, then extracted the most important topics following Wise and colleagues’ method. At the end of the road, Patrick used R to compute two visualizations. The first one is a representation of the sematic distance between blogposts (thanks to Multidimensional Scaling). The second one depicts a results of a Clara cluster analysis, in which 10 clusters have been built. At the center of each cluster is a prototypical article. Another visualisation, using “magnet” layout to browse topics and posts is under construction.

Even tough these visualizations are nice and interesting, they’ve having hard times making sense of them! Especially the second one, trying to infer meaning from cluster is difficult (getting back to the prototypical posts at the center of the medoids is a solution to get some insights about it).

A European company promoting a breath freshener is airing a one-second ad.

Via Lost Remote

He's going to work on a "new news startup" that's still in stealth mode. "This is the first public mention of it, but you'll hear more about it soon," he writes. Jarvis will also consult for About.com and write a book.

Via Lost Remote

The “television pocket” may look like a toilet for your cellphone, but it’s actually a cradle that turns your FOMA-compatible phone into a security camera, letting you or other FOMA users peek in at any time. Apparently, the company thinks one of the big selling points is being able to talk to your pet. No word on price, and we don’t need to tell you that it’s only available in Japan.

[Via picturephoning.com]

"Over the next three years Simula Labs will finance 6-8 open source startups with $10-15 million it got from venture capitalists, News.com says. The venture financing enterprise is mostly interested in hiring the founders of the project and selling the services based around product infrastructure. LogicBlaze and Mergere are among the first startups who got financing from Simula Labs, and it looks like a logo that incorporates orange and brown is required before you apply."

Via Eyebeam reBlog

(via), the BGP-1001 is an interesting add-on to turn your cell phone into a portable console. It’s actually a bluetooth-enabled gamepad:

I am wondering if people would use it in public transport or in a queue at the supermarket - would they carry it all day long in their bag?

Via Clippings.reblog

Dozens of colleges and universities are rolling out legal download services for students. Some of those services are underwritten by the entertainment industry — it’s called shaping habits of future customers. [Wired News: DAT’s Entertainment]

Via Cinema Minima

More than 1 million people saw a Buick commercial before watching the antics of "Desperate Housewives." So why should broadcast television executives be nervous?

Because the Buick ad was on the Internet.

After years of siphoning ad dollars from newspapers and magazines, the Internet is starting to chip away at the biggest and most powerful medium of all: television.

Commercials for Land Rover, the Army and Staples Inc. run before music videos and TV clips on Yahoo. General Motors Corp. cut commercial orders on some broadcast networks but agreed to pay $4 million to sponsor an America Online music service, expanding a campaign that placed Buick spots before AOL's recaps of the hit show "Desperate Housewives." Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com recently landed blue-chip advertisers such as American Express Co., Volvo and Sprite.

"Our business is probably coming more from television, especially broadcast television, than from any other medium," said Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer for Yahoo Inc., which sold $3 billion in online ads last year. "Brand marketers have finally recognized they cannot ignore the shift in media consumption patterns."

Jeff Jarvis: "We need to look at a world in which support from classified, retail, and national advertising will leak or pour out and in which the audience goes wherever it wants to go."

Kathleen Gilroy posted recently about a vision of the future of RSS:

Imagine a universal portal (public or internal for corporate use) that does nothing more than help people to collect feeds that will help them learn about subjects they care about.

I think she’s onto something and I’ll relate her point to a project I’m working on now:

I’m working with a start-up called mpire here in Seattle. Mpire is building an online application that makes life easier for small businesses that use eBay. I’m working with them on their blog strategy and support forums.

One of the priorities we’ve outlined is to get them up to speed on the blog world and RSS. So, I set out to find all the eBay-related blogs I could find. Then, I created a NewsGator Online account for them and subscribed to all the eBay blogs, along with some other feeds and sent them the login.

This was a way for me to provide them a look at the kind of information they could track using blogs and RSS. It’s just step one.

Via del.icio.us/hypergenesb

Performs mashups live.

AgileTV has secured a $22 million investment to fund the ongoing development and delivery of its voice recognition system for cable television.

The Promptu voice controlled television remote employs network based voice recognition to allow viewers to search for programmes using spoken instructions.

“The cable industry is very focused on solving the challenge of finding ways to help consumers experience the full array of television programming available today,” said James Caccavo of Valence Capital Management, the New York based private equity firm that led the investment. “AgileTV’s voice navigation service is the solution. We believe the overall opportunity with the cable industry is very promising.”

Lauder Partners, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that has invested in over twenty other cable or interactive TV ventures since 1990, also invested in this funding round.

3UK has launched a moblogging service in partnership with Yospace, which announced the launch of its service a few weeks ago. This is not the first moblogging service — anyone with an MMS-enabled cameraphone has been able to moblog for quite a while now. But it could well be the first time a UK operator has offered the service, which is strange considering how well it supports what they’re trying to do. 3’s three million customers can “share mugshots, arty scenes and video clips captured on their video mobile via the Web”.
Not only does this encourage people to buy higher-end handsets, it encourages them to use MMS — a service that followed most mobile technologies in failing to live up to the hype with which it was launched…at least so far. Plus, as people look at their friends blogs they begin to consider starting their own, so the service is self-marketing. The idea also ties in with the concept that the most popular content for mobiles will be the same as for the internet — user generated content.
The big thing with 3’s announcement is that it makes mobloggin a lot simpler. While it was pretty simple before, most people are put off by anything more than a complete pre-made system, which 3 now offers. “3’s My Gallery is set to transform blogging from a ‘geeky’ hobby to a mainstream communication method. The immediacy of this type of web publishing means that people can comment instantly as it happens, on the move” added David Springall of YoSpace. It’s a great development, but I wish the companies wouldn’t try to imply they came up with the idea…
Recent stories:
–Publishing Tool Mobilizes Concert Tickets

MIT Technology Review has a great overview of this emerging, online, collaborative way of creating and disseminating news.

In some cases, such as the Korean site OhMyNews, CCJ [Collaborative Citizen Journalism] stories are reported by a team of volunteer journalists; in others, such as Wiki News, a group does serial fact-checking and vetting on an existing piece, calling attention to errors or omissions.

"Collaborative citizen journalism is a very, very nuanced thing, and it's different than just one citizen blogging," says Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc., a large blog publisher, in an email. "But CCJ is the best method for getting to the truth since you have many people and their perspectives involved in the process. Of course, CCJ it is harder to produce (at least right now since it is so new)."

One of the newest members of the CCJ scene is also one of the most intriguing.

This week saw the very-soft launch of Bayosphere, created by veteran technology journalist Dan Gillmor, who left the San Jose Mercury News last year and wrote a book We The Media, in which he espoused many of the tenets of this new form. Bayosphere joins a small community of sites, such as Wiki News, Backyard, and Newstrust, dedicated to getting people to work together to chase their own stories, comment on stories from the mainstream media, and track which news they think warrants their attention.

continues on to talk about how Collaborative Citizen Journalism generally falls under three different approaches: Localized/regional (like Bayosphere, local indymedias, etc), broad approaches (like wikinews and ohmynews), and collaborative media-watchdog approaches (like Newstrust).

The last approach (media vetting) is very ripe for development of collabrative applications and efforts. Media analysis was once largely the domain of email lists, and politics-oriented websites. This online media vetting has rarely been collaborative (besides the email lists) and has usually been polarized towards one "side" of a political issue. So, given that climate, creators of these collaboration schemes will need to take steps to avoid allowing these spaces to disintigrate into yet another battle ground.

Via Smart Mobs

Orange, a provider of mobile phone service in the U.K., is launching a new 3G mobile entertainment service called "Orange TV" next week. The service will start off with nine channels - ITN News, CNN, Big Brother, Celebrity Love Island, Comedy Time, Cartoon Network, Toon World, Fashion TV and extreme sports. At the onset, only users of Orange's Nokia 6680 will be able download the free TV application from Orange World to use the service, additional handsets and channels are expected to be added in the future. Customers will pay a subscription of £10 ($18.27 USD) per month to watch the channels.

Via Broadbandreports

My girlfriend and I are sitting in a semi-darkened theater on Thursday night. The ticket says 9:45 PM, it was now that time and we had just finished watching 10 minutes of commercials. Instead of the movie, we get an in-depth ad for Ron Howard's new movie and a great big view of Ron Howard. He is not looking good, probably because they didn't bother with makeup for what is destined to become a DVD extra.

We can't get over how bad he looks, like he's a junkie one fix away from hitting bottom. I say it must be age, figuring that Opie was in black and white so it must have been quite a while ago. She says he isn't that old. Normally this would be an impasse and we would move on.

With no interest in the Ron Howard featurette, I send an SMS saying "Ron howard age" to 46645 and get an immediate response saying

Q&A: Ron Howard Date of Birth:1 March 1954 Source www.who2.com/ronhoward.html

And yes, my phone is on silent.

Small things like that are what Howard Rheingold has been writing about for a while. If I can find out something as arbitrary as Ron Howard's birth date from somewhere as disconnected as a movie theater seat, our entire relationship to information is changing. Kudos to Google for succeeding to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

This project is working on the architecture, technology and experimental applications of a real-time, multi-site, distributed, interactive and collaborative environment called Distributed Immersive Performance (DIP). The objective of DIP is to develop the technology for live, interactive musical performances in which the participants - subsets of musicians, the conductor and the audience - are in different physical locations and are interconnected by very high fidelity multichannel audio and video links.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a 'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.

Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your progamming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3 times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot! However, thanks to BitTorrent the website owner gets almost near-broadcast economics on the web by harnessing the unused upstream bandwidth of his/her users."

Java Embedding Plugin
Need to run those Java 1.4 apps in Firefox (or Camino and Mozilla) on the Mac.. Download this plugin..

Via sLop

The idea here is to let the users of the archive promote the collection by creating things so the free tier promotes the paid tier. Today’s remixer is tomorrow’s licensee.

"Tyzx is going to change the way people and the world interact through its 3DAWARE visual interaction technology. The concept of visual interaction is simple: use digital imagers in products to see the user and environment, interpret what is happening and respond automatically - visually sensing the environment rather than waiting for input from keyboards and switches. Tyzx's 3DAWARE technology inexpensively "sees" accurate, real-time, 3-dimensional information and interprets it - transforming it into actionable events."

On the Internet's ability to disintermediate vs. groupthink.

"n fact, evidence of collective intelligence is all around us, and New Yorker writer James Surowiecki collects much of it in The Wisdom of Crowds. [Surowiecki wrote on technology and happiness for the January 2005 issue of Technology Review.] Surowiecki shows how groups can often outthink even the most knowledgeable experts. He offers proof after proof that "the value of expertise is, in many contexts, overrated." By recounting how the stock market divined that booster rocket manufacturer Morton Thiokol was most to blame for the Challenger shuttle disaster (the official answer came six months later), or how the U.S. Navy found the sunken submarine Scorpion by aggregating the best guesses of a variety of experts, Surowiecki demonstrates that collective intelligence can be harnessed, and that it does not have to be unwieldy. Collections of experts, he concedes, are prone to the ills of groupthink, which can lead to debacles like the Bay of Pigs. But he argues that crowds with certain characteristics--notably, diversity of opinion, independence of opinion, decentralization, and a way to aggregate opinions to arrive at a collective decision--will generally outsmart their most brilliant members. This is true for specific problems and broad ones, Surowiecki says, and for crowds big and small. His premise quickly comes to seem intuitive."

The office of the U.S. Register of Copyrights recently released its annual report for 2004. Along with some useful information about the office's function, the report includes a sort of editorial about the copyright system, entitled "Copyright in the Public Eye." The editorial displays a surprising misunderstanding of the purposes of copyright.

Consider, for example, this sentence:

The Founders knew what they were doing when they made explicit that Congress was to secure to authors an "exclusive Right." They understood that individual rights, especially property-like rights, were the key to establishing a stable and productive society.

ubtle rewriting of the Constitutional language. The Constitution does not direct Congress to establish copyright, but merely allows it to do so. Let's be clear: the implication that the Founders would approve of today's copyright statute finds no real support in the historical record. The first Congress passed a copyright act, and it was vastly narrower than the one we have today.

The Constitution allows Congress to do other things, too, such as imposing taxes and regulating interstate commerce. But nobody would argue that the Founders wanted the broadest possible taxation and regulation. The Founders trusted Congress to use its power judiciously, in copyright as in other areas.

Google getting in the RSS ad business

"If you’re like many savvy web users, you may be reading this via a feed reader, along with all the other blogs, newspapers, and other content that interests you. Whether a feed is Atom-enabled or RSS, it offers great flexibility for users and additional distribution for publishers. As with many promising technologies feeds haven’t quite hit the mainstream yet, nor are the business models entirely sorted out.

Enter AdSense for feeds, launching today in beta. The idea is simple: advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising - and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from. Given the great flexibility that feeds can offer, it’s essential to get the model right, especially so that readers are satisfied. Towards this end we have outlined what we believe are some best practices for advertising in feeds. Publishers who want to participate in the public beta can apply here. "

"The Media Networking Operator (MNO) already exists. If user-generated media is being created to communicate, or network, with other people, then the MNO's are the companies that give prosumers a place to post their content, make it findable and operate the platform that is the glue to make it all stick together in a relevant fashion."

Minus Kelvin, a physics and calculus teacher by day and composer by night, has been making regular contributions to ccMixter since February.

Friday we learned that Runoff Records, Inc. has signed MinusKelvin, after discovering his music through a podcast of ccMixter (enabled by the licenses). Together with another ccMixter contributor, Pat Chilla, they will now be doing music for the next three seasons of America's Next Top Model.

FireANT (the videoblog reader formerly known as ANT) is now available as a public beta for both Windows and OS X. New features of the Windows version include iTunes and Sony PSP sync capabilities. Congrats Josh and Jay.

FireANT is an RSS video aggregator and media player that can automatically download media content for you to watch and listen to.

FireANT lets you subscribe to any RSS 2.0 feed that supports enclosures or Yahoo! Media RSS in one of three ways:
1 Add the URL of the channel manually.
2 Browse FireANT's Directory and drag original videoblogs into your Channel list.
3 Search for any video on the web using Yahoo! Video Search and subscribe to a channel of search results.

a history of vinyl video to pre nasa and the rca days of am radio.

"Based on the obsessive-compulsive nature of my previous postings on all aspects of vinyl technology, several people have recommended that I check out Vinyl Video, an artistic venture by a collective of European artists, who encode black and white video data into the grooves of vinyl records, and play them back through a custom-built set-top box. The box, which decodes the video data and transmits the signal to an ordinary television set, is available from the Vinyl Video website for approximately $2500."

Dive Into Greasemonkey is a book about programming with Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension for customizing web pages. Read it online for free.

