unmediated

Vlog | SoHo | Round 2
Apple Store, SoHo, NYC
Sat. July 30, 7-8:30pm

Videoblogging is a new form of expression centering around posting videos to a website and encouraging an audience response. It is the next step from text blogging and podcasting. A community of artists, video editors, podcasters, bloggers, and software developers has formed around this new mode of communication. Join videobloggers as they show their favorite videos and viewing tools, discuss video blog creation, and share tips and techniques. Learn how you can create your own video blog for free!

This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.

Excellent rant on how newspaper blogs give voice to the already-voiced

"Publishers, editors and broadcasters feel precisely naked if they are not participating in the trend of the moment. They yap about innovation and then simply shamble along, following the lead of others. That's why editors love editorial fads. If one person makes a mistake he or she gets blamed for it. If everyone makes the same mistake, it's an industrywide experiment. No blame. Safety in the mind-numbed crowd..."

FeedShake is a new service for combining , filtering and ordering multiple XML feeds in realtime. It is useful for everyone having RSS managing problems. You can mix multiple RSS feeds , sort them by the date they are published, limit the number of items to list , filter the feeds by keywords and/or only have listed the items with particular keywords. Feedshake gives you a new feed , which can be used in any other RSS reader, browser with RSS support and other RSS services like FeedBurner , Syndic8 etc...

At the annual meeting of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, or CTAM, in Philadelphia this week, the big buzz was about mobility, says Wired Magazine.

The so-called triple play, where cable companies offer TV, Internet and telephone service is so last year. Now it's the quadruple play -- including a wireless platform.

After all, customers now want to take their entertainment and communications with them everywhere they go. The last thing cable operators want is to be left out of that party.

"The winners and losers are going to be determined by issues like portability and mobility," said Lindsay Gardner, executive VP of affiliate sales and marketing at Fox Cable Networks.

"We think the quadruple play is right there," said Peter Weedfald, senior VP of sales and marketing at Samsung's consumer electronics division. He urges more cooperation between gadget makers and the cable industry. "We can't do it alone. Selling cold steel does nothing for us."

Cable operators are also discussing partnerships with traditional wireless firms to integrate mobile voice and data services into the bundle of cable services offered to consumers.

"The wireless phone is becoming the third screen of their life," said John Garcia, Sprint's senior VP of sales and distribution. "They want this phone to do everything that their TV does and everything that their PC does."

Ideas floating around CTAM included allowing customers to program their digital video recorders from a mobile phone and letting them access video content on their mobile device as seamlessly as they access "video on demand" programming at home.

After all, cable execs are well aware that telcos, many of which already have wireless subsidiaries, are uniquely positioned to offer a wireless component as they roll out their own video, voice and data packages.

"It's really going to be on any device anywhere," said Robert Ingalls, president of Verizon's retail markets group. "We talk about time shifting. It's going to be place shifting."

A href="http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/" target=new>CableDatacom News, Communications Engineering, Converge Digest, Cable Today, CATV.org, Cable Labs and Ethernet 1st mile.

Billed as the "first national network created by, for and with an 18-to-34-year-old audience," Al Gore's Current TV will launch August 1st in 20 million homes. Programming is designed to show younger audiences what's going on in their lives. It will do so in short bursts called "pods," which will vary in length from 15 seconds to five minutes.

The goal, says Gore in USA Today, is to serve as a bridge between the Internet and TV by allowing people to customize what they watch. They can even produce what they watch through "Viewer Controlled Content" pieces submitted via the Internet.

Gore says his political views won't be a part of the network programming. "The reality of the network will speak for itself. It's not intended to be partisan. It's not intended to be ideological."

And though he may be a relative newcomer to the TV business, Gore has already learned how to stick to the corporate message, refusing to answer a question about Karl Rove because he was there to speak about Current.

He was, however, willing to compare working on Current to running for president.

"It has been a blast. It has been so much fun. It is hard ... but I feel like I've gotten my graduate degree in business." First and foremost, this is the first major new non-fiction network launched in a decade (Oxygen was the last). Lot's has changed in the world in terms of technology, tools, connectivity, and the engagement of the audience.

Current TV will make user-content mainstream, an important step for the evolution of media.

A new survey finds just 9 percent of Americans know about RSS and only 13 percent are familiar with podcasting. I can't say I'm surprised. (Free reg. req.)

