unmediated

more overloading of RSS. sweet...

The Dynamic Nature of Place and Space

From The Feature: "...many projects have approached the idea of annotating space before but few have succeeded as well as FoundCity in giving this networked effort a more personal quality. By overlaying the perspectives of thousands of people, FoundCity approaches the dynamic nature of place and space."

Foundcity--by John Geraci, Christina Ray, and John Schimmel--is a social mapping tool for creating a personalized map of your life on-the-fly. Using your mobile phone, you "tag" or capture photos throughout the day, label them with any words you want, and send them to your map. At home, you access and customize your map, which you can share with friends, keep private, or publish openly. As a visitor to the Foundcity site, you view a map of all tags and connect with the people and places that share your interests. By plugging in to the network of Foundcity users, you learn what others value in the city as you surf their hotspots. By publishing your own tags, you share what you know about your city.

Weather Maps is a cool new site that using Google Maps and personal weather station data to let you view real time weather information on a map.

The site says:

This can provide some very interesting information, particularly in areas with microclimates, such as San Francisco. For example, summer in San Francisco can be particularly cold and foggy, and this map can help you to find a sunnier area of the city to visit. Clicking on the web cams give you a visual observation from a given location. Looking at wind direction can help you locate approaching weather fronts.

Most of the data comes from personal weather stations that are run from homes and schools. Weather Underground and Weather Bug are two of the major sites that compile this data. By default the map only displays Weather Underground data. Selecting 'Weather Bug' will display additional points but may take longer. Note: Weather Maps is not affiliated with either of these sites.

Our widget was designed and animated in Maya, and combines for the first time Javascript for Quicktime with Javascript, CSS, RSS, and a custom hacked XMLHTTP request patch into one widget, gives you the latest five feeds from the ArtificialEye in its own player on your desktop! I guess that makes it the world's first VJ Widgetcast!

Get ready to spend the next couple of hours clicking in fascination.

Newseum, a site billing itself as "the interactive museum of news" has created "Today's Front Pages," a Flash-based interface to let users see the front page of over 425 newspapers across 45 countries. While many are in the United States or Europe, there are numerous papers from the rest of the world, too. Brazil, in particular, has an abundance of news outlets available online.

Pointing at a dot will show the current front page for the linked paper; clicking will give you a close-up of the front page in a new window. The close-up page will also allow you to head over to the newspaper's site.

For me, a service like the Today's Front Pages site is a useful tool for getting a quick glance at the global zeitgeist. What are people in Hong Kong concerned about today (bird flu)? Or India (student fees)? Or Chile (flooding)? Or Canada (the legalization of gay marriage)?

The least-represented continent is, unsurprisingly, Africa. A single Tunisian newspaper is available; clearly, either the Newseum needs better African links or the African newspapers need to start putting up images of their front pages...

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 12:49 PM)

Content providers are starting to see the value in making an end-run around the established channels.

Engadget points out that the Slingbox has been released, and is available at CompUSA and BestBuy for $250. The device hooks into the back of your TV, and allows you to watch television on any desktop or laptop in the house (or outside your house, provided you've got a broadband connection). Hook the device to your television and home router, and manipulate your Tivo from another zip code.

The city of West Hollywood, Calif., awarded PCC Network Solutions a contract to design and build a pilot outdoor public wireless mesh network that will enable the city to offer outdoor wireless Internet access to residents, businesses and visitors.

Vodafone and Microsoft MSN unit plan to launch in several European countries an instant messaging service that will allow communication between mobile phone users and computers.

Users will be able to see the presence of their contacts and exchange IM between MSN Messenger on a computer and Vodafone Messenger on mobile phones and vice versa. The service aims to bring together more then 165 MSN Messenger users with nearly 155 million Vodafone customers around the world, and increase traffic on their networks.

The service will be charged on the commonly-used mobile commercial model of "calling party pays" and customers would be able to pay for the service through their mobile bills.

(via Reuters)

On the MicroLearning Conference in Innsbruck, Austria 23-24 June 2005 Arnaud Leene presented the various aspects of what is called MicroContent. "MicroContent is Everywhere", said Leene. He made it clear what MicroContent really is and coined a MicroContent definition.

With the advent of Internet, publishing has become accessible to everyone. People have been creating and gathering content and made this content available to everyone in the world. Where web-pages and -sites as MacroContent. MacroContent enfolds MicroContent.

tely creating and maintaining MacroContent is too hard for most people. People seem to be much better in producing MicroContent, such as small thoughts, items in discussions, comments, bookmarks, etc. Blogging allows people to write and publish such small thoughts episodically. Each blog entry, consisting just of a title and a description, is automatically merged into a web-page and this is made available to everyone.

People realise that it is not just thoughts that they are publishing, but reviews, comments on other blog-entries, announcement of events, recipes, interesting sites, records of a golf run, books they keep, images they have taken, places they have been to, etc, etc. Items contain links to other Items, Items have structure. We are moving to
Structured MicroContent.

Technorati tagged more MicroContent and MicroLearning musings of this presentation. Also see Arnaud's blogged musings on MicroContent.

Sebastien Paquet and Sebastian Fiedler presented their own MicroLearningProposal and illustrate through concrete examples how the empowerment to personal learning environments is happening. They tease out salient implications of this transition: learning becomes networked and personalized.

This week, Japan’s Ministry of Land is demoing a technology at Kansai Airport that will transmit information to cellphones using the LED or fluorescent lights in the departure lounge, reports Engadget.

"NTT DoCoMo is supplying the phones, while NEC, Matsushita, Keio University and Japan Airlines chip in on the remaining technology.

the phones at the appropriate blinkenlights around the lounge to get information on departure times and shops and facilities, and to download music and video."

Via Smart Mobs

TiVo announced the winners for its HME Developer Challenge contest today. The grand prize winner is AudioFaucet (nee iSee iTunes) and its author Kyle Copeland, who will be receiving a Segway for his work. AudioFaucet provides control over iTunes for people streaming music using an Airport Express (or a really long audio cable) using TiVo's Home Media Engine platform.

The other winners are:

Best Music Application

Music Monkey, which plays music from your library and makes you guess the title.

Best Photo Application

Flickr/TiVo, a way to browse Flickr from your TiVo (previously discussed on PVRblog)

Best Game Application

NBC Trivia, a game using trivia from Seinfeld and Friends

Best Information Application

Digital Home, an application allows home automation enthusiasts to control lights, security cameras and more.

Most Creative Application

Galleon, a collection of apps that just hit version 1.0.0 and does all sorts of things like read email and RSS feeds, play podcasts, show webcams and a ton more.

Congratulations to all the winners and we hope to soon see the ones we can't find online yet!

: This should create a good buzz in the industry...mobile operator T-Mobile has changed its "home page" from its own T-Zones to Google on its higher end handsets and handheld computers (only in Europe for now...not decided anything in U.S.)...

As James says, it sounds like T-Mobile has realised the best (and perhaps only) way to encourage customers to use mobile data/content is to allow them to access whatever they want...they're not using it much now.

Via PaidContent.org

CamcorderInfo got their hands on the Sony HDR-HC1, the first 'affordable' High-Definition Video camcorder available. For around two grand (or less, even), you can get a true HD camera with tons of features, including a touchscreen interface, decent (but slightly limiting) manual controls, and the ability to shoot still pictures, as well. It uses a CMOS sensor instead of the 3CCD setup of its older brother, the HDR-FX1, but according the review, it's really not that big of a deal.

There are downsides—a proprietary accessory shoe limits upgrades and recording in HDV requires a higher-than-average quality tape—but for being the very first small, consumer HD camcorder, it sounds like Sony has hit it out of the park.

Sony HDR-HC1 HDV Camcorder Review [CamcorderInfo]

This concept CD sleeve connects to your PC via USB, then lets you use conductive ink to remix tracks that came on the CD in the first place. A very cool idea, albeit one that seems impossible to implement in simple fashion (perhaps when they can embedded some disposable remixing chips in the cardboard sleeve itself). But what I'd really like is a remix board where I can use the ink—I can't make music, but I can paint this party started.

The CD Sleeve you can play [MusicThing]

Brand Republic: "Journalists will be given a minimum level of training every year and editors will be given advanced training in ethics, values and dilemmas."

In the 1980s, there was much talk about "spin-off" technologies from government research, particularly military research -- devices and ideas first developed to benefit the Pentagon, and later used by the far larger civilian market (for example, the Global Positioning System). In the 1990s, the flow of ideas reversed, and political economists started to talk about "spin-on" technologies, a clumsy neologism covering the use by the military of off-the-shelf devices for reasons of cost, size or capabilities(for example, hand-held GPS units). We may be moving back towards the spin-off scenario, however, in the realm of portable power.

PhysOrg has the latest example of this: advanced Lithium-ion batteries with up to 40% more power than standard batteries of equivalent sizes. The batteries are intended for use in power vests to be worn by soldiers, powering the variety of electronic gear carried by modern infantry. As such, the batteries need to operate in a far greater temperature range, be more rugged, and last significantly longer than off-the-shelf batteries.

Those characteristics are also precisely the ones needed for more reliable batteries for electric vehicles, and the batteries look to be able to scale up in order to meet that demand. The improved battery technology also scales way down, for use in implantable medical devices.

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 01:38 PM)

For years, while people went on and on about the importance of copy protection to make sure that "content" would be available online, plenty of people knew not to be worried. Those who were complaining were almost always using "content" in a more traditional sense -- as in the professional, broadcast style of content. What they kept forgetting is that the whole reason why the internet is useful, and why people flocked to it in the first place had nothing to do with that kind of content. It was about communication -- which is a different kind of content. It's user created content. Almost everything online that has really caught on has been about enabling that user created content, so it's a bit funny to see the NY Times make it sound like user created content is suddenly a "hot" area. It's always been a hot area online. What's new is that more companies are recognizing this and building additional tools and resources to make it even easier for anyone to create and "publish" their own content. The examples in the Times article suggest just some of where the next generation of tools might be headed. Basic things like blogging tools were the last generation. What's next is less about starting with a blank slate, but taking content and building on it -- even if that goes against just about everything the "traditional" content industry thinks about how the world works. Tools like del.icio.us or Yahoo's new wannabe-del.icio.us and even things like Google Maps (especially with the addition of Google Earth today) that let users do much more with the initial content show a brief glimpse of where some of this is headed. The individual pieces may not make much sense (and, as businesses, they may fail), but the concept is there. People use the internet to communicate -- and we're just at the beginning of what the next generation of tools will allow us to do.

Another how to on rebuilding battery packs. Did you recently notice poor performance of your notebook Li-Ion battery?. Don't be taken aback, this is happening even to the best battery! Now days Li-Ion batteries are widely used in portable devices due to there excellent energy to weight ratio and for the reason they are not suffering from "memory effect". Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

Yahoo.icio.us, except I can't find the damn bookmarklet

Via my man Duncan - iTunes 4.9 not only supports podcasts (extremely cool) but videoblogs:


Hey, that's not an MP3... it's an Amanda Congdon!

You have to search the podcast directory to find them - I'm waiting for mine to show up. And, it's not nearly as cool or functional as FireANT. But it could change everything and introduce videoblogs to the masses. How long before our audience grows exponentially? People will be turning their TVs off in droves. Films will have a new distribution outlet. We'll go through more growing pains. It's an exciting time for personal media.

iTunes certainly trumps Google Video as the exciting media development of the day. Even so, it may be inferior to Odeo when that gets released. Power users will likely use FireANT and Odeo, while iTunes introduces a whole new audience to podcasting and videoblogging.

Google has released a patch with the changes they made to the VLC media player. Nothing too exciting–they’ve basically just crippled it by making sure that it will only play AVI and MPEG media types, and then only if they are served from http://video.google.com/. They’ve disabled the ffmpeg encoding functionality as well, presumably to avoid having to pay fees for distributing an MPEG-4 encoder. (Google has to pay MPEG LA $0.25 for every download of the GoogleVideoViewer after the first 50,000 downloads, up to $1 million per year. If they hadn’t disabled the encoding functionality, this per-download fee would double, so commenting out five lines of code saves them an additional million bucks per year.) The only bugfix appears to be something related to the ActiveX plugin (a mouse hovering problem). Other than that the bulk of the patch consists of changing “VideoLAN” to “GoogleVideoViewer” throughout the code.

AI engineer extraordinaire Damian Isla has started a new group blog called Game/AI, and invited fellow AIIDE attendees Rob Zubek and Paul Tozour onboard. Damian did great work at MIT Media Lab’s now winding-down Synthetic Characters group, and since became the AI lead at Bungie for Halo2. Rob you may know from his occasional comments here on GTxA — he recently finished an excellent dissertation at Northwestern (more on that in a future post; see an older post here) and has just joined Maxis. Paul was an AI developer for Metroid Prime, Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2. One of their first discussions: ending the tyranny of hierarchical finite state machines.

Speaking of AIIDE, the keynote talk slides are now online.

rench pay-TV company Canal Plus Groupe, which is controlled by Vivendi Universal, plans to give subscribers to Vivendi’s SFR cellphone service access to about 20 TV channels over their phones. It will mark the first time a broadcaster has migrated a selection of its own channels onto a mobile platform. Synergy, as they say…

For now, the service will be launched on 3G, but by the end of the year, Vivendi hopes to offer the service in DVB-H, or Digital Video Broadcast Handheld, for a broad range of portable devices.

Canal Plus will offer channels with news, sports updates, cartoons and documentaries. But there will not be live sports or recently released Hollywood films that are available to viewers who subscribe to Canal Plus services via cable or satellite.

The new “on-the-go service” costs an extra €7, or $8.40, per month for SFR customers who already subscribe to high-speed telephone data services.

Looking at Apple's RSS extensions for podcasting, I'm struck by the similarity to Quicktime's extensions for SMIL. In the Quicktime SMIL documentation, SMIL is considered a macro language for Quicktime rather than a thing in its own right. In the RSS extensions, feed formats are considered a macro language for the iTunes Music Store.

I'm certain that Apple doesn't like or understand the idea of internet standards. It sees standards as a crutch for the weak or as concessions to hereditary enemies like Microsoft.

Ditto for its hereditary enemies, of course.

---

Tristan Lewis suggests details of a merger between the new iTMS extensions and Yahoo! Media RSS. His suggestions are sensible, and I'm happy to see somebody make a direct comparison between these two dialects, but Apple's work on these extensions is so willfully crappy that I don't see the point.

What a bummer -- Apple takes a cool grassroots movement into the mainstream and shows total disrespect at the same time.

David Clark, a leader in developing the internet in the 1970s and '80s, is taking steps toward creating a new network with tighter security and compatibility with future technologies. By Mark Baard.

Olga Kharif for Business Week's TechBeat wonders if credit card companies and banks could soon be in for a nasty surprise.

For the past several years, European wireless service providers have allowed subscribers to charge vending machine purchases onto the users' mobile phone bills. Now, U.S. service providers are starting to follow suit. For instance, users of mobile short-text messaging service SMS.ac can now add charitable contributions to their wireless bills.

ed to send a short-text message to a 5-digit short code to donate 25 cents a day for 31 days. That donation will appear on their monthly wireless bill.

Here's my thinking: If wireless service providers continue to roll out such billing services, they could, eventually, grab a chunk of revenues away from credit card companies and banks...

Via Smart Mobs

Believe it or not, a new study by Turner Broadcasting found that TV viewing is on the rise for both broadcasting and cable. "What’s happening is that the total amount of television viewing keeps going up, despite what other media types say or what people believe or what people tell you when you ask them in a survey," says Turner's Jack Wakshlag.

Molly Krause,Project Leader of H2O at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has helped me create a playlist for the personal media revolution. H2O is still in beta, but looking real good.

Via New Media Musings

An Experiment in the Future of Reading

"ABSTRACT: Speeder Reader is an interactive reading station built around two primary ideas: dynamic text (especially RSVP, that is rapid serial visual presentation), and the interface metaphor of driving. As words flash one at a time on a screen in front of the reader, he or she controls the rate of speed of the words with a gas pedal (up to 1850 words per minute in the current instance). Text stream selection is performed with a steering wheel. Thus, one can "drive through a book." We leverage people's knowledge of the familiar activity of driving an automobile (or, in the case of children, operating a speed-racing video game) to allow comfortable and intuitive access to a possibly less familiar world of interactive text. We emphasize the power and ease of the familiar driving metaphor as a navigation device. Speeder Reader was first installed at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, as a part of a larger exhibit on the impact of digital technologies on reading." From Speeder Reader: An Experiment in the Future of Reading [PDF] by Maribeth Back, Jonathan Cohen, Rich Gold and Steve Harrison.

Wow, this is really, really awesome. Will definitely make one.

"Make your own (unofficial) flickr badge. Print it out, laminate it, wear flickr with pride! Show the world how truly photographically geeky you really are!"

(Badges!?! Citizen journalists don't need no stinkin... ;) -kc.)

Via del.icio.us/tag/citizenjournalism

Jon Lech Johansen] (known for his work on decrypting DVD security codes) has created a patch for the Google Video Viewer. The patch, released on Johansen's 'So Sue Me' blog, effectively disables a modification Google made to the VideoLAN code to prevent users from playing videos that are not hosted on Google's servers.

Scalar's Teleglass, which lets users privately watch movies or TV, read text or view pictures via a tiny screen attached to their glasses, just started selling on the Japanese company's Web site and is expected to hit stores soon.

Enter a keyword, retrieve all posts with that tag

"Tag Central was created in 2005 as part of Godlikenerd.com. I created it after noticing that 43 Things imported data from other services that are tagged with the same thing. This site aggregates this data from a variety of sources. All one needs to do is provide a keyword that the data should be labeled with."

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

Indymedia UK reports that servers hosted by Italian group Autistici have been hacked by police. At the same time, servers belonging to Indymedia UK Bristol were seized by police.
According to that BBC report, police explained with this analogy:

The raid and arrest were carried out by the British Transport Police.
A spokesman said: "This is not unusual. When we get wind of graffiti, for example, we often do house searches."

This story echoes another one, where British Indymedia machines were nabbed by US forces in fall 2004.

(via nettime)

"del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records."

Wormhole2 is a plug-in that lets you route audio via a network, between any computers you've got handy (Mac or PC). You could save processing power by letting different machines handle CPU-intense effects and instruments, or share audio onstage. (You'll need to send sync separately.)

It gets cooler, especially with new features added to version 2:

Automatic configuration

Easy routing and option configuration, via a gorgeous interface by CDM reader Atariboy

Low-latency, and automatic latency compensation for round-trip au dio

VST (Mac/Win) and Audio Unit (Mac), US$49.95. By the way, if you remember this as an apulSoft app, you may have notice it's gotten the some of our favorite (and now award-winning) music developers. Go try the demo and let us know what you think!.

Via createdigitalmusic.com

Viewpoint: Instant messaging and the future of language by Naomi Baron, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48 , Issue 7 (July 2005).

In this paper, the author claims that the writing style commonly used in IMing, texting, and other forms of computer-mediated communication need not spell the end of normative language.

Are email, instant messaging (IM), and text messaging on cell phones degrading the language? This question surfaces in debates among language professionals and, perhaps more important, among parents and their teenage offspring. (…) The most important effect of IM on language turns out to be not stylized vocabulary or grammar but the control seasoned users feel they have over their communication networks. (…) Adolescents have long been a source of linguistic and behavioral novelty. Teens often use spoken language to express small-group identity. It is hardly surprising to find many of them experimenting with a new linguistic medium (such as IM) to complement the identity construction they achieve through speech, clothing, or hair style. (…) Our research suggests that IM conversations serve largely pragmatic information-sharing and social-communication functions rather than providing contexts for establishing or maintaining group identity. Moreover, college students often eschew brevity. Our data contains few abbreviations or acronyms (…) IM conversations are not always instant. (…) The most important effect of IM on language turns out to be not stylized vocabulary or grammar but the control seasoned users feel they have over their communication networks. (…) Our data suggests that when teenagers transition to college, they naturally shed some of their adolescent linguistic ways in favor of more formal writing conventions

Why do I blog this? analysis of IM, focused on whatever domain (forms, content, social networks…) is amazingly intriguing!

Via pasta and vinegar

The UK cable company's trial service provides broadband internet users with free, high-quality TV content via four channels which play out like traditional TV channels.

Aggregating content from providers such as Flextech Television, High.tv and The Horror Channel, Blueyonder TV streams a mix of entertainment, factual, lifestyle and sport-based programming around the clock.

Content is played out at speeds up to 1.8Mbp/s and the service will automatically tailor the speed of delivery to each viewer's broadband connection.

Viewing can be paused and a three-day programme guide provides an on-demand option, allowing users to select content from anywhere in the schedule. The trial currently has around 25,000 regular users.

Endemol and Channel 4 are planning to launch the UK's first mainstream mobile TV show in September.

"The show will be similar in concept to the 'mobisodes' created by Fox for its drama 24. But Endemol director of interactive media Peter Cowley said its mobile drama would be much more integrated with the broadcast show. "We're using the talent from the TV show for bespoke mobile content with parallel storylines," he said."

When the founder of USA Today, Al Neuharth, calls the time-tested practice of anonymous sources an "evil of journalism," what does it mean? Well, for Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, it could mean jail time. For investigative reporters, it could mean greater difficulties in uncovering the truth. And for potential scandal-breaking sources, it could mean that they'll keep their mouth shut if their anonymity can not be protected. The combination of the stain left on reporting by the likes of Jayson Blair, who falsified stories while working for the New York Times, and the recent disclosure of the anonymous source, Deep Throat, the government insider who helped direct the Watergate investigation, bring new light to this old debate. Sure, nobody wants to hear of journalists conjuring up sources to fit their story, as happened with Blair. But nobody (aside from a few top official who will remain, well, anonymous), wants to restrict the job of the Fourth Estate in digging up information that the public should know. So where do we draw the line?

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism thinks that the sudden movement against anonymous sources stems from "an attempt to tighten, to eliminate a looseness that's developed over the last 20 years," and is not designed to "make it difficult to do investigative reporting." Eric Burns of Fox News Watch thinks that this has to do with the decline in trust of journalists by the public and between fellow journalists since the Watergate days. Maybe these assumptions are true, but there remain no industry-wide guidelines concerning the use of anonymous whistle-blowers. USA Today requires that its managing editors be privy to the identity of the unnamed source before an article is published. Most local papers don't even allow anonymous sources, according to a survey done by the Associated Press. During the Watergate reporting, anonymous sources were permitted, but suspected criminal activity had to be confirmed by two alternative sources before being made public. Now, Burns feels that "What is likely to happen... is that (reporters will) have to use more than one anonymous source before they're comfortable."

Should guidelines be set? Who's to write them? How will they be reinforced? Will we ever see investigative journalists able to uncover Watergate caliber scandals again? What do you think?

Whatever happens, Ms. Miller, who's being forced to disclose her anonymous sources by US Federal Courts, said she would rather spend the 18 months in jail than contradict the promise she made to those sources.

Sources: The New York Times and Fox News

ps. Editor & Publisher has let it be known that the Sacramento Bee has been unable to find 43 'people' quoted by Diana Griego Erwin, a columnist who resigned on May 11 under speculation of fabricated sources. With problems such as these, regaining public trust is only going to become harder.

German telecoms company Siemens Communications and Grundy Light Entertainment, a German supplier of television entertainment programming, have connected television with broadband fixed and mobile networks.

In the first experiment of its kind, both companies linked viewers live either from home or out and about to let them participate in a game show. The viewers called in during the show and were ‘beamed into the television studio’ via video telephony. The caller's live video transmission was effected either via mobile radio on a UMTS mobile phone or over the fixed network with the aid of the Surpass Home Entertainment solution from Siemens. Siemens believes that the combination of telecoms with television will open up business opportunities for the entertainment industry and network operators.