"Increasingly in a world of decentralized media production and consumption we will find each other through the content we create, for better or worse. As things become more and more decentralized the way people will find us will be either through a direct existing relationship, a referral, or serendipity."

An important part of CNN's decision to stop charging for video is the streaming of commercials with the videos. CNN has determined it can make more money selling commercials than it can through paid content. This is a notion I support.

However, there's a huge potential downside if this isn't handled properly, and that all depends on the commercial load. CNN says it will be adding 15-second commercials to the streams. I've got to tell you, folks, fifteen seconds is an eternity on the Web, and I don't think most people will stand for it. The people at MSN Video did research and discovered that 7-10 seconds is the optimum length for a commercial attached to a stream. My own intuition agrees with that, and so I advise clients to sell spots of 10-seconds or less.

But even Microsoft is running 15-second spots now, because advertisers are demanding it. Fifteen seconds is a broadcast standard, and advertisers can simply repurpose broadcast ads. But we must remember that time is the new currency. Fifteen seconds seems like nothing when you're used to dealing with three or four minute commercial pods, but the same dynamic that's at work with skipping commercials via TiVo is also at play here. The user is in charge online, and I don't think they'll accept the ratio of ad-to-content.

This is just further evidence that the advertising industry has its head firmly up its backside when it comes to the age of empowered consumers.

File-sharing development and distribution—company RazorPop will launch a new unlimited music subscription service ($9.95/month) to compete with Napster and others. The service, called RazorPop P2P Music Subscription, will pay music copyright owners a cut of the subscription revenue. An independent clearing house will collect customer fees and distribute licensing fees based on sample network downloads monitored by an independent research firm.

The interesting part is that the service includes copyright infringement insurance: as the RIAA continues to sue regular P2P users, RazorPop’s customers are protected by insurance that covers $5,000 per subscriber.

PS: This report is based on a Slick post, but we could not find the press release on RazorPop’s website.

Ads by Google

I've posted before about South Korea's OhMyNews and how it has put into practice the theory of Citizen's Journalism. So it was good to read an update on the stats, based on a recent meeting with Mr Oh.

It employs 50 staff and 38,000 citizen reporters, all of whom submit about 200 stories a day, 70% of which gets published. Permanent staff are mostly used to fact-check and edit.

Citizen reporters can have their details published, so they can get news sources and tips direct and PR people can contact them. And every article has a comment section to engage the community in further dialogue.

Little known fact #1. OhMyNews is not a spin on its founder's name, My Oh. But named after a comedian's popular catch phrase at the time "Oh My God".

Little known fact #2. OhMyNews was launched at 2:22 p.m. on the 22nd of February, 2000.

It would be interesting to find out more about the financial success/business model, if anyone knows more.

The Mobile Technology Weblog is sponsored by:

"Former Chief Technology Officer and company's primary technology evangelist at Macromedia, Jeremy Allaire is the man most can connect back to one technology product: ColdFusion.

According to many Jeremy Allaire Jeremy is an insightful technology futurist and a very talented Internet entrepreneur. With his new baby, Brightcove, he wants to become one of the early, leading players in this emerging online video distribution industry enabling effective and sustainable distribution of commercial (and non-commercial) video content on the Web.

I interviewed Jeremy on a number of issues relating to both the future of online content distribution as well as about his plans and ideas at Brightcove...."

From Macrovision, the folks whom recently mandated "Thou shalt delete content promptly from thy Tivo" come the following 2 USPTO patent applications for Peer to Peer interdiction methods: "Interdiction of unauthorized copying in a decentralized network" and "System and methods for communicating over the internet with geographically distributed devices of a decentralized network using transparent asymetric return paths." These patent applications describe (in pain staking detail) how Macrovision interdicts on Peer to Peer networks to prevent illegal copyrighted file sharing from many locations across the globe and avoid ban lists as well

Stories about people selling virtual goods from online multi-player games is not new. It's been a subject that some have followed for years. However, a new LA Times piece on the subject brings up some numbers and facts that probably could use a bit more detail. The article implies that $100 million to $200 million changes hands in the sale of online gaming items. Actually... that's not what they say at all. They say: "for stuff that exists only as bits of data on the hard drives of far-flung computers." Funny... that should include all digital music or digital content sold online. After all, that only exists as of data on the hard drives of far-flung computers. As for the many millions, that probably could use some more backup as well. The article quotes a few people who claim to be making quite a living just selling online items in video games -- even though it was just a year ago when one person made lots of news trying (and failing) to replace his income by video gaming. Has the market really advanced so much in a year? Admittedly, even Sony has recognized that people want to buy this stuff and has set up its own market for goods and characters in EverQuest. Still, the same guy who is making the claim about the $200 million "a year" (which also seems problematic, considering this market appears to be growing) is the same guy who, in the past, claimed the online gaming universe had the equivalent GDP to Bulgaria in 2002 and Namibia last year. Of course, when you looked at the details, though, even those seemed exaggerated. Also, the study focused on total GDP, rather than the more interesting GDP per capita, in which case we noted that the standings of online gamers was more like the Federated States of Micronesia rather than Namibia (quite a bit further down the list). Either way, the numbers in the article certainly make the market sound pretty big -- but there's little evidence to back it up.

Via Techdirt

I'm going to Gnomedex in June and will be in Seattle June 23-25th.


Any Seattle videobloggers want to get together on Jun 25, 2005 at 6:00 pm for an Eric Rice inspired VloggerLobbyBarCon?

Seattle Marriott Waterfront Lobby Bar

Seattle Marriott Waterfront
2100 Alaskan Way
Seattle, Washington 98121 USA
Phone: 1-206-443-5000

I'm at this conference, RSS Syndicate, at a panel called New Pathways to Profits: Exploring Business Models. Amos Schwartzfarb, of Work.com, Alex Williams of Corante and Paul Forster of Indeed.com are talking with Mark Harmon.

So, Forster just suggested that one business model might be to have a conference blogger doing regular updates, and then charge for those, via RSS.

Say what? How bout that's a value add to make the conference better. And what about all of the rest of us who live blog.. are we competitors in that model?

And Forster just talked about sponsored job results? But not with ads. Is that like sponsored search results? I really love those.

Consumers, markets, monitization. Over and over. Wo.

Okay. As Doc just blogged:

Listening to a panel talking about "monetizing RSS feeds" with advertising, among other forms of "content" they "pour" into a "stream" for an "audience," yada yada yada blah blah blah... arf.

I say.. guys, you're in the matrix. You need to take the red pill, and get off the consumer rant.

Ps. this is freely live blogged for your pleasure. No ads. Just in the moment. Enjoy.

It all depends on who you ask, apparently. Mobile TV has arrived in South Korea, but deciding if it's off to a fast or slow start seems to depend on your bias.

After a year's delay, South Koreans finally were given access to a new broadcast service beaming 7 channels of video content and 20 channels of audio content straight to subscriber mobile phones, all for about $13/month. Of course, there have been some questions about the demand for broadcast-style mobile TV. Mobile connected devices still seem to be more about connecting with others than passively consuming media, so many are betting that empowering personal media is the route to success for any sort of mobile video offering, rather than offering passive broadcast video.

With the launch in South Korea, though, perhaps there's a proxy market everyone can watch to see how mobile broadcast video will do elsewhere. Unfortunately, the initial results (and it is still quite early) seem to be showing that it's easy to prove any position, if you have no frame of reference. That is, while some are making the case that it's a big success, others are making the case that it's a failure.

On the failure side, we have reports showing that sales of TV-enabled handsets are noticeably below expectations. There are plenty of reasons for this, beyond a lack of interest in mobile TV. There's extremely limited handset selection (two at the moment, though, that should be expanding quickly) and the handsets that are available are quite expensive. Still, a smaller number of handsets sold suggests that the demand isn't as pent up as some believed.

However, at the same time, there are reports claiming that the 20,000 subscribers to the service in the first few weeks is a huge success, and actually demonstrates "a strong start." It seems a little difficult to reconcile "fewer than expected" handsets being sold with "a strong start," but perhaps it just depends on whose expectations are being discussed. Of course, the publisher of the claim that it's a strong start also happens to be the same analyst firm that has staked its reputation on the idea that mobile broadcasting will be "the killer app" of mobile phones -- and anyone who disagrees is simply a "naysayer." With that in mind, it seems like they may be inclined to look at any stats with rose colored glasses.

Whether it's a good or a bad start, 20,000 subscribers is significant. What will be interesting, however, is to see how this market develops over time. It's likely that more people will buy into it as there are more handset options (and those options get cheaper). However, what will be most interesting is to watch how usage changes over time. While broadcast style video may attract some users for the simple novelty of it, it seems like more interactive video applications are more likely to be sustainable over the long term.

Investor's Business Daily has a story today on how newspapers need to evolve to grab the attention of consumers who are turning to the Web in droves. For a model, look to the Houston Chronicle. In today's paper Dwight Silverman explains how the media needs to evolve and what the Chron is doing to turn its web site from a news delivery channel to a place where conversations take place. The paper today is launching three trackback-enabled blogs. Dwight hits it out of the park with this passage...

It's important that we do this. While the vast majority of people still get their news through traditional sources — newspapers, TV, radio — more and more are turning to the Web. And because getting news via personal computer implies that the experience is going to be more than just one way, the smart news organization will begin meeting that expectation.

This is particularly true of younger audiences for news, which find little relevance in traditional media. My own 13-year-old daughter is a great example. She gets most of her news from her friends, who communicate via e-mail and instant messaging, pointing out sites and news stories that appeal to their collective interests.

Internet audiences don't want news to be a lecture. They want it to be a conversation: "Tell me what you find, then let me tell you what I think."

Via Micro Persuasion

PaidContent.org reports that Dan Gillmor has quietly taken a step forward in his first grassroots media project. When asked a few weeks ago about his newly registered site, Bayosphere.com, Gillmor did not want to answer questions. Yet as of today, he has released a bit more information cocerning the site. Bayosphere is now the new home of his blog and will soon host a community designed to take advantage of the internet as “ a medium through which we could connect and collaborate for mutual benefit." While maintaining his current focus on grassroots media, Gillmor will himself return to reporting on Silicon Valley. But long term plans for the site do not only involve Gillmor. He describes himself as the site's host, not the site's editor, and plans for the blog to be made of many voices.

Source: PaidContent.org

Via editorsweblog.org

Microsoft has released its MSN Search Toolbar, allowing Windows users to search for e-mail, documents and other data stored on hard drives more quickly than using the "Find" function.

Via HackLog

The BBC plans to test on-demand programmig using high-speed internet access, and an interactive Media Player or iMP.

The Guardian says the Beeb will launch a public trial of iMP, which allows viewers to download any show from the previous week that they may have missed.

Telecom giants such as BT and France Telecom will also launch new initiatives to link the internet to the TV through a set-top box later this year. A company called HomeChoice already offers a similar service in the London area. HomeChoice programming is available via 1Mb, 2Mb or 4Mb broadband connections with up to 80 digital TV and radio channels

The BBC already has an interactive channel (BBCi), so online viewers should be ahead of the game in the UK. Executives reason that whether they view content on their computer screen, web-connected TV or a portable device, they'll want to access BBC shows "any time, any place, anywhere".

The $99 Freeview settop box provides a dozen digital television channels and over 20 digital radio channels -- absolutely free -- in the UK. It's paid for with advertising. As competition has increased, from multichannel TV and now the web, the BBC wants to widen the distribution of its content in order to make a convincing argument for the licence fee.

The pilot scheme, initially limited to 5,000 people and running from September to December, with the technology ahead of a full launch next year. Viewers will be able to search through more than 190 hours of TV shows, 310 radio programmes, regional programming and some feature films. After seven days, the content will be automatically deleted from their computer.

Unlike personal video recorders, viewers don't have to chose programs in advance. They download it.

The BBC - which is developing iMP alongside another major project known as the Creative Archive, aims to offer a huge library of classic shows for download - will try to keep costs down by using "peer-to-peer" technology to distribute the programmes.

Search engines such as Google Video Search and Yahoo! Video Search are also investing millions in developing "video search" tools. Settop boxes like Moxi allow viewers to download and play content. But so far the viewing fare is limited and not coordinated with off the air broadcasting.

The Amino AmiNET500 set-top box with PVR includes SkyStream's software to manage and schedule live and on-demand media. U.K.-based Amino equips its set-top box with an 80 GB hard drive and PVR capability.

U.S. consumers are stuck with the ATSC digital television standard which (mostly) can't deliver a signal to rabbit ears. The remaining 15% of the audience still watching off the air probably couldn't afford a DTV anyway. The Software Data Download Service, A/97, defines specifications for downloading software to terminal devices using an MPEG2 transport stream.

ATSC is attempting to "fix" it with E-VSB. Developed jointly by LG Electronics (Zenith) and ATI Technologies, the Enhanced VSB (E-VSB) "standard" will provide digital TV broadcasters in the United States, South Korea and other ATSC countries with improved over-the-air DTV reception.

The COFDM-based Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial (DVB-T) used by Freeview in the UK, works indoors. The primary advantage with E-VSB may be that it keeps royalties in-house. E-VSB utilizes Vestigal Sideband modulation, slowing the data rate down for "rugged" reception. For ATSC, a workable DTV system in the United States may be less important than the royalty payoff.

Cellular providers are moving into the mobile television vacuum. Crown Castle bought 1.4 GHz spectrum across the United States and have deployed DVB-H technology in a three-site, single-frequency network trial in Pittsburgh. DVB-H is for handhelds. Qualcomm's new 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.

CES head Gary Shapiro thinks E-VSB is a totally bad idea.

"The recent activities to develop enhanced-VSB standard have been a disappointment and a misguided endeavor," he said. "Furthermore, we strongly believe that standards should be created and decided upon by consensus, which did not occur in the development of E-VSB."

Still, what the BBC is doing with this test isn't exotic broadcast datacasting or mobile television. They are simply putting programming on-line. Even ATSC broadcasters in the United States could do that!

BBC's Mobile Video, Interactive TV News, ABC News Now Looks to Future, The Free Triple Play, IP-TV Settops, Mobile TV Expands, Verizon Does Cellular TV, Video Search, Big Media Mobilizes, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, Samsung's Video over DSL and The Man Who Invented Television.

Who would have thought that new methods of human socializing would emerge from the combination of digital music playlists and wireless communication between devices? This article about findings presented at the recent Computer-Human Interaction conference offers some tantalizing hints:

(Thanks, Jim!)

Music playlists can reveal intimate aspects of character, even when the listeners alter their lists to portray themselves in certain ways, according to a recent study.

The study also found that sharing digital music, including among people with disparate song tastes, can lead to the formation of strong group identities.