Via Lost Remote

Here's a look at the technology behind the BBC News Web site.

A fantastic guide that explores everything from how captions and audio work together, to how to record audio, to what technology and tools you should use.

MAKE pal C.K. Sample has a good overview of all the new things with the PSP Firmware v2.0. It looks interesting, and I'll update once I have another PSP, otherwise (for me) the web browser isn't really enough to give up all the homebrew games and applications. The coolest thing is the video/audio download and pictures via Wi-Fi, there's a ton of projects and physical space stuff you can do with that. Link.

I thought we were making some progress here, but Diane Mermigas reports that traditional media execs attending Herbert Allen's exclusive Sun Valley summit all but ignored the new media execs in attendance. "The traditional media companies sat there and listened to them with their heads in the sand, like it's business as usual," an attendee told Mermigas. "It was really bizarre."

Via Lost Remote

Nothing makes me feel better than sitting with the family watching hours upon hours of home VHS footage of me making my first poopy. Oh those were the days, pooping when I wanted—heck, where I wanted. The VHS tape labeled "poop" will forever have its place in my heart, representing my childhood fecal freedom. JVC, however, is looking to rid the world of poop VHS tapes by going straight up digital with their new hard drive based camcorders. This new model will record up to 37.5 hours onto the 30GB hard drive.

Related
New JVC HD Camcorders Announced

JVC announces 30Gb GZ-MH70 Camcorder [Pocket-lint]

Moving pictures: Looking Out/Looking In is a robust, tangible, multi-user system that invites young users to create, explore, manipulate and share video content with others. The Moving Pictures concept consists of a video station containing a set of two cameras, a number of tokens, a screen and an interactive table. Moving Pictures enables a meaningful, spontaneous and collaborative approach to video creation, selection and sequencing. The station supports multiple input devices and group interaction, encouraging collaborative creation.

No sane person at the time ever thought these things would become the most significant electronic consumer device in history. But that's exactly what is happening. Bigger than television. Bigger than the PC. Bigger than the telephone.

WiebeTECH has announced the G505 Video Contest to recognize video editing work done on Macintosh G5 systems. Enter a video clip (up to 5 minutes long) of your video project edited on a G5. The winner will receive a G5JamPak, worth over US$2,000. [DIGERATI UNIVERSITY]

Via Cinema Minima

"We're not a telephone company anymore; I sort of resent that,” says Lea Ann Champion, an executive at SBC in charge of Project Lightspeed. “We're a communications and entertainment company.” The Economist takes a look at the rise of IPTV and VoIP and the death of the landline. Also see this Telegeography report on VoIP, from which a lot of the data is pulled.

Cory Doctorow: The 2005 Machinima Film Festival has been announced for November 12, 2005, in NYC:

The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), an organization that provides advocacy, education and community for Machinima (filmmaking using real-time 3D game technology/virtual reality), today announced the 2005 Machinima Film Festival and the call for entries for the 2005 Machinima Awards (the Mackies). Sponsored by NVIDIA and the Independent Film Channel (IFC), the third annual festival will be held Saturday, November 12th 2005, at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

The one-day event will include screenings of Machinima films, workshops hosted by Machinima filmmakers, special presentations, talks with award-winning independent filmmakers and seminars about Machinima production techniques. The event will culminate in an awards ceremony where some of the best Machinima filmmakers will be recognized for their creative artistry in this new and powerful entertainment medium that's set to revolutionize the worlds of filmmaking and animation.

Wonderland)

I recently got a great tip about the hardware that may power the video iPod. Here's a hint: it looks Sharp.

After the bajillionth Google Maps site it hit me: Google Maps is at its core a nifty UI widget for a common type of data. The OS doesn't provide a widget for dealing with location data, and the web browser as a subset of OS widgets certainly doesn't (hello combo box!). That's like 10% of what makes Google Maps so cool, which is a lot considering how cool it is. People with location data are scrambling to put their data in a format that's usable. Google Maps is literally changing the way people think about place.

Your homework assignment tonight is to think about what common types of data people have, and what kind of UI widget could be created specifically for browsing that data. Then create a multi-billion dollar business around your new web service. Bonus points for sucking up to my sympathetic nature towards the Semantic Web.