The companies conducted the pilot in a game show with participants selected not only from the studio audience, but also from people calling in with their video phones. Both companies completed their demonstration project in mid-June.

New York Times: The Web site of the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., offers blogs and news podcasts. The paper's head of new media says: "We want readers to think of this as their paper, not our paper." (Via I Want Media)

Behaviour lets you use CSS selectors to specify elements to add javascript events to.

In the Journal of Neuroscience, this article outlines how activity of neurons can be decoded into a reconstructed image.

Via Eyebeam reBlog

"You know how file sharing is ruining the corporate movie, music and software businesses?

Global Frequency is a TV show based on Warren Ellis' DC/Wildstorm comic book/graphic novel series.

“The Global Frequency is an independent, illegal, covert intelligence agency determined to prevent international politics from undermining the security of the global community,” says the show’s site.

[...snip...] Warner Brothers nonetheless, “passed on the pilot for Global Frequency, says Wired News. “But that didn't stop someone from leaking the pilot on the internet. The file eventually found its way into the BitTorrent network.”"

MTV Games will incubate and produce games for the MTV audience. "[It] will also partner with publishers to sell in-game advertising, collaborate on game soundtrack development, and develop complementary television programming," reads the press release. Speaking for this gamer, sounds like a great fit for MTV. (Via PaidContent)

Chuck Olsen, Videobloggers, and BBQ. What more could you ask for?

"Hey bloggers, videobloggers, podcasters, and media-curious!

We are holding hands with Vloggercue NYC and Vloggercue West to present Vloggercue Midwest on July 9.

Vloggercue started out as a BBQ gathering in New York, part of the "Summer of Vlog." Now we're gathering on the West coast and the Midwest at the same time, linked together through a Flash videoconference.

We'll play some selected videoblogs, show you how easy it is to set up your own, and announce a new Minnesota-themed daily videoblog. Oh yeah... we'll eat and drink and babble ot each other, too.

Geeky? Of course. Fun? Hell yeah. Educational? I'm afraid so - but mostly fun.

What does Apple get out of turning iTunes into a podcast client?

"I think Apple has seen a bright future for the podcasting concept (whether or not it will still be called 'podcasting' in future is another question entirely), as a means for professional radio to undergo rebirth and amateur radio to explode from the underground and into the mainstream.

Right now, podcasts are free to listen to, but this will change very soon. Popular podcasters will start to ask listeners to pay a fee. A small one per broadcast, of course, but a fee nonetheless."

SCOTUSblog reported this morning that

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that developers of software violate federal copyright law when they provide computer users with the means to share music and movie files downloaded from the internet.

Um, not quite. Reading the actual decision, it seem that the Court held that

One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’’s lawful uses.

So, just distributing software that enables users to share music and movie files is not enough, and just distributing such software and knowing what people might do with it is not enough: to be violating copyright law, the developers have to actively promote the use of the software for violating copyright.

Of course, no one knows what exactly active promotion of copyright infringement is and isn’t. Arguably, Apple is actively promoting copyright infringement by selling iPods with so much space that you couldn’t possibly fill them with iTunes Music Store purchases alone. So, from now on, whenever a U.S. technology company invents a new product, it will sit on the shelf for years while lawyers debate whether it actively promotes infringement. Meanwhile Chinese and Korean companies will develop five generations of the same product and take the whole market before the U.S. product ever sees the light of day.

Bottom line: this decision won’t have a significant effect on file sharing. The number of file sharers will continue to grow, as will the total number of bits shared. What this decision (along with the Bush administration’s (lack of) broadband policy) will do is help ensure that in 25 years American teenagers will be feverishly studying Mandarin in the hopes that they can get into Peking University, so they can get a decent job in Beijing and send money home to their parents in New York.

Cool with me, I love Chinese food.

kenyatta cheese edits unmediated, a group blog on participatory media, and works with the art and technology center Eyebeam.

Although touted as the next generation of television, IPTV is shaping up to be a more advanced version of the same old cable television network -- one-way, expensive, and totally inaccessible for citizens to use. While the professionals build complex video delivery systems to mimic traditional TV cablecast facilities, a number of community-based video sharing projects are leveraging the distributed nature of the internet, giving anyone the ability to publish a "video channel" and making citizen broadcasting accessible to all.

CommonMedia - By the folks at CommonBits, the CommonMedia platform includes two social networking services for sharing freely distributable music and video: CommonTunes and CommonFlix. Both sites give you the ability to search, tag, and share media that you either find online or seed yourself via p2p software like BitTorrent.

OurMedia - Like CommonMedia, OurMedia allows you to share your user created content, but they'll also host it at the Internet Archive for free as long as you're willing to share your work with a global audience. They even plan to release an API in the near future that'll allow programmers to build less text-centric interfaces for accessing the content shared on the OurMedia platform.

Broadcast Machine - If you already have a website and want to distribute video via p2p, check out Broadcast Machine from the folks at Downhill Battle. Broadcast Machine is software that you install on your server that makes it easy to upload your own video and publish your own "channel" for others to browse.

The great thing about all three projects, is that with a digital media player like EyeHome coupled with podcast and videoblog download software like FireANT or iPodderX, and content from any of these open media services on the backend, you can have yourself a citizens' internet television service before many of the commercial IPTV services get off the ground.

Not bad for a bunch of civilians.

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in WorldChanging Guests at 11:32 AM)

(Nothing you folks don't know of already. I just never seem to reblog my own posts anymore. ;) -kc.)

This is a story to watch. Bloggers who built their Internet followings with anti-establishment prose are now lobbying to protect their livelihoods from federal regulations, AP reports. The article adds that some are even working with lawyers, public-relations consultants and a political action committee to do it.

Via Micro Persuasion

"A first for the Mac OS X platform, Wirecast can now send multiple broadcast streams from a single document. This means you can create different streams for users with different bandwidth requirements, from DVD quality to 3GPP cell phone. "

Went to the RCA show this morning! good stuff. will go again this afternoon for some more pictures.

Broadcasting House, by Matthew Falla, is a project which came out of a collaboration with Grizedale Arts in the Lake District, UK. It is a small model house that periodically transmits a pirate broadcast over the air to the user's TV.



Most of the visitors to the Lake District are not interested in the contemporary art and the local and tourist population's reactions to Grizedale seemed at best apathetic and at worst hostile. However, what visitors seem to like are souvenir models and trinkets. In particular, the small, caricatured houses, exemplified by the company "Lilliput Lane."

Falla decided to use these objects as a vehicle for Grizedale to reach a much wider (unsuspecting) audience. The models lies dormant for a month after being purchased. It then starts to transmit a short range pirate broadcast, taking over live TV and replacing the regular television broadcast with an alternative, scheduled broadcast.

the company Panoman has created some cool auto-panorama generating software for cameraphones. You just start the app, turn around in a circle, and the program stitches together a panorama for you. Simple, but cool.

Via USC Interactive Media Division Weblog

Wired News: Fans Spread Jams With Music Mixes

Music fans once turned to radio DJs to expose them to new music. But as music grows on the net, listeners are relying on friends and strangers to feed them -- often in creative combinations.

Forget the album and corporate radio. Fan-built playlists and mixes are taking over the way people get their music.

Ego gratification alert: the story has a quote from me.

At video.google.com a new link offers a small download that allows browsers to stream the videos that video.google.com has been archiving. The video.google.com site says You've made a great video. Now who will watch it?, and the answer is, at least YOU can watch it! There is stock price gold in such circularity, but give it a go anyway. Note: not all video that the search engine indexes is watchable. In fact, only a small minority appears to be. There is more information on which video search results are watchable here. Google offers up some examples of "interesting videos".

Web developers are taking a cue from the Grey Album and mashups have become increasingly in vogue. The one that triggered this post was AudioFlickrscrobbler which finds photos related to the music you're listening to; but web service mashups seem to be everywhere these days.

Jon Udell asks "How do you design a remixable Web application?" An answer he missed was to make it produce and consume data on the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web is all about remixing and linking and sorting data. All you do is import the data you want into a triple database like Redland or Jena, then run a SPARQL query to find all the linked data you're looking for.

Also, I love microformats and I think they are a great bridge, but they can be limited.

Compare XFN with FOAF: in XFN how do I say on my family's ne'er updated blog that Harold is my brother and my mother's son?

That said, I think that for the Semantic Web to take off microformats will have to take off first. Once people start getting plugins that allow them to add embedded microformat data into their apps (like a script to add hCalendar data to iCal) people will demand that the web interact with their personal data stores. From there, it's just a matter of time.

One Word Movie is an on-line platform which organizes, based on user-supplied terms, the flood of images on the Internet into an animated film. A word turns into images, images turn into a movie.

I've confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google's video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April.

Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged as "free" available for real time streaming through the VLC player, which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

(We tried hinting at this about a month ago. ;) Although like Microsoft's Video, I get the impression that Google Video will end up DRM'd as well. -kc.)

Submit links to your favorite videos or upload your own for distribution via BitTorrent.

(From the folks at CommonBits. -kc.)

Mary Hodder's ruminations on videoblogging.

"hat's interesting to me is how I'm now discovering the vlogosphere as I once did with the blogosphere about four years ago.. back when there were maybe 100k blogs... I had no idea what I was looking at because it was all mysterious then: the format, the linking, blogrolls, and the people, online trust and references. There were nuggets of magic, people who came through asynchronously to share and converse both information and points of view that were personal, passionate, deeply held and often far more expert and full of breadth than legacy media."

"Dozens of attendees are typing away, live-blogging what's being said. Digital cameras snap pictures that appear on FlickR a few moments later. A few people are roving around with mini-DV cameras and video-blogging it. Others are recording audio and podcasting it...."

The Nashville ABC affiliate is expected to announce on Monday that the station is switching to the video journalist (VJ) model of news -- reporters who shoot and edit their own video. You may remember KRON-TV made a similar announcement in May. The WKRN staff was informed of the change on Friday, several sources tell Lost Remote. Both stations are owned by Young Broadcasting. I'll have more on the story on Monday...

Ray sends us the scoop on the CVS disposable video camera- The king of the one-time digital camera hacks/analysis finally got his hands on a CVS Camcorder on Friday, the 24th via someone shipping him one FedEx. Within 18 hours, he had slurped the flash memory and has the unencrypted, XVID codec, 320x240, 30fps movies stored in the camera on his computer. Link.

How can we videobloggers do things together? How can we make small teams of people that share the workload?

Make screencasts using the free vnc2swf

vnc2swf is a screen recording tool for X-Window (X11), Windows and Mac OS Desktop. It records the live motion of a screen and generates a Macromedia Flash(TM) movie (.swf) file. Motion capturing is divided into two parts:

1. Convert a screen image into some portable image format. 2. Record the captured images in a Flash movie.

BusinessWeek: "The software giant will include reader technology in the coming Longhorn operating system -- and make it available for free."

"When I was a teen, we used the telephone to get into each other's lives. Now teens are in each other's faces constantly via IM and networks like MySpace and Xanga. Fast forward 20 years and imagine them as adults who own homes and have kids. Imagine them taking the communication skills they're honing today and applying them to a fight over a local development proposal or a school board election. Not only will they have more sophisticated tools, but they'll be more likely to use them than today's adults would be."

Mediaboard ONE makes it easy to catalog, access and manage your images and movies in one place - no matter if you store your media files on your Mac, on CD/DVD or access a network server.

A roundup of coverage on the OhmyNews English edition of the 2005 conference on citizen reporting and participatory journalism.

Poisson is coming out!

"People think of the cameraphone as a more convenient tool for digital photography, an extension of the digital camera. That's missing the mark. The mobile phone is a communications device. The minute you attach a camera to that, and give people the ability to share the content that they're creating in real time, the dynamic changes significantly."

Flickr set of a Free Radio Berkeley workshop

CNet: "In the ever-expanding world of personal publishing on the Web--whether it be blogging, audio/video casting or social networking--helping to establish trust between virtual strangers will be one of the next big technology issues to tackle, according to several industry executives here at technology confab Supernova."

: A bunch of stories on IPTV over this last week...
-- Why is Asia leading the Global IPTV Revolution?: What may be surprising to many people is the fact that Asia is leading the IPTV revolution and is the fastest growing market for IPTV with subscribers set to double in the next 12 months, followed by Europe and the U.S. as a distant third.
-- Time to Rethink US TelcoTV: The US TelcoTV industry has yet to learn the lessons of their predecessors, and would be well advised to reassess the assumptions upon which current deployment paths have been built.
-- Phone Companies Using Microsoft Hit TV Service Snags: WSJ on MSFT's IPTV software problems...
-- SBC's Service Delayed: SBC is unlikely to meet its timetable for offering the IPTV service over its 13-state region in the next three years, but says it pushed back its target date because of problems installing high-speed fiber lines, not because of problems with the Microsoft software.
-- Triple play: clearly coming of age: Telefonica's mix of content offerings and pricing secured it 40,000 subscribers in the first three months since launch and the company now expects 300,000 subscribers by year end.
-- HDTV Pushes Telcos Toward MPEG-4: Driven mainly by a need to cost-effectively deliver high-definition (HD) television, many telco TV providers are now preparing to use the more cost-efficient MPEG-4 video compression standard.

Imagine smartly multicasted chat and conferencing, non-proprietary instant messaging, distributed social networking and data sharing. And now imagine all of this rolled into one. PSYC is an open source protocol and technology, bringing the useful and amazing aspects of several technologies, some of which have been proprietary too long, together.

South East Asia region is the current leader in IPTV adoption, with seven out of 13 countries already having rolled out some sort of service including PCCW’s NOW, which is the largest IPTV deployment in the world, and accounts for one third of the total global IPTV subscribers. According to Gartner, the number of IPTV subscribers in these countries will double by end of 2005. One of the reasons why IPTV has been quick to take-off in Asia is because of the availablity of new broadband networks that can support higher speed flavors of DSL. The population densities in most Asian cities, and the short distance to central offices is the main reason why you have seen higher deployment of DSL/Broadband in that part of the world. Second reason - there are no legacy cable networks, and people want to see TV. It does make me wonder - just like cellular and broadband networks, the massive scale adoption in Asia could give the a region a leg-up in defining the future direction of IPTV as well. Any thoughts?
Further details at Converge Network Digest.

Post-centralized media manifesto

"Web enthusiasts have been particularly well educated and informed about the importance of media rights thanks to the efforts of Slashdot, BoingBoing, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, CreativeCommons et al. As a result, both CommonBits and CommonTunes have been well received.

But this is just the beginning of a much broader evolution of what I refer to as public webcasting. Emerging platforms and services are setting the stage for an exciting future in which just a few pieces remain missing."

Tune Me is an immersive conceptual radio based upon tactile features. The sound and the visual are triggered by "touchy" interfaces. The visitors enter the ellipse-shaped space, immersing themselves in a new world where to listen to the radio waves.



As well as the sound, each channel provides light features as well as vibrating and pulsing experience. When choosing the different FM stations, the overall space changes, defining different moods upon the nature of the different content. News, sport, classical music and international pop. Each of them triggers a different visual experiences, the space vibrates, pulses and interacts with the visitors.

Developed by Line Ulrika Christiansen, Stefano Mirti and Stefano Testa (with Daniele Mancini and Francesca Sassaroli). More pictures by Stefano and Simone.

Also part of Touch Me at The Victoria & Albert Museum (London) till August 29th 2005.

Watching the reports of Gnomedex, I heard about a demonstration of extended RSS processing that the Microsoft IE team did regarding a calendar. Dare Obasanjo explains:

Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.

Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn’t just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.

Now, being able to subscribe to an event calendar is very handy, but there is a much simpler way - using hCalendar and Brian Suda’s x2v calendar parsing tool.
I adapted the conference calendar page, to add an “hevent” to each session ( with help from Ryan and his hCalendar creator).

Now you can subscribe to it directly using the x2v link. This is available today, not in a future release of IE, and you can easily add events to your blog or webpage this way for people to subscribe to.
Tags: gnomedex, hCalendar, microformat

Yesterday, during the CAIF workshop, Takashi Matsumoto (KEIO University) presented Z-agon.

Each face of this cubic movie player is a high-resolution and rimless display allowing you to watch digital movie contents in any place where there's Wi-Fi.



You can receive video mails on the cube and this newly coming message can be shown on the bottom face to avoid getting in the way of your work. Even if you put Z-agon up side down the device would recognize it and automatically corrects itself by algoritm.

You can also play games on its six-face. The game is displayed as a scrolling game, with for example, a character that moves through one display to another one. Also Z-agon has built-in video cameras to augment communication between users. You can see the face of another user while s/he is using Z-agon. Takashi also showed an amazing use of the cube with maps of the city where you could tilt the device to zoom in/out the map.

The network of Z-agon is envisioned to be peer to peer, therefore Z-agon cubes can privately communicate each other sharing its contents.
The first prototype was about 12 inches, but now it's about 2.5 inches.

Movie.

PDF presenting the project.

There are several new techniques for making reading online more efficient ...

"Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store.

The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says.

ScentHighlights gets its name from a theory that proposes that people forage for information much in the same way that animals forage in the wild. "Certain plants emit a scent in order to attract birds and bees to come to them," Chi says. ScentHighlights uncovers the "scent" that bits of information give off and attract readers to it."   continued ...   (Via csmonitor)

KDE audioplayer to use Wikimedia content as a content repository

Registration is now open for the first Accessible Design in the Digital World Conference, taking place in Dundee, Scotland, on 23-25 August 2005.

The conference will explore the frontiers of inclusive design in the real world, by examining the challenges in both implementing guidelines andmeeting legislative responsibilities. There will be opportunities for discussion and debate among those at the front-line of design anddevelopment work and those providing guidance regarding accessible and inclusive design.

Piksel[1] is an annual event for artists and developers working with open source audiovisual software tools. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, by the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK) [2] and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of open source. Piksel05 will take place in Bergen october 16. - 23. 2005.

Ourmedia will coöperate with Odeo, Buzznet, Brightcove, and the Open Media Network to build a central registry of media files online. The lack of such a “union catalog” (central registry) means that it is a lot harder to find footage than it ought to be; it would be ideal if all the separate meta-directory efforts, including Moving Image Collections (MIC) Cataloging and Metadata Portal and The Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) Cataloging Project, would start working together. [Television Archiving]

• Unlimited calling within the US and Canada for US$19.95 a month

• Like, Lust, or Love? Find what you’re looking for at lavalife.com

BitPlayer is a movie player that provides numerous options for viewing, organizing, and exporting QuickTime-compatible movies. With BitPlayer, you can catalog movies in multiple customizable playlists, and view them in a number of ways, including full screen. You can also use BitPlayer to quickly and easily convert your movies into other formats.

Fantastic roundup of the current state of TV to mobile devices.

script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, compatible and, ultimately, totally cool JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly, Web 2.0 style.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been looking at alternatives for use in introduction to interactive media design classes. Todate classes in Communication Design have stayed typically worked with Macromedia applications (Flash and Director). At one point we had a class which introduced students to Java...

So over the last couple of weeks I have started looking for alternatives to the macromedia suite. The front runner todate has been Processing.

Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.

Source: Processing web site

ay I had a look at Quartz Composer, which I think is a contender, with the one exception, it is limited to OS 10.4. However, Processing is open source and cross platform. This is a significant point of difference, which highlights questions of equity and accessibility. I am a cross platform sort of person with a windows machine at home and a mac at work.

The other key difference is the interface and style of programming, between the visual programming supported by quatz composer, which is similar to MAX/MSP, and the traditional mode of programming supported by Processing. Here there are a number of questions related to the profile of the students, the purpose of using such environment within the class, the desired outcomes etc...

Once I have completed all of my marking for the semester I hope to do some more exploration, and fingers crossed will have a copy of 10.4 on my work macintosh so I can spend some more time with quatz composer.

Quartz Composer is a development tool provided with Mac OS X v10.4 for processing and rendering graphical data. Its visual programming environment is suited for: Developing graphics processing modules without writing a single line of code; and, Exploring the visual technologies available in Mac OS X without needing to learn the application programming interface (API) for that technology

Quartz Composer brings together a rich set of graphical and nongraphical technologies, including Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, QuickTime, MIDI System Services, and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), which is a lightweight XML format.

Source:Quartz Composer Programming Guide

Digital Human Body Communication was first unveiled to the public. It is also called as BAN (Body Area Network), as it handles communication between devices using the human body as a medium. [via Telecoms Korea]

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said that although only a small amount of data, such as information on a name card, can be transmitted at the moment because the data transmission speed is just to be 2.4Kbps, the speed will be improved to 1MB within the yearend.

AN can be utilized in numerous ways, such as touch based authentification service, electronic payment service, e-business card service, and touch based advertisement service.

Via Smart Mobs

really nice article on thefeature.com interviewing John Poisson, head of Sony's mobile media research and design group in Tokyo about MMS technology, what it's limitations are, and where to go in the future.

MMS has several problems. Cameraphones are kind of like home exercise equipment: the ad make it look like a cameraphone will be fun, easy to use, improve your life and make you smile more. But when you get home and try it, you realize it's a pain in the ass. So you don't really use it. We think it's the software. The MMS interface on most phones is user-hostile. It can take 40 clicks to do what you want to do. There isn't really that ability to take a picture and share it with someone intuitively like you can when sending a text message. And the ability to add music or a little icon to a picture is not aligned with people's simple desire. There's also very little feedback that what you sent was received. It's simply a send mechanism and not a communication mechanism. That ignores the very nature of what this mobile device is.

Via USC Interactive Media Division Weblog

Jonathan Schwartz - Participation Age, part 2
J. Schwartz:

If there is ten times the number of people using mobile handsets than PC's, these mobile handsets are becoming not simply a platform for receiving phone calls, but also for creating businesses, for creating content for the network and for creating opportunities whether they are economic, social or simply academic.

D.W:

It's not an information age thing, it's a conversational thing, a fundamental part of participation.

J. Schwartz:

You are more forward-thinking [...] it's not about providing information. For us the network is all about providing opportunities to participate, it's creating an opportunity to participate.

From Jonathan Schwartz, president, Sun Microsystems

June 21, 2005 David Weinberger: "We caught Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems, immediately after his talk at Supernova. He says that we're moving from the Information Age to the Participation Age. Since the Net has been participatory - at least when it comes to content - from the beginning, I try to find out what exactly marks the beginning of the new age. We also talk about whether business leaders really have to blog."

A PSP formatted video review magazine, made for the PSP to be played on the PSP. Really great to see this user made content done up in such a pro-way. This edition features three sections reviewing UMD movies, future PSP games, and some must have PSP accessories. Download and pop the 100mnv01 folder on your Memory Stick. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

Forbes.com's Sam Whitmore says he doesn't think so. " The generations behind us would rather watch and listen than read. They won't tolerate the lunatic fringe. And for my money, they'd rather be pandered to as consumers than fulfill their duties as citizens."

I am not so used to know what happen in the field, but it’s however interesting. Østfold University College in Norway conducted a research experiment in which people used standard mobile phones (such as the Nokia 6630) to provide coverage of the historical opening of a new main bridge between Sweden and Norway. The real-time coverage was provided by reporters in “the field” and builds on the concept of citizen journalism.

Great paper in D-Lib about personal digital libraries by Neil Beagrie.

People are capturing and storing an ever-increasing amount of digital information about or for themselves, including emails, documents, articles, portfolios of work, digital images, and audio and video recordings. Computer processing, storage, and software tools available to individuals are increasing in power, volume, and ease of use, year on year. Many issues arise from this more informal and increasingly empowered landscape of personal collection, dissemination, and digital memory, which will have major future impacts. This article provides a commentary on current research and emerging services in this area and discusses potential implications for individuals, libraries and their institutions.