The research adds to the growing body of evidence gathered during the past few years that technology is changing the ways people relate to one another.

The findings were presented at the recent Computer-Human Interaction conference in Portland, Oregon.

One of the high-tech advances analysed in the study is called computer "discovery capabilities".

This allows one technology to discover and connect to another, for example, as Apple's iTunes digital music program can enable a computer to automatically find and connect to iTunes running on other computers.

The same technology allows a laptop to discover internet hotspots in places like coffee shops that are wired for discovery capabilities.

"Right now the research about discovery capabilities is focused on one technology finding another technology, but we wanted to understand what the social impact of discovery might be," says Amy Voida, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Via Clippings.reblog

Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.

I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets. - More at http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

So you can target your ell jay to your demographics

we take blog entries and make them into movies... simple, right? (fun too!)

(via and bloggingpro), a great list of things people can do with RSS, compiled by Tim Yang

1. Get the news as it happens from multiple news sources
2. Collect your email from all your email accounts in your RSS reader (mailbucket)
3. Track Fedex packages
4. Get notified of bargains at Ebay (rssauction)
5. Get stock updates
6. Get the weather report (wunderground)
7. Find out what people are saying about you, your company or your product online (technorati or pubsub)
8. Get music, radio programs and TV clips
9. Stay updated on someone’s schedule (RSScalendar.com)
10. Get cinema schedule updates
11. Read your favourite comics
12. Find out what other people surfing (del.icio.us…)
13. Automatically backup your weblog posts
14. Get software updates
15. Get the latest bittorrent files and ahem, p*rn

Some readers add other functions in comments:

1. traffic conditions (maps.yahoo.com)
2. get up-to-the-minute police and fire events (incidentlog)
3. video game statistics
4. jobsearch (rssjobs)

Neilzii sez that Maiden Outdoor are near completion of enabling these screens to talk to your mobiles via Bluetooth.

They are saying that the screens will allow users to download digital content i.e movie clips, music or mini ads to your device if the user decides to accept.

As Volvo adverts are looped on plasma screens, travellers with the Bluetooth facility on their mobile phones turned to "discoverable" have a message beamed to them asking if they would like to download a clip of each of the seven adverts – the series where television viewers see snippets of conversations in cars about becoming an astronaut or surfing above sharks, among others.

Advertisers are projected to spend $198 million on online video ads this year -- barely enough to finance a day and a half of ads on TV. But some of the world's biggest advertisers are scrambling to get video on the web.

Via Lost Remote

: Sony will launch its new PlayStation 3 video game console in the spring of 2006, with the promise of HD graphics and broadband connectivity...

With a built-in Ethernet port for high-speed Internet access, PlayStation 3 will allow gamers to surf the Web while simultaneously playing games. Its disc drive will use Blu-ray, a next-generation DVD format backed by Sony with vastly more capacity than current discs.

The third-generation PlayStation stands at the heart of Sony's convergence strategy that aims to pull together its game console and electronics hardware business with its movie and music segments.

Via PaidContent.org

Next year Boeing's Connexion unit will offer live TV channels as part of its on-board WiFi service. Passengers with laptops will be able to view four TV channels from providers like BBC World Service, CNBC and MSNBC.

Via Lost Remote

"Emotional tone will naturally fill all digital forms over the next decade. No matter what permutations of new technologies emerge, emotional people will eventually flesh out sterile digital territories until now inadequate for the exchange and appreciation of normal human emotions."

I woke up to the news that Newsgator has bought FeedDemon.

Although I can't say I was expecting this move, I am also not the least bit surprised.

My good friend Brad Feld is up to his old tricks.  Brad is the master of the venture rollup.

When he finds a sector where he's early in the development of the market, he gets in, figures it out, builds a management team, and then gets busy convicing others to join the party. That's the play book for the venture rollup.

It appears that Brad's convinced the team at Newsgator to do a venture rollup.  Its a smart play because the big guys have figured out how important RSS is and are coming after the early entrants.

Here's a market share chart for my feedburner feed.  It is based on a sample size of one and certainly isn't representative, but I bet its not too far from the market as a whole.

Newsgator had an impressive 13% share of my feed.  But Bloglines is at 26% (down from almost 40% a year ago) and FeedDemon was at 18%.  My Yahoo is at 7% and gaining fast.

With the FeedDemon deal, Newsgator blasts into first place at 31%.  That's a big move.

And don't expect Brad and his Newsgator team, led by Greg and JB, to stop there.

I wouldn't be surprised to see them go after the leading Mac reader, NetNewsWire, which would get them to over 40% of my feed.  And add the Mac userbase the party.

Another friend, RIch Levandov of Masthead Venture Partners, joined the party last month and the company has a warchest now.

With Bloglines sold to Ask Jeeves, and with this FeedDemon acquisition, Newsgator is now the dominant independent RSS aggregator.  That's a good place to be with RSS taking off and my hat is off to Brad, Greg, and JB for pulling this off.

This is the HDR-HC1, a Sony video camera that will be yours in exchange for 1330 of your hard-earned EUR in Japan from July onwards.

This video camera can record HD video in 1080/60i (1440x1080) on miniDV's!!! The most important aspect of this model is that Sony tries to render HD accessible for all, so this is a "compact" model (compared to everything else that is already available) with dimensions of 71x188x94mm and a weight of 680g.

Watch a whole hog barbeque, fly casting in Kansas or movies by indie filmmakers. Niche TV programming is in the works. Small companies like DaveTV will soon use broadband to offer shows catering to special interests.

"Independent artists need a method to alert fans that they won't face 20 years of prison time for downloading their songs. In an effort to combat the Anti-Piracy Seal, I have created an alternative logo for artists who aren't concerned with file sharing and federal level copyright infringement."

Preview of Participatory Culture's P2P video publisher that turns a website into a TV channel.



"Broadcast Machine is software for your website that can publish fullscreen video files to thousands, using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs. It is free, open source, and designed for easy installation. Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management. It creates a browsable archive of videos on your website, but its real purpose is to be the perfect publishing tool for our video player that comes out in June. Broadcast Machine creates channels that, viewed in the player, give people a TV-like experience."

There are over 8 billion web pages. Most of them suck. use outfoxed ot build on your social network... similar to stumble upon.

FoxiPod uses Greasemonkey with Firefox to make downloading MP3s and music files and adding them to iTunes a single-click process.

With Backbase software you can quickly create user-friendly and highly interactive Rich Internet Applications. These applications are based on Web Standards and can be viewed in almost any modern web browser without installing any plug-ins. Backbase is ideally suited to create the presentation layer of web applications, especially if ease of use and time-to-market are essential. Adoption of the Backbase software will allow you to communicate more effectively with your customers, and improve the productivity of your web developers.

feels like annozilla + de.lirio.us + groups

"GoodNotes helps you categorize, leave notes on and share web pages with your fellow students without leaving the browser. GoodNotes is a free open source FireFox browser extension for group online research, built on the Annozilla code library."

"A step-by-step guide to setting up a videoblog for free."

A new Directory for Videoblogs:

At Vloggercon in late January 2005, there were about 20 regular videoblogs.
Three months later there are well over 200...with new videoblogs popping up everyday.
I see no sign of this slowing down.

So how do we keep up?
Linking, filters... and directories which Michael Sullivan has done.
Introducing VlogDir.

Michael says,

VLOGDIR is a new Videoblog Directory Service that allows you to add a link to your vlog along with descriptive details, rss feeds and attached media.
Every VLOGDIR entry will ping and inject itself into the videoblogging.info community page which will display the most recent 20 vlogs added to the VLOGDIR.

So add your videoblog to the directory and get listed.
This way everyone will know how to find you and subscribe to your feed.

VlogDir is a great complement to Videoblogging.info, which is the public site for the Videoblogging Group. We are building a smart ecology of tools. A real community is developing.

(source: momentshowing)

Lance Knobel: "When it comes to the media, most of us today are tool managers. We switch on the television, open the newspaper or read Google News."

Downhill Battle's email workspace tool

"You and your friends and family need a simple way to talk together, but group emails can get tedious. Conversate gives you an instant discussion space for any article, picture, song, video, website, or pretty much anything. Make social plans. Collaborate on projects. And for your business or organization, Conversate can be an ongoing chat room that doesn't require your constant attention."

We have two eventual aims - firstly that the ontology created is deemed acceptable by our peers and secondly that it can be used to form the basis of fanfiction related semantic web applications.

American Business Media, the association representing more than 2000 magazine titles and 2,300 web sites, has launched MediaPace, a blog for business media.

Exploding TV: one-man bands

: Lost Remote reports that KRON-TV in San Francisco is the first major market news operation to switch to one-person TV crews (following some local cable news operations). The Remoters then wonder about what the audience will think of less-than-perfect video. A few observations:

: As audiences shrink, the way to maintain profitability -- for now -- will be to cut costs. Expect to see a lot more of this.

: I believe the audience cares more about a good story than a rock-steady camera. I've told the story already how I tried to convince a FoxNews exec that webcams would come to cable news and he got all huffy about backhaul quality and all that... and then I started broadcasting via webcam on MSNBC and they love it. It's real, they said, it's immediate. Rougher video will turn from being an economic move to a news fad.

: At one of the Harvard confabs, podcasters said that NPR gets obsessive about audio quality and that's a way to keep the people off the airwaves. The same is true of TV -- and, for that matter, print journalism: It's overcomplicated to keep the club closed and exclusive. But we all know how easy it is to write and publish if you have something to say. It's getting just as easy to broadcast and distribute.

: I'll be we'll quickly see local TV news -- and radio and newspapers -- follow the leads of Current.TV, blogcasts on MSNBC, YOURadio, and the podcast show on Sirius: You'll see just folks recording and reporting in any medium.

Mobile phones are very practical, but sometimes very annoying to take with you all the time. Until now, nobody came up with an enjoyeable solution that allowed you to get the phone out of where you put it in less than 2 seconds. But look who enters the ring? P4PSystem presents shirts and T-shirts capable of making our lives easier. These shirts have a special pocket in which you can slide your phone from the top and take it out from the bottom. It remains to be seen how this translates into a safe and practical everyday use though...

Via Akihabara News

A British survey on text usage from Reuters.

British men are almost twice as likely to use their mobile phones for talking compared with women, who prefer to text, according to research on Wednesday.

"The fact that women are more likely to be texters could suggest that women now see mobile phones as extremely social tools," said Ellen Shiels, senior market analyst at Mintel.

"They can stay in touch with each other and make arrangements to meet without getting drawn into a long conversation."

Via Emily

Xeni Jardin: Joi Ito blogs about an exchange he had with his sister Mimi regarding an anime fan-scene in Japan. The activity resulting from "illicit" Naruto derivations created by fans amounts to a convincing case study for the notion that filesharing can generate new fans and consumers.

If you go to the site that lists the BitTorrent files of Naruto, you will see that fans have subtitled the episodes into a variety of languages like Hebrew, Portuguese, French... When new episodes of Naruto come out, the fans get together on IRC and other fora and collaborate and create subtitled versions and put them online. If you search for Naruto on Amazon.com, you find a page where the fans are voting for the DVD release and the notice says that they will notify the publisher of the voting. (It would be interesting to find out if the publisher or the fans initiated this.) It also appears that when a local DVD is released, the fans take down their subtitled episodes for that region. By allowing the fans to create demand, the publishers are using these file sharing networks and illegal derivative works as an extremely efficient form of marketing. Thanks to the network of Internet anime fans, Naruto is still niche, but popular globally.

This kind of publisher approved "piracy" is not a new thing. Dojinshi, are comics created by fans of Japanese comics. They are illegal derivative works. They make their own stories using famous comics as the base. They have huge conventions and it's an amazing community. The publishers of most of these comics encouraged this dojinshi culture because they realized that this increases the demand for the originals. These derivative works and sharing creates "fans" not "lost customers".

blog post

from the ITP office at NYU:
catch some coverage of the ITP shows on various blogs

bloglines

engaget 1

engaget 2

we-make-money-not-art

boing boing

createdigitalmusic

coolhunting

Scott Trudeau and I were talking about the intersection of blogs and wikis, which I realize everyone else talked about two years ago. Maybe next I'll start blogging about how I'm sorry that I haven't blogged more, or pull post ideas from Anil's list of clichés. I also had an insightful conversation with Mark Dilley about wiki organization and how it might apply to groups of blogs; something that might find its way into ArborBlogs.<

One of the things that came out of my conversation with Scott was the idea of space with both. Blogs are one dimensional, posts are points on the axis of time. Posting over time makes a blog taller visually and wider metaphorically.

Wikis are two dimensional. If the fundamental unit of a blog is a post, the fundamental unit of a wiki is the page. Adding pages makes a wiki wider using our imaginary graph, and as a wiki page evolves over time the wiki gets taller.

Mark's idea of organizing blogs into groups involves adding that second dimension to blogs. The blog becomes the fundamental unit, and the network grows wider as it adds blogs, taller as those blogs add good posts and deeper as blogs accumulate posts over time. Mark is looking for a tool to organize blogs and he thinks in wikis. He wants interlinking, backlinks and recent changes distributed across a network of blogs.

Another mental framework I stumbled on is that blogs link to the past and wikis link to the future. When I blog at PVRblog, I usually want to provide background on a post. For example, a post about EchoStar suing TiVo links to an earlier post about TiVo suing EchoStar.

Wikis are built around links to the future. In order to create a page, you have to link to that page first; you have to link to a page that doesn't exist. Linking to a stub on the Wikipedia is a link to the future when that is a full page with good information.

I don't think that a blog equivalent of a future link exists, but it could be powerful. I've been working with some people in Ypsilanti on their grassroots journalism project and one of the things that we're looking to do is provide a way for people to request coverage of meetings. In a wiki you request a page by making a link to it and waiting, but there's precious few ways to request that a blog that is connected to yours make a post about something. NowPublic tries to address that for grasssroots journalism. A way to distribute these requests over a network a blogs would allow conversations to evolve organically.

: Bill Gates is in a very talkative mood these days. This time he's chatting with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German text)about Windows Mobile, portable music and plans to leave Microsoft's leadership when he turns 60.
On mobile music: "As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run. ... If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I'd bet on the mobile phone for sure." He thinks consumers want more possibilities, not limitations.
He praised R.I.M.'s Blackerry but said Windows Mobile 5.0's server-less email approach "will make wireless e-mail ubiquitous." (Here's the quirky Google German-to-English translation.)

Via PaidContent.org

Sends podcasts to mobile phones (by converting them to ringtones?)

Micropayment company allows single download and subscriptions.

"BitPass Unplugged will allow podcasters ranging from hobbyists to mainstream media organizations to increase revenue with a-la-carte and subscription-driven premium podcasts. It also leverages the loyalty of a growing number of listeners who prefer to download music, audio blogs, radio shows and other content and have it transferred automatically to portable media devices for listening at the user's convenience."

