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]

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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]