: PricewaterhouseCoopers has come out with its annual report on the state of the media and entertainment industry and outlook for the next five year..and PWC thinks the industry is poised for solid growth, led by new technologies and the rapid development of the Chinese market. Sector wise summaries are on this page...
IHT: Spending on Internet advertising and access charges will rise at an annual rate of 16.9 percent globally over the next five years. Spending on music, including physical sales of recordings as well as digital downloads and ringtones, rose 5.7 percent last year, the first gain in five years. And the report predicts accelerating sales increases over the next five years, at an annual rate of 8.3 percent.
Variety: Mobile music will be the driver behind the music industry. Spending was $37.8 million last year on ringtones and the like; with the arrival of master ringtones and ringbacks, PWC projects the average mobile phone subscriber will spend $65 annually on music for the phone in '09, reaching $3.4 billion.
MediaWeek: With only minimal advertising on Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio, PwC does not expect satellite radio to represent a huge threat to terrestrial, but it could hold down terrestrial radio’s growth.
Guardian: Despite the deterioration in UK consumer spending, PwC is confident the favourable economic outlook will sustain 6% annual growth in advertising here. Internet advertising will continue to grow at double-digit rates, while advertising in traditional media will only increase by 4%-6%.
Sample Chapter: In the U.S., wireless games will experience the fastest growth rate, increasing from $281 million in 2004 to $2.1 billion in 2009, a 49.3 percent compount annual increase.

Via PaidContent.org

Will New Media Produce New Narratives?

"...The book's fifth and final section, "Digital Media," is certainly the most pertinent, at least to cyberculture scholars. In order to answer her question, "Will New Media Produce New Narratives?" editor Marie-Laure Ryan explains that, from her perspective as narrative theorist, three issues must be covered. Firstly, Ryan must define narrative. For her, a definition of narrative must be "sufficiently abstract . . . but flexible enough to tolerate a wide range of variations" (337). Thus, "narrative is a mental representation of causally connected states and events that captures a segment in the history of a world and of its members" (337). Secondly, Ryan pinpoints several properties of digital media which "affect narrativity in either a positive of a negative way" (338). Some examples of the "fundamental" properties are: "reactive and interactive nature;" "multiple sensory and semiotic channels;" "networking capabilities;" "flui[d] and dynamic nature;" and, finally, the ability for digital works to "undergo various transformations" (338). The third issue involves a more precise definition of the term "interactivity." According to Ryan, interactivity, i.e. "user participation" (339), is based on two dichotomies: "internal/external involvement" and "exploratory/ontological involvement" (339)..." From the review of Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling by Jessica M. Laccetti, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.

Editor: Marie-Laure Ryan
Publisher: Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004
Review Published: June 2005

Narrowstep, an internet television company based in London, has created an online television service for Telewest Broadband, combining scheduled and on-demand services across a number of virtual channels.

"The service is based on the Narrowstep platform, which it describes as a “Television Operating System”, or a “TV station in a box”. The platform provides a mixture of scheduled, live and on-demand channels that play out around the clock like traditional television channels. In-house producers at Telewest Broadband are able to encode, schedule and play out the service from a web-based management console."

great looking (citizen journalism) site from Chuck Olsen.

Not unlike Television in the 1950s, this is a young medium searching for the right content that plays to its strengths.The Wildlight Channel is confident that it has the right content for this medium.

"The Wildlight Channel will showcase fresh and original short-form film content from around the world. The channel is initially aimed at 3G phones and will feature animations and live-action shorts that are particularly suited to small screens and a mobile audience."

The process he describes in "Narrating the Action" is the inverse of music video editing: arranging audio clips to match the video rather than vice versa.

Linksysinfo points out that Linksys has made their GPL'd source code offerings available via FTP (previously they were only available via http). As the site notes, Linksys has now made the source code to 27 different products available, which has allowed a flood of amazing third party firmware. We're still waiting on some interesting home-brewed firmware for the new MIMO based WRT54GX.

Via Broadbandreports

Adrian put up a video template for download, so you can make a vog without having to purchase expensive software. It's the best thing since sliced bread! In the future Adrian will create more of these templates, making it dead easy for any to create these truly new media videos!"

Widgetarium is an IDE for developing Dashboard widgets, with syntax aware editors for JavaScript, HTML & CSS, widget packager, and Dashboard debugging emulator.

"(Two weeks ago), the Warner Brothers film studio released the DVD "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" in China on the same day it debuted in U.S. theaters. The company is testing whether quickly released, studio quality DVD's, will be any help in stemming pirate copies from popping up over there. They claim these illegal competitive products cost them 3.5 billion a year in lost revenues."

via: ThisRevolution.blogspot.com

Current TV, a new cable television station started by Joel Hyatt and Al Gore will soon be announcing the winner of their latest video contest, about the same time and probably with far less fanfare, Current will also release a new licensing agreement to govern all future Viewer Created Content.

Under Current TV's present terms, if you submit a video, you give Current the right to use your piece as they deem fit.

I irrevocably grant Current the non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid license and right to use and otherwise exploit the Submission, and the title thereof, in whole or in part, in any manner or medium now or hereafter known or devised (including, without limitation, film, television, videocassettes, interactive devices, Internet and on-line systems), throughout the world and in any and all languages, including, without limitation, the right to copy, edit, change, modify, add to, subtract from, re-title and adapt the same and to combine it with other material.

However, these are non-exclusive rights and you're free to try to get the video out through any other avenues that might be available to you. You do, however, still grant Current the "Rights of First Negotiation and Last Refusal" -- basically Current TV has first dibs should you try to go about selling the piece. Additionally, "the most consideration that Current will be required to provide [you] to acquire all available Retained Rights is... the Writer’s Guild of America minimum scale payment for five minute single news program script (currently $1,237)."

Under these old terms, you could still take your video (that you submitted to Current) and put it on your vlog, or submit your piece in an unrelated online film festival.

Well, that's all in the past now. Under the new new licensing agreement, by uploading a video to Current TV, you can't do anything with it for six months three months. Even if Current TV doesn't want to put your piece on television, you are contractually forbidden from putting the video on your videoblog, and from trying to get it out through almost any other avenue besides Current. In the event that Current TV decides they want to air your video, it is my understanding that they would obtain all rights to the piece in perpetuity; you would be compensated for your work according to Current's new incremental pay-scale.



With this latest announcement, Current TV, a television station that promises to "democratize television," seems to be falling short of it's stated goal. While everyone that I've talked to at Current seems to really get the personal media revolution, this development runs against everything the network should be doing. If the network is really about helping young voices to be heard, then Current should be embracing the growing movement of videobloggers and encourage participants to put their submission videos up on their videoblogs. The videobloggers would, in turn, put a link to Current TV on their blog entry and this would help drive more content to Current's site.

JD Lasica, the author of Darknet, and the co-founder of ourmedia feels that Current's decision to pursue the new licensing terms "will seriously undercut the quality of the material that people make available to Current." He describes Current's new terms as "a holdover mindset from big media, where six-month exclusivity contracts are common. No doubt some percentage of users will consent to the restrictions, while others will say, No way."

While trying to figure out what prompted Current to pursue these new terms, I came across this interesting article about Current TV's Head-Of-Programming David Neuman regarding his days at the Digital Entertainment Network.

I pointed out that this much original content would be very expensive, and suggested that one thing kids (and other Internet users) sometimes like is to be given recommendations about other useful and interesting Web sites. Neuman cut me off with a laugh and condescending sweep of his little hand.

"I don't think we need to be sending people away from our site! I don't think that's how we make money!" ("No! Definitely not!" said the chorus, laughing with him at my stupidity.) "Look, as soon as we're as big as Macy's, then we'll tell people how to get to Gimble's! I'm concentrating on getting as big as Macy's!"

Just as this is simply not how the web works, the industry approved 6 month exclusivity option is not how new media will prove to work either. While I still have very high hopes for Current, it's dawned on me that some people at Current TV only wants to democratize televison as long as they can have a monopoly on democracy...

Technorati tag: Current TV

Note: I am the volunteer organizer for The San Francisco Current TV Meetup Group and obtained this information through a conference call with Current TV and the other meetup organizers. I was never instructed not to share any of the information that's contained in this blog entry and thus feel that it's acceptable for me to share and comment upon this information in my blog.

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patters (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

AlwaysOn and Technorati are pleased to present the first annual "Open Media 100," the power list of bloggers, social networkers, tool smiths, and investors leading the Open Media Revolution.

For "organizers and activists using free and open source (F/OSS) online advocacy tools, and developers and designers building those tools"

Some interesting comments on writing (and rewriting) stories through a storyworld:

We all know that in the digital age, the news media are growing more fluid every day. If a print newspaper or magazine makes an error, they run a correction the next day or the next month -- but if a blogger makes an error, he or she can fix it immediately. The continual rebirth of the Star Wars films suggests that art is moving in the same direction. As the popular films, TV shows, and other narratives that function as cultural reference points for billions of people go digital, they are becoming far more than static artifacts -- they're living stories that can evolve in the telling and re-telling. It's almost reminiscent of the way oral epics like the Iliad evolved as they were transmitted from bard to bard. Add elements like fanfic and transmedia storytelling and you may get something even more potent: a society that continually creates and recreates its narratives in multiple media, with multiple storylines and multiple authors.

Which version of each Star Wars movie is the "real" one? It doesn't matter anymore. What matters is how the version you're watching at any given moment fits into the grander mythos that Lucas is still spinning.

ech Coast - George Lucas: The New Bard" href="http://wade.trblogs.com/archives/2005/06/george_lucas_th.html?trk=nl">Tech Coast - George Lucas: The New Bard

And a previous post by Henry Jenkins:

Many of our best authors, from William Faulkner to J.R.R. Tolkien, understood their art in terms of world-creation and developed rich environments which could, indeed, support a variety of different characters. For most of human history, it would be taken for granted that a great story would take many different forms, enshrined in stain glass windows or tapestries, told through printed words or sung by bards and poets, or enacted by traveling performers. Sequels aren't inherently bad-remember that Huckleberry Finn was a sequel to Tom Sawyer. But Twain understood what modern storytellers seem to have forgotten-a compelling sequel offers consumers a new perspective on the characters, rather than just more of the same.

A workshop I did notice at Ubicomp 2005: “Situating Ubiquitous Computing in Everyday Life: Bridging the Social and Technical Divide“:

A workshop to be held at UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan, 11 September 2005. Sponsored by the Knowledge Acquisition & Projection Lab @ Indiana University. Organized by Michael A. Evans, Andy Crabtree, Mike Fraser, Peter Tolmie and Rick McMullen

Submission Deadline (Extended): 18 July 2005
Acceptance Notification: 25 July 2005
Final Version: 8 August 2005
Workshop Date: 11 September 2005

*Call for Position Papers*
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the Twenty–First Century")

If we take Weiser’s vision seriously, then it is clear that the ultimate challenge for ubiquitous computing is to weave or situate new technologies into the very fabric of everyday life. Despite a number of impressive efforts developing and evaluating prototype systems, many researchers will no doubt recognize that UbiComp demonstrations are nevertheless very ‘distinguishable’.
Such systems have yet to disappear or become an ‘unremarkable’ feature of everyday life - this, we suggest, largely being a result of where emphasis is placed in the development of ubiquitous computing systems. Although attempts have been made to understand he ‘fabric of everyday life’ of target users, emphasis to date has primarily been placed on demonstrating theoretical principles from computer science and the capabilities of new ubiquitous technologies. Given the nascent state of the field, this has been an understandable first phase of growth. Nonetheless, with the movement of computing research away from the workplace and its diversification into novel areas of everyday life, the time is ripe for serious reflection on the nature of everyday life and its importance to the ongoing development of ubiquitous computing systems.

Further details: www.pervasive.iu.edu/~kapl/ubicomp2005/

Why do I blog this? I think this workshop raised an important question often forgotten: how can ubicomp be situated in everyday life. That’s a tremendous issue: how can we engage users in using these technologies. That should indeed fits with their activities/habits/expectations/desire… easy to say but how do we actually do that?

: FT has a long story about what has been written in much details before: Yahoo's Hollywood/media ambitions, with the eternal question: will Yahoo get into original content or not?
Some say Yahoo is tryign to bypass TV. Internet portals "are essentially establishing themselves as [quasi television] networks online", says Dave Burwick, CMO of Pepsi-Cola in North America.

Via PaidContent.org

You have to give the MPAA credit for tenacity. After politicians told the MPAA that they wouldn't roll over and legislate the broadcast flag when the courts realized that the FCC had no authority to mandate it, apparently the MPAA went to work on figuring out a sneaky way to get the bill approved. Following the lead of such laws as the Real ID Act, it appears that the MPAA has learned that all you need to do to get laws in your favor passed without having politicians even glance them over is to include them in a big appropriations bill -- so that's apparently exactly what they're doing. Apparently, a sub-committee is likely to slip the Broadcast Flag into a big appropriations bill tomorrow without any discussion at all. Once again, isn't it worth asking why these types of appropriation bill riders are allowed?

Sensing Focus

Invisible Media: David Merrill and Daniel Schultz are investigating the interaction possibilities that arise when objects in the environment and wearable computers can cooperatively sense the focus of a person's attention. Currently implemented with infrared transceivers, Invisible Media can sense the gaze of the user, while simultaneously communicating their identity. In a learning scenario this two-way ID passing and attention sensing can enable a stateful teaching interaction that tracks the progress of the learner. In a public setting, objects being attended to can transmit the URL of a relevant audio stream or other media to a mobile user. Exciting opportunities for collaborative filtering arise when the number of users and augmented objects gets large.

Inscription, Enrolment and Agency

"The state is going to be recording everything we do, why shouldn't we make our own recordings -- if only to challenge the accuracy of what others capture?"

In Inscription: Surveillance Turned Inside Out, Howard Rheingold talks to Microsoft sociologist Marc Smith about "ways to use tomorrow's panoptic snooping technologies".

I was instantly struck by Smith's use of the term "inscription" - instead of "authoring" and despite AURA's call to "annotate the planet" - a term which Rheingold describes as relating "to behavior that leaves traces detectable by others." But because words do things, because speech acts, inscription also means enrolment** in particular contexts, identities and practices.

The current obsession with tagging and projects like Urban Tapestries, Yellow Arrow, Grafedia, MapHub (and, oh, about a million others now) all work off the general idea that "regular" people can, and indeed should, declare and order their experiences and ideas, and share them with other people.

I don't know where or when "bottom-up" became an absolute social, cultural and (cough) ethical good, but classification, authorship and/or publication are not simply matters of production, or more specifically, about changing the means of production. First of all is that pesky matter of consumption and use: how are people actually consuming and using this information? Second, into which (unequal) arrangements or assemblages do all these practices enrol us?

For example, do we really want to say that when Microsoft or Nokia record everything that it is inherently better than when The State does it? What kind of agency do we actually have? When we use our blogs for 'impression management' or when we post pictures of ourselves to Flickr to have more control over what appears in searches, what kind of agency is that?

** In the work of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, enrolment refers to the "process in network-building in which actors' support is gained for development of a sociotechnical entity, their role defined and their interests and identities orientated to suit." In other words, an actor/actant must be made relevant to others (interessement), be made indispensable to others (translation), and be granted consent by others (enrolment). [blogged by Anne on purse lips square jaw] [Readers' comments]

Forty-five percent of Americans say file sharing services should be outlawed, according to a new survey highlighted over at p2pnet.net. Those most in favor of outlawing the technology were older than fifty years of age, and most commonly lived in the Western or Southern states. “As the first generation raised on the ‘browse, sample and share’ culture of the Internet, young Americans are challenging the traditional notions of intellectual property,” says Kaan Yigit, director of the study.

With ReBlog.com end-users will be able to click on a ‘ReBlog’ button and send a piece of micro-content or microformat to their favorite tool for editing, annotating or just plain prettying up.

(It's a little thing I like to call a "La-ser" ;) -kc.)

I, reporter

: Amy Gahran says she's starting a site on citizen journalism called I, Reporter.

Via BuzzMachine

I'm arranging a Boston videobloggers dinner on Monday night at Dogwood Cafe in Jamaica Plain at 7:00.

If you'd like to join us, let me know.

You don't have to be a videoblogger, we'll tell you all about it.

I can't say I'm surprised. Almost as soon as the Los Angeles Times' new "wikitorials" went online, they were flooded with "inappropriate material." So the Times website pulled them, for now. Bummer.

Didn't Times Web and editorial staff see this problem coming? Couldn't they have implemented appropriate protective measures right from the start? This project sounded bold and creative -- but it also sounded like a major spam and troll magnet. Even worse, from what I've seen online over the years, Los Angeles appears to be a virulent breeding ground for especially ignorant, thin-skinned, tenacious legions of online (...)

Entry continued...

Jupitermedia analyst David Card thinks AOL is preparing for a big fattie splash into the RSS pool. He says:

1. The new version of MyAOL is "essentially an RSS reader", albeit not as slick as how Apple does RSS in its Safari browser.

2. "AOL has a deal with Feedster to provide 7 million user-selectable feeds." (what a coup for Feedster!)

3. "Future plans include integrating feed lists into IM – think RSS playlists that incorporate presence. Think Buddyfeeds." Intriguing... sounds like a mix between AIM, Live Journal and Webjay!

David then makes a big splash of his own, by stating:

"Shockingly, AOL is positioned to be the leader in RSS among the big portals, search engines, and Internet media companies. Gasp."

He's suggesting that AOL will usurp Yahoo, Google and Microsoft (and Jeeves/Bloglines?). I think he's talking in terms of sheer quantity of RSS users. Indeed David says that AOL could "teach a lot of mainstream users to use it [RSS]".

I don't really have an opinion on this, because here in New Zealand we don't have AOL. Still, I do know that AOL is right up there with Yahoo in terms of catering to "mainstream" users. So if they're about to promote RSS on their portal, well that's big news.

But interesting to read Susan Mernit's viewpoint (Susan used to be an AOL executive):

"I share Card's skepticism...AOL is gonna have to pull more than one rabbit out of the hat to make a quick turnaround work."

(via): some folks envisions a location-based wikipedia: Russel Buckley at the Mobile Technology Weblog proposed A Manifesto for Taking Wikipedia into the Physical World:

One of the most exciting things that’s going to happen in the next 10 years, in my view, is that the Wikipedia will move into the physical world. It may not be a Wikipedia initiative (ie it might be a new and different organisation that makes it happen), but the principles will transfer and apply.

7;s look at how this might work.

You’re in London and are standing in a pleasant, sunny street in Camden Town. City life is going on around you and you fancy the idea of knowing a little more about where you are right now.

Using your phone, as if it was a PC mouse, you uncover snippets of information from the world around you. You click on an old house in the road and a wealth of digital information comes onto your phone screen. Some contain video and audio links.

You learn that the house is on the site of one lived in by Charles Dickens’ wife after their separation. You’re interested in Dickens so you poll the area and find that there’s actually a tour of Dicken’s Camden Town that afternoon.

Out of curiosity, you look up how much this kind of house would be worth, what local rates and taxes are. And you read a review of a local citizen’s view of schools in the area.

Moving on you see a tree, which looks unusual and casually click on it to reveal its genus. Then you click on car you like the look of, to find out how much it would cost second hand (2003 model), where you might be able to find one and what the gas consumption is like.

As stated by WorldChanging,:

He’s essentially arguing for an open urban informatics model, one combining camera phone networks, virtual tags and location-based services. What makes his argument novel is that it makes the wiki concept central to the model – anyone can annotate, update and edit.

Why do I blog this? I think it’s an interesting step forward the integration of various sources of information to build a bottom-up physical-space augmentation. Besides the cost of implementing it is not so touggh, relying on today’s technologies.

Via pasta and vinegar

P2P research firm BigChampage says the average number of p2p users online around the world at any given time in 2003 was 5,518,899

By 2004, that figure had soared to 7,048,102. And up until June 17 this year, the number of people simultaneously logged into the p2p networks at any moment was 8,535,159.

In America, where the Big Four records have been engaged in a vicious sue ‘em all campaign in an attempt to sue customers into buying product, that number almost trebled from 2,936,656 in 2003 to 6,223,317 up to June 17, 2005.

Rock and roll. This is so cool. Andrew does a video blog. (He's running for Public Advocate in NYC in case you don't know.) Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson did a super job creating the vlog.

And look at the video:



He's very cute there with that little slightly embarrassed smile, should get lots of votes! He's on his way to a wifi hearing, where he testifies that wifi in NYC is key to keeping NYC 1st in the world.

YES! I want universal wifi. It's like a water. Which should be a municipal utility.

Also, the low res quality of the video gives it that "60's -- we're gonna change the world!" feel.. like we're watching JFK or something!

I love this. Every candidate should have a "man on the street" vlog.

Previous videos include: Being a Business Owner in NYC and Meeting Andrew (where you can learn that his name rhymes with Shea (Stadium), that he works out, sends his own email, and works late a lot, was born in NJ, lived in NYC, studied art and architecture, and wants to know your complaints so that he can use new technology to connect you and others to each other, and the right folks to fix it.

Nice work, Andrew, Jay and Ryanne!

Update: See Andrew get interviewed by Amanda Congdon at the Rocketboom vlog, about NYC wifi.

A two-day conference in London will bring together key players from across the interactive television field to discuss how to create more engaging services.

The PICDEM Z demonstration kit is an easy-to-use ZigBee Technology wireless communication protocol development and demonstration platform. The demonstration kit includes the ZigBee protocol stack and two PICDEM Z boards, each with an RF daughter card. The demonstration board is also equipped with a 6-pin modular connector to interface directly with Microchip's MPLAB ICD 2 in-circuit debugger (DV164005). With MPLAB ICD 2, the developer can reprogram or modify the PIC18 MCU Flash memory and develop and debug application code all on the same platform. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

One of the advantages of downloading files from Bit Torrent was that you knew the spyware companies had not gotten their dirty paws on this network. Unlike Kazaa which has become a main-source for AdWare on many windows machines, Bit Torrent lived in relative ambiguity. But is growing popularity as a p2p network has started to get the wrong sort of attraction.

VitalSecurity.org security researcher Chris Boyd has been tracking these developments closely and has discovered that many music, television and other videos are being bundles with Aurora adware program made by Direct Revenue, which pleads innocence and blames a rogue affiliate. Like we can believe an adware maker. Apparently, the same affiliate is distributing adware from 180 Solutions. (These type of companies, once seen as great investments by VCs have become hot potatoes, and many VC firms are scrambling to hide their investments, as per Silicon Beat.)

The so called rogue affiliate is a company innocently called, Marketing Metrix Group. The domain of the company is registered to someone in Vancouver, Canada. The website has strangely vanished from the web, but folks at eWeek were able to corral some details off the site. The company lists PartyPoker.com and Hotbar.com as its clients. Direct Revenue has admitted that it was using MMG to push the Aurora software. Direct Revenue chief technology officer Daniel Doman is the former director of engineering at Doubleclick. Direct Revenue says it has pulled the plug on MMG. Only a matter of time before a new rogue affiliate pops up.

: For cable, the problem with current navigation technology will only become more apparent as choices creep higher and higher. But emerging interactive program guide (IPG) features, as well as entirely new navigation systems, are on the way to help viewers find that needle in the haystack or that diamond in the rough.

Current trends are spreading work away from traditional spreadsheet-style guides and toward more intuitive IPGs. Better search functions, recommendation engines, voice recognition, and visual "mosaic" technologies are other core components of the cable IPG of the not-so-distant future.
Great overview...

Via PaidContent.org

The Snapstream blog has a great, detailed tutorial on How to watch Beyond TV recordings on a Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). They cover every last detail. Even if you don't have Beyond TV, this is a great tutorial on how to get video onto your PSP.

Via PVRblog

Jenny, the Shifted Librarian, says in "Why RSS and Folksonomies Are Becoming So Big":

In the race to find what deserves face-time, services like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com in combination with the rapid adoption of web apps like bloglines, newsgator, feedster and kinja are making Google’s search seem very, very slow. And it’s all being accomplished with RSS technology.