Human Interaction with Space

An invitation to researchers, faculty, staff, and graduate and PhD students to submit a letter of interest for a 4-day interdisciplinary workshop--Locative Media in the Wild--to be held July 20th- July 23rd*, 2005 at the Crooked Creek Research Facility in the White Mountains of Inyo County, California. Convened by Brett Stalbaum and Naomi Spellman, Interdisciplinary Computing Arts, University of California San Diego. Funded by the UCSD Center for the Humanities and the UC Humanities Research Institute the goal of this workshop is to share knowledge, methods, and tools between various research disciplines that have a focus on human interaction with space. Our hope is to identify common interests as well as blind spots among a range of disciplines, in order to enrich the various practices represented, and to inspire new areas of research. Four individuals will be chosen to participate. Each will be provided with overnight accommodations, all meals, travel expenses ($300 cap), and $500 compensation.

BACKGROUND The fields of cognitive science, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, dance, art, computer science, the earth sciences, and geography are concerned with the negotiation of space. Recent advances in wireless telecommunications, sensor technology, and Geographic Information System tools have inspired a tide of experimental creative projects. These tools are being used to address how communication, navigation, and big data are played out in space. As the landscape and urban streets become the canvas for ubiquitous computing applications, what kinds of possibilities emerge? How can research across multiple disciplines enrich the various practices?

WORKSHOP GOALS AND ACTIVITY While the workshop is intended to yield useful tools and problem-solving methods for all workshop participants, we are most concerned with fostering an interaction among disciplines, and examining and expanding upon how researchers approach spatial problems. Discussion and facilitated activity will set up a framework for activity over the 3-day workshop. Participants will be asked to present and demonstrate their own approach to spatial problems, and to collaboratively address problems outside their discipline.

The problem(s) addressed will be culled from workshop participants. Possible approaches include but are not limited to: Geographic Information System software, GPS-enabled mobile phones, narrative strategies, social navigation, performance (performative engagement of surrounding), data visualization, and data mining. Mediated or unmediated, digital or analogue a variety of means to communicate with and through space will be explored. A people-centered approachwill be emphasized in a supportive and flexible environment. Results of the workshop will be made publicly available online. Results will serve as a basis for ongoing multi-disciplinary research in this area.

WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS Participants may be at any stage in their career, and do not need tobe affiliated with an institution, academic or otherwise.

WORKSHOP LOCATION The physical location should inspire activities with a range of possible scales, problems, methods, and outcomes. By placing the research group outside of a familiar context, participants will be encouraged to rely on each other to address problems that engage the surrounding. The Crooked Creek facility is located at 10,000 feet in the White Mountains in Central California. Facilities and labs include dormitory-style rooms, a weather station, a Geographic Information System lab, and high-speed telecommunications.

TO SUBMIT A LETTER OF INTEREST Please email a short letter of interest to naomi.spellman@gmail.com with "Locative Workshop" in the subject line. Attach your CV. Explain how your research activity or practice relates to this general theme. Include any specific information you deem relevant. Letters of Interest should be received by June 10, 2005. Questions should be directed to naomi.spellman[at]gmail.com or stalbaum[at]ucsd.edu.

*Date of workshop to be confirmed

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION An online discussion and bibliography hosted by Brett Stalbaum and Naomi Spellman, November 2004: Exploring and defining the social and cultural implications of Geographic Information System tools and computerized mapping in a multidisciplinary setting: http://34n118w.net/UCHRI/

The fiber cable is laid. It's even to your neighborhood. The technician is in your home happily installing your new IPTV box in the living room. His face is all smiles... until you tell him that you want a box in the bedroom, in the office, in the guest bedroom, in the kitchen, in the oldest kid's room, and everywhere else you might have a television. The latest gripe about IPTV is that it's inside the home that is the killer expense. According to LightReading it breaks down like this:

"...two additional set-top boxes at $150 each, new CAT-5 cabling at $50, approximately eight hours of skilled installation at $50 per hour, and a “windshield cost” (gas and depreciation on the service vehicle) of $50."

Around $800 to make two additional televisions IPTV-capable. And that's too expensive.

I remember toying around with design ideas for the "connected" home years ago. It basically consisted of having a "closet" for your hardware and a smart system for pulling all manner of cable: phone, electric, CAT, and whatever else you wanted implemented. Basically the common office department floor setup, right? But even my "futuristic" design wasn't entirely necessary because data will travel wirelessly. The question is, how much and how fast will it travel wirelessly?

The current answer is "not fat enough, not fast enough". At least not in the home, not affordably. We know that it can be done though - we've seen it done at Sundance. They beamed a full-length feature to an HP running Windows Media Center. And we also know that Bluetooth is already developing solutions to work in the home using UWB, which could be the affordable solution.

So what is the problem? Could the problem be with SBC? Is it truly a matter of capacity? Could the problem be with the DSL devices they plan on using? Could it be with SBC proprietary solutions based on the current model rather than the needed one? The hidden costs may simply be a matter of how you are wired - or unwired - and how the company plans to profit from it or adopt you to it. Early adopters may shy away, but the solution will emerge - and it will be wireless.

Well, what started as a service for interactive mobile social networks grew up a lot today; that’s right, Dodgeball, the little project that could borne of NYU’s ITP program got bought by Google today for an undisclosed sum of money (we’ll just assume they’ll be able to pay off those student loans). For those of you who don’t remember Dodgeball, they were started as a service wherein a registered phone can “check-in”, and anyone in your registered circle of friends (or their friends as well) in the area will be notified of your proximity (and vice versa), so you can, you know, do lunch or whatever people do. It pretty much goes without saying that this is just begging for use with Google maps mobile and Google local (why do they keep building technology to make it easier to get out of the office and have a social life, anyway?), not to mention the obligatory Orkut integration we’re likely to see. Now quick Dodgeball guys, cash out now and live like kings in the Balkans forever!

Ads by Google

Legendary musician Frank Zappa wrote an extremely interesting article on home taping back in 1983 (A Proposal for a System to Replace Ordinary Record Merchandising):

Every major record company has vaults full of (and perpetual rights to) great recording by major artists in many categories which might still provide enjoyment to music consumers if they were made available in the right way. MUSIC CONSUMERS LIKE TO CONSUME MUSIC . . . NOT PIECES OF VINYL WRAPPED IN PIECES OF CARDBOARD. [emphasis in original]

Read the whole thing. Very cool.

via MeFi

(Thx for the forward exiledsurfer. -kc.)

Originally posted by Mike Masnick from TheFeature.com, reBlogged by ts

It seems like many mobile operators are trying to become media moguls for all the wrong reasons, but that doesn't mean they can't learn a thing or two from the way the entertainment industry works. The biggest problem is still that the mobile operators believe they know best what any user would want to do with mobile data, and therefore keep their gardens walled up tight. There are a few exceptions, but they're still somewhat difficult to find when many operators seem allergic to any openness.

However, this is clearly an area where the operators can learn from the music industry they're so obsessed with these days. While the recording industry still does control musicians quite a bit, it uses a system to encourage more rapid development of artists. Russell Buckley is suggesting that operators would do much better by copying that setup. He suggests the operators should invest in new development by giving "advance" money, which can be recouped on future revenue.

While such a solution may be more costly upfront, it does make a lot of sense. With the current model, so much risk is put on the small developers that it's tough to get too much innovative development happening. While operators would obviously protest that this plan only moves the risk to them, that's not quite true. Since the operator can spread money across a wide variety of developers, it actually diversifies the risk, encouraging more development. Just a few big successes can easily pay for any of the failures. The diversification of the risk actually lessens the risk in some sense, while encouraging more development, which is more likely to create the "break through" applications that will drive data usage. It seems like a win-win situation for everyone, if only the operators could ever lower down their guard.

[Mike raises some interesting points; however, some of what he's discussing is already being taken care of by publishers and aggregators in the ecosystem, who have raised capital to fund interesting content and applications, and in some cases by the operators themselves. My own company has directly benefited from operator advances and subsidy of content, as have many others in the biz. -ts]

William Crossman, a futurist and an English instructor at Vista Community College in Berkeley, believes that reading and writing are doomed, reports Inside Bay Area.

"The respected scholar gives the written word until 2050 to become a curiosity of the past.

t talking computers, which we already have in a primitive form, will be storing and retrieving information for us rather than paper and textthem and getting our information by asking questions rather than by checking our files or libraries.

Crossman, unlike others, does not wring his hands over this. He sees it as a positive.

When asked why we would give up what many consider to be culture's shining achievement — literacy and written language — Crossman says it's inevitable — text is merely one stage of our evolution, and it's on the way out.

He points to the phonograph, telephone, television, video, movies, and instant and text messaging lingo as proof of our culture's unconscious rebellion against text.

He cites statistics that show that IQ scores worldwide are getting higher as literacy rates are plummeting. Children especially just don't want to learn to read and write, and this is not just for the socioeconomic reasons people tend to ascribe to it, he contends."

Via Smart Mobs

"If you're inside a building, a GPS receiver cannot find you. But a $40 radio chip from Rosum Corporation will do it, with the help of TV signals," notes Roland Piquepaille. The CIA-backed start-up says TV signals are 10,000 times stronger than the ones from GPS, according to the Mercury News.

Rosum founder James Spilker, one of the original architects of the GPS satellite... realized a synchronization feature in digital and analog television signals could be used for other purposes than to lock the vertical hold for older TVs.

The engineers created a radio receiver chip that could zero in on the TV signal and get the synchronization information. Using precision timing, they figure out how far a TV signal travels before it is picked up by a device equipped with Rosum chips. Next, they compare the measurements against other data that they collect with their own listening stations and then finally calculate the device's position. The Rosum engineers call this process "multilateration," which is akin to navigational triangulation...

Rosum's vice president of engineering, Greg Flammel, says tests of the technology show it can track someone in the basement floor of the San Francisco Public Library. It also found a person in the heart of San Francisco's financial district...

Rosum is best used with a GPS system, mainly because TV signals don't reach into places such as the Nevada desert or the middle of the ocean. The technology also isn't useful for tracking someone vertically. So it can locate a person in an office tower but can't determine what floor they're on unless the building is ringed with a set of Rosum antennas. (thanks to JF for the tip)

Finnish mobile handset manufacturer Nokia has announced that it is to make the air interface specifications for its mobile TV technology freely available for third parties.

Based on Digital Video Broadcast - Handheld (DVB-H), the end-to-end solution makes it easy for operators and service providers to roll out mobile TV services. The air interface specifies how mobile TV terminals interconnect with the network end of the mobile TV solution.

"Circuit-switched networks and the humble shortcode -- funny how what seems like yesterday's technology can play a critical role in ushering in the content of tomorrow.

Mobile content is supposed to be easy for the consumer, a point that often gets forgotten in such a technologically fast moving industry. Give users great content they can engage with without having to engage their brain and you're onto a winner.

Which is why the development of video shortcodes, which don't appear as the most pioneering technology, is so important. Video shortcodes have been on the way for some time now but with almost all UK operators ready to offer the facility, they are on the verge of exploding. "

Last weekend I was at BlogNashville, I met Online Journalism Review's Mark Glaser, while there.

He's on the left in the photo with Dan Gillmor. Today Glaser blogs: Seven big ideas (and one pet peeve) from BlogNashville. Want to see more about the conference, Glaser points you to a video report put together by Glenn Reynolds. It is an excellent example of the future of vlogging. Tomorrow I will be putting up a vlog created by my class on an APME Credibility Roundtable they did. That's if OurMedia.org is working okay.

: Our contributors Dorian Benkoil & David Eckoff will writing from there. Expect to see reports on panels, interviews etc. The dedicated blog is here...
See our 2003 (down the page) and 2004 coverage from the previous iterations of the conference...
The coverage is sponsored by Click&Buy.

Via PaidContent.org

: LATimes: Jon Healy writes: "Yahoo Music Unlimited is more like a cable TV service than a record store, letting subscribers play as much music as they wish for as long as they pay $6.99 a month or an annual subscription of $60."
Well, yes and no. It's like cable in the sense that it's a subscription. But, unlike cable, subscription music is completely on demand and can lead to purchased downloads that last after the subscription. (Conversely, if you've used cable to record to a DVD or VHS, you may still have access after service stops.)
Some more coverage:
-- News.com: "Record label executives who have seen the service, which is in part based on wholesaler MusicNet's technology, say the community aspect in particular shows a promising evolution for the online music business." News.com's story may have been the catalyst for today's announcement.
-- WSJ:"It's a hugely aggressive move, a shot in the arm to the subscription notion," says David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
-- FT: One analyst questioned how Yahoo's new service could be profitable with such low prices...Goldberg said the service would make money, although he did not rule out raising prices in the future.

Moovl is a digital online drawing tool with lifelike dynamic properties. It allows children to create drawings that move according to simple rules of science.

When children draw pictures on a Tablet PC or an interactive whiteboard, the animating environment simulates gravity, collision, and tension so that the pictures move as if they were in the real world. The software is intended to allow children to make predictions and hypotheses about how things in the world work, to visualise their ideas, and to test them out in a trial-and-error approach.



An online "scrapbook" function allows kids to save their simulations and access resources created by other children over the web. This feature aims to help children to think together about science, and to share and solve problems together.

Authors: SODA (the guys of the amazing soda constructor, a version for mobile phones is announced).

Moovl will be shown at the OFFF festival in Barcelona, from 12th to 14th May.

Via we make money not art

"Give us your PDF and a couple days later, you'll have a black and white, printed and comb bound book on your door step."

Mike Elgan writes that while the mainstream media are obsessed with blogs, they seem unable or unwilling to truly understand their appeal - or to grasp that blogs have already transformed the public. (via Steve Rubel)

"This article will provide a short introduction to alternate reality games, looking at their short history and how in 2004, an ARG was used to promote Halo 2. It will also explore the potential for ARGs to be not just promotional vehicles that end with a game's release, but also a way to build and become part of a rich and involving story for a game."

BBC Backstage is a collection of feeds, APIs, and other tools for remixing the BBC's digital offerings, to "make your stuff using our stuff."

"backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC's new developer network, providing content feeds for anyone to build with. Alternatively, share your ideas on new ways to use BBC content. This is your BBC. We want to help you play."

"NowPublic wants to display the best photographic work from citizen journalists and photobloggers like you and we invite you to submit your newsworthy* images to our first Citizen Photojournalism Awards."

"Today, armed with little more than green screens, a few scene props and an incredibly small budget, it is possible to create an action flick that will look 90% as good as the big million dollar productions. And this is exactly what James Mather and his crew did on this short, 20 minute production called "Prey Alone". Total production budget? About 80,000 Euros."

"Cutting edge tools are now in the hands of millions of people all over the world. With the right idea, and a bit of resourcefulness, it is now possible to create high-quality VFX films for next to nothing. "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" they say. Well, these new film-makers prove that we are now entering an age of film-making "Digital Democracy"."

efficient serialized data exchange for flash

"Flash remoting for PHP enables objects in PHP to become objects in actionscript, almost magically! AMFPHP takes care of all the data-type conversions, serialization, and other client-server details. This provides a great way of connecting rich media clients with data and logic living on the server. While at the same time allowing designers to design and programmers to program."

The new version of iTunes (4.8) just came out and it now supports video. So it looks like we're getting one step closer to use iTunes as a way to view video blogs and TV-like content (or whatever Apple has planned too). The next podcasting applications like iPodder will likely support ways of getting the videos in an easy way automatically (I'm guessing that it might work now, I just downloaded iTunes 4.8 a minute ago). Here are some screen shots of the video UI elements that were added. Link.

"The music you'll find on Music for Dozens is all uploaded by independent artists and small labels. Every song can be previewed for free, and 20¢ of every song sale goes to the artists. There's no DRM on Music For Dozens, so when you buy a track, it's yours to do with as you please."

"CoolStreaming is a network for live media streaming, or you can call it P2P Streaming Internet TV. In principle it's similar to BitTorrent(BT). The core operations are very simple: every node periodically exchanges data availability information with a set of partners, and retrieves unavailable data from one or more partners, or supplies available data to partners"

Examples of how Greasemonkey will change everything. 2005 is the year of the Greasemonkey script.

(Also see Greasemonkey Stole Your Job (and Your Business Model -kc.)

"Newmark hopes to develop a pool of "talented amateurs" who could investigate scandals, cover politics and promote the most important and credible stories. Articles would be published on Internet sites ranging from Craigslist to individual Web logs, or blogs."

AlwaysOn and Technorati looking to honor the people changing the media landscape.

" We’d like to hear from you. Who are your nominations for key players driving the Open Media Revolution? Comment on this post and list your nominations, up to 5 per category. You can also tag your own blog posts with Technorati tag: AOTechnorati100. We’ll be closing our call for nominations on May 16, 2005 and we’ll be watching."

Ken Norton addresses in some detail a common UI problem with tags - how to handle delimiters, i.e., how to allow multiple tags without forcing people to mash terms together like “sanfrancisco”.

There’s a bit of an irony here. The openness of interfaces like del.icio.us (where you’re just given a text input box and the unclear clue of “space separated) has lead directly to tag uptake. But that uptake is still limited, and, I would argue, limited by that openness–there’s a large part of the user population that, when faced with an empty text box and little help, are daunted, and enter nothing.

There are many problems to be addressed in tagging UIs. The challenge is not getting in the way (tagging works because of its low “cost”), while providing enough cues and structure so that people feel confident in using it.

Via You're It!

This is geeky, but perhaps useful to some of our readers. Best Kept Simple blogs a tutorial on sending SMS via http:

The more and more you read about how other's are using SMS, you begin to wonder why you're not. This tutorial should show how. Unfortunately, i am only able to code in PHP, so it would be nice to hear from those of you that can programme in other languages.

Via Smart Mobs

ITP Spring Show 2005 Tuesday, May 10 and Wednesday, May 11 - 5 to 9pm both days - ITP, 721 Broadway, 4th Floor

more information at http://itp.nyu.edu/show

An exhibition of innovative student work including multimedia installations, physical computing and interaction design, sound and video design projects. All projects on display at ITP.

http://itp.nyu.edu/show/results.php

(Can't wait to see the work of Shawn's 'Producing Participatory Media' class. -kc. )

Business Week magazine's new blog about blogs makes for interesting reading. One post, though, interested the evangelist in me. They got a few letters from readers who still didn't understand what blogs were after reading their cover article on the topic last week.

I'm finding this too. When I talk with audiences I either find people who are very familiar with the blog world (if you know what Technorati is, for instance, you are probably one of those people), while most people just don't know much about our little world at all.

It's not just blogs, either. How many people -- even those who are advanced computer users or developers -- really can explain what Avalon is? Or what Indigo does? Or what Aero is?

Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

I suppose the day was going to come where the casual gaming market would get a conference of its own. It's nice to see that the day is in late July (July 19-20 to be exact). This conference is put on by The Games Initiative, who has put on various other conferences such as the Advertising in Games Forum and How to Break Into the Game Industry. Please go here for more info.

InstantSharecam is a service for sharing in real-time and on the spot high-res videos/photos with your friends or your crew right from your digital camcorder to other devices.



No more delay in sharing images by going back home and logging in your video blog site or transferring to your video editing suite. As the system features a real-time broadcast connection associated with GPS, you won't lose sight of your friends while you are going on group trip.



InstantShareCam was designed for semi-professional users who need to go on multi-cam shooting scattered in different locations. The service application is more affordable than renting microwave radio communication systems and it provides a secure network through the wifi 30G network operators.
,br> InstantShareCam is Akemi Tazaki's thesis project for her Master at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Via we make money not art

The FCC exceeded its authority by requiring consumer electronics makers to help restrict copying of digital TV broadcasts, a federal appeal court rules. Michael Grebb reports from Washington, D.C.

(Wow. How the heck did I miss this one Friday? -kc.)

TV next killer app for cellphones, analyst says
Not so sure about "killer app" but definitely worth checking out. It certainly won't be "TV" as we are used to. Probably more along the lines of video blogging and other INTERACTIVE media.

Via sLop

"Congdon is reason enough to watch "Rocketboom." A fizzy ingenue with a mischievous streak, she bridges the gap between the program's dual missions: to be a newscast homage and a New Media breakthrough. She makes "Rocketboom" comfortable and cool, all at the same time."

:) -kc.

Dailymotion is an open platform dedicated to home-made videos. Publish your videos, watch other's ones, comment, answer, CREATE !

What would an information architect do with the wealth of information given by del.icio.us / flickr / technorati tags?

"I suspect however, that I would have got a richer dataset if I had asked a group of people to freelist on "apple". I think what we are seeing is the mental models of "Apple" among the early del.icio.us adopters, who are by no means a reresentative sample. Additionally, all the tags are related to links that they have found worth saving. All these bias the data in a certain direction."

Screen scraping tool to build turn sites into RSS feeds

Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter: "Web design in Web 2.0 is about building event-driven experiences, rather than sites. And it’s no coincidence that RSS is one of the key building blocks. RSS feeds enable people to subscribe to your content and read it"

"Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.

The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways. These tools, the interfaces of Web 2.0, will become the frontier of design innovation."

An Israeli company plans to take the best blog postings by customers and put them between covers, says Nir Ofir, the editor.

Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

There’s a nice writeup of music-game-maker Harmonix, developer of FreQuency, Amplitude, and Eyetoy: AntiGrav, today in the Boston Phoenix. With the recent Karaoke Revolution 3, the company may be working towards one day pleasing even demanding machine-learning researchers/karaoke software developers such as Lawrence Saul. And with a realistic virtual bear costume included, who knows what other niche markets Harmonix may be embracing?

The article describes this hyperinstrumental Media Lab spin-off’s transformation into a rhythm-music game developer, a change-up inspired by the success of the genre in Japan. It also reveals that those lucky suckers have a S.T.U.N. Runner coin-op in the hall. The company’s support for their employee’s artistic endeavors is notable - “We don’t want to crush the people’s expression of musical passion that they have in their lives outside of Harmonix to make these games,” the CEO says - as is the company’s own innovative output. I know of the company via a friend, the uncrushed Dan Schmidt, who works there and also lives an additional sinister double life as a musician (fronting Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives) and non-music game-maker (For a Change). So it must be true.

Via Grand Text Auto

"The presentation is 37' minutes long and gives a quick and simplified overview of the web conferencing and online collaboration markets while highlighting unique tools and services that I have found to be particularly interesting and cost-effective.

As a matter of fact, in this presentation there are quite a few tools that provide true opportunity to communicate and collaborate in real-time without imposing on you enterprise-level price tags. Some of them are even free, while most cost only a few tens of dollars per month."

Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) announces that it is working with Microsoft on future versions of the Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center Software Kit, enabling manufacturers to develop Portable Media Centers with TI hardware. TI provides an integrated, cost-effective solution to meet the growing hardware demands of these devices. This is another step for TI in delivering technology that`s the driving force behind innovative portable applications.

[...snip...]

This development is based on a TI system-on-a-chip (SOC), a highly-integrated Digital Media processor targeted specifically for portable applications, capable of supporting QVGA resolution for Windows Media Video 9, as well as up to D1 resolution of other commonly used video formats. TI’s Digital Media processor is a multi-core device, embedding a digital signal processor (DSP) and an ARM core. It has an integrated peripheral set, supporting the base Portable Media Center requirements, as well as many of the additional options available to Portable Media Center developers. It features an integrated video encoder, hardware video accelerators and USB host capabilities, offering superior performance over single-core PMC implementations, while minimizing power consumption. With a programmable architecture, the Digital Media processor can support Windows Media Audio (WMA), MP3, JPEG and all other major digital media formats, as well as offers encoding capabilities for OEMs that want to differentiate their Portable Media Center products.

We don't really know how "citizen journalism" will turn out, though as I noted in an item earlier today, a growing number of entrepreneurs and traditional news organizations are giving it a try. In these early days, it's worth watching the content that people are adding to these new sites.

Much of it, of course, is of the micro-local variety. For instance, from MyMileHighNews.com here's a piece submitted by "Michael" about a guy who collects Boy Scout memorabilia. At the Daily Camera's MyTown site, "Tekee" submitted a story about a kids' team winning the local Pee Wee hockey (...)

Entry continued...

If you are you are student, teacher, citizen journalist or professional journalist, you should take some time to roam about The Journalist's Toolbox @ the American Press Institute. It is filled with links to collect information and to practice the craft. Here is something on a psychologist's tips for interviewing and something for novice interviewers from the New York Times.

However, be warned some of the links seem to be broken. Still it is a good place for browsing.

May 18-19, 2005
Jurys Great Russell Street, London

Wireline operators across Europe are calculating business models for the addition of broadcast, interactive and on-demand video services to their product portfolios. As voice and data services become further commoditised, the aim is to access new revenue streams and achieve effective differentiation. However, a number of challenges face operators. Revenue models, regulatory issues and ROI on infrastructure are key concerns.

---

[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

Indy, a collaborative filtering music player mentioned previously, has just been released in beta for the Mac. Also, a new version of the Windows client is out.

Note: Some antivirus software reports that the Indy distribution for Windows carries the virus “Downloader.Istbar.8”. Ian, Indy’s developer, assures me that this is a false positive and there’s nothing to worry about.

Steve Gillmor's audio show, Gillmor Gang, is coming back. Alright. Even better, it's powered by a Tablet PC!

And a new show, Gillmor Daily, coming too.

Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Stowe Boyd posted a ”blink” on Corante about an event he was going to that he thought was charging for a live video stream.

On the train en route to NYC, for the Blogging Goes Mainstream conference, hosted by Business Development Institute, and a long list of great speakers. If you can’t attend, I think PR Newswire is streaming the audio out for $125.

That got me thinking/blogging about some of the implications of charging for live audio and video streams. What are the tensions between folks who live blog out at an event (text, audio, photos, video) and what organizers might want to sell. Are they competing? Complementary? Is someone going to want to ‘own’ that stuff?

Stowe riffed back and I thought it worth a post here on Many2Many (as I have been a very delinquent guest blogger!)

Stowe noted that the event location did not have wireless — except for employees (hmmm), so live blogging was out of the question. He also said “I think any conference that tried to prohibit blogging would have a riot on their hands.” (Stowe, I’d love to know if they did sell feeds from the event in question and if so, if you know how much uptake they got.)

I agree that trying to limit blogging is riot-inducing. I’ve yet to meet a blogger who is begging to be controlled! But limiting connectivity starts to go in the direction of control - implicitly.

But lets think beyond blogging to podcasting, combining photos and almost-live transcript blogging. Think of IRC channels and note-taking wikis open out to the public. These are more than a blogger editorializing on conference content. These are potentially high value artifacts of the event. Personally, I have received GREAT value when folks have done this, even when I’ve been a paid participant at the F2F event (think of http://www.northernvoice.ca) But what would an organizer think? Is this something they want to reserve the right to sell? Can they? Should they? Like at many concerts, which prohibit cameras and recorders, will our laptops and wireless be banned from conferences and events so the event producers can sell out the same thing?

What is the balance point for the event organizers and the free-contributed “sending out” from bloggers? How different might this balance look in different situations?

For me this goes to a deeper question about the perceived and real value of participation in distributed events. Or distributed participation in F2F events. ;-)

I’m in the midst of writing up a “lessons learned” about an online e-consultation and one of the issues that keeps coming on the table are the costs and benefits of participation in distributed events. In the end, I believe this will be one of the factors that determine if people can build a market “sending out” live events to offsite folks (and visa versa).

Right now there is less willingness to pay for something online than F2F. The price points are different. Clearly, they are not the same experiences. But can enough value be created — and perceived/experienced — in online participation so that people will pay? It sure does costs to produce them; different costs, but costs nonetheless. Or will free or “almost free” dominate and the cost be recovered in other ways? (i.e. sponsorship, marketing benefits, etc.)

I think there is room for a wide range of options, but I believe controlling is a losing proposition in almost all cases. I say that from lessons learned trying to control blogging at a past event, even though I think we had good reason to make the request in terms of keeping trust in the room. It is contrary to the nature and ethic of blogging, even if that same ethic may be perceived as contrary to the interests of either the event producers or participants.

No easy answers. What do you think?

Mediacast 2005 is hosting a free three-day conference in London in connection with the annual trade exhibition. The event will cover many aspects of digital television, including interactive and high-definition services, the telco video, voice and data triple play, and mobile video.

Via informitv news

Gil Lee sends word that the Video Games Live tour is set to kick off this summer at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic. The tour is a gamer’s dream come true, with music from titles like Zelda, Ghost Recon (great stuff), Warcraft, Zelda and Beyond Good & Evil, among many others. The tunes will be performed by orchestras, choirs and soloists on a stage full of lasers and projected game images.  Things could hit overkill with the intro of actual game characters running around on stage (visions of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge dance in my head), but that may just make it a must-see.

Via Joystiq

"A tussle over antipiracy technology is looming over the young mobile phone content business, with big phone companies claiming that new music and video services could be derailed as a result. At issue is a set of technologies aimed at protecting music and other content from being indiscriminately copied after being sold through mobile phone networks, a critical component of the new content services if record labels and movie studios are to sign on."