There is wisdom here.

Via Social Media

BBC Click Online interviews Niklas Zennström,the entrepreneur behind Kazaa and Skype,about how his two inventions came about,and how broadband and wireless devices are shaping his vision for the future.

How Skype and Kazaa changed the net

Via Smart Mobs

True holographic video has now reached proof of concept stage. The device uses a Texas Instruments digital light processing micromirror chip, but instead of white light it reflects laser light that reconstitutes an image from an interferogram. [piquepaille]

Via Futurismic

NewMindSpace is a collection of live-action urban street games that take place in major metropolitan areas such as NYC and Toronto. Another game moves the classic game, “Capture the Flag” into the urban grittiness of Brooklyn where players “outwit opponents, hiding around warehouse corners before you find their flag, outmaneuver their flag keepers and dash home for a point in the pulse-quickening game of urban capture.” One game that resembles “Flash Mobbing” is BlowBubbles where mobs of people attempt to completely cover a public landmark with clouds of bubbles.“Manhunt” is like tag on crack, where mobs of people search out the runners in a dense urban space. Coming soon to a street corner near you!

I've seen a lot of half-baked advice on how business organizations can leverage the power of online community. This post on Collaboration Requires Contribution is one of the few that has both a solid theoretical grounding (complete with citations) and practical advice that makes a lot of sense in my experience. The two tips in this excerpt are just the beginning:

(Via del.icio.us)

"Generalized reciprocity" is one of the keys for building social capital as well. For our purposes in thinking about contribution, it is clear that we are not simply talking about contributing information. Human emotional connections are also important. This is a difficult hurdle for many corporations, as their representatives are so used to thinking in terms of formal, third-person voice when communicating to their audiences. Be it the website, brochures, press releases, canned elevator speeches, etc., all of these formal tools are not tremendously helpful when it comes to participating in a community. So, let's revisit the original question: What do we have to offer to the communities we want to join/build? Here are some general ideas, which clearly will have to be tailored to fit:

* Recognition: One of the most powerful attributes of blogs that enable comments, for example, is that it is very easy to acknowledge that someone has offered an idea. By responding with a follow-on comment or post, you have recognized that person publicly for making a contribution to your space. Even if you only follow up by email, you are still recognizing that they are a person, who has an opinion, which you have responded to. This type of action is so incredibly rare in corporate communications, that it often comes as a total shock. But the simple action of recognition brings you more tightly into the community you want to belong to, and ultimately, to influence.

* Ideas on How to Solve Problems: From tips on how to fine-tune your products to answering questions people might have about using them effectively, contributing ideas and helping to solve problems can generate respect among community members. If your customer service department doesn't have someone dedicated to monitoring blogs and answering questions, you might want to think about asking someone to volunteer to do so. If you don't have a real customer service department, one of your developers or product managers might be the appropriate person to take on this role. By actively contributing to people who are interested in and using your products, you not only seed goodwill, but you may be able to recognize and solve problems before they become big news (i.e., use the community as an early-warning system).

On how Internet-native companies like eBay and Monster are threatened by microformats and the Semantic Web.

"Structured Blogging provides a means to include tags in web pages and blog postings that clearly identify structured data for what it is -- rich, fielded data -- not just a blob of text. Using Structured Blogging, you can post an item which is an "Event Announcement" and, because of tags in the item, that item can be identified by any one of potentially hundreds of search engines as being an "Event Announcement" which has fields that conform to a known or discoverable schema and can thus be indexed, stored and searched for with all the power, precision and flexibility of the normal structured data searches provided by databases. "

"Researchers at Microsoft Corp.'s labs in Cambridge, England, are developing a file-sharing technology that they say could make it easier to distribute big files such as films, television programs and software applications to end users over the Internet.

Code-named Avalanche, the technology is similar to existing peer-to-peer (P-to-P) file swapping systems such as BitTorrent, in the sense that large files can be divided into many smaller pieces to ease their distribution. End users request the file parts from other users' hard drives and reassemble them to create the original file.

Such systems can scale well to serve millions of users, and reduce the bandwidth and computing costs of sending content directly to users from central servers. Some have also irritated publishers who complain the services are used to share copyright works illegally.

From the geeks behind CommonBits, tagged and organized directory of music online.

Luminance is a live, playful, interactive art installation in which participants use their own physical body movements to create and influence digital content on a 10' X 7.5' screen. Participants are completely untethered. Their gestures, dancing, leaping and stillness can create image elements on the screen that move with the user and/or move digital content already on the screen.

Visual Communicator 2 eliminates traditional editing timelines to allow for dramatically faster video creation that has the visual impact of a television newscast. Below is an introduction to its interface.

In a continuing effort to please investors, it seems that Google will soon launch a Paypal-esque service code-named Google Wallet. While there has been no official announcement from Google, the Wall Street Journal announced over the weekend that plans were in the works. Ebay's Paypal accounted for $233.1 million, or 23 percent, of eBay's revenue during the first quarter.

Via Broadbandreports

Vimeo is now available for anyone to sign up Drop by, upload some clips, and see what all the fuss is about.

Track media link diffusion through Webjay, useful for bands.

"My linkback web micro-app on Webjay is now up and running at a production level of quality. What this does is allow people who only have a direct link to an audio or video file to go to the blog entry where it first appeared.

As I said the other day, my motivation is to show that third parties can link directly to media without having the media files be disconnected from all the metadata -- author, title, related blog entries, comment forms, etc -- that you get in a blog entry. This is particularly relevant for media which has a direct link on del.icio.us, because there is no way to put a linkback URL into a del.icio.us entry.

What I have done here does not solve the problem of how external services like del.icio.us can take advantage of the Webjay linkback micro-app, short of assuming that Webjay will always know the source of a media link."

Seems like forcing pr0n onto darknets like Freenet could cause a dramatic rise in people using darknets

Lorenzo Manes, who's been working on LULOP's decentralized media efforts for 4+ years now, sent me the heads up regarding their new opensource project LULOP2. LULOP2 is the backend of LULOP.com. Lorenzo writes:

We are looking for people with programming skills who are really interested in the field of IP video distribution and willing to look at the documentation and the code, give us valuable feedback and help kickstart the open source project.

If you are a programmer willing to install LULOP2 and take on some light reporting duties (like reporting bugs, giving feedback on code, installation, documentation, usability, give some publicity by writing about it in blogs and sites) this is extremely valuable to us and we are keen on rewarding this effort with a giveaway of the perfect companion for such a platform, 10 wireless network media centers from Neuston, the Virtuoso MC-500. Interested people should write me a mail at lorenzoATlulop.com in order to get her/his Neuston reserved. The process should span over the next 2 to 3 months and we expect to ship the boxes after summer break.

(from LULOP.org)

I suspect that after television converts to an "on-demand" environment and advertisers perfect new ways of using that medium, we undoubtedly will see media concentrations like what has already happened on the Internet.



The above chart comes from the IAB's 2004 report. It shows what Internet marketers have known for a long time -- that the top 10 Internet media companies have consistantly harvested over 71% of all Internet ad revenue for quite some time. The top 50 companies earn over 94%!

Those media companies who repeat this feat in VOD should be good investments. As they become known, I will make sure to report on them here.

Fans of the television show "Lost" don't sleep when the season does. The show, which moves within a fog of mystery, has been leaving clues that fans have hunted long and hard for. One clue was discovered that surrounds a poster depicted in the background for the fictional airline, Oceanic-Air. And where there is one, there are more. The clue-leaving game is not new to  the relationship between the internet and film/tv, but it's not often used successfully. This new batch of clues will certainly leave "Lost" fans in a frenzy as they scour the internet to discover more about this mystery.

But what will really keep the momentum of this show is not the clues themselves. Instead, it's the communication that is created as fans post their discoveries and theories to the message boards. The mystery of how to retain fans in an off season may be temporarily solved when people discover they have a lot of fictional information to share with one another, which leaves a lot to talk about before the show returns in the fall.

Full Story from the Houston Chronicle

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~savage/ps/index.html Using Wi-Fi to make local Wi-Fi users visible to each other

Mostly I'm interested in this list of concepts and neologisms. Why, there's nothing I dote on more than a good, ringing, conceptual neologism.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~savage/ps/index.html Key Concepts

'THE ZOMBIE EFFECT- Zombies in horror movies walk and talk, but they're no longer human. A zombie's mind and soul and spirit are gone.

'Many complain that electronic devices -- mobile phones, laptops, headphones and televisions, in particular -- brings with them what we call the "zombie effect." Sometimes people look like zombies when they use such devices, as they focus on faraway people and events and information. In doing so, they devote less attention to the people and places and activities nearby. Onlookers experience an odd feeling as they look around at the disengaged people who "aren't all here."

'We've heard a lot of concern about this from caf? owners, patrons and staff. We've heard many references to the cold, quiet ambience that can infect a place that was once full of warm, friendly face-to-face conversation but is now pervaded by blank-eyed "zombies," faces bathed in laptop glow as they tune out the people around them to focus on faraway Internet activities, or as they concentrate on mobile phone conversations with distant friends and colleagues. The Zombie Effect can insulate people from serendipity, from the possibilities of new friendships and fruitful interactions with the people around them. Like urban sprawl, it can also wash away regional flavor and the sense of place.'

(((Are you in a wifi cafe surfing BEYOND THE BEYOND instead of talking to the hot chick at the next table? Dude, you've got ZOMBIE EFFECT!)))

Business 2.0: Cheap computing, infinite bandwidth, and open standards are powering an epic technological transformation that will churn up huge new opportunities — and perils for those who can’t adapt.

Now comes computing’s fifth wave. It’s different from the sea changes that came before it. For the first time, the shift isn’t driven primarily by a single piece of hardware or by how corporations deploy it. Instead, it results from the unprecedented coalescence of three powerful technological forces: cheap and ubiquitous computing devices, from PCs to cell phones to tiny but potent systems that are beginning to show up in everything from bedroom lamps to key chains; low-cost and omnipresent bandwidth; and open standards — not just Linux source code but the opening of other software as well as corporate databases.

The fifth wave puts computing everywhere. It offers access to limitless amounts of information, services, and entertainment. All the time. Everywhere.

Via Om Malik on Broadband

By Mark Glaser: The Contagious Media Showdown sought who could create the most popular Web site in 22 days. While winners such as Forget-Me-Not Panties seem obvious now -- their winning strategies are not.

Norwegian voice over internet protocol (VoIP) solutions provider IPdrum has introduced the IPdrum Mobile Skype Cable, a bridge between internet telephony and mobile phones. The IPdrum Mobile Cable connects internet telephony service Skype to a mobile phone via the mobile phone network, allowing Skype users mobility and worldwide calling for local rates.

With IPdrum and Skype, a user can, free of any long distance charges, call worldwide from his or her mobile phone.

IPdrum has developed patent-pending technology to connect the traditional telephony systems with peer-to-peer (P2P) telephony. IPdrum Mobile Cable enables the user to Skype from his or her mobile no matter where he/she is.

Swedish telecoms supplier Ericsson and digital music subscription service Napster are to offer the first integrated digital music service available for mobile operators.

The service will support coordinated wireless and PC downloading of digital music in both subscription and a la carte models, and phone-based initiation will enable music library access for mobile and PC usage.

Like Flickr but video instead of photographs

BT today launched the world's first combined fixed and mobile phone service.The announcement marks an important milestone in the broadband revolution which is allowing people to communicate in ways they never have before.BT Fusion works just like a mobile phone when you are out and about, but switches automatically and seamlessly onto a BT Broadband line when you get home.That means you get all the convenience and all the features of a mobile phone but with fixed lines prices and quality.

(Shiny pic and fantastic soundbites can be found here. -kc.)

If you happen to read french, there is a must-read today: Les NTIC comme architectures de la rencontre pour une société d’individus: Le cas du développement d’un jeu de rôle mobile-internet basé sur la géo-localisation des terminaux (ICTs and the engineering of encounters: A case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals) by Christian Licoppe et Romain Guillot (France Telecom R&D).

It’s actually a study carried out by researchers at France Telecom about how french company Newt Games imagined its next game, a mobile multi-user role palying game, which has to be scaled down into something simpler: Mogi Mogi (more information about the game in Feature).

Anchored into sociological (as well as socio-cognitive theories à la Kirsh, Norman, Suchman), the paper explores how a game at first targeted to the specific mobile game fans turned out to be accessible to everybody (ranging from simple users to hardcore gamers) and that can support encountering/matchmaking. The most interesting part (with regard to my interest, no offense for the writers) is simply the description of the game development process. Of course, in this paper, the name of the developers/company is not cited, nor the name of the game but it’s easy to guess that it’s Mogi Mogi (based on various cues: a snapshot!!!!, partnership with KDDI, link with Innovacell).

The very interesting point in this paper is how the mobile game developer reshuffled their project due to various constraints (technology, market, financial pressure, management, critics by game editor Ubi Soft).

There is actually an english version of this paper, presented at Mobile Leisure and the Technological Mediascape (Manchester, 2005): ICTs and the engineering of encounters: A case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals:

By means of tests and user feedback, designers initially oriented towards the concept of a multi-player role playing game for mobile phones, targeted towards a specific audience, will shift their design strategy. They will gradually grasp the potential represented by the possibility of users “seeing” their mutual positions on mobile screens in order to enter into contact with one another. Their design work will focus on the engineering of encounters, through an innovative geolocalised service which is now oriented towards any mobile phone user (and not only gamers) – a generic device that anyone could use in principle. The design trajectory moves away from the development of a highly scripted, distinctive game towards the development of a generic information and communication technology.

Since the services they design are based on location tracking, they are particularly interesting from a sociological standpoint. Geolocation embeds issues of space and place directly into the engineering of mediated encounters. Up to now, electronic encounters were a characteristic feature of Internet world, i.e. in situations where actors use a connected personal computer. The development of mobile technology actually introduces original possibilities of exploiting cell phone tracking (in wireless network or through satellite positioning) to engineer disembodied meetings “on screens”. Since mobile phones almost always accompany their owners as they move about, a geographic position (that of their “geolocated” terminal) can be associated with personal electronic identities. The mobile phone screen may become a map of the cityscape, and icons or avatars represent the location of the players that move in it.

: This is the year of mobile video...at least in terms of activity among the industry players. It is still a conceptual play on a lot of levels, but at the the Mobile Entertainment Marketplace conference in London today, the whole Earl's Court conference hall was buzzing with, well, buzz about mobile video.
Our extensive coverage on our dedicated blog is here...
The MEM Conference coverage is sponsored by AG Interactive & Def Jam Mobile

"Stella" doesn't premiere on Comedy Central until June 28th, but you can watch the entire first episode on ComedyCentral.com right now.

CONFOTO is a repository for conference photos and associated metadata. This service provides a tailored photo browser and a generic RDF browser for people, events, and other related resources.

In a 1U form factor the C2800 handles up to 512 simultaneous digital streams - the smallest footprint and greatest density available today.

This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

What Can You Learn from a Cell Phone? Almost Anything!
by Marc Prensky

Japanese students have long learned everything from business to cooking through "manga," graphic novels that are now becoming popular in the West as well. At a recent computer show, a Japanese company handed out a manga pamphlet (about its "middleware" software) that could easily be displayed one frame at a time on a cell phone—similar to the so-called "mobile manga" that has recently become a phenomenon in Japan (Karen Raugust 2004). It follows that in many cases, our mobile phones will be able to replace our textbooks, with the limited screen size of the phones being, in fact, a positive constraint that forces publishers to rethink their design and logic for maximum effectiveness, rather than just add pages.

I sure love that development;)

In Japan, Masayasu Morita, working with ALC Press, evaluated the use of English language lessons formatted differently for computers and cell phones. He found that 90% of cell phone users were still accessing the lessons after 15 days, compared to only 50% of computer users (2003). Another Japanese company, Cerego, strongly supports using cell phones for learning. Outside of Asia, however, I have found that the number of people learning with cell phones or doing research on cell-phone-based learning is exceedingly small.
[...] Of course PDA-based research will be useful, but we will not be on the right track until educators begin thinking of using the computing and communication device currently in the students' pockets to support learning.

Since I read about the Sony building site case in 2003 where they switched from PDA's back to cell phones, I can only subscribe to this. Do not use tools where people need to first understand how they work - this won't work. Use their daily tools which they already know inside out.
KAYWA - promo plug - has always believed in this paradigma, that's why our mobile blogging solution works on wml, xhtml, i-mode capable phones.

Despite what some may consider cell phones' limitations, our students are already inventing ways to use their phones to learn what they want to know. If educators are smart, we will figure out how to deliver our product in a way that fits into our students' digital lives—and their cell phones. Instead of wasting our energy fighting their preferred delivery system, we will be working to ensure that our students extract maximum understanding and benefit from the vast amounts of cell-phone-based learning of which they will, no doubt, soon take advantage.

Educators, let's be smart;)
If any of you are reading this and you are interested to experiment with mobile learning, you could start with mobile KAYWA weblogs. Do not hesitate to contact me, if this is the case.

Via Ernie Miller via BoingBoing, the latest bit of agitprop from Downhill Battle, which says that for each iPod sold, only 21 tunes it contains were purchased at the iTunes music store. Which of course begs a few questions: 1.) Where do the rest of the tunes come from? and 2.) Why not make it easier for artists to be paid for them? Remind me again why the Induce Act proponents scoffed when EFF suggested the law would target devices like the iPod?

Via Copyfight

Virtual characters powered by advanced AI techniques, allowing them to change their emotional state in fairly complicated ways in response to the conversational English being typed in by the human player: this is the future of video games....

Constitutional Code reports that Macrovision is invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against an analog "signal noise" reducer. This touches on the little-known 17 USC 1201(k), the "Macrovision provision" of the DMCA (Macrovision DMCA Lawsuit Targets DVD Copying Products). This isn't about digital anti-circumvention (the most commonly invoked), but analog anti-circumvention. The following is probably not directly invoked in the case, but will shed some background:

[1201](k) Certain Analog Devices and Certain Technological Measures. -

(1) Certain analog devices. -

(A) Effective 18 months after the date of the enactment of this chapter, no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any -

(i) VHS format analog video cassette recorder unless such recorder conforms to the automatic gain control copy control technology;
(ii) 8mm format analog video cassette camcorder unless such camcorder conforms to the automatic gain control technology;
(iii) Beta format analog video cassette recorder, unless such recorder conforms to the automatic gain control copy control technology, except that this requirement shall not apply until there are 1,000 Beta format analog video cassette recorders sold in the United States in any one calendar year after the date of the enactment of this chapter;
(iv) 8mm format analog video cassette recorder that is not an analog video cassette camcorder, unless such recorder conforms to the automatic gain control copy control technology, except that this requirement shall not apply until there are 20,000 such recorders sold in the United States in any one calendar year after the date of the enactment of this chapter; or
(v) analog video cassette recorder that records using an NTSC format video input and that is not otherwise covered under clauses (i) through (iv), unless such device conforms to the automatic gain control copy control technology.

(B) Effective on the date of the enactment of this chapter, no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in -

(i) any VHS format analog video cassette recorder or any 8mm format analog video cassette recorder if the design of the model of such recorder has been modified after such date of enactment so that a model of recorder that previously conformed to the automatic gain control copy control technology no longer conforms to such technology; or
(ii) any VHS format analog video cassette recorder, or any 8mm format analog video cassette recorder that is not an 8mm analog video cassette camcorder, if the design of the model of such recorder has been modified after such date of enactment so that a model of recorder that previously conformed to the four-line colorstripe copy control technology no longer conforms to such technology. Manufacturers that have not previously manufactured or sold a VHS format analog video cassette recorder, or an 8mm format analog cassette recorder, shall be required to conform to the four-line colorstripe copy control technology in the initial model of any such recorder manufactured after the date of the enactment of this chapter, and thereafter to continue conforming to the four-line colorstripe copy control technology. For purposes of this subparagraph, an analog video cassette recorder ''conforms to'' the four-line colorstripe copy control technology if it records a signal that, when played back by the playback function of that recorder in the normal viewing mode, exhibits, on a reference display device, a display containing distracting visible lines through portions of the viewable picture.

(2) Certain encoding restrictions. - No person shall apply the automatic gain control copy control technology or colorstripe copy control technology to prevent or limit consumer copying except such copying -

(A) of a single transmission, or specified group of transmissions, of live events or of audiovisual works for which a member of the public has exercised choice in selecting the transmissions, including the content of the transmissions or the time of receipt of such transmissions, or both, and as to which such member is charged a separate fee for each such transmission or specified group of transmissions;
(B) from a copy of a transmission of a live event or an audiovisual work if such transmission is provided by a channel or service where payment is made by a member of the public for such channel or service in the form of a subscription fee that entitles the member of the public to receive all of the programming contained in such channel or service;
(C) from a physical medium containing one or more prerecorded audiovisual works; or (D) from a copy of a transmission described in subparagraph (A) or from a copy made from a physical medium described in subparagraph (C). In the event that a transmission meets both the conditions set forth in subparagraph (A) and those set forth in subparagraph (B), the transmission shall be treated as a transmission described in subparagraph (A).

(3) Inapplicability. - This subsection shall not -

(A) require any analog video cassette camcorder to conform to the automatic gain control copy control technology with respect to any video signal received through a camera lens;
(B) apply to the manufacture, importation, offer for sale, provision of, or other trafficking in, any professional analog video cassette recorder; or
(C) apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously owned analog video cassette recorder, if such recorder was legally manufactured and sold when new and not subsequently modified in violation of paragraph (1)(B).

(4) Definitions. - For purposes of this subsection:

(A) An ''analog video cassette recorder'' means a device that records, or a device that includes a function that records, on electromagnetic tape in an analog format the electronic impulses produced by the video and audio portions of a television program, motion picture, or other form of audiovisual work.
(B) An ''analog video cassette camcorder'' means an analog video cassette recorder that contains a recording function that operates through a camera lens and through a video input that may be connected with a television or other video playback device.
(C) An analog video cassette recorder ''conforms'' to the automatic gain control copy control technology if it -

(i) detects one or more of the elements of such technology and does not record the motion picture or transmission protected by such technology; or
(ii) records a signal that, when played back, exhibits a meaningfully distorted or degraded display.

(D) The term ''professional analog video cassette recorder'' means an analog video cassette recorder that is designed, manufactured, marketed, and intended for use by a person who regularly employs such a device for a lawful business or industrial use, including making, performing, displaying, distributing, or transmitting copies of motion pictures on a commercial scale.
(E) The terms ''VHS format'', ''8mm format'', ''Beta format'', ''automatic gain control copy control technology'', ''colorstripe copy control technology'', ''four-line version of the colorstripe copy control technology'', and ''NTSC'' have the meanings that are commonly understood in the consumer electronics and motion picture industries as of the date of the enactment of this chapter.

(5) Violations. - Any violation of paragraph (1) of this subsection shall be treated as a violation of subsection (b)(1) of this section. Any violation of paragraph (2) of this subsection shall be deemed an ''act of circumvention'' for the purposes of section 1203(c)(3)(A) of this chapter.

Phew! Did you get all that? Most of it doesn't directly apply to this case, but I thought readers might want to look at the extent of format and technology micromanaging that Congress thinks is necessary in copyright law. All this to keep people from copying VHS to VHS (which will soon be dead technology). Don't you love the law? The Home Recording Rights Coalition has some of the legislative history of this provision (Macrovision Legislative History).

This is called the "Macrovision provision" of the DMCA because it essentially mandates use of Macrovision's Analog Copy Protection in VCRs. Wouldn't you love to have your technology mandated by law? Must be nice.

One example of the products under fire is the GoDVD! Model CT-2. Because it is not actually a VCR it doesn't fall under 1201(k), but it would likely run afoul of 1201(b), which makes it illegal to distribute anti-copy protection devices. However, 1201(k) makes it quite clear that Congress considers this technology copy protection technology, and because it is mandated for VCRs, makes arguing around it quite difficult.