Once again Sony proves to be a big fat pain in the ass when it comes to copyright protection. This is one fight I hope Microsoft wins. Janus/WMA DRM may not be perfect, but at least it's a good standard that Plays For Sure across a broad spectrum of hardware. Better to have Microsoft extorting the carriers than Sony.

Via Digital Media Thoughts

PR Face2Face is Jeremy Pepper's special series of interviews with the top public relations and publicity professionals in the country, as well as with people involved in the public relations world. The ninth installment is a Q&A with Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media Inc.

Via Micro Persuasion

As someone pointed out on the Tapland boards last night, I guess I am sort of queer for the PSP. I'm not ashamed—it's the best mobile gaming platform yet. There are a couple of stories floating out there in internet that hold even more promise for Sony's platform, though, especially from the 'relatively cheap hacking platform' perspective.

The first: someone has executed code from the PSP's MemoryStick, something Sony specifically attempted to prevent (you'll put together why here in a second). It only works on the first-generation Japanese firmware models, so it's obviously using a hole that Sony has since plastered over.

The second: someone has figured out how to dump the data from UMD discs, which means games can be download and (someday) run from MemorySticks, presuming someone can follow up on the first item to make the execution of code possible.

Altogether this means lots of free games in the future, either from legal homebrew, grey-area emulation, or good ol' American piracy.

Hello World on PSP [PSP411]
PSP UMD format cracked; game ISOs appear [Engadget]

Jus think what Google can do with detailed logs of individual WWW traversal: Google tool to speed Web surfing

A beta, or test version, of Web Accelerator was introduced via the Google Labs technology incubation site late Wednesday. The tool, which must be downloaded, will tap into the power of Google’s global computer network and thus help sites load faster, according to the company.

Web Accelerator works by sending URL requests through company servers designated specifically for speeding site downloads. The application also can compress site data before sending it to computers.

[…] Web Accelerator marks the latest effort by Google to flaunt the enormous computing power of the worldwide network of servers used to support its market-leading search engine.

Via Furdlog

The "6th General Assembly of the Digital Media Project" recently released a set of documents "providing an Interoperable DRM Platform". I've written before about the self-contradictory nature of their goal (A Perfectly Compatible Form of Incompatibility). Now we get to see how they plan to achieve the goal. And I have to say, the documents are a real piece of work. I could blog for a month just dissecting them; but I won't subject you to that. Instead, just a small sample or two.

The documents describe a world unlike the one we actually live in. They do this, mostly, by redefining words that we all understand, creating improved versions that are distinguished typographically by capitalization. (There is a whole document devoted to definitions.) When you enter DMP-World, you give up your rights; they are replaced by Rights. And unlike ordinary rights, which you may possess simply by virtue of being a human being, Rights have to be Granted to you, and they can be Withdrawn by a Creator. In DMP-World, you can't buy devices; all you can get are Devices. You don't whistle a tune; you execute Functions on Governed Content. The goal of all of this is to achieve Trust: "a state where Users, Devices, or Content Data enable Users to execute Functions on Governed Content".

All of this is done with little if any reference to copyright law. There is plenty of talk about "protection" and "intellectual property" and, of course, Rights. But not much is said about the actual scope of copyright law or its correspondence to the structure of DMP-World. Instead, DMP-World seems to redesign copyright from the ground up, replacing it with something much broader, and yet at the same time much less precise. Copyright law, for example, explains with moderate precision which types of works it covers and which it doesn't cover. In DMP-World, the system covers Works. What is a Work? Here's the explanation (from document 2, p. 13), which I swear I'm not making up:

The first object identified and to which IP is attributed to in the Creation Model is Work. Work refers to the fruit of an effort undertaken by an individual or group of individuals that constitutes the logical construct that persists independently of the innumerable possible physical representations of that construct. A Work on the one hand can be very concrete by being unequivocally identified through a large number of differing manifestations all of which are perceived as being of the Work yet it is also ephemeral in that proof of its existence requires the use of physically perceivable resources that are not of the Work. The Work is somewhat like an invisible hand that gives shape to a glove.

ms, it a lot like the Tao: both concrete and ephemeral, existing independently of physical manifestations, and knowable only through its tendency to give shape to the world. The Tao is even described, sometimes, using the hand/glove metaphor.

To aid your understanding, here is Lin Yutang's translation of the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, which does seem oddly relevant to DMP-World:

The Tao the can be told of
Is not the Absolute Tao;
The Names that can be given
Are not Absolute Names.

The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the Mother of All Things.

Therefore:
Oftentimes, one strips oneself of passion
In order to see the Secret of Life;
Oftentimes, one regards life with passion,
In order to see its manifest forms.

These two (the Secret and its manifestations)
Are (in their nature) the same;
They are given different names
When they become manifest.

They may both be called the Cosmic Mystery:
Reaching from the Mystery into the Deeper Mystery
Is the Gate to the Secret of All Life.

make things perfectly clear.

Via Freedom to Tinker

The creation of authentication systems is a major industry. Stephen Downes argues in his paper on 'Authentication and Identification' that we we don't need authentication, that authentication won't work, and that people don't want it.

Though the development of authentication systems will no doubt continue to be a source of considerable churn and considerable investment in the near future, Downes states that it should be evident that authentication is (a) not necessary, (b) won't work, and (c) is not desired and raises the questions What will work? What do people want? Stephen pleads for 'the need of a mechanism for self-identification, where clear and unambiguous control is placed in the user's hands, a mechanism that enables the user to declare to every site (or none, if that's their choice), "I am me!" And a way to do this automatically, unambiguously, with as little effort as possible'.

Authentication won't work because no system of authentication provides any more security than a system of self-identification. Authentication will not work at all unless it is tied to a proxy, the identity of which can be established online, which means that the security of the authentication is no greater than the value of the proxy to the user. With cheap computation, computers on a USB (reference is out there somewhere), disposable telephones, e-paper, and more just beyond the horizon, it seems clear than the value of the physical asset to which authentication is being tied will continue to decline, at which point authentication will provide no disincentive against misrepresentation of identity whatsoever. Authentication is useless if not tied to the person, and can be tied to the person only with the compliance of the person, which in effect reduces it to self-identification.

not desired because authentication essentially involves the transfer of control over one's own identity from oneself to a service provider or identity broker, and as a consequence, enables the breach of the user's security and privacy whenever it is in the interests of that service provider or broker to do so. It moreover undermines the individual's fundamental right to determine and express who they are.

Part two of Stephen Downs series on identity is 'mIDm - Self-Identification the World Wide Web'. In it Stephen explains how a system of self-identification would work.

Exploding media: creativity

: For me, the lesson I learn from the announcements last week that podcasts are coming to Infinity Radio and Sirius is that big media is adopting citizens' media faster than I ever would have predicted.

I've said that what would make big media pay attention to citizens' media, in the end, would be economics: We, the people, are creating compelling, valuable, addictive, fresh content at a lower cost than the big boys with all their big ways and big costs. And as the big boys' audience and revenue shrink, they will turn to new ways to make content and save money.

I thought this would take time to happen -- as it has taken time for mainstream media to decide that they wouldn't get cooties reading blogs. But I was operating in the wrong world, on the wrong timetable. Mainstream media journalists have been slow to accept or at least acknowledge citizens' media because they operate in a priesthood, a club closed in by its standards and rules, and they don't want to change any of that and allow new members in.

But radio is entertainment. It is a business. There's no hooha about professionalism and higher standards. Hell, just look at prime time. Listen to radio.

So along comes content that is new and getting an audience and -- best of all -- cheap or even free, and you'll see guys in suits slap on iPods and webcams faster than you can spell EBITDA.

But this raises two issues, two cautions:

The first is podcasts and vlogs are new, really new. Their potential is limitless. But at a year old, even Mozart couldn't play chopsticks. They have not begun to reach their potential. So I worry that Infinity and Sirius will slap on lots of podcasts and we'll immediately read the reviews from big media snobs that it's all tedious crap. Or a lot of it may actually be tedious crap. And then it will all be dismissed as a fad, a bubble, a nothing. And I don't want to see that happen. And the fate of this media merger is in the hands of Adam Curry and whoever is programming YOURadio and Current.TV and I have hope that they will do more than just slap up any old multimedia blather. I know they will pick the best they can find. I also know that the people will make great stuff to try to impress them and get the attention. But the programming directors here -- inserting themselves into a new medium where programming directors are an oxymoron -- need to do more: They need to encourage and support the best. And that leads to the other issue...

The big guys can't just exploit the citizen-producers and take the stuff for free. They need to find value in what they create and pay that value not just because it's fair but also as the way to support the creation of great new stuff. The creators need to realize, in turn, that they're not going to get rich overnight doing this, not until someone proves that audience and advertisers will make it profitable. And there are new ventures being started by not-so-big-boys that aren't making any money yet. But this has to be seen as a partnership or it won't work.

If it is seen as a partnership and if it does work, I'll now bet you'll be hearing your neighbor on some form of radio and seeing your coworker on some form of TV just as you are reading your friends in this, some form of publishing, sooner than you can imagine.

Teenage cell phone users are also heavy users of television, computers and video games, according to a new study from MindShare Online Research. [via Media Week via YPulse]

"The media agency polled 400 respondents between the ages of 13 and 17, and found that teens with cell phones are heavier users of media than other kids their age.

The survey showed that "while virtually all teens watch television, cell phone users are significantly more likely than non-users to use the Internet every day, read newspapers, listen to the radio and read magazines."

Experimedia is both a community site like Slashdot and a net-label. I've seen this done before by Opsound, which also mixes community and publishing. The difference is that Experimedia really hits you over the head with features for socializing, and I needed that to understand what I was seeing.

Internet music is conversational: the internet is the new medium, conversation is the new genre. Wherever you see net-native music -- Songfight, Remixfight, CC Mixter, Webjay -- you see a conversational version of a formerly static medium. This is why it makes sense to say "I really feel like hearing some podcasts right now" in the same way that you'd say "I really feel like some triphop."

In transposing the idea of a record label to the internet, community net-labels like Experimedia and Opsound are rethinking it as something more like hosting a party and less like operating a printing press.

Via the weblog of Lucas Gonze

Yahoo is developing a search engine for finding downloadable songs and music data from across the Internet, according to News.com...plans are to introduce it within the next two months...The specialty engine will let people search on an artist's name, for example, and retrieve all the available songs from other music services, as well as album reviews and band information from Yahoo Music.

That's the key: Yahoo's activity in the music market has been slower than others, but it bought out MusicMatch last year, is working with MusicNet and relaunched Yahoo Launch as Yahoo Music...

The music engine will draw on Yahoo's search-marketing service to add related ads to music search results..

Other players in the market are SinginFish, GoFish, MP3.com, MSN (has music search tab) and others...

Related: Yahoo Launches Video Search; Ties With Content Providers

After a few months in beta, Yahoo has formally launched its video search page with new content from CBS News, Discovery, MTV, Reuters, Internet Broadcasting Systems (IBS) and more. "This relationship greatly expands the number of users who will have immediate access to our vast reservoir of current and historical broadband CBS News video -- all for free," said Betsy Morgan, VP for Business Development, CBS News. Yahoo is in a race with Google to become the online destination for people looking for video.

Earlier this week: Google adds more video search partners

Via Lost Remote

Much like the shift from molecules to atoms to subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, etc.) to quarks to (potentially) tiny vibrating strings as the most fundamental unit of physical matter that we can find, the fundamental unit for content on the web has been getting smaller as well:

1. The site. You'd see references on sites or in emails like "check out this cool hotwired.com site" or "go to Bobaworld, scroll down, and click on the 'cool links' link". This quickly gave way to:

2. Individual pages. People learned that the web was all about the page. The X-Files Episode Guide page, your Geocities home page, the product page for that new Thinkpad with the fold-out keyboard.

3. But eventually content producers started gathering several chunks of content on the same page and came up with the post/permalink combination. The idea is that several bits of content might be on this page right now, but may be gone when you come back, so here's a permanent link to it so you can find it at some later time. Weblogs are the best example of this, but there are others...Google Maps gives you a way to permalink the particular map you're on for later reference.

4. And now it seems that there are several efforts underway to cut the fundamental unit down to the phrase or word. Online bookmark managers like del.icio.us and Furl and scores of bloggers doing remaindered links blogs link to things with just a few words to describe them. Sites supporting tagging (del.icio.us, Flickr) are creating vast collections of stuff for single words and short phrases. Wikipedia is working on making any word or phrase linkable to an array of information about that word. Linking words or phrases to a Google search result is always an option as well. The result is something like: the Sun is a large ball of gas that gives off energy to Mother Earth.

Note: the fundamental unit of matter metaphor works ok, but is obviously still a metaphor. In particular, the shift in the fundamental unit for content on the web is not one of discovery (linking a single word to a search result was obviously possible many years ago) but of a very rough consensus of perception. Still, something fun to think about.

NetworkX (NX) is a Python package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks.

Mimi Ito has updated her “Media Mixes” paper for inclusion in an upcoming book entitled Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (which doesn’t have much web presence yet, but sounds right on). Anyway, it’s well worth checking out if you want to understand what the pervasive media ecology of the future (and for kids, the present) looks like. (Here’s hoping Dr. L. Ron Reacharoundasaurus will drop some science on us in the comments regarding whether she has her facts straight on the card gaming culture.)

I think she’s a little too easy on the corporations currently engineering the media mix; it’s pretty clear they could care less about empowering people and are all about the cold, hard cash. And let’s face it, they’re doing their best to keep this kind of thing illegal and marginal. But part of what we need to do is convince the media corporations that by loosening their grip and allowing peer-to-peer cultural production to move from the margins to the mainstream, they can solve some currently intractable problems. If we fail, we need to burn the whole thing down and start over.

Via Ryan Shaw

The MouseField, by Koji Tsukada, Toshiyuki Masui and Itiro Siio, combines an RFID reader and motion sensors to detect an object and movements after the object is placed on it. The system can interpret the user's action as a command to control the flow of information, without using special controllers.



For example, you can listen to music with just a MouseField and RFID'd CD jackets. All the music in the CD has been previously saved in a music server. When you place a jacket on the MouseField, a music player appears on the screen, shows the contents of the CD, and starts playing the music. You can change the sound volume by rotating the CD jacket, and move to the next or previous track by sliding the jacket to the front or to the back. To stop the music, just remove the jacket from the MouseField

Video.

Related: Tasting Music.

Via we make money not art

"Give it All, Zero For Rules!" shouts Mattin. For some, free music software isn't just a way of saving money. It's a way of life.

At the center of the debate is a semi-rivalry between two similar programs: Pure Data (http://pure-data.iem.at/) (aka "Pd"), and Max/MSP (http://www.cycling74.com). Both Pd and Max/MSP use a similar interface, allowing you to build custom music, video, and multimedia applications by visually interconnecting objects. It's not quite programming (though in each you can code your own objects if you like), but it offers many of the benefits of programming visually, and in real-time. Pd is free/open source; Max/MSP costs a few hundred dollars.

So why are there two programs? Here's a VERY long story made short: [read more]

not so simple..

"HERE is a block diagram illustrating the relationship between Google AdWords, and the Google AdSense PPC program."

By touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time.

Feedfest is a six-month online multimedia series focused on the increasingly dynamic and powerful content syndication applications that are allowing people to consume what they want, when they want, where they want and how they want.

DIY culture starting with fashion

"All over the Web, bloggers, artists and entrepreneurs are unexpectedly finding that T-shirts are more reliable moneymakers than the original ideas that brought them to the Internet."

"Soon -- probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two -- we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.

And we will be doing it to ourselves."

iam is a research project by Tripp Millican . iam is a 24/7 point-of-view video, published to the web as serialized metafictional video blogs, in a layered/drill down UI, exploring narrative possiblities and new types of personal filmmaking.

The iam system creates an hybrid of personal television's reality show and scripted drama to be shared with other people. Being able to watch a piece that is not only shot in real-time but is also continuously being produced, is impossible. And trying to edit this much video is a formidable task.



So the iam system provides better summation tools and a UI suited to handle large amounts of video data: it auto-summarizes the video for the viewer, saving time and helping them understand the full video without having to watch it.

A button on the camera enables the "director" to tag moments during his/her day as "important". Software can analyze video for changes in scenery and lighting which further breaks apart video into separate scenes. By offering a stackable interface, the audience is able to quickly understand the complete content of a video in a way that was previously impossible.

>iam will be presented at PASS THROUGH, the thesis exhibition by the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television.

At the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, May 7-12, 2005.

Via we make money not art

Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire is condensing its phone, cable TV, and Internet services all into Wi-Fi, as reported by the New York Times (free registration required). The project, which started in 2001, has added 1400 WAPs and 24,000 wired ports. All that, and cost effective too.

Via Slashdot

TV-news consultant Terry Heaton has written an important post on the Morph blog of the Media Center, in which he bemoans an overall lack of foresight in the TV business. He writes of how more and more stations are laying off people -- an indicator of the industry's troubles -- yet the majority of people in the business still look at the problem through the fuzzy lens of the past.

Heaton writes: "TV news people are reluctant to get involved on the Web side of their stations. While I'm sure a lack of knowledge contributes to this, there is a sense (...)

Entry continued...

Via Poynter E-Media Tidbits

Microsoft's new version of Xbox, code-named Xenon, will be more of a "PC hybrid" according to Bill Gates. They're aiming to be a media hub for the living room, utilising the Web as a channel for media content and to enable collaboration. As Tom Foremski notes, this will give Microsoft "a ready platform for its DRM technology and for its MSN online network".

What are the Web 2.0 ramifications of all this? Well for a start Microsoft is aiming for Xenon to be more of a social experience. Take this quote from Gates, during an interview with Engadget:

"We’re going to have games that are more sociable, more approachable, particularly by taking this idea of Xbox Live and bringing in contests and spectators and ratings and talking to your friends and various new things there we think we can make it much bigger category than it’s ever been to date."

How are they going to do that? Via the Web, presumably. But the catch is you'll need to connect via a Microsoft Media Center PC, which seems to underpin what Gates referred to as their "media vision".

So what exactly is this "Media Center PC"? In Part 2 of the Engadget interview, Gates implies that the Media Center PC can be thought of as a kind of home server or a gateway to an external Web server (via the media content provider). Gates also confirms that Media Center will be part of Longhorn, the next version of Windows.

To get a glimpse of how Microsoft's media vision might work, check out this recent Microsoft guide on how to use a Media Center PC to schedule the recording of TV shows. Note that you'll need a plethora of Microsoft software in order to do this, including the dreaded Microsoft .NET Passport.

And that's what you can expect with Microsoft's PC Hybrid and media strategy in the near future. Sure you'll be able to connect to and communicate with people all over the world, but you'll be locked in to Microsoft's software. Gee whiz, that sounds familiar...

NB: Amusingly, the tv program used as an example of something to record in the above guide is 'Napoleon: The Man Who Would Rule Europe'! A Microsoft writer with an ironic sense of humour perhaps? ;-)

Today's 2.75-minute screencast features Nic Wolff's ingenious solution to the vexing problem of single sign-on to websites. I've mentioned it before, but I suspect few outside the geek community read those postings or "got it" if they did. We'll see if this narrated visual demonstration can manage to cross over. ...

Mark Cuban's HDNet announced it signed Steven Soderbergh to direct six films in high definition. "The Soderbergh high-def projects will be the first slate of simultaneous releases in movie history," reports DCinema Today. The "day and date" flicks will be seen in theaters, on TV and in DVDs all on the same day -- something Lost Remote has been pushing for since 2003. Right on, Mark.

Hollywood Reporter: It's one of Hollywood's biggest controversies

Via Lost Remote

Digital Media Europe reports that Reuters will implement a mobile phone distribution service in the UK and US. Subscribers from 70 mobile devices will be able to receive the news agency's top ten articles as well as images. The service is easily downloadable at on handsets by linking to mobile.reuters.co.uk.

Source: Digital Media Europe

Via editorsweblog.org

Saturday at high noon join in of a day of workshops and lectures about tactical media making with some of the web’s most notorious pioneers and players. Join special guests from The Yes Men, the Electronic Freedom Foundation and creators of Subservient Chicken (Crispin Porter + Bogusky), Black People Love Us, Rejection Line, FundRace, How to Dance Properly, del.icio.us, Blogdex, Nike Sweatshop Email, Dog Island and Pizza Party to learn the tips and tricks to win the Showdown.

Business 2.0: A decade ago (that’s nearly seven decades in Internet years) a music fiend like me had limited options when it came to finding new, unknown, yet promising musical acts. Reading magazines like Rolling Stone and listening to the radio were the traditional ways to discover new music. Going to nightclubs and listening to a deejay’s selections was another way. Still, the best recommendations came from friends or fellow music lovers who were in the know.

Broadband and always-on Internet access has taken that friends-recommending-music concept online. Today dozens of websites make it easy to find music that matches your musical tastes. Continue reading at Business 2.0 website…

In this piece I have taken a gander at some of the more popular music recommendation services such as Last.FM, Live Plasma, Music Mobs and software apps like Audioscrobbler. I have two more services that make finding information easier: SoundFlavor and FIQL. Would love to know what you guys think!

Via Om Malik on Broadband

[Updated:] Check out the new QuartzComposer blog; I'll be reading! -PK

I looked earlier this week at Quartz Composer, an interactive eye candy development tool that not only creates slick RSS newsfeed screensavers, but even allows audio and MIDI input and outputs MIDI control, perfect for live performance and VJing.



Developer Pierre-Olivier Latour has posted an extensive description of Quartz Composer at VJCentral. Quartz Composer is in fact a descendent of the now-defunct PixelShox, a free tool with a cult online following that is now unsupported. But there's no need to shed tears for PixelShox: Quartz Composer is a completely different product, a major leap forward taking advantage of OS X Tiger's new Core Image features.

Bottom line: Quartz Composer is free in Tiger and just another reason to upgrade. All you need to do to get it is install the developer tools from the OS X installation DVD -- you were going to install it anyway, right? Go check out VJ Central for the full links, and stay tuned for more QC info here in the coming weeks..

Via createdigitalmusic.com

A report from Frost & Sullivan focussed on the US mobile video industry cites the management of intellectual property rights as a main concern for the industry. “Though content providers may have already assigned rights to established distributors in specific countries and regions, obtaining amendments to existing licensing agreements remains a much complicated process for content aggregators. In some cases, content providers assign exclusive distribution rights to established distributors in these regions, which further complicates the process of introducing video services over mobile networks.” The suggestion is made for a single organization to act as a “clearinghouse for mobile video rights clearance”.
Another interesting part of the release is the suggestion that carriers should have a data strategy that encouraged an increase in average revenue per megabyte (ARMB). The concept of average revenue per user (ARPU) has been around for a while, and many telcos are judged on it, but as mobile data networks become saturated (which I think will happen as usage overtakes the introduction of new technologies that increase bandwidth) telcos may be judged on how much revenue they derive from their bandwidth, rather than users.

Via MocoNews.net

Mono-cultural to Inter-cultural: the networked public domain

Public Spaces; Shared Places? examines how and why public spaces are shared and valued in different ways. Public space as a policy idea has come of age over the past five years. But there’s nothing new about sharing space in cities. By its very nature urbanity has always been an experiment in spatial membership. Contact with others is both part of the appeal of living in cities but also determines how, why and where we move within them. This project starts from the standpoint that public space isn’t something that is simply created on the architect’s drawing board, but develops over time as a result of the interaction of complex social relationships.

The research process will widen the understanding of public space from something that exists in squares and parks, to a prism through which an entire city can be viewed. Rather than selecting specific spaces in a city to study, we seek to uncover the collective spaces that people value and how they are shared.

Related Pages:

Public Spaces; Shared Places? WHY?
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Public Spaces; Shared Places? DIARY
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Public Spaces; Shared Places? OBJECTIVES
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Public Spaces; Shared Places? PLACES
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Public Spaces; Shared Places? PROJECT PEOPLE

[via Gerrit on Smart Mobs]

Via networked_performance

Whatever you want to call it, Backpack is freakin' awesome. Backpack lets you create and share lists, photos, documents and more in a wiki-like editable Web site you can share - like this one. I am trying it out to share blog links with my client and I love it so far, though I wish it enabled RSS feeds for each page. I see lots of applications here for the PR community including instant press rooms that can be set up in the event of a crisis. Kudos to 37 Signals. It's also generating a ton of buzz. I bet they're going to give Jot and Socialtext a run for their money at least in the small biz market.

Via Micro Persuasion

Rex Hammock points to Blogspotting's Stephen Baker, who suspects that newspapers and other publications will ultimately open up their archives for all to see. Not so fast, says the WSJ's David Kesmodel, who writes about the New York Times' current investigation into whether site visitors would pay a subscription fee to access most (or all) of the paper's historical content.

If we're making predictions here, I'll say that whatever the current costs are for offline copies of newspaper articles to be researched will be scaled down for online archive use, and passed along to the customer. Publications are going to be moving to either a heavier reliance on advertising or some sort of online subscription service as print distribution declines, and there is no reason they shouldn't be able to recoup some of the cost of hosting that data - on a constantly live basis - from the reader. If people don't want any subscriptions, they're going to be subject to more ads or advertising methods, there is no way around it.

Via The Media Drop

Stephen Speicher has an excellent article describing CableCard technology and the minefields that must be navigated before the technology can really be used. It's definitely a "must read" if you want to understand the technology and why it's important to the consumer.

Via TVHarmony

Building a "movie" using very basic animation and visual widgets. Assemble these into scenes and add dialogue to build a storyboard. Possibility of doing this on a mobile, interactively, with more than one participant.

"The idea is to assemble these into scenes and add dialogue to build a basic storyboard for a "movie". Of course, I am thinking about the possibility of doing this on a mobile and the potential of doing it interactively with more than one participant, or "writer" (player).

I imagine a plot editor that enables scene creation, copying and deletion. One level down, there would be the scene editor itself, where the props and characters are assembled and positioned. Here, dialogue is also added. Writers could add scenes and their co-writers would be notified of updates."

The New Millennium Research Council has just released a wonderful new report by Prof. Benjamin Compaine entitled The Media Monopoly Myth: How New Competition is Expanding Our Sources of Information and Entertainment.

Ben Compaine has long been the voice of reason in the field of media finance and economics. His classic study of the media market, “Who Owns the Media?” is the classic refutation of the myths about media ownership and consolidation. Ben conclusively shows, both in his old book and his new NMRC study, that the media marketplace has never been more dynamic, diverse and competitive.

Attached below is a summary of what you will find in the report that I pulled from the NMRC’s press release about the report. But I encourage you to download and read the entire study for the facts about the current state of competition in our modern media marketplace.

---[summary of new Ben Compaine “Media Monopoly Myth” report ]---

• Americans have more choices available to them when it comes to media content than ever before. ”(Television) viewers have more choice from more sources than at any time in the history of the medium… Who owns the media does matter for content, but not always with the outcomes in the direction proclaimed in the common wisdom. Among other findings, this paper reports on studies that make a strong case that: having more sources of programming creates more diversity in television programming; there is no support for the contention that media ownership by chains or conglomerates leads to any consistent pattern of lowered standards, content, or performance when compared with media owned by families or small companies; publicly owned newspaper chains are less likely to have an ideological agenda they want to promote than those that are family controlled; and television stations with cross-ownership—in which the parent company also owns a newspaper in the same market—tend to produce higher quality newscasts.”

• The largest television industry players control less of the market today than they did in the past. “Contrary to the widespread perception that television is more concentrated than 30 or 20 or 10 years ago, by a number of critical measures, there is more competition. The market share of the three traditional television networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC—has declined substantially since 1980. Even adding in the audiences they have gained through control of cable networks, the combined audiences are lower than in some idealized past. In the 1970s, on a typical weekday evening, the three networks were watched by about 56 percent of all households with televisions. By 2003, on a typical evening those networks had on aggregate a 20 percent rating. They also face competition from newer networks, including Time Warner’s WB and News Corp.’s Fox. Those five networks together aggregated to a 26 percent rating. Adding together the rating of these five broadcast networks with the cable networks owned by the same corporate family (e.g., CNN, HBO, etc. with WB) and the five major providers of television programming accounted for an average 51 percent rating in December 2003. This was less than the three networks had into the 1970s.”

• Internet-based and other digital media will overwhelm traditional ownership/content issues, making federal limits and caps irrelevant. “About two-thirds of Americans are using (the Internet) for everything from e-mail to news to weather to… listening to radio and watching ‘television’… the online ‘DrudgeReport’ received a greater viewership than the weekly circulation of Time magazine… New devices are becoming available to make Internet radio accessible apart from a personal computer, including access via various current and potential wireless technologies. Video and film via the Internet are on the verge of becoming more mainstream. As some of the local telephone carriers upgrade their systems with fiber optic cable to the curb or the home, the transmission speed of downloads will be competitive with cable and satellite services. Devices are on the market that allow even today’s broadband users to download movies and video programming for storage on personal video recorders for viewing at their convenience.”

• Local radio competition is stronger than newspaper and television competition combined. “In the largest U.S. markets, there are 15 or more separate owners or radio stations—and in most of even the smallest markets there is more competition in radio than television and newspapers combined. Consolidation in the radio industry has been pronounced. The context, however, is that of an industry that has more than tripled in the number of stations over three decades with no change in the limits of stations ownership. By 1980, a single owner could hold no more than 0.16 percent of stations nationally… Thousands of radio and radio-like stations are available via the Internet. Stations are available from around the world. About 40 percent of listeners of Internet radio accessed stations from outside their local market.”