Read the Macrovision press release: Macrovision Files Lawsuit Against Sima and Interburn’s DVD Copying Products.

Our electricity bills are up these days -- and while the blame can be pinned to our increasing reliance on various electronics from charging gadgets to computers to DVD players to video gaming consoles, one big culprit for many may be the big screen TVs they're buying. Apparently, these suckers use electricity the same way SUVs guzzle gasoline -- but, just like SUVs, don't expect Americans to give up their big screen TVs. Instead, the industry is looking at coming up with some self-imposed standards to make these TVs a bit more energy efficient.

Via Techdirt

More on the community besting of the new Sony PSP firmware mentioned yesterday: Both Engadget and Slashdot are pounding this link with traffic, which details how you can use two memory sticks to get around the new PSP firmware and use the device as you see fit (SNES emulation, homebrew apps, etc.) (Mirrors)

---

I'm working on a linkback web service. When it's done it will allow direct links to blogged audio and video to be traced back to their source weblog. My motivation is to show that third parties can link directly to media without having the media files be disconnected from all the metadata -- author, title, related blog entries, comment forms, etc -- that you get in a blog entry.

An H2O Playlist is a shared list of readings and other content about a topic of intellectual interest. It is a simple yet powerful way to group and exchange useful links to information.

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

"To be clear, this guide isn't a substitute for, nor does it constitute, legal advice. Only an attorney who knows the details of your particular situation can provide the kind of advice you need if you're being threatened with a lawsuit. The goal here is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected."

free video sharing , unlimited bandwith. Microsoft Mediacenter edition coming soon.

A Singapore television station is making its romantic drama series, PS I Luv U, available in three-minute episodes on 3G mobile handsets. The mobile show will launch throughout Asia, but already handset makers are trying to develop video-ready programming that can be aired on wireless networks, according to this Reuters article.

From Technology Review Blogs:
Brad King: Emerging Technology and Culture - The 4-Gig Handset Hard Drive and Asian Television

ACTLab TV offers Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming software called Alluvium Media Server, and an Alluvium media player. ACTLab TV builds upon Open Source and Copyleft media. Its goal is to provide independent artists with the tools and knowledge to produce and distribute original, independent, creative works. ACTLab TV is a project of the ACTLab Program at the University of Texas at Austin. [ploosh!]

Via Cinema Minima

JVC has come up with palm-sized hard drive video cameras. JVC’s new Everio G series camcorders come with a 20 or 30-gigabyte hard drives, instead of removable media such as tapes or DVD-R. The GZ-MG40, with a 20-gigabyte hard disk, records 7 hours at DVD-quality; the GZ-MG50, with a 30-gigabyte hard disk and a 1.33 megapixel CCD, records 10 hours of DVD-quality video. Each is small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. Will Hollywood protest JVC and Sony as companies which aid and abet “pirates” who use such small camcorders to record features at very high quality? [p2pnet.net]

• Get a bargain on a camcorder at Cinema Minima Amazon Shop — you’ll save money, and your purchase through this link supports Cinema Minima!

Via Cinema Minima

Chris Thilk from Movie Marketing Madness interviews Perry Wang from Media Revolution, a creative web design shop with some movie studio clients. It's interesting to see how the website is transforming from a promotional tool created at the end of production into a communicative medium used during production. Some nice info in there.

Via ChapmanLogic

The point of this site is to compile tons of short home made movie clips. Each movie clip is going to come from different people across the world. and will be edited to gether to make one of the most interesting movies known to man.

AdAge: Music and video will be freely accessible and personalized as America Online moves from subscriptions to an ad-supported model.

Netimperative: Consumers of the future will "become their own editor" as technology puts them in control of the media they consume.

"The study revealed that the emergence of technologies such as personal video recorders and wireless broadband will cause consumers to become more emotionally engaged with their media.

This means they will have a positive response to targeted ads that appear in their chosen media, provided they are seen as relevant, the report asserted."

Independent World Television is building the world's first global independent news network. Online and on TV, IWTnews will deliver independent news and real debate -- without funding from governments, corporations or commercial advertising. Internet fundraising makes it possible.

Wal-Mart and Target will stop stocking movies in VHS format, except for significant new releases, following a similar announcement from Best Buy and Circuit City. Flashback 1977: Detroit duplicator Magnetic Video pays 20th Century Fox $300,000 to license the first fifty movies for distribution on VHS. M*A*S*H was the best-selling title of the bunch.

With a PC running Linux and a recent VGA card, you can emit a real digital TV signal in the VHF band to your DVB-T set-top box. DVB-T emitters are usually very expensive professional devices. Now with a standard PC you can broadcast real DVB-T channels! Examples to transmit PAL or SECAM analog signals directly to your TV are also presented. [via] Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

Hey folks at PBS, I hear you're having funding problems. Might I suggest taking a spin around the Web to find content released under a Creative Commons license that you can broadcast for free? The Creative Commons site has a content search engine, as does Yahoo!

It doesn't look like there's a whole lot of video just yet, but Jason Scott has just released his 5 1/2 hour-long documentary series on BBS technology and culture under a Creative Commons license. The series is not going to cost any money to acquire beyond the $50 the 3-DVD set costs and from what I hear, it's an interesting and professionally produced view of a topic that many in your potential audience might be interested in watching.

And perhaps it's time to make the Public Broadcasting Service into just that...media by the people, for the people. A nationwide public access channel that draws the best citizen content from around the country and (this is the important bit) is edited into PBS programming. Or at least take a few hours out of the week for this...I don't want to see Frontline, Sesame Street, Nova, or Newshour with Jim Lehrer taken off the air, but giving the Make magazine gadgeteers a half-hour a week to geek out about hacking stuff seems reasonable. The overall result may feel less professional but a lot more participatory.

Multimedia information retrieval research community and the practicing video retrieval community are poles apart. They are developing more or less disjoint approaches.

In the big picture of the Long Tail, there are so many items that even today's niche looks relatively popular.

Interactive Greasemonkey userscript development environment.

Doc Searls on mediation and the difference between "media" and "a place."

"It's simple. The old boss, one major exemplar of which is the FCC, could throttle your speech and drive you off an entire medium because it defines what you do as "content" (http://fcc.gov/parents/content), and therefore "not protected by the First Amendment." It's also why Howard Stern is jumping from a one medium where his speech is restricted to another where it isn't. Yet."

High-definition radio -- touted as the most exciting thing to happen to the AM and FM dials since they were invented -- is finally gaining some traction in the United States.

While hardly anyone can yet receive their gussied-up signals, more than 370 radio stations are now broadcasting in high definition, a digital format that boosts audio quality and limits static. A handful have begun experimenting with digital "multicasting," which allows broadcasters to spawn inexpensive sister stations and could give traditional radio a fighting chance against the pumped-up variety of satellite and internet competitors.

The Social Fabric, by Steven Blyth, is a representation of your social world, displayed as a single visual array on your mobile phone. It keeps you informed about which relationships are prospering, which you have neglected, and the overall state of your social fabric.



A series of avatars on your phone screen represent your friends, acquaintances or relatives. The frequency of all digital communications (they can include voice calls, voice Messages, SMS, MMS, e-mail, Instant Messaging, VoIP, etc.) between you and each person, which the system monitors, determines that avatar's posture: an alert stance indicates frequent recent contact, for example; a lethargic posture or turned back means neglect. You can also register non-digital contacts manually.

The avatars can be grouped manually according to sentiment, category, and so on, or programmed to begin clustering together before an upcoming event: your family before a birthday, or friends before a poker night, for example.

Related: Gori. node garden.

Via we make money not art

We asked our friend Matt Thompson and his creative partner Robin Sloan to talk to us about EPIC, their anxiety-inducing vision of the mediacentric future. We asked them to share some of their experiences and thoughts since EPIC took on a life of its own on the Internet. They said, "Sure, why not?" Here it is:

Matt: One of the first questions people always ask after they see EPIC 2014 is, "Do you really think this is going to happen?"

Nah, we usually say. Google didn't even buy TiVo in 2004 (fixed in the 2015 version). Clearly they can't take over the world now.

Lately, I've begun giving a different answer. It already has happened. It is happening.

No, fact-stripping robots haven't quite been rifling through your news sources, rearranging facts and quotes and recalculating statistics to produce custom-tailored stories for you. Microsoft hasn't exactly focused its sights on its suite of productivity software. And Google and Amazon remain kissing cousins.

But all the fundamentals behind our narrative -- ever more customization and choice; people contributing more of their thoughts, efforts, and personal data to a shared media flow; the creation of worlds of metadata; content freed from platforms; bourgeoisie relinquishing the means of production to the proletariats; etc. -- most of this stuff is old hat by now. I think EPIC has engaged people not by spinning these trends out into what's going to happen next, but by putting them together in a fun, vaguely sci-fi context and provoking people to think creatively about what's happening right now. It prodded some people who might not have thought of it before to see connections between things like HousingMaps.com and BBC Backstage and Hossein Derakhshan and RFID tags.

When we first started showing EPIC to journalists at the Poynter Institute, the reaction was often, "This simply can't happen. People will reject the shallow chaos of blogs and 'pods and whoziwhatzits for our brand names, our hallmarks of accuracy and credibility." But days after the little movie escaped to the Internet, in one of the first threads about it on the group blog MetaFilter, one snarky commenter immediately captured its essence: "Citizens, I have had a vision of tomorrow! It looks just like my vision of today, only... more so!"

Robin: Yeah, and EPIC is really meta, you know? Matt's right: The things it describes exist today. But as an added bonus they are in turn demonstrated by EPIC's travels. The movie was featured in places like MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report and the Financial Times. But far, far more people found it on the Internet via blogs, forums, or (most of all, I speculate) via emailed links. Sure, our present-day proto-Googezon skews way nerdy; and sure, the mechanisms by which information is posted and organized and sorted and displayed are all pretty fungly. But still... it's kinda starting to work. What I wanna know is... when are we gonna start getting PAID? (Hey, would anybody buy an EPIC t-shirt?)

Bookmarked items in del.icio.us that end in one of a number of filetypes will now automatically get some system tags added.

A bunch of Business Week articles on the ability of the Internet to remove gatekeepers

The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. "There's a fundamental shift in power happening," says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) "Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in."

Nokia announced today that it is using best-of-breed open source software as the basis of a new mobile browser for its world leading smartphone software, the Series 60 Platform. The new browser aims at an unparalleled user experience when browsing full Web pages on a smartphone screen - over wireless connections with the top performance in the mobile industry. The flexibility and extensibility of the new browser will allow Series 60 licensees to further innovate and customize the browser, for example to meet their operator customer needs.

Poynter Online: Steve Outing reviews different ways to incorporate citizen journalism into news sites and newsrooms.

"This article is designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media. We'll look at how news organizations can employ the citizen-journalism concept, and we'll approach it by looking at the different levels or layers available. Citizen journalism isn't one simple concept that can be applied universally by all news organizations. It's much more complex, with many potential variations."

Microsoft Research unveiled last week, partnerships with seven universities to develop a Mesh Connectivity Layer technology.

The goal is to create a wireless mesh network among users who can then share a single, high-speed Net connection. Victor Bahl, senior researcher at Microsoft's networking research group, says a company or a person could decide to invest $800 per month to lease a T-1 line "and connect the remote neighborhood for a fee."

Mesh Connectivity Layer is a loadable Microsoft Windows driver that lets computers communicate via a wireless mesh network using Wi-Fi or WiMax services, tricking the computer into thinking it's directly connected to an Internet connection. The software creates a virtual network adapter that looks like a regular network connection to the computer, and uses an Internet Engineering Task Force protocol called Link Quality Source Routing to route data among computers in the neighborhood.

Once the driver is part of Windows, it will help to create a wireless mesh network in which every computer in the neighborhood helps to route data to backhaul link that's used to connect to the Internet.

The infrastructure needed to make mesh connectivity in remote places a reality is starting to take shape, said Rick Rashid, senior VP at Microsoft Research, in a speech at the MobiSys Conference held last week in Seattle. The price of small, simple satellite connectivity devices has dropped to around $3,500, making it feasible to set up a satellite link and connect it to a wireless mesh network in areas that don't have Internet access, he said.

Mesh Connectivity Layer will let neighbors forward one another's data packets across shared gateways distributed around a neighborhood until the data arrives at an Internet connection, whether it's a satellite link or a T-1 line.

But Microsoft says work still needs to be done in areas such as capacity, range, privacy, security, and multipath routing before the offering is ready for market. And, Bahl says, the Mesh Connectivity Layer network "must be able to manage itself."

Via Daily Wireless

TgBlog: italian daily videoblog about Internet. Tech people explain web/tech to unsavy users. Grassroots personal media revolution experiment (DYO tv with croma)

The Mobile Imaging Summit conferences, now in their third year, are limited attendance events open to senior executives that bring together leaders of the imaging, information processing and telecommunications industries to foster revenue growth in the camera-phone ecosystem.

"easily make comic book pages, or even an entire comic book, using your own images or drawings as panels."

"Faced with the strategic imperative to change -- the moment of restructuring that has come to most American industries and now is coming to news -- the smart and sensible will change. The only question is how. But that's a big question."

"Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map hybrid might zoom in to a 3D model of the area where an automatic pop-up starts playing a slideshow with pictures of the scene or streaming video along with the text news content. Imagine integrating Google Maps into your classifieds so readers could search for jobs based on what is close to their house. The possibilities are endless. "

What are the implications for art and art education if, as Michael Goldhaber predicts, the new economy is based upon the allocation of limited 'attention' rather than on limited materials or labor?

This is a question I'd be interested in discussing in a virtual seminar. The background articles on this idea are listed below:

Europe's Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a report today examining the state of online music distribution. The report tries to find a middle ground in the P2P wars, and it has made news because some of its findings go against the RIAA's party line. For instance, the report found that there's no clear causal link between the rise of P2P and the fall of offline music sales. The report also recommends that the music industry "re-evaluate" its attitude toward P2P, and possibly by considering ways to operate legitimate P2P networks. In fact, the OECD seems generally up-beat about P2P as a technology, a fact that doesn't sit well with the RIAA. For the obligatory round of RIAA scowls, frowns, and harumphs about the report, see this Wired article.

Via Ars Technica

Lucas Gonze discusses playlists at Hawaii Pacific University.

If only mobile phones were an open standard .. the brilliant Greg C on mobile gaming:

"I like this game, and I want to send the demo version to my buddy--or maybe even buy it for him." Great idea, and an excellent way of enabling viral marketing of mobile games. But step back and think about the complexities: I'm on T-Mobile, my buddy is on Cingular. I have a Nokia phone, and he has a Samsung phone. What I really want is to send him an SMS with a WAP link that allows him to download and install the game--but I'm on T-Mobile, and Cingular keeps it at some URL that T-Mobile doesn't know about. Also, because he has a Samsung phone, he doesn't want the same build of the application that I use--he wants the one that the developer optimized for his particular phone. And if I'm going to buy it for him--well, I have no billing relationship with Cingular, T-Mobile doesn't have any existing scheme for sharing revenue in this case with other carriers, and so on and so on. The idea is simple--but the current network realities don't allow it.

What a bleeding headache, eh? Hopefully they'll start talking interoperability or open standards soon; imagine the big games that could happen, not to mention cross-network MoSoSo.

I've published this presentation over at my own site: http://inventio.us/deixis/. Thanks for taking a look... cgb

Abstract:
In his recent Kairos article "When Blogging Goes Bad," Steven Krause suggests that the fit between weblogs and the writing classroom isn't perhaps as seamless as we might wish it to be. His article recounts a "failed experiment" where weblogs failed to provide a "dynamic and interactive writing experience."

My presentation takes Krause's article less as a "cautionary tale" and more as a challenge to understand where the friction between weblogs and the writing classroom is located. Drawing on Kathi Yancey's discussion of deixis in her 2004 CCCC Chair's Address, Carolyn Miller's work on ethos in Human-Computer Interaction, and Duncan Watts' work in network theory, I suggest a couple of conclusions. I argue that the "community" we work towards in our classrooms is largely a clustering, or centripetal, type of networking, while much of the "dynamic and interactive" nature of weblogs comes from connective, or centrifugal, activity (or more accurately, a healthy mix of the two). Furthermore, the energy of blogging is highly context-specific (deictic), in a way that can be difficult to accommodate (or value) in a classroom setting.

I am in Bristol (UK) this week (June 12-15, 2005) for the conference "Up to Speed: the Potential of Broadband as a New Space for Research, Development and Production, organized by The Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council England and the Watershed Media Centre, where the event is to take place. The program is here and the text of my presentation here.

If anybody who is going to blog this event, please post a comment here...

The Optware Holographic Versatile Card (HVC) is only as big as a credit-card but stores 30GB of data.

30GB is about 6 times more than a DVD can store and in closer to the capacity of next generation DVD formats like Blu-ray or HD DVD.

A HVC costs about 90 cents. A HVC drive is supposed to cost $1,800.
I am not sure where the market for the Optware HVC holographic disc will be.
More details on Nikkei.net (Subscription) and on the Optware site.

Via I4U Future Technology News

In an article appearing in AdAge today, Disney's new CEO says that his company needs to "leverage the great migration" of viewers to consumer-controlled media formats." Phew! That's a mouthful. Let me just abbreviate it to this: Disney believes in VOD.

I have deliberately stopped posting references to media people who feel compelled to say the obligatory words about 'consumers are in control' and 'audience fragmentation' etc., because everyone says that now. I will try to post references that only give us hints as to how each player wants to frame what comes next.

In that context, this article did give us some hints:

[Iger] sees the ESPN new-media model as a direction for other Disney media properties. "That's the profile I want to create for the whole company ... content that lives on all media platforms." ESPN provides live sportscasts and interactive games through broadband online channel ESPN 360. The company has also launched ESPN Mobile, its own branded cell phone.

Mr. Iger characterized ongoing talks with Time Warner Cable and Comcast about VOD program distribution as "pretty productive," and predicted that viewers might see such shows as early as 2006. One sticking point with cable systems operator Comcast has been the issue of how content providers would be compensated. Comcast envisions VOD essentially as a free service for its subscribers.

Note: the last sentence above is a common refrain from the content owners.

UPDATE:

CBS would take $1 per VOD view?.

: DreamWorks Animation has tied up with video game publisher Majesco to become the first studio to provide films for Nintendo's line of Game Boy portable vidgame players. Majesco will release "Shrek," "Shrek 2," and "Shark Tale" later this summer in its proprietary Game Boy Video format with a price expected around $20.
Majesco had to develop a new technology to play video on the Game Boy, however, and can only store animated content up to 90 minutes.
This follows success of Sony PSP, where other studios are scrambling to release portable movies on to...
In related news, Nintendo will establish 1,000 WiFi hotspots in Japan by the end of 2005 where owners of its DS portable game machines can play games with others online for free. The company is planning a similar service for overseas markets...

Via PaidContent.org

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a technique for mixing images and video feeds from mobile cameras in the field to provide remote viewers with a virtual window into a physical environment. Reality Flythrough dynamically stitches together still images and live video feeds to create a 3D environment.

The application fills in the gaps in coverage with the most recent still images captured during camera pans. The software then blends the imagery with transitions that simulate the sensation of a human performing a walking camera pan - even when one of the images is a still frame. If older images are not desirable, the fill-in images can be omitted, or shown in sepia, or include an icon displaying how old the photo is.

"Reality Flythrough creates the illusion of complete live camera coverage in a physical space. It's a new form of situational awareness, and we designed a system that can work in unforgiving environments with intermittent network connectivity," said UCSD professor Bill Griswold.

"With virtual tourism, for instance, you could walk down the streets of Bangkok to see what it will be like before getting there," added Neil McCurdy. "Another really cool application is pre-drive driving instructions. Imagine going to your favorite mapping website, where currently you get a set of instructions to turn left here or right there, and instead, you can 'fly' through the drive before doing it."

Video.
Via Eurekalert.

Via Clippings.reblog

FeedLounge is a web-based feed reader with a very powerful interface. It handles both RSS and Atom feeds and has fun features like tagging of feeds and feed items, keyboard commands and saving items from feeds

Resource for finding and making screencasts.

Scientists at the University of Arizona have discovered how to use quantum mechanics to turn molecules into working transistors in the lab, a breakthrough that might one day lead to high-powered computers the size of a postage stamp.

Results of the as-yet-unpublished study came together just weeks before Canadian researchers performed a similar feat using chemical means. That experiment appeared in the journal Nature last week. Together, the two studies could bring the final frontier in nanocomputing -- a single-molecule transistor -- considerably closer to reality.

Nobody could have said it better:

In all my years covering digital music, Ive learned to scorn the mainstream medias parroting of RIAA-promoted statistics, memes, alarmist conclusions, and agenda-driven rhetoric. The intersection of digital technology with analog art is a complicated business, and many journalists, editors, and publishers just don't bother getting even a basic grip on facts, or developing any discrimination in their perception of news.

Via the weblog of Lucas Gonze

According to a new global survey, today's teenagers would be lost without their mobile phones, but they would rather text than talk. Natalie Hanman reports on the lost art of conversation for The Guardian.

"While UK teens spend $304m on mobile music a year, and own a collective 4m cameraphones, texting is the favoured form of youth communication, according to the Wireless World Forum mobileYouth 2005 report, the result of a five-year study into how young people all over the world use their mobile phones.

Despite all the technologies that have launched in the last five years, SMS is still the leader," says Graham Brown, chief executive of W2F, teenagers are keeping things simple - and cheap.

In the US, for example, young viewers of the latest series of television talent show American Idol registered more votes by text message than over the telephone, and in the UK, teenagers are sending more text messages every year, reaching a projected total this year of about 22bn.

"It's not just cost," says Brown. "Texting is something immediate and within their control." It is also something that teenagers' parents often don't understand, because most (70%) use "txtspk" instead of fully worded predictive text. It's quicker and, it seems, easier to disguise from those prying parental eyes".

I’ve been meaning for close to month to write about Lulop’s new version, Lulop2, an “Internet news gathering” platform. Lulop has been around for a while (four years), and it’s prime mover, Lorenzo Manes, has built a viable business that brokers video footage shot by professionals, and purchased by television broadcast networks.

Lulop2 is now being used to host 2500 video titles, and for anyone dreaming about creating a marketplace for the exchange of online video footage, it’s worth a close look.

Via Television Archiving

Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society explained to the US Copyright Office that “orphan works” pose a real problem, and require a regulatory solution. Copyright orphans are works whose copyright owners cannot be found. Orphan Works. [Center for Internet and Society]

• Public Domain Enhancement Act is intended to allow abandoned copyrighted works to enter the public domain after 50 years. [INDUCE Act (IICA)]

Via Cinema Minima

The FCC today sped up their timeline for migration to digital television, bumping up the date by which many large sets must come with digital tuners. The push to migrate users to digital and high definition television (accompanied by this very sassy website), is driven by the fact the government stands to make tens of billions selling off the old analog frequencies used by existing formats. The money spent on the campaign irritates some critics, who believe the taxpayer money is needed elsewhere.

I like to watch / CopVision is a program that watches television. Specifically, it watches COPS on Fox. It is not a video, it is a software process that tries to make sense of a live video feed. COPS is all it has ever known, and it probably thinks it is COPS.

"These are not true bottom-up, spontaneous, grass-roots expressions of networked solidarity, nor even representations of groups willing to follow up on their stated convictions; they are simply instances of large numbers of people momentarily willing to take their orders from above."

Examples of mobile technologies used to monitor ourselves and our environment -- what I've come to call the Participatory Panopticon -- are coming out fast these days, and it seems simpler to me to just collect recent tidbits and present them all at once. Here's what I've run across lately...