• National newspaper chains exert less ideological control over editorial content than local newspaper owners. ”…a review of 17 studies concluded that there were few differences in the editorial page slant of newspapers owned by groups and those that were independent. On the other hand, editors of chain-owned newspapers were found to have greater editorial latitude in determining editorial policy than those at family-owned newspapers. Put another way, publishers of family-owned newspapers exert greater editorial control over the editorial process than at group-owned publishers. While publicly owned newspaper chains may be more focused on profitability than those that are family controlled, they are less likely to have an ideological agenda they want to promote.”

You can use Tor to make an anonymous BitTorrent tracker

The $26 billion that marketers will spend in 2010 in online display ads, email, search, and classified ads will represent 8% of all advertising spending — rivaling spending on cable/satellite TV and radio. Almost half of all marketers plan to increase online ad spending by decreasing spending in other channels.

USC and EA are partnering to offer female students a scholarship to attend the Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp during the USC's Summer Seminars program.
From the press release:

The USC Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp is a 4-week program designed to help students pursue their dream of working in the video game industry. The single scholarship in the 2005 summer seasons will represent the first female registered student in the program, as the 2004 inaugural year featured an exclusively male student body. The scholarship includes free admission to the camp, room and board at USC, and three college credits for successfully completing the program.

Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp runs from July 3rd to July 30th. Deadline to apply for the scholarship is May 15th. It is open to any female high school junior or senior with a GPA of at least 3.5 and who submit both a written recommendation from a teacher and a 250-word essay on why they are passionate about video games. Applications should be sent to: ea-usc-scholarship@ea.com.

"We hope this scholarship not only provides an exciting opportunity for an inspired girl, but sends a broader message. EA wants to encourage girls to aspire for a career building games...and we hope the best and brightest continue their studies and find a future home in the industry," said Steve Seabolt, Vice President at EA.

Representing 39% of the gaming population, according to the Entertainment Software Association, women players are a growing force within the gaming community. EA is responding to this demand by encouraging and empowering young women to take the industry seriously and consider it for a future career. This scholarship is the first step in a larger program designed to encourage women to pursue their passion for gaming and enter the industry as professionals.

EA and USC have been working together in a number of different ways to ensure students are ready to enter the games industry with the knowledge and power to make a difference. "EA continues to support our engineering program at USC," said Dr. Anthony Borquez, Director of the Information Technology Program, which offers numerous courses on gaming. "Not only does EA provide us with game resources and guest speakers for our classes, but we also staff animators and engineers from EALA who teach classes in my program."

Applicants must have a cumulative B average, submit a letter of recommendation from a high school teacher and submit a 250 word essay "Why I want to grow up and make games." More information about the USC interactive entertainment summer camp program and EA scholarship can be found at: http://www.usc.edu/dept/admissions/programs/summer/seminars.shtml.

Via game girl advance

lotsa API's

Unsurprisingly, SCOTUS has turned down an appeal by Internetmovies.com against the "good faith belief" provision of the DMCA. The site, which was briefly shut down in response to an MPAA complaint in 2001, had argued that the language of the DMCA statute was unconstitutionally vague. The issue is likely to come around again, one hopes with a stronger case behind it.

Via Copyfight

Richard Koman has an interesting interview with Jennifer Feikin, Google’s director of video. As with Brightcove, Open Media Network, Lulop, and others, the plan is to create a new market for video content:

The plan is to allow content owners to charge for their video content. When you upload content you’re asked to specify a price for your content, and a sale results in a cut for Google.

Though Google is looking at DRM, it is also exploring ad supported models.

Via Television Archiving

Wireless developers plan to work together to meld Bluetooth with an emerging technology designed to beam video and other large content short distances between TVs, home entertainment systems and computers.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, a 3,400-member group whose backers include Nokia, Motorola and Intel, said it has begun working with two industry bodies developing rival versions of the technology commonly referred to as ultra-wideband, or UWB.

It is unclear whether the collaboration will produce an integrated platform combining Bluetooth with UWB.

UWB allows speeds of 100 Mbps and higher, making it a far more effective way to transmit a video signal from a digital video recorder to a flat-screen monitor or a laptop without wires

The Oberkampf php tools allows Flickr addicts to create their own photo-homepage.

Via k10k.

Via Clippings.reblog

Speakeasy today announced that they've launched their pre-Wimax wireless service in downtown Seattle, the first of seven cities they'll be offering the service. The service is aimed at businesses, but at $800 a month for 6Mbps symmetrical service, it doesn't seem to offer terribly huge cost savings over other comparable solutions. Speakeasy recently received a "strategic investment" from Intel, who has been absolutely relentless in hyping Wimax's potential.

Via Broadbandreports

---

Eyebeam has organized a contest on the theme of contagious media, the idea being to come up with a meme (project, hoax, web page, joke) that gets you the most hits within a certain period of time. This occupies an awkward zone between social sculpture (art), public relations (not art), new media art, and web-development-as-usual. Participants in the workshops include Nick Denton of Gawker media, who didn't wait to see how the unruly and amorphous new form of expression called "blogging" would evolve but rather led the charge in turning it into something streamlined and branded a la the late 90s dot com model. Blogs under the Gawker umbrella are much like the one you're reading except they have nicer logos and blinking ads interspersed with the copy. They do get hits though. This page has had a couple of mentions on a site called Screenhead (thanks, mon) and both times stats spiked big time.

Speaking of stats, mine are great, thanks. Numbers aren't crowed about here like they frequently are at Josh Marshall's blog but let's just say they're very encouraging and I appreciate everyone who reads. One of the discussions I had early on with fellow bloggers at Digital Media Tree (a collective that is the brainchild of tech whiz Jim Bassett) is that blogging isn't like dot coms because it isn't about number of eyeballs but quality of eyeballs. "Paradigms (memes, whatever) grow around communities of strong interest" is another way of saying it. Well, maybe they do, maybe they don't--you never know what's going to be important in the long or short run. But a perverse thing about the Internet is too much success can destroy the effort before it begins: bandwidth costs money, and more traffic makes blogging more expensive. To accommodate the traffic you have to upgrade and put up ads or a tip jar to keep going.

It can be exhilirating to have a contagious project take off, but recent history teaches us the party's quickly over and you're left picking up your guests' cigarette butts. The only solutions to the problem of the hit meme are to embrace capitalism, quit while you're ahead, or be like the characters in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," who wear prosthetic devices that blunt their natural talents (thick eyeglasses for painters, heavy ankle weights for ballerinas) so they're perpetually good but not too good.

And when it's all said, what did "Turkish Man Kiss You" and "America We Stand As One" really contribute to the discourse? Is their "success" as ironic artifacts something that could, or should, be deliberately contrived?

Updated slightly to accommodate a good point from someone who seemed mildy surprised that these things getI updated/rewritten after they're posted (let me know if you want credit for the thought in the last sentence). The rule of thumb is if the post changes substantively I do an "update," otherwise it's just sub-Orwellian tweaks.

Chris Kyriakakis, deputy director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) and the founder and director of the Immersive Audio Laboratory. talks about how the Internet will shift from simple browsing to a more realistic experience and how improved immersive technologies can enhance journalists' abilities to deliver a scene to their audience.

See video

Download MP3

mobilemedia

!Cellphedia is a thesis project created by Limor Garcia - a graduate student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.

It's a cell phone application that promotes the sharing of knowledge. It allows to send and receive encyclopedia-type inquiries between specific, pre-defined groups of users, through Text messaging.

Users can register on this site and start building the quick-reference Cellphedia-type encyclopedia entries, by asking other users and answering other users' questions where-ever cell phone service is available. It's 'The first ubiquitous social encyclopedia'.

"Cellphedia will be the new way to get encyclopedia type information on the run. After creating a profile, a user will be able to get all the information they need – from “how old is the queen of England?” to “how many miles is the Brooklyn Bridge?” – while they’re walking in the street.

A Houston company has licensed a chunk of the nationwide spectrum to broadcast TV signals directly to cell phones. It could be the first DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) rollout in the United States. "We’ll want to work with local broadcasters because they do the best job with local news, weather and sports," says Crown Castle Mobile Media President Michael Schueppert.

Last week: Mobile TV phones set to reach masses

Via Lost Remote

Al Gore Gets Down
by Ari Berman

The article is justifiably skeptical of Current's prospects for success. I've been plently skeptical myself, but I'm glad they chose a hopeful quote from me in the article:

The blogosphere, with its open-source proclivities, seemed more receptive. "If they can help create a generation of citizen journalists and indie mediamakers, they have my full-blooded support," blogged Chuck Olsen, an unsuccessful Current applicant and documentary filmmaker.

Re-reading that last part makes me laugh... "Chuck Olsen, an unsuccessful Current applicant and [unsuccessful] documentary filmmaker." Thank you, thankyouverymuch.

C/Net has a feature story on municipal broadband in the USA and has created A clickable map which makes it fast and easy to see which states have imposed restrictive legislation, fiber to the home or wireless clouds.

Across the country, acrimonious conflicts have erupted as local governments attempt to create publicly funded broadband services with faster connections and cheaper rates for all citizens, narrowing the so-called digital divide. The Bells and cable companies, for their part, argue that government intervention in their business is not justified and say they are far better equipped to operate complex and far-flung data networks.

CNET's interactive municipal broadband legislative map details the major battlegrounds on the issue. At stake is the fate of high-speed Internet access for millions of Americans, hinging on a fundamental question of civics and economics--whether the government or private industries should take the leading role in building out what's considered this generation's critical infrastructure challenge.

Additional sections include; Cities brace for broadband war, Tangled up in fiber, A question of independence, and Photos from the broadband trenches.

Other recent articles on municipal broadband have appeared in Broadband 2.0, e-Week, Newsweek, Mother Jones and Telephony Magazine.

MuniWireless has the most consolidated coverage. DailyWireless has perhaps close to 1,000 "city cloud" related articles on-line (search "city clouds").

Share and Enjoy!

Via Daily Wireless

Scott Matthews' RSS/Podcast/HTML in-page browser, seems like a good way to make Podcasting feeds accessable to browsers.

Two bloggers with photos of exploding limo near the harvard yard, and no mainstream coverage

"With the ParMedia platform we will together create the world’s largest gathering place of multi-media content and exchange of ideas that eliminates censorship, spin, and manipulation of content. Anybody with an internet connection or a cellular phone can contribute any information of any type."

"Digital technologies can leverage our innate propensity to self-organize ourselves into cooperative online communities. Indeed, dozens of different Internet-based genres demonstrate this – open source software, collaborative websites and archives, community listservs, peer-to-peer file sharing, social networking software, the Wikipedia community, and so on. So the question we should consider is: How ought we to design and build online communities to leverage our evolutionary propensities for cooperation?"

Now upload Mpeg, Mp4, Mov, 3GP, 3G2, Avi, Wmv, Asx, jpeg

"This entry explains about doing video blogging using nontonBlog. The experimental video was captured by my wife in 4 takes :D with my Nokia 6630. Then I attached it to an email composed using the phone’s internal mail client and sent it to an address. I put the nontonBlog program in crontab so it will check new mail, grab the email contents and put it in WordPress’ database."

CED Magazine explores how most of the major cable providers are toying with video-mail as an "on-ramp" to full video communications. Comcast launched their video-mail last summer, and offered a free webcam to entice their users. Since Beta, our users haven't been particularly impressed; most webcams already come with e-mail video-software. Full VoIP with priority packet video? Now that might turn heads.

The Internet Filmmaker’s FAQ is one of the oldest filmmaking resources on the Internet (started in 1994) and contains answers to over 133 of the most frequently asked filmmaking questions around (and is constantly expanding). The Internet Filmmaker’s FAQ. [RebelOne]

Via Cinema Minima

Supergaming! Design for Massively Collaborative Public Play is the title of a recent talk by Jane McGonigal at PARC. I'm very sorry I missed it. Thanks, Spoonman, for pointing to it. She defines a specific class of smart mob games. Jane had organized one of the most clever and fun flash mobs -- the one that played Duck, Duck, Goose in San Francisco's Dolores Park:

This talk examines four experiments in supergaming, an emerging constellation of mobile-social network practices that are both ludic, or game-like, and spectacular - that is, intended to generate an audience. I focus on a flash mob, an urban superhero game, a flashmob supercomputer, and the award-winning alternate reality game I Love Bees to identify and analyze four key attributes of supergaming. I propose that it is 1) massively scaled, as in supersized gaming; 2) embedded in and projected onto everyday public environments, as in superimposed gaming; 3) able to heighten the perceived power and imagined capabilities of its players, as in superhero gaming, and 4) able to harness the play of distributed individuals into a high-performance problem-solving unit, as in supercomputing gaming. Using performance theory, cognitive psychology and my own experience as a supergames designer, I argue that supergames are capable of producing shared ludic frameworks, or gameworks, that can be extended to everyday life, making public spaces, public utilities and public information more open for persistent, playful engagement.

: As we reported first here, ABC News is the first news channel on Sony's new PlayStation Portable...
HR 1: The initiative is starting with the technology program "Ahead of the Curve," music reviews and other shortform content drawn from the network's all-digital ABC News Now multimedia news initiative.
HR 2: AtomFilms has also tied up with Sony, to give away complimentary short movies for the platform. The deal is a Sony media buy, which means Sony is actually paying Atom to give away these films..in return, of course, PSP gets promotion on AtomFilms' site...

QuickTime 7 Update Guide

From the article:
Updates to QuickTime for Java
QuickTime for Java (QTJ) is now fully supported in QuickTime 7. QTJ is now installed by default in QuickTime 7.

Finally!!!

Via sLop

GridLockd is an urban game, created by Mohit SantRam, where teams compete to capture grid positions in a half hour.



Loosely based on Othello, a two player game of tiles, the game board is made up of 36 unique semacodes placed within intersection points on a 5 block by 5 block city grid. Using their camera phone to photograph a semacode, the first team to send it to semacode@gridlockd.net will win possession of the intersection.

Whichever team captures a point first claims the intersection but rivals can claim that intersection by capturing two surrounding intersections.

This project is meant to display how semacodes, cameraphones, ad-hoc groups, and social dynamics are effected under time pressure.

The work will be at the Spring Show 2005, on May 10-11, in New York (ITP - 721 Broadway, 4th Floor).

Via we make money not art

Marketers devise tracking technology to monitor each advertisement you're exposed to, and how the ads affect your spending. Welcome to Project Apollo. Joanna Glasner reports from San Francisco.