Cellular-News reports that Uppsala BIO, a Swedish biotechnology research group, has developed a blood testing device to be used with cameraphones. According to the description at the Uppsala BIO website:

The chip will be constructed from a polymer, a piece of “plastic”, and will have narrow channels and small compartments. The compartments will hold the solutions and reagents needed to detect the biomarker and to generate light. [...] If the searched biomarker is present, this will trigger a series of chemical reactions that will generate light. The whole process takes place on the surface of a small particle, a nano particle. Antibodies and enzymes are bound to the nanoparticle to recognize and bind the biomarker, and to catalyze the reaction that gives rise to light. The nanoparticles are used to enhance the efficiency of the light generating process and to enhance the contrast between light and no light. Light is generated in the same way that it is generated by fireflies, and can be recorded by a standard camera, such as the ones that are present in most mobile phones. The recorded image is readily communicated to a doctor or other expert for interpretation.

See the illustration at right. Telemedicine via cameraphones is a rising phenomenon. The Swiss researchers have determined that, at least in certain circumstances, diagnoses via cameraphone images can be comparable to in-person examinations. The Uppsala BIO mobile phone blood test, however, is designed specifically to be used with digital cameras and cameraphones. It won't be the last one.

A short while ago, I posted about the agricultural tagging done in Japan allowing shoppers to examine the history of a given vegetable. Now a similar project will be coming to Thailand -- not with vegetables, but with shrimp. The Bangkok Nation reports that shrimp farmers and distributors will soon be using RFID tags to identify where, when and how the shrimp were raised and collected. The Science and Agriculture ministries claim that RFID is used instead of bar codes due to the need to withstand moisture and temperature changes which could warp or ruin a printed code.

The main downside to the project is that RFID readers are not (yet?) standard hardware for consumers, so the food transparency stops at the shopkeeper. Still, it's a step in the right direction -- with each tray of shrimp tagged with origin information, it's going to be hard to tell buyers that they can't find out what the tags say.

Finally, in the realm of location-based services comes "Crunkies:" a terrible name for an interesting idea. As described by Business Week, Crunkies are geography-linked blog posts accessible via mobile phone.

You walk into a Chinese restaurant and your phone buzzes. It's a blog post from a friend with a simple message: Avoid the duck. [...] The idea is that you can leave location-based posts in certain places for your friends. And they pop up when your friends appear.

The cybergraffiti -- which only exists in what might be called 'crunkiespace,' invisible to anyone but authorized viewers -- is another form of urban informatics, and a way of augmenting reality. The Crunkie website is currently down, so it's impossible for now to say just how far they take the idea. There are signs that Crunkies may primarily be just another dating app; according to Emergic, the Crunkie website claims:

Crunkie is a mobile social networking tool that brings the power of your friend group to your mobile phone. Now you will have one place where you can capture and share all your thoughts and experiences.

With Crunkie on your mobile phone, you can find your friends, see what they've been up to, and browse their favorite places. Through the mapping interface you can find each other and hook up while out on the go, or just kickin' it on the weekend.

using outdated "hip" "urban" lingo. Shudder. Still, maybe somebody not still catering to the youth of 1995 will take the same asynchronous location communication model and do it right.

(Via Cellular-News, Picturephoning and Emergic)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Tech Bloom – Collaborative and Emergent Technologies at 11:50 AM)

P2P-Radio is a program that can distribute audio and video streams (MP3/Ogg Vorbis/NSV) over the Internet in a peer-to-peer manner. It's possible to create your own internet radio station with P2P-Radio!



P2P-Radio is programmed in Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and many other systems.

On the heels of the illegal online release of PSP games packed as ISO files, "someone has now developed and released a utility enabling anyone with a PSP to 'dump' data on inserted UMD discs to their PSP memory sticks,” says Games Radar, going on:.


“Previously, a small number of PSP games were released on to the internet by small piracy groups, who specialise in the hacking and copying of numerous different types of digital media.


“However, in light of the release of this 'dumper' utility, anyone in possession of an original 1.0 firmware PSP has the ability to copy game files. As such, the number of PSP game files currently doing the rounds on the internet is expected to explode.”

BUT ----- there’s a problem, continues the post.

At the moment there's no way of playing these raw game ISO files from memory cards, Games Radar says.


“However, hackers are currently working on an ISO player, which, according to some, is merely days away,” it states, adding that there’s some consolation for Sony:


Copied PSP games won't turn up at boot fairs because for now, there’s no way for potential counterfeiters to burn their own UMD discs.

If you happen to be a Hollywood tourist who stumbles across a bootleg DVD merchant, you might want to think twice before pulling out your wallet. Several Hollywood studios along with the MPAA have funded a collection of cameras which are currently being installed by the LAPD to watch a hotspot known as Santee Alley. Software associated with the cameras monitors activity and alerts the LAPD's central area station. While eliminating illegal piracy may be a worthwhile goal, this situation does make one ponder how privacy is threatened by an industry associated with entertainment and pleasure. Now it seems like we all run the risk of being a part of an unwanted reality show.

Full Story from Boing Boing (Xeni)
Full Story from Wired (Xeni again)

Tim Wu has an interesting new draft paper on how public policy in areas like intellectual property affects which innovations are pursued. It’s often hard to tell in advance which innovations will succeed. Organizational economists distinguish centralized decision structures, in which one party decides whether to proceed with a proposed innovation, from decentralized structures, in which any one of several parties can decide to proceed.

This distinction gives us a new perspective on when intellectual property rights should be assigned, and what their optimal scope is. In general, economists favor decentralized decision structures in economic systems, based on the observation that free market economies perform better than planned centralized economies. This suggests — even accepting the useful incentives created by intellectual property — at least one reason to be cautious about the assignment of broad rights. The danger is that centralization of investment decision-making may block the best or most innovative ideas from coming to market. This concern must be weighed against the desirable ex ante incentives created by an intellectual property grant.

This is an interesting observation that opens up a whole series of questions, which Wu discusses briefly. I can’t do his discussion justice here, so I’ll just extract two issue he raises.

The first issue is whether the problems with centralized management can be overcome by licensing. Suppose Alice owns a patent that is needed to build useful widgets. Alice has centralized control over any widget innovation, and she might make bad decisions about which innovations to invest in. Suppose Bob believes that quabbling widgets will be a big hit, but Alice doesn’t like them and decides not to invest in them. If Bob can pay Alice for the right to build quabbling widgets, then perhaps Bob’s good sense (in this case) can overcome Alice’s doubts. Alice is happy to take Bob’s money in exchange for letting him sell a product that she thinks will fail; and quabbling widgets get built. If the story works out this way, then the centralization of decisionmaking by Alice isn’t much of a problem, because anyone who has a better idea (or thinks they do) can just cut a deal with Alice.

But exclusive rights won’t always be licensed efficiently. The economic literature considers the conditions under which efficient licensing will occur. Suffice it to say that this is a complicated question, and that one should not simply assume that efficient licensing is a given. Disruptive technologies are especially likely to go unlicensed.

Wu also discusses, based on his analysis, which kinds of industries are the best candidates for strong grants of exclusive rights.

An intellectual property regime is most clearly desirable for mature industries, by definition technologically stable, and with low or negative economic growth…. [I]f by definition profit margins are thin in a declining industry, it will be better to have only the very best projects come to market…. By the same logic, the case for strong intellectual property protections may be at its weakest in new industries, which can be described as industries that are expanding rapidly and where technologies are changing quickly…. A [decentralized] decision structure may be necessary to uncover the innovative ideas that are the most valuable, at the costs of multiple failures.

As they say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing.

Via Freedom to Tinker

As a publishing phenomenon, blogs may strike some observers as reminiscent of a development first observed in the early 60’s, when “niche” magazines began to supplant mass-circulation titles like Life and the Saturday Evening Post. But bloggers are not simply imitating the successful marketing strategies of yesterday’s editors. Rather, their work is indicative of a sea change in American culture, one that has been accelerated in recent years by the web-based information technologies and “new media” that are now an integral part of the lives of most middle-class Americans.

The simplest description of this change is also the starkest one: the common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists. In its place, we now have a “balkanized” group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways.

By nat... ... 10 years ago to this day, Rasmus Lerdorf made the first release of PHP. It was slow to take off as this graph shows, but when the sleeping tiger awoke ... Kapow! I had dinner last night with Rasmus, and he's still the sanguine man he always was. He pointed out that he's never taken a job where he's being paid to run the PHP project, which makes him a rare item in the world of programming language creators. ... Ten years into PHP, Rasmus is still working at it. He's been a fixture at conferences, recently even taking his son with him. He passionately supports the smaller grassroots conferences, so I'm glad he's speaking at OSCON this year. Rasmus still hacks on PHP and is still as interesting and mellow as the day I met him. This bodes well for PHP--here's to the next ten being as successful as the first. Congratulations!

Samsung announces new LCD Monitors with 4ms response time.

The new Samsung 17" SyncMaster 178B and the 19" SyncMaster 198B sport this new extremely fast LCD response time. Samsung achieves 4ms response time with their RTA (Response Time Accelerator) chip. The last milestone was 8ms, which is available with the Samsung SyncMaster 915N for instance.

The Samsung press-release also mentions a new SyncMaster CX713S. I am not sure if this one also features 4ms response time. The Korean to English translations are always a challenge.
More details on the Samsung Korea site (Korean).

Ari Soglin, editor of GetLocalNews, has an interesting essay at Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism: Citizen journalism and the storytelling instinct.

While many of my college classmates talked of getting into journalism because they wanted to change the world (this was early post-Watergate), I believe that my motivation came at least in part from the discovery that journalism was a way to tap that dormant storytelling instinct.

Via New Media Musings

A panel on the IPTV market at the Digital Media Summit...
-- Olivier Gers, FremantleMedia Licensing Worldwide, Senior VP, Licensing, Americas: As content owners, the rights issues is big problem in IPTV. The second problem is that what kind of interactivity do we allow across different countries.
What Mark Burnett's Apprentice has done with Yahoo is fantastic, in terms of integration for advertisers.
-- Steve Haire, Verizon Communications, Director, Interactive TV: Tivo: Tivo's interface and consumers offerings it the gold standard for people like us...but set-top box subsidies is taking a heavy toll on Tivo. I would think--personal opinion--they would move into a licensing model where they license it to the Motrola's of the world. Tivo's advertising model is going to work a lot better for them 5-10 years down the line.
The Digital Media Summit coverage is sponsored by Nine Systems

: A panel at the Digital Media Summit today, about the future of digital music.
-- Wendy Nussbaum, Universal eLabs, Senior Director: We are looking towards video downloads as another product through our distribution channels [this is in light of the labels starting charging online portals for streaming their videos]...we don't know the demand yet, but we thought might as well make it available.
-- Mike Gaumond, Motorola, VP & GM, Media Solutions: Phone vs the iPod: They will co-exist. We did a lot of math and came up with 750 million reasons: that's the number of handsets that will ship this year and a lot of them will have MP3 capability.
He said that Moto's iRadio streaming/cached readio product will launch in trial this month and will formally launch early next year. A critical review of the service is here....
-- Kieve Huffman, Sony BMG, VP & GM, U.S. Digital Sales and Business Development: The amount of money we're generating from master tones would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Verizon's Vcast for $15 a month has been fairly successful.
The Digital Media Summit coverage is sponsored by Nine Systems

C|Net News has an image of a display that "will soon be able to squeeze high-definition quality out of non-HD sources such as cable, DVD and VHS" (Photo: High-Definition Simulators). If true, I wonder how much this will decrease demand for DRM-encumbered true HD?

Via The Importance of...

Interaction Defined by Interference

2.4_interference_interaction by Michelle Teran: A wireless, networked play space is constructed from cameras, bikes and public monitors in stores, banks and cafes. The movement and flow of an urban environment is captured and transmitted by wireless cameras connected to moving bicycles. The interaction and interference of flow when travelling through the city is visualized and broadcasted from television sets at local businesses, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces.

The cameras transmit wirelessly on the same frequency and interfere with each other. This collision of radio waves translates into distorted and volatile real-time editing of video and audio viewable on a monitor within range. Interaction is defined by interference. Either entering as a cyclist or non-cyclist, the public becomes engaged with a network where negotiations between people and hardware, cross signals culminates in a continuous spatial-temporal state of change.

Via networked_performance

"CTC 2005 comprehensive conference will define your strategy for collaboration and evaluate the most appropriate tools and applications. Each of the conference tracks address the advantages and potential pitfalls, from both IT and business perspectives. The benefits of collaborative technologies can be significant, but only if they fit the needs of the business."

In PDF format.

Sponsored links are marketed as a sure-fire way to lure consumers to specific Web sites, but a Penn State study shows most online shoppers don't take the bait."Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). "By themselves, sponsored links appear not to be a viable business model and should be only one part of an online advertising campaign."

We told you last month about Qualcomm's plans to launch MediaFlo -- a wireless TV service that promises 30-frames-per-second video. And now MediaFlo is starting to strike deals with TV stations to vacate channel 55 to clear the way for the service. MediaFlo is slated to launch first in Denver and roll out nationwide in summer 2006.

The most valuable media company in the world doesn't make movies, doesn't broadcast TV shows and doesn't print CDs or DVDs. Google now has a market cap of $80 billion, surpassing Time Warner's cap by $2 billion. It has only been 10 months since Google's IPO. Is this another bubble waiting to burst, or the real deal?

Via Lost Remote

"...while some companies have been making progress getting their devices smaller, size might not be the reason why portable media players have yet to ignite the market in the same way as Apple did with the IPod. "Many people don't have a source for MPEG4 files," says Eric Tsai, manager of the sales division at Hsinchu, Taiwan-based Vosonic Technology, referring to the video file type widely supported by the devices. And without a ready source of compatible video files, who needs a video player?"

There's a rule with any consumer electronics technology that has generally held true over time: it's all about the content. VHS won over Beta because there were more movies for it. If there's not enough content, a technology will fail, no matter how cool it is for it's time (Minidisc). This article talks about the lack of video content being a blocking point for consumers buying video devices. I tend to agree, which makes Microsoft the company to watch - they're already one generation in on connecting a PVR (MCE 2005) to a portable media device (PMC), and I'm sure (I hope?) they've learnt a lot from the first generation. My hunch is we'll see 2nd generation PMC devices coming out this holiday season, and it will be interesting to see if they listened to user feedback. If one model had a CompactFlash slot on it, I would have bought one instantly. MP3 players are a more or less evolved consumer electronics device, but portable media players have a long way to go.

Via Digital Media Thoughts

The global broadcast television industry is undergoing fundamental, unstoppable change that is rendering the network model obsolete, says Deloitte. in "Television Networks in the 21st Century"

What was previously considered "television content" is now being burned into DVDs, time delayed by Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), broken into fragments, piped on demand over the Internet, downloaded into mobile devices and syndicated around the globe. Such changes are having a profound effect on the structure, dynamics and future of the global broadcast television industry, both private and public.

significant impact of this transformation is audience fragmentation. Content is being consumed across an expanding array of media, channels and devices. This, in turn, is steadily eroding the once dominant position of television broadcasters andmajor networks.

press release

Ctheory.net hosts a paper by Jeff Rice that discusses how Detroit and some of it's institutions are attempting to re-invent Detroit as a digital city. Detroit's plan has been to lure technology companies to the decaying downtown of Detroit. It is theorized that these technology companies will then help attract and maintain a "Creative Class" who will spearhead urban/economic renewal.

Rice proposes a wholly different direction. He proposes that the city itself should become "digitized" by utilizing social software, and creating an emergent folksonomy of encounter and experience throughout the whole city.

My argument is that the connections Florida stresses are not found in a causal or referential relationship among individuals, capital, the city or other forces, but rather in the new media logic of assemblage; that is, combination in general. In the assemblage, reference is not a requirement. The social connectivity planners like Florida believe will emerge out of urban renewal may be better actualized through the digital assemblage of tagging. My call is for a plan of information tagging, where residents, working in digital spaces, reimagine the city through their own conceptualization and actualization of tags. In place of tagging the bypass or the stop sign with graffiti, they tag the city itself as an encountered name or moment within a digital, interconnected space. On the Web, these encounters become moments of discursive interaction and combination as others add to the tags with their own tagging attributes. "The history of urbanism," Steven Johnson notes, "is also the story of more muted signs, built by the collective behavior of smaller groups and rarely detected by outsiders." Tagging brings this behavior to the foreground so that social connectivity is generated among those within the recognized urban space and those often deemed "outsiders" (those who bring new naming conventions to the discussion and to the urban space itself). If there, in fact, exists a Digital Detroit as this city claims for itself, than it must be found within the practice of tagging.

Detroit, like the urban experience in general, has become non-referential. Its empty spaces, or "ruins" as the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit website declares, don't refer to anything anymore. Tagging allows us to transform that non-referentiality into social experience. The lesson of Detroit is a lesson for all urban sites. Digital space becomes social space through assembled meanings, and that assemblage actualizes the popular logic of social software. Tagging, then, marks a place where new media logic informs our understanding of space and the urban, fashioning a sense of the "social" not yet accounted for in urban studies. Imagine, then, the city as a network of tags. Residents, who tag themselves simultaneously as writers or non-writers, mark the city through memory maps, weblogs, del.icio.us tags, and other related tools in order to reconstruct the city's sense of urbanity as a digital experience. The tagging generates a number of assembled taxonomies, some recognizable, many not. Through the assemblages, we find new Detroits to engage. We find new Detroits emerging out of our own discursive constructions. This reworking is social in ways capital investment has failed to generate. By making these cities cyber -- that is, by putting them on the Web -- the tags used to develop these spaces will inevitably be linked to other similarly named tags for other cities, for other, not yet imagined, encounters.

Via Smart Mobs

Nintendo's Miyamoto: We're happy with the road we're taking - Jun. 3, 2005

"This might come as something of a shock to the gaming world, but Shigeru Miyamoto - the man who created Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda - really doesn't feel like playing games these days."

"There's not a lot I want to play now," he told me recently. "A lot of the games out there are just too long. Of course, there are games, such as 'Halo' or 'Grand Theft Auto,' that are big and expansive. But if you're not interested in spending that time with them, you're not going to play."

What he misses, he said, are games you can pick up and play - something the company hopes to accomplish with its next generation home console, currently code-named "Revolution".

Traditional television: 500 channels and nothing to watch. The future of VOD: 500,000 streams and I don't know what to watch. You don't really want your VOD service to notify you of every new content. You probably want recommendations that are appropriate to you.

MeeVee, a start-up specializing in personalized programming search and recommendation, has launched a beta version of its service on its Web site. Membership is free.

It was very easy to sign up and it quickly found my television provider and local channel line up from only my zip code. In addition to TV Guide like functionality, it lets me search much farther into the future than my DVR does. It also has a Netflix like rating system which (presumably) will guide me to recommendations based upon my likes and dislikes. That is a service I appreciate from Netflix, so it will be interesting to see what MeeVee comes up with for me in the future.

While the web access to the service and weekly email is nice, it really would be best if MeeVee were already inside my DVR. Then, I would want it to automatically tape strong recommendations since I often go long periods of time without searching for something new to watch.

The service, which the company wants to offer on the set-top box, is based on patented metadata-generation technology. You can search real-time programming databases by keyword, program, actor or topic. It includes a search engine, a customizable listings guide, personalized recommendations, and a personal planner. Since the service is not inside my DVR, MeeVee tracks the broadcast times of the show, and emails the planner to me on a weekly basis to create what the company calls a "personal TV guide".

According to MeeVee, the technology that drives the service focuses on characteristics of TV shows, such as frequency and ratings, in order to ensure that search results are relevant to the end-user. It has advanced matching algorithms to provide recommendations based on viewing preferences. The technology also analyzes TV programs' characteristics to provide relevancy to searches and recommendations, based on data MeeVee receives directly from the networks.

MeeVee has just signed a deal with the NBC Television Network, under which the latter will provide video clips of its shows that will be made available on the MeeVee program guide. The company says that NBC is one of over 300 "strategic media partners" that are currently providing content to its service.

There were vague stories last week about TiVo and chipmakers coming to agreements regarding TiVo ToGo, and it seems that's now bearing fruit. Today TiVo ToGo gains Windows Mobile support.

For now that's a delivery on the promises of what TiVo showed at CES early this year but the cool thing about Windows Mobile is that eventually TTG will also work in various PDAs and cellphones with the Windows Mobile operating system. There are several smart phones out in the US market, and plenty of PocketPCs out there, so hopefully a device compatibility list is revealed soon that includes the major brands. [thanks for the tip, Jon!]

This community is for the promotion of Character Role Play games, games based on literary works, movies, TV shows, historical events, or original creations In which the members play as the characters of that particular genre.

The GLS Conference will foster substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education.

a software programme that visually incorporates sound and movement into the pictures you take

Russell Shaw checks out the tiny Pocket Tracker, a GPS unit hooked to a ham radio frequency for "live" tracking.

There we were this weekend, pitching an RV in the rugged Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon.

These are mountains where outlaws used to flee, and never got found. Sometimes, that still happens. Except, in my part of the world, those outlaws are more likely to be meth dealers rather than cattle rustlers.

Other times, the good people get lost. And that's where Pocket Tracker comes in.

Union County - a mountains-and-sagebrush expanse of some 2,039 square miles - has a search and rescue group that looks for about 50 missing persons a year. It's now testing the Pocket Tracker, a carry-along unit that consists of a GPS and radio receiver, connected to a HAM radio frequency.

Search teams use the device to map and coordinate their locations, marking areas already searched and which ought to be combed next. Pocket Tracker is set to work on either 144.390 MHz or 144.340 MHz.

No, you can't find PocketTracker on Froogle-yet, anyway. The gizmo doesn't even have its own Web site. That's because the makeshift collection is the recent invention of Tony Barnett, a former HP engineer who owns the HiValue Radio company in Boise, Idaho (about 150 miles as the vulture flies from Union County).

Now in test, Pocket Tracker contains additional equipment besides the GPS and the radio. It has a permanent digital repeater, two portable repeaters, as well as computer-mapping software. Union County got a $4,528 grant last year for 10 complete Pocket Tracker setups.

Talk about "some assembly required"...

cool - and free. But other solutions, mostly using cellular communications, allow dynamic tracking, too.

Wherify's GPS Locator (below) is a wrist-watch device that costs $199.



Mobile Crossing has a Bluetooth GPS unit, as does Dell. Toss one in your purse or backpack. It might work with T-Mobile's MDA III (a PocketPC with built-in WiFi), Samsung's SPH-i700 Camphone, or fast EV-DO cellphones (with 1.3 megapixel cameras) like Motorola's V-710 or the LG VX8000.

Police cars often used CPDP (analog) cellular networks with GPS-Enabled Modems -- until cellular carriers shut down their analog service. Infosynch, GPS-Passion and Pocket GPS cover the beat.

Nextel offers several GPS tracking solutions. They can use the Motorola i730 phone or the Motorola i930 which features a built-in camera, Push-To-Talk, and Java, running Windows Mobile. Mobile Locator is a Nextel branded GPS tracking solution.



Other wireless trackers are provided by Nextel affiliates and by third parties like uLocate (above). AccuTracking.com, with Nextel phones, lets you see locations, speed, and headings. You'll need Nextel's iDEN i58sr, i88s, or i730 phone and Nextel Total Connect service plan ($12/mo).

Wouldn't it be fun to make a Mobile Access Point with a Wherify or uLocate device, a Linksys WRT-54G with embedded captive portal software ($80), (powered with a 12 Volt battery), along with a EV-D0, EDGE or 3G card or a WiFi bridge packed inside a WiFi/Wimax enclosure (for the backbone). T-Mobile's integrated GPRS/3G/WiFi data card does the trick (in Europe).

DailyWireless has more on GPS PDA, Oregon's state-wide wireless net, Tracking Devices, Balloon Tracking, Seattle's People Tracking, Real ID, UWB RF-ID, Real-ID Passport, $10B Contract for People Tracking, Visa Tracking, Container Tracking, Port Security with RF-ID, RF-ID Tracking Pills, Mad Cow RF-ID, Tracking RF-ID, Digital Angel, RF-ID: From Soup to Nuts, Tracking Ship Movements - And You, Homeland Insecurity, Marathon RF-ID Tagging Port Security with RF-ID, Intelligent Transportation, RF-ID Tracking from Space?, Minority Report, The Matrix, the Matrix Expands and Matrix Shrinks.

Keith's ipodArmy site is a great resource.

"I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last month trying to find good music that is podcast friendly, legal to freely share and/or “podsafe.” To be quite honest it’s been a struggle, but it has gotten easier as I’ve discovered new ways to find good music to add to my podcast. It’s not not exactly easy but it’s manageable and seems to get better as the days tick by."

Olympus has prototyped a head mount display that shows information when required without impairing vision. The HMD does not usually display anything but shows simple information on certain occasions, e.g. to notify the arrival time of your train, or to draw attention when you receive an e-mail.



"A main body of the HMD shapes like a stick and measures 3.2 mm x 3.2 mm x 27 mm. A 0.16-inch LCD panel with 113,000 pixels is embedded in the main body that is to be attached to the eyeglasses. The total weight of the main body and the attachment portion as light as 27 g enables prolonged use."

Via Wonderland < Tech-On.

Windows Media Player  |  Quicktime

This screencast introduces you to FireANT for Windows. It teaches you how to add channels, and download and watch videos.

FireANT is the first software application that comes complete RSS subscription, Video Search, built-in BitTorrent, and the ability to sync media onto the iPod and Sony PSP.

Oh yeah... and its free!

: Sun's new $25 million online ad campaign includes RSS ads placed with NYTimes.com and Feedster. Citrix Online told AdWeek RSS ads are outperforming banner ads in cost per placement, while Sun execs say RSS ads brought in one-third of the participants for an online event. The text ads touting Sun's in the tech and business RSS feeds are a first for the newspaper site.

Via PaidContent.org

"Citizens define news a lot more broadly than traditional journalists do. What's news to them could be a little league game or the swim meet," says JD Lasica.

(Yet another JD Lasica post. One more and I'm declaring this JD Week at unmediated ;) -kc.)

"Social software has enormous potential to help us collect, examine, discuss, organize, and edit large archives. It can set up useful structures to aid the reader/editor in the digestion of content. And it can transform the role of the author, editor, and reader. But we will not realize these potentials unless the tools are honed in appropriate ways. As our experience with the Gates Project points out, we must embrace a new notion of editorial structure and of reader/authorship in order to craft tools and methods that will allow us to understand large bodies of content and make meaningful statements in the networked environment."

A radio how-to guide put together by NPR engineer Flawn Williams.

JD Lasica continues his Darknet mini-book, with an excerpt about a home-authored DVD featuring copyrighted work and original audio commentary (Story: Fair Use in a Digital Age). This is actually very close to one of my favorite concepts for annotation. Buy the Casablanca DVD and then download Roger Ebert's (or similar expert) audio commentary. Of course, the DMCA makes this extraordinarily difficult. And, did I mention this excerpt quotes yours truly?

Not as far fetched as it seems...

Stephen O'Grady posts that to control the effects of Avian flu H5N1, it seems one scientist is counting on the Wikipedia entry about the illness:

Citing the impact that Wikipedia had post-Tsunami, Dr. Lucas Gonzalez of the Canary Islands in Spain is attempting to use the publically authored and edited site to help prevent, slow and survive an outbreak. I find this fascinating not simply because it's an illustration of the growing public awareness of the power of things like Wikipedia, but because of how different a world we live in.

As Barry discusses, one of the critical problems during the 1918 pandemic was one of communication. Fearing panic, the government cracked down on the media, using official and unofficial channels to suppress and control content they believed to be objectionable or incendiary. The unfortunate result of all of this was that the public completely lost faith in any sort of official media, and like the boy who cried wolf when the time came to get actually truthful information out, no one believed it. When you see reports daily that nobody's really dying, and daily claims that the cure is almost here, then walk down the street and see crepe paper (used to mark houses where a victim had passed away) on every house, you know something's not right. Hopefully we never test the hypothesis, but with Wikipedia - or more decentralized means like blogs - it's difficult to imagine that sort of censorship in today's world (unless the internet itself was shut down).

tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_ocean_earthquake"> sold me on the value of Wikipedia, but this is a pretty amazing concept nonetheless. Even to consider this possibility inspires me...

I wonder if or how many schools are blocking Wikipedia?

As mentioned before, radio is the killer ap for much of the developing world. At the same time, creating communications systems which can run off-grid is a real challenge. Here's a project, RURANET, which tackles two problems at once, creating a locally-run, solar-powered radio network in Niger:

In Bankilare, in southwestern Niger, many of the 2000 inhabitants and about 10,000 nomads in the vicinity do not have access to electricity, telephone or clean water. Radio is the primary source of news and information, but few can afford a radio or, more significantly, the batteries it consumes. The villagers often have great difficulty receiving the signal from the national radio station ORTN, which also does not broadcast in the local languages.

sidents of Bankilare built their own radio station, which runs on solar energy, and broadcasts programmes in three local languages. A growing number of villagers have access to solarpowered or wind-up radio receivers that require no batteries. What’s more, through the station, local farmers can obtain a variety of useful information, including weather forecasts, drought and pest alerts, and market information, downloaded from a satellite.

The Bankilare community radio station is one of the first in an ambitious seven-year programme to build a rural radio network (RURANET) of 160 selfmanaged, solar-powered broadcasting stations in Niger. Currently, more than 70 RURANET stations are fully operational.

RURANET gets its news via the bird, free, on donated satellite radio receivers, but it could just as easily come in other forms, as Ethan has pointed out.

(Thanks Emeka!)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 10:29 AM)

Go Skype go! I want video! Still worried about Skype becoming a messaging monopoly!

From CommsDesign - Ushering in the era of free phone calls.:

QUOTE

EET: Is video the next step?

Zennström: Video is certainly something we are working on right now.

UNQUOTE

Via North American Bandwidth News

This remarkable essay by Jay Rosen is simply must-reading for everybody. To offer up portions for comment would be an injustice, so go read the whole thing. Suffice it to say I agree with the premise that it is very useful to view contemporary journalism as a religion.

An interesting conversation has been brewing over at Read Write Web. It starts with a note about SuperFeedSystem and its marketing language:

What if you could have constant new content on your site ... without having to write a word of it? Now you can with the wonderful power of FEEDS. ... Use other people's information to have constant, new, expert articles auto-added to your sites.

There's an element of personal interest for me here, because I'm a co-writer of ReBlog, and our language says:

A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software. ... reBlogs are useful to individuals who want to maintain a weblog but prefer curating content to writing original posts.

Wow, sounds pretty similar.

I believe we avoid the thornier redistribution issues aired on Richard's site by focusing on the personal nature of reblogging, and taking care to build a clear chain of attribution into the reblogged news items. However, the technology is effectively the same between the two projects: SuperFeedSystem could probably be used to publish an Unmediated or Eyebeam ReBlog, while our software could be used to co-opt other people's written works into a search engine juicer.

Legally, the issues here are also identical. A few commenters argue that the second S in RSS grants implicit permission to re-use, but I don't believe this to be the case. Copyright law is clear that the owner of a work has the right to determine where and how it is reproduced. I don't think that the publication format is an implied license. I'm actually surprised that this conversation is even taking place - the stated goal of groups like the Creative Commons or the FSF is to provide for ways to unambiguously license material without requiring the old-style byzantine permissions runaround. It feels as though most of these questions have been asked and answered countless times, and that in 2005 it's enough to slap a CC badge on the work and be done with it. Richard's site lacks one, therefore he reserves all rights except fair use (excerpts, attributed quotes).

Still, I can see why there's a point near the end of the comment stream where the spittle flies a bit; ultimately it comes down to user's intent with a program like SuperFeedSystem or reBlog. If attribution is given in good faith and content is sampled judiciously, there rarely seems to be a problem.

A commenter near the bottom says:

I've never used any of Rich's articles, but now I definitely know that I won't. I would think that most people would get the hint from this conversation. Please keep life simple for newbies like me. RSS has been fun so far without the legal mumbo jumbo.

The whole point of a Creative Commons license is to recognize that new technologies allow for wholesale duplication, recontextualization and redistribution, and to formalize the licensing process with a simple pattern.

Attempts by the Chinese government to force Chinese bloggers to register their blogs has failed, with only 430,000 Chinese bloggers registring with the country’s Information Ministry, representing around 10% of the estimatated number of blogs in China.

Failure to register blogs in China can result in sites being shut down, and potential jail time for those failing to comply.

The Australian reports that there are said to be some 40,000 “internet police” working to block access to sites the Chinese Communist party doesn’t like, and to assure that local internet users are complying with the country’s laws regarding speech. There are also said to be at least 61 people in Chinese jails for posting illegal messages or articles on the internet.

Via The Blog Herald: more blog news more often

One way to build trust in individual news stories is to vet them through a review process accessible and separate from the editorial process within a single news organization. NewsTrust is a new effort to do exactly that:

The free NewsTrust web site will feature top-rated news providers and the best news stories on a variety of important topics. This news rating service will be fully searchable, and include links to featured stories and their sources. Each story will be carefully rated for accuracy, credibility, fairness and relevance by a non-partisan team of practicing journalists and trained "citizen reviewers." This high-quality selection of "news you can trust" will be updated daily on the Web - and a personalized news feed can also be sent to you by email. Think of it as a "reliability filter" for your news.

Headed by Fabrice Florin, advisors for the project include Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold, John McManus, Bill Mitchell, Rory O'Connor and Kim Spencer. Not yet in production, a prototype of the front page can be seen here.

More about collaborative news projects are included in this useful overview: Is CraigsNews' Coming Soon? in a May 19 article in Technology Review.com.

One question about these projects is financial: the NewsTrust page reports that 59% of the respondents to a recent market study said they would pay $10 a year or more for the service. If users are paying for a news aggregator that promises credibility and quality,what would be the incentive for paying for an individual news site separately? If users can get all the news they need on NewsTrust, the $64 million question remains: who will pay for the foundational journalism being evaluated, dissected and linked to across the Web?

As if you need more proof, FeedBurner has published some interesting stats chronicling the rise of podcasting...

Via Micro Persuasion

“This year, the first mobile phones will come to shops which allow you to record VHS quality video. This will happen in Asia. The strongest multimedia drive at the moment is in Japan and Korea,” said Eero Kaikkonen, Hantro’s chief executive, referring to analog VHS video quality. “Next year it will be VGA quality,” he added, referring to the Video Graphic Array standard, with a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels per individual picture.

Via Diablog

Last month I spoke at BlogNashville, a conclave of folks who got together to discuss the state of blogging and the issues confronting emerging media such as podcasting and videoblogging.

At Dan Gillmor's session on grassroots media, I spouted off a bit (as I'm prone to do at these things) about fair use in the digital age. If the thousands of works that Ourmedia's 21,000 members have uploaded in the past two months are any indication, a majority of grassroots video and audio can be published and shared and remixed (if the owner allows it) by using Creative Commons licenses assigned by the creator to each work.

But there's another category of works that fall into the grey zone of fair use. And I said that it's important that we assert our fair use rights in this emerging landscape and not let the entertainment companies and their allies on Capitol Hill clamp down on this astonishing grassroots mediasphere before it has a chance to flourish.

A couple of sessions later, Gigi Sohn, the executive director of PublicKnowledge (and one of the heroes of my book), moderated a session about Copyright and the New World of Syndication. (The mp3 is here.

Gigi took the same position as Larry Lessig does -- that fair use is the right to hire a lawyer after you get sued.

That is perhaps true, given that fair use is not nearly as robust as many of us would prefer, and far less a bulwark against lawsuits than the public generally believes.

But the point I make about fair use in my book is far different: Use it or lose it.

So, what's your view on this matter, Copyfight readers?

I don't want to engage in a legal skirmish here, particularly because I'll be at a layman's disadvantage. But I'd love to hear some thoughts about high-level strategies for bulking up our fair use or digital rights as millions of us will want to borrow from and comment on our visual culture, just as 10 million blogs already do in the text world.

Here's some food for thought:

- A few minutes ago I just posted a set of fair use guidelines written for Ourmedia, on a pro bono basis (bless you!), by the remarkable IP team at Fenwick-West in San Francisco. They've reduced a monstrously complex thicket of laws into some easy-to-understand rules for the digital age (albeit rules with a lot of greys at the edges).

- Since Ourmedia launched in March, with the offer of providing free storage and bandwidth to anyone, anywhere, who wants to post works of personal media, we're naturally been dealing with issues of copyright infringement. You can find plenty of muddy greys on the site, as well as works we felt went over the line. (Not sure what the entertainment companies think about all this, but they should be pleased; we're giving our members a crash course in copyright law.)

- In my latest entry from the book on Darknet.com, I excerpt a section about a fellow who spent $700 to create a DVD to annotate his favorite TV show. I found it fascinating that Siva Vaidhyanathan and Ernest Miller gave different views of fair use for such visual works. I suspect both are correct, though they chose different parts of the legal tradition to emphasize.

- This morning I came across this video by Josh Wolf (see the 21MB QuickTime movie). He took a music video by a band and inserted news clips of people protesting U.S. foreign policy. Infringement? Creative reuse? Or muddy grey?

Aeon Digital has announced a revolutionary digital video recorder that can record programmes over the internet and lay them off to DVD.

This latest digital video recorder can record up to 200 hours of television programmes and burn up to 30 hours of video to a single recordable DVD disc. The same box can also play media, digital photos, music and video, directly from a personal computer.



But wait, there’s more. It will also allow users to rent DVD quality movies over the internet. To provide the internet based services, the company will launch the Aeon Digital Network, which it claims will change the way entertainment is delivered to and viewed in the home.

After plugging the box into a home network it will automatically connect to the Aeon Digital Network over the internet. Users will be able to choose between instant playback of streaming video, or high quality downloaded material.

The Microsoft Windows Media 9 format is used for recording and internet playback, and files can also be played back on compatible computers or other devices.

Via informitv news

The Media Center invites bloggers and leaders of small, independent, alternative or start-up media ventures to submit applications for two fellowships to:

Cross-Platform Media Teams: Strategic Thinking for a Multi-Platform World, June 21 to June 24, 2005, Reston, Virginia (in the Washington, D.C.metro area)

The fellowships cover tuition only. Recipients will be responsible for their own travel and lodging costs.

Recipients must be able to attend the entire program and take on the role of program reporters.

In this executive learning program, organizational teams of senior representatives from both Web and legacy operations will tackle the challenges and rewards of multi-platform media and interdepartmental cooperation, and take a critical cross-company survey of opportunities on the media horizon. The program includes on-site case studies of Washingtonpost.com and Discovery Communications, hosted by their top executives.

Please send to gpan@mediacenter.org a brief statement about who you are and why you're interested in the program. The application deadline is noon ET, Friday, June 10, 2005.

More than a quarter of digital TV devices sold worldwide in 2010 will be mobile phones, as handset vendors strive to place a `TV in every pocket', according to new predictions from market research group Strategy Analytics.

Traditional devices, such as set-top boxes, however, will remain the staple for some years, and demand for these will also increase. A report from the firm predicts that the device manufacturers that are likely to lead the fixed/mobile DTV convergence opportunity are Samsung, Sony/Sony Ericsson and LG.

'In the context of the mobile industry, digital TV will be a relatively minor event,' said David Mercer, an analyst with the group. 'But for digital TV players mobile devices represent an important new opportunity. The industry will push digital TV into people's hands, but it faces a challenge getting them to use it.'

The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary (PBCore) is:

- a core set of terms and descriptors (elements)...
- used to create information (metadata)...
- that categorizes or describes...
- media items (sometimes called assets or resources).

The PBMD Project has spent over two years comparing and contrasting various metadata descriptors, dictionaries, and schemes in order to arrive at the smallest set of elements that could adequately describe the media items produced by Public Broadcasting radio and television stations that may be shared between stations, regional and national distributors, independent producers, and even vendors of Digital Asset Management systems.

The PBCore is a "core" because it can actually be considered a foundation of descriptors that should categorize media items adequately enough that other interested parties can successfully search for and review desired media items. The objective is to be able to share media items and allow users access to descriptions complete enough that they know what to expect if they should review, play or download a media file.

The idea has caught fire in recent months, fed by the boom in blogging and a backlash against mainstream.

"Barry Parr's newsroom is his home office in Montara. Working part time, he writes up to 10 articles a week for no pay.

Time to quit journalism? Parr doesn't think so.

He's intensely excited by his work as reporter, editor and designer for Coastsider.com, a one-man Web site that covers news along the San Mateo County coast. If there's a murder, board meeting or endangered red-legged frog where homes are to be developed, he wants to write about it.

"When I beat the local newspaper or I put up something I know has a different take on the news, then I get really happy," Parr said. "It's rewarding."

Parr's new calling is known as citizen journalism, an intriguing concept that is deceptively simple. Average people write their own news items on the Internet and comment on what other people post. In the process, an interactive, democratic form of media is created."

xFolk offers markup protocols so that you can host your own tags that can be used by crawlers, rather submitting them to a central db like delicious

"xFolk is an xhtml microformat that enables users to tag and share bookmarks on the Internet without using a centralized system such as del.icio.us or flickr. To give a concrete idea of how xFolk facilitates decentralized bookmark tagging, consider a writer who wishes to publish a list of related links at the end of a web article. At the end of the article, the writer simply formats the links and tags in xFolk. Then a web crawler that understands xFolk can digest the page and extract the link information, placing it in one of possibly many directories. In this example, xFolk's underlying use of well understood standards already widely used by publishers and crawlers eliminates the need for the centralized services that currently exist. A similar scenario exists for link blogs."

Telecoms Korea reports that ultra-low cost handsets will sweep the Chinese market, according to BDA China, a Chinese research firm dedicated to telecom business.

"There are a several reasons why cheap phones are increasing in China:

-- The government is fueling competition by increasing licenses to manufacturing handsets.

-- Leading handset makers such as Motorola and Nokia are trying to expand their market by introducing low cost phones, thereby increasing competition.

-- Handset makers increasingly release ultra-low cost phones to enhance their price competitiveness.

The cheap phones are not only the case of GSM but also with CDMA.

BDA China projected that fierce competition over low cost phones will drive up the number of mobile subscribers."

A nifty solution to the "boredom of filming wedding ceremonies" or the danger of filming in a dangerous environment...

Dokumat 500 is a fully automatic documentary robot. The Robot consists of a modified tripod and a video camera. The tripod moves autonomously around and pans and tilts the camera. It switches the camera and a spotlight, mounted next to the camera independently on and off. So, the documentary videos are edited directly inside the camera and the robot supplies a complete finished end-product. All you have to do is switch on the device and insert a cassette.



Don't miss the hilarious movie.

By Niklas Roy (you know... Pongmechanik, Grafikdemo, etc.)

Everyone knows that plenty of content that is transferred using BitTorrent is perfectly legit, right? Apparently not the bright folks at 1and1 Internet, one of the world's most popular hosting firms. According to Boing Boing they sent a cease and desist letter to a website owner, claiming he was guilty of copyright infringement for hosting torrents of his own films. Once again, it looks like a clueless company is associating the protocol BitTorrent, with the activity of distributing unauthorized material. I wonder where they got that idea? Update: The company is now claiming the policy is in place partly for legal reasons, but also because BitTorrent uses up too much bandwidth, suggesting they have no clue how BitTorrent actually works, as that's exactly what BitTorrent is designed to avoid.

Via Techdirt

StoryCast is an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family. Each story consists of a sort of narrated slide show of photos accompanied by the storyteller's voice.

Composition is radically simple: Using the mobile phone handset as a microphone, users speak into the phone while clicking on thumbnails of photos they want to describe or that illustrate a story. The user experience is similar to recording a traditional voicemail, with the benefit of allowing users to augment the audio track with pictures.

Once the handset has recorded both the audio track and the corresponding sequence of pictures, it sends the whole message via email, HTTP or MMS. The team implemented this prototype on a iPAQ h6315 camera phone running the pocket PC phone edition operating system. The organizational structure of a story can be represented in SMIL or MPV (XML formats for multimedia presentations).

The stimTV™ Network is built on patented technology that facilitates the storage and retrieval of video clips in response to a viewer’s profile or to specific requests by delivering fully assembled, entertaining, broadcast-quality media programming.

phpMMORPG is a Web interface that can be used to create an MMORPG with a back-end which permits users of the interface to create their own games.

While flat-rate data pricing has encouraged adoption, it scares the operators with fears of eating into other revenues and overloading capacity. Combined with decreasing prices in competitive environments, will operators be able to keep it up?

Mobile operators are in a funny position when it comes to data pricing. They need to encourage usage -- but they're worried about too much usage. Pricing data in byte-sized chunks or even in minutes acts to discourage actual usage. When people aren't quite sure what they need mobile data for, having them watching the clock (or the byte total) isn't likely to do any favors in helping subscribers figure out why mobile data makes sense. Instead, they'll just let it slide.

NTT DoCoMo discovered this recently when it finally decided to offer flat-rate data pricing, which helped its FOMA 3G service finally catch on. However, even with the success it created, DoCoMo executives later admitted that flat-rate pricing was a problem for the industry -- not a boon.

A new article from the New York Times service highlights this issue. Japanese operators keep dropping the prices on data, leading more users to start using data instead of voice communications in many cases -- cutting into voice revenue. The article doesn't even take into consideration that the Japanese market is about to get much more crowded, with the entrance of three new entrants, including Softbank, a big believer in offering cheap services in the broadband world.

The NY Times article is supposed to be a warning to US operators -- but it's not clear what the solution really is. Without offering flat-rate data pricing, it's much more difficult to convince users why they should bother checking out the various data offerings. Having a ticking clock in the back of your mind isn't conducive to experimenting with creative new uses of technology. However, actually allowing widespread usage creates a capacity problem for operators who are afraid to overload the network.

One solution, that US operators seem to be taking right now, is to use pricing as a limiting factor. That is, they start out data offering with high prices almost to discourage too much usage, while still letting the early adopters to pay up and enjoy the benefits of high speed wireless broadband. However, that clearly isn't sustainable long term. Prices are clearly going to drop over time, especially as more competitors enter the market. A second option is to limit types of usage. Witness Clearwire's decision to block VoIP users from using its service. However, this also may be unsustainable long term. When people want access to data, they want access to all data. But, that will present problems as well. As data does get cheaper, people will figure out ways around blocks -- or demand the ability to use data service, even in cases where it can clearly take away voice revenue, such as by using Skype over a 3G connection.

The answer, unfortunately, is that there isn't a great answer for mobile operators. They need to understand that this is an issue they're going to be facing moving forward, and realize that it's where the market is headed. Offering some form of flat-rate data still looks necessary to be competitive. However, in order to do that, operators are going to have to make sure networks can really handle the capacity of people really using those networks. At the same time, existing business models are going to get squeezed, so operators need to be aware that the lifetime of certain cash cows may be approaching an end point -- and start seriously considering other options.

Science Commons - a new project of Creative Commons that works to encourage sharing of scientific and academic knowledge - has launched an Open Access Law Program. The Program is designed to make legal scholarship "open access," that is freely available online to everyone, without undue copyright and licensing restrictions. The Program involves an Open Access Law Author Pledge, Open Access Law Principles and an Open Access Law Model Publication Agreement.

Our very own Chairman & CEO, Lawrence Lessig, is one of the first signatories to the Open Access Law Author Pledge. In addition, 21 important law reviews have adopted the Open Access Principles, or have policies that are consistent with them. Leading journals like such as Michigan Law Review, Animal Law, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Indiana Law Journal, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Michigan State Law Review and, New York Law School Law Review, Texas Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Wayne Law Review and Michigan State Law Review have signed on, as have all of the journals published by Duke Law School and Villanova Law School. More information about the Program is available at the Science Commons Program page. The Program is one part of the Science Commons Publishing Project, which is working to support open access to scholarly research in a wide range of disciplines including agriculture, entomology, biology, anthropology and now law.

Via Creative Commons Blog - rss

You win some, you lose some. Despite Apple's attention-grabbing announcement, Microsoft today revealed plans to offer software upgrades to allow Outlook users access to corporate e-mail via their mobile devices, a move directly targeted at taking over market share from industry leader Research In Motion and its Blackberry handheld device.

"We heard from our customers they want a simple and easy way to give their employees access to mobile messaging. The thing that has been the complicating factor until now is expensive middleware. We offer it as an upgrade. It's free," said Suzan DelBene, responsible for marketing Mobile devices at Microsoft.

The software giant said at this year's TechEd conference in Orlando that its Messaging and Security Feature Pack would use "direct push technology" to support direct wireless connections between devices running its yet-unreleased Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system and Exchange Server 2003. Support for transfer of rich-formatted Microsoft Office documents and Outlook data, including contact information stored on an Exchange server, are among the features being touted as part of the upgrade.

The move will allow mobile e-mail access to millions of consumers with smartphones, including two of the Orbiting Headquarters' own, although having to wade through nationalistic German spam will still be a chore, no matter how cool the toy may be.

We're all hacking the CVS digital cameras, now we can hack $30 videocameras! -- the world's first single-use point-and-shoot digital video camera. CVS/pharmacy, the retail leader in digital photo and image processing, is exclusively offering the world's first compact, affordable, one-time-use solution for creating and sharing high quality home movies on DVD. For under $30, consumers can now enjoy a DVD home video experience that compares to pricey DVD camcorders, which cost upwards of a thousand dollars. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

: There's complex maths involved: the cost benefit analysis for mid to smaller sized telocs and cable providers. On paper it's a great idea, but in reality, it's a tough sell. In the short-term, the steady march of improvements to MPEG video transmission systems and the massive legacy set-top base means there just isn't a compelling need for MSOs to buy into an IP video conversion.

But it could work for PC-basedVOD services fueled by high-speed cable modems. Already, providers including Akimbo and the Starz Encore-RealNetworks offering (Starz! Ticket on Real Network) are delivering Internet-based VOD services, and cable operators may well choose to add their own services rather than see that revenue stream flow elsewhere.

Via PaidContent.org

ARCHOS PMA400 SDK
Yes.. It is here.. Now I can get to work. Oops. Gotta spring for one of the units first ;-)

Linux Devices has an article about it as well.

Via sLop

From Forbes.com Symbol, Microsoft Team Up On RFID .

I think this is the biggest news to come out of the RFID space so far.

NEW YORK - Microsoft asked. Symbol delivered.

On Monday, Symbol Technologies (nyse: SBL - news - people ), will unveil the first radio-frequency identification reader that supports Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Windows CE. The move should reassert Symbol's market dominance in RFID and give Microsoft a foothold in the small but growing market

First there was Google Maps, and that was cool.
Then there was Google Map hacking, and alpha geeks thought that was cool and, you know, made alpha geeky things.

Now, there's user friendly Google Map map making, and that's just plain awesome.

"It is impossible to get around the fact that professional actors contribute significantly to the enormous revenues that video game companies enjoy," said Seth Oster, speaking on behalf of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Game publishers argue that their current offer is generous. They resist sharing their profits, contending that voice actors play a small part in the development of a video game and aren't the reason consumers buy them."

Syndication for mobile portals (PDF) and Audio by Kevin Smith (L.C.)

The Vodafone live! mobile portal brokers content from third party providers, then presents it in a format suitable for the requesting user and their handset. This use case discusses the differentiators between mobile and fixed-line web portals, how Vodafone have created plug-in extensions to the standard XML syndication formats, and how the syndicated data can then be presented to mobile users to generate content sales.

Via Hannes del.icio.us

Via All about Mobile Life

"In recent years, as the high-tech industry has begun to offer wireless-phone products, this connection between technology producers and users has been blocked by huge, powerful middlemen. In the U.S., the wireless phone carriers have used their ownership of networks to sharply restrict what technologies can actually reach users.

I call these cellphone companies the new Soviet ministries, because they are reminiscent of the Communist bureaucracies in Russia that stood athwart the free market for decades. Like the real Soviet ministries, these technology middlemen too often believe they can decide better than the market what goods consumers need."

By Cyndi Greening. Phoenix, Arizona USA (Cinema Minima) — Since I’m into videocasting and podcasting, I was delighted to find this bit of information from our friends at BOING, BOING — Instructions on how you can play video on an iPod.   You’ll find all of the details at iPodLinuxOrg   It’s unsupported and there are no guarantees, but it appears that once you install GNU/Linux on your iPod, you can play videos on it! (via Cory Doctorow and MAKE Blog)

Via Cinema Minima

Recently unveiled in Tokyo, Japan, TDK’s new prototype Blu-ray Disc records data at 72 megabits per second, double the 36Mbps rate of the current Blu-ray Disc specification. The increased speed has been accomplished through recent advancements in disc recording layer formulations. The initial Blu-ray Disc standard allows for 25GB single layer Blu-ray Discs and 50GB dual layer Blu-ray Discs. To achieve 100GB capacity, the prototype Blu-ray Disc incorporates four 25GB layers. Like all Blu-ray Disc media, TDK’s prototype 100GB Blu-ray Disc is single sided.

Hideki Hirata, TDK Engineering Manager, noted, “Anticipation surrounding the release of the bare Blu-ray Disc format continues to grow. Although there’s been considerable speculation regarding next-generation Blu-ray Disc capacities, TDK is the first to successfully achieve 100GB in a working, prototype disc. TDK’s development of a prototype 100GB Blu-ray Disc with double the recording speed of the current specification validates the company’s position as a leader in extending the capabilities of optical media.”

If podcasting can be described as TiVo for audio, then the open-source Internet TV platform that the Participatory Culture Foundation plans to release by late June might be described as TiVo for the Internet.

Videoblogger Steve Garfield has a new interview with Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle about the recently released video publishing package Broadcast Machine. And Slashdot has a thread on it. I'll be chatting with Holmes by phone later this afternoon.

Via New Media Musings

A well-supported and fully-funded open source project, Delta3D is a full-function game engine appropriate for a wide variety of modeling & simulation applications.

"Delta3D is an Open Source engine which can be used for games, simulations, or other graphical applications. Its modular design integrates other well-known Open Source projects such as Open Scene Graph, Open Dynamics Engine, Character Animation Library, and OpenAL. Rather than bury the underlying modules, Delta3D just integrates them together in an easy-to-use API -- always allowing access to the important underlying components. This provides a high-level API while still allowing the end user the optional, low-level functionality. Delta3D renders using OpenGL and imports a whole list of diverse file formats (.flt, .3ds, .obj, etc.)."

This is the official development community of Elgg, an open source Personal Learning Landscape which allows learners to create their own online digital identity and interact with others creating both individual and community learning environments.

This hypertext essay is a discussion that has developed from an iterative theoretical and design project where video prototypes have been developed to explore and make visible the possibilities for alternative forms of video blogging practice.

MPEG-7 based Java prototypes for digital photo and image annotation and retrieval supporting graph like annotation for semantic metadata and content based image retrieval using MPEG-7 descriptors.

A former reporter for the Hartford Advocate is launching a one-man "hyperlocal" news site, ctnewsjunkie.com, because "a lot of [local] news is going unreported." (via I Want Media)

Via del.icio.us/tag/hyperlocal

here's vvSlowDowner. you feed it a DV file (no, transcoding a non-interlaced format to DV won't work for this- has to be an honest-to-jones DV file), and it creates another DV file that's exactly twice as long. the new movie is half the speed of the original.

"I have a bet with a friend that within ten years most TV will no longer come in 30-minute chunks. When you think about it, there's nothing magical about half hours; they're simply an easy way to divide a broadcast programming schedule into segments that start and finish on the hour."

pbWiki - instant, free wiki spaces for groups or individuals

This Web site lets you collect information from any Web page into an RSS feed. It works by looking for the patterns you provide to identify where each item in the feed starts and ends.

"I sat there listening to the entire podcast wishing it was in video so I could associate who was talking with the proper face, because I’m still not familiar with their voices"

Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones

Taken together with Mobile and Open: A Manifesto, this report and accompanying graphic map are offered as resources to the those who seek to use these new tools to alleviate suffering, create wealth, educate, liberate, create and inform.

This post examines three different public aggregation tools, Drupal, Planet Planet! and Feed2JS and explores the importance of centralised aggregation in facilitating your learning or organisational blogging community.

An important understanding of why Creative Commons is important from an artist's perspective

Epson has announced the development of a flexible display: The image shown is a 2 inches, 320x240 (QVGA) resolution display. This resolution is fairly good, but not unusual. In Asia, lots of cellphones have a similar resolution on 2.2" displays.

However, Epson's new display is flexible, thanks to the use of plastic instead of glass in the display. This is quite an achievement that will lead to thinner, lighter, flexible and possible less fragile screens.

Over on BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin links to PSP Drive, a podcast/broadcatch website for Sony's PSP (Video-Casting for the PSP: pspdrive.com).

Via The Importance of...

The Boulder Daily Camera's "MyTown" experiment in citizens media isn't working, according to Poynter's Steve Outing. In a post called Write, Citizens! Please, Write!, Steve, who's a local guy, notes that two big weekend events in Boulder produced only a smattering of entries.

In its print edition (as well as online), the Camera had been heavily promoting MyTown in advance of these events, specifically urging people to submit their stories and photos to special areas devoted to the Festival and the Bolder Boulder (10K race).

For the Creek Festival, the paper ran stories giving attendees an "assignment" to "cover" the event, as though they were amateur, unpaid journalists.

Alas, I'd have to say that it didn't work out.

Ever since I interviewed Dave about blogs for my book, Free Culture, I've been thinking a lot about his idea of "amateur journalists." It is a powerful concept, which rewards careful thought. To see its value, we must remember the original meaning of "amateur," meaning one who does something for the love of it alone. And when we think of journalism that is regulated by those ideals, it is easy to see why such journalism nicely complements commerical journalism. As he said to me,

"An amateur journalist simply doesn't have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way."

It is because I found Dave's view so compelling that I've been worried for sometime about the emergence of advertising in blog space. I'm not against it. I just worry about how it might put pressure on the "doesn't have a conflict of interest" norm. If the virtue of the amateur is to seek the truth, that virtue could be in tension with the desire to earn more ad revenue. The simplest way to get linkbacks is to say the most absurd things imaginable.

But the more I've talked about this with observers and friends, the more I think the real fear is not bloggers tempted by ad revenues. It is instead the emergence of the equivalent of tabloids in blog-space: commercial entities whose sole purpose is to generate ad revenue, who do that by being as ridiculous and extreme as possible.

The danger here is that the conflict has returned. Just as the British tabloids care little about the truth in their path to selling papers, commercial blog-loids care little about the truth in trying to attract eyeballs. And it is here that the cycle turn vicious: for the amateur space feeds the professional troll by careful and repeated efforts to show that claims made are false or outrageous. If you're paid by the click, who cares why people click.

This creates a dilemma for open and honest disagreement about the facts. For here there is a conflict in interest: the interest of the amateur journalist is not the interest of the professional troll. Yet the only way the amateur can do his job -- by quoting and criticizing -- is to feed the troll.

We either need a way to cite that doesn't reward bad behavior. (Copyright law restricts that (Google, for example, would be really angry if you started linking to caches rather than original locations).) Or we need a way to know when to ignore.

In either case, imho, it would be useful to think more about this conflict in interest, if the nature of the amateur space is not to be displaced by something different.

Gear Live takes a look at the American Idol Digital Camcorder.

The American Idol branded digital camcorder toy is of course aimed at kids. The toy camcorder can record 5 min. of 640x480px video on its built-in 16MB memory. Gear Live finds that the camcorder not as bad as it sounds. Read more about it on Gear Live.

(Is this the new Pixelvision? Someone should totally rebrand this thing as part of a OurMedia Home Journalist Kit. ;) -kc.)

Carlo Longino asks the question: “Can mobile content ever go beyond repurposed existing content without meaningful carrier support?” He goes on to point out “Television companies pay production companies to produce pilots of new shows; record labels pay for recording and other costs. But as things stand in the mobile content world, operators want developers to assume essentially all the risk of developing new content, then want to take a cut of any sales”. If operators want better content — or more particularly, original content designed for mobile phones — they should have a hand in developing that…

Via MocoNews.net

Kind of convoluted to set up but it is so crazy, it just might work!

>>> Media/blog junkies, don't miss this event!

CITIZEN MEDIA FAIR TO EXPLORE PEOPLE POWER AND THE MEDIA
Concerned about the news media? You are not alone. Americans all across the political spectrum are increasingly dissatisfied with - and distrustful of - the performance of local and national news sources. A Citizen Media Fair to be held June 4 from 1 to 5 p.m. at Hamline University’s Klas Center will bring together journalists, media activists and concerned citizens to talk about what citizens can do to increase media accountability, quality and diversity. The fast-paced program will feature panel discussions, hands-on workshops, screenings of documentaries on the news media, and a keynote address by Air America Minnesota talk show host Wendy Wilde.

PEOPLE POWER AND THE MEDIA
Saturday, June 4th
1 PM - 5 PM
Hamline University

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: WENDY WILDE [AIR AMERICA MINNESOTA 950 am]

PANELS
Holding the Media Accountable:
Gary Gilson, Minnesota News Council
Kate Parry, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Scott Johnson, PowerLineBlog.com
Rob Levine, Cursor.org

Making Your Own Media:
John Slade, Counter Propaganda Coalition
Janis Lane-Ewert, KFAI Fresh Air Radio
Chuck Olsen, director of Blogumentary
Pam Colby, Minneapolis Telecommunication

Plus workshops and more.

We’ve wanted a camera that we could take everywhere to record everything we see from our POV ever since we saw Edison Carter doing it back in the day. Of course, his rig was way too bulky and cumbersome to really carry around for any length of time. Fortunately, now that we’re living 20 minutes in the future, all that has changed, and there are setups like the DoubleVision series from the U.K.’s Second Sight Surveillance (not to mention other POV-cams from outfits like Viosport). The DoubleVision Pro is particularly sweet, combining a head-mounted camera with a pocket 30 GB HDD that can store as much as 46 hours of video. While Second Sight markets the unit as a mobile surveillance device, we could easily see ourselves donning this and zapping our raw footage up to Bigtime TV.

[Thanks, Marc]

Ads by Google

"Findhash is a movie portal offering an own movie information database, an advanced commenting system, forums, articles and news from the newest hits to the oldest classics. The site contains some movie technology details can be important, but hard to find anywhere else (for example: p2p availability). "

Via del.icio.us/tag/p2p

AMD is letting the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 loose in the wild today, with the launch of four dual-core models. Priced from US$531 to US$1,001 in quantities of 1,000, the chips will offered for desktops made by HP and Alienware in the US, Acer in Europe, and Lenovo in China.

As we noted in our coverage of the Athlon 64 X2 "pre-reviews" in early May, Socket 939 motherboard owners should be able to drop an Athlon 64 X2 CPU in there with a BIOS update (if they have deep enough pockets). The least-expensive (US$531) model is the 2.2GHz 4200+ with 512KB of L2 cache. That is followed by the 2.2GHz, 1MB L2 cache 4400+ at US$581; the 2.4GHz, 512KB 4600+ at US$803; and the 2.4GHz, 1MB 4800+ for a cool grand.

The release of the dual-core desktops also indicates that the end is near for the single-core Athlon 64. According to the AMD Athlon 64 Product Marketing Manager Jonathan Seckler, the company will likely end development of their first 64-bit desktop CPU.

"We have no immediate plans for new Athlon 64s," Seckler said. (The top chip right now goes at 2.4GHz). There are also no current plans to come out with a dual-core chip for the Sempron line, AMD's budget processor.

Now that both AMD and Intel have released their dual-core desktop processors, what conclusions can we draw? First and foremost, the 2.8GHz Intel 820 D is a much cheaper option at US$241 in quantities of 1,000, less than half the price of the Athlon 64 X2 4200+. While AMD's lowest-cost dual-core CPU may outperform Intel's 820D and 840D, Hannibal's comment that the Pentium D provides the most dual-core bang for the buck right now holds true.

Nature reports that "a team of scientists from Hungary and the United States has found that the majority of online news items have a lifetime of just 36 hours.As reporters have always suspected, yesterday's news is stale,and the day before's news is invisible".From the papers abstract."our results document the fleeting quality of news and events:while fifteen minutes of fame is still an exaggeration in the online media, we find that access to most news items significantly decays after 36 hours of posting".

Life is short in online news

Fifteen Minutes of Fame:The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web

Via Clippings.reblog

Digital advances will not kill off newspapers, predicts Samsung CEO Hwang Chang-gyu at the World Association of Newspapers gathering in Seoul. Newspapers will evolve into "something ubiquitous." (Via I Want Media)

"Microsoft is the big unknown in this space, and RBOCs are putting a lot of faith in their middle-ware, Rich Thompson, analyst with Heavy Reading told me a little while ago. He points out that Microsoft is trying to make it all happen with fewer than 500 people. He very succinctly pointed out that marketing muscle is one thing, and R&D muscle is one thing."

: A thought-provoking powerpoint by Umair Haque on the new economics of media, what he calls Media 2.0. "Plasticity makes Media 2.0 personal:
-- No clear distinction between professional and amateur media;
-- because all media can be unbundled/rebundled
-- The distinction shifts from professional/amateur to mass/personal
-- Media will be unbundled and rebundled at the personal (not mass) level"
Read the last slide first, and then dive in...

Via PaidContent.org

: Newsweek's international edition has a series of stories on the future of TV, focusing on the digital revolution.
-- Changing Channels: How TV is gettting reinvented, with broadband and mobile...IPTV, mobile video, DVR, SMS voting, the works. "Already, CBS has plans to post two or three separate endings for its popular "CSI" series on the Web, and the broadcaster is also looking into VOD over the Internet."
Analysts like Sanford Bernstein's Tom Wolzien believe that content makers have a "once in a generation" opportunity right now to start distributing their products directly to consumers via the Internet. By cutting out the middleman, he believes companies like Disney, Viacom and Liberty could increase their revenues by as much as 50 percent over the next few years. Broadcasters who also own their own product, like News Corp., major commercial networks, public broadcasters like the BBC and other content makers, would also stand to gain..."
-- Television Reloaded: Time-shifting, screen-shifting, space-shifting and everything else in between.

Via PaidContent.org

Forrester Research predicts 50 million U.S. households will be equipped with a DVR or VOD capabilities by 2007 -- a tipping point for advertisers to recognize that 30-second spots are "increasingly impotent." (Free reg. req.)

Via Lost Remote

"Web researcher Gordon Borrell says, "The deer now have guns," and he's right. With a PC, a $100 web camera, a $200 piece of real-time TV production software that includes a teleprompter, free blog software, FTP access to a server, a small digital camera, editing software, and an imagination, anybody can be a TV station, a newspaper or a multimedia news operation. In order to do so, however, the person running the enterprise needs to know how to do everything."

In Italy, Nessuno TV has launched BlogTV, the first satellite TV made by vloggers.

Anyone can provide content, all you need is a digital camera, a webcam or a camera phone. You publish the movie (max 5 minutes) on your own vlog, send it to Nessuno (means "nobody" in italian) Tv which will then broadcast it.



Via Travelling Breeze.

Next-gen MMOG roundup from an old pro, the man who does That Chart.

Useful.

How to stream video and audio to mobile phones using open source software.

Build high quality side-scrolling games without any programming, check out the demo movie.

"Game design just got easier with Power Game Factory, software for creating side scrolling action games for the Macintosh. Featuring a polished graphical user interface, Power Game Factory is capable of producing games similar to many of the most highly regarded 8-bit and 16-bit console video games, but with far superior graphics and sounds. Best of all, no programming is required."

Description. The CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers.

Tools for taking control of digital culture

New at Ourmedia: A one-page PDF of videoblogging resources, handed out by Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson at BlogNashville.

Via New Media Musings

FLOSS Away Technical Constraints

Videotage FLOSS in Media Workshop--Speakers: Kam Wong (Assistant Professor of School of Creative Media, City University) and Annie Wan (Instructor of FLOSS in Media Work Shop); Date: 5 June 2005 (Sunday), 2pm; Venue: Videotage, Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon.

The limits of media art should not be the software license or functionalities created by software designers. Pure Data, free libre and open source software allow you to tailor your own software to match the requirements of your own art piece. FLOSS stands for free libre and open source software. Pure data, an excellent example of the FLOSS idea, is a programming language that can be used in a wide variety of multimedia creation. Annie Wan will touch on interactive installation, VJ performance, audio synthesis & analysis, motion detection and tangible media. You will be working on your own creative project, and you will have a chance to present your work at the party on 27 August.

Annie Wan is a young international artist specializes in audiovisual art and interactive art development, Her recent works have been shown in Sweden, Latvia, Germany, France, Norway, Singapore and Iceland. She will be a PhD candidate with scholarship and Top Scholar Award in DXARTS, University of Washington, Seattle. Check out www.slimboyfatboyslim.org for more information about Annie.

Videotage (literally merging the two concepts of "Video" and "Montage") is a non-profit interdisciplinary artist collective, which focuses on the development of video and new media art in Hong Kong. Founded in 1985, Videotage began as a facilitator for collaborative time-based projects. In a small shared office with two chairs and table, Videotage's support to artists came in the form of labour and equipment for production and post-production, and the exchange of ideas. Videotage has since expanded to include publications, education, exhibitions and screenings.

Via networked_performance

Imagine the dangers when full Internet capabilities become available to drivers. Dr. Meirav Taieb-Maimon and her colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (South Israel) have developed a voice recognition system that enables drivers to surf the Net while keeping their hands on the wheel.

The "Maestro" system lets you verbally dictate a query to a search engine and listen to the results, read to you vocally and smartly arranged to help you get to the information you need as quickly as possible.

The system also allows selection of the different properties from search engine type, number of results returned, search methods and styles to voice pitch and volume settings.

"The effects of these systems on drivers must be investigated before approved for use while driving," Taieb-Maimon said. "We believe that the results of the study will have important implications for driving safety."

Via Usernomics Israel 21c.

Last March we pointed to the RepRap project -- an attempt by Dr. Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath's Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technology to design and build a Free/Open Source fabber. In the subsequent few months, Dr. Bowyer and his team have made substantial progress, including adopting a "Meccano" structure for the test unit similar to the Glue Gun Fabricator devised by Vik Olliver; a report by Vik Olliver detailing how to make one for yourself (PDF) can be found at the RepRap website, along with all of the current plans and design reports.

(Via reBang)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 03:02 PM)

AVR Butterfly MP3

Via sLop

SUB 5 is a program created by DVD Station to give a place in the video store to films that earned less than US$5 million at the box office. This means people could rent or buy such a movie in stores nationwide. In the SUB 5 deal, the film’s producer (or filmmaker) retains ownership. If a DVD is selected to be in the SUB 5 program, all revenue would be split 50/50, minus credit card fees; the first US$25 goes to SUB 5. [DVD Station Blog]

Via Cinema Minima

In order to speed up their deployment of IPTV services (and eliminate having to haggle with towns and cities), SBC and Verizon are trying to eliminate the local TV franchise concept, instead writing laws that would pass single, state-wide franchise provisions. Their attempt to do so in Texas has not gone as planned, their State bill failing to gain approval. "Competition for video services will occur much slower without a statewide video franchise," warns a regional Verizon president. (It would have been slow anyway; they still need to build the network).

Via Broadbandreports