Business 2.0: "An unknown number of those Apple-made microstars will convince themselves that they hold a first-mover advantage in an untapped medium and that there is at least a modest living to be made from a popular weekly podcast that maybe, just maybe, could become a bona fide media brand. Eventually they'll fail, and they'll fail faster than ever before. Because the sense of novelty attached to streaming audio and video -- the sense that one could build a brand and a studio before big media showed up to play -- has already passed when it comes to podcasting. For the first time in the history of the Net, big media showed up early to play."

"The Internet is filled with innovations, artistic expressions and independently created entertainment. Our goal is to make that digital content easy to find, view, share and manage. ONTV builds conduits between you and others, to enable the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and emotions, embodied within digital content.

With the Beta Release of I/ON, we hope to begin to make our vision a reality. I/ON is an Internet Video Console that allows you to watch the web - accessing rich media content directly, on-demand. "

This may look like a typical external hard drive, but it would be foolish trusting appearances when dealing with a name like "Movie Cowboy." What lies underneath the unassuming facade, is a self-contained media player that not only reads from a hard-drive of your choice (not-included), but will also let you browse and play media from a networked PC. Out of the box it's capable of playing mpeg-1/2, mp3, wma, ogg, and wav files as well as ripped DVD image formats (VOB/IFO/ISO) from DVDs that you presumably downloaded own, of course. Outputs include s-video, component video, and digital optical audio outputs, and to complete the package it comes with a slick little remote. It's too bad they didn't include wifi network support for those of us that don't want to snake ethernet cables across the living room. -JM

Movie Cowboy

"Podcasts are so last month. If you want to get in on the hip trip, you'll turn your attention (and camcorder) to vodcasts—Video-On-Demand-casts, that is. No, this isn't stuff of the future. By following the steps I'm about to outline you can create and distribute a downloadable vodcast today."

"Anina, who refuses to reveal her age, is a fashion model based in Paris and known by her first name only. She likes to call herself a supermodel, but she doesn't mind the nicknames she has been given either; supergeek and 'mobile artist'. But how exactly does a girl from a family of five in Michigan, USA, go from playing with codes and JavaScripts on her computer rather than with dolls, to being a supermodel, working with the best names in fashion, pouting on the catwalk for Givenchy AND to delivering speeches at mobile conferences for Nokia? And not only that, now she is in the midst of project 360fashion where she is in the process of choosing different people from different aspects of the fashion industry; models, agencies, photographers, magazines, designers stylists, journalists and even TV channels; encouraging them to set up individual blogs on their websites. With this Anina is hoping to introduce a new way of communicating fashion."

Link: [eriksmartt.com/blog] - Blog Archive - semacode 1.5 released.

There’s a new version of semacode available, which includes the full source code for the Symbian SDK. Now I guess we need Python bindings ;-)

I wonder if semacode could be used to facilitate Bluetooth pairing. One solution would be to have a semacode sticker on the phone and the app would do the pairing without searching. Alternately, is the camera and semacode good enough to read a semacode on the phone's screen?

If the semacode app and camera could read a semacode off the screen, then I could think of a few cool apps that could use such kind of help. Sure we have Bluetooth, but sometimes, you just want to touch and get it over with. This way we wouldn't have to wait for RFID, which needs hardware. Semacode could do this all in SW.

Just a thought.

I'll pontificate on this later, here's the short version. Some people include information about events in web pages so that if you have the right tools you can import them straight off the web to whatever calendar program you use. This format is called hCalendar.

I created a Greasemonkey user script that will find those hCalendar events and provide a link to import them into any calendar program that supports the iCalendar format (most notably Apple's iCal and Mozilla's Sunbird). What does this mean? Well any time you see an event on the web that has hCalendar information, you can click a link and it'll be added to your calendar so you don't have to copy the information by hand.

How do you get started?

1. Install Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension
2. Right-click on http://george.hotelling.net/projects/converthcal/converthcal.user.js and choose "Install user script..."
3. Go to a page with hCalendar information (such as this one on Upcoming.org) and you'll see a link to add the event to your calendar

This is possible thanks to Brian Suda's X2V converter service. Suggestions welcome.

First of all, let's just say that a Japanese or Korean telephone is meant for calling, despite the multi-functional, supersonic, high-specced devices we present you once in a while. The new DoCoMo phone, a FOMA SH700iS, can make phone calls, but it doubles as a video camera too. It can even change its viewing angle by 10 degrees to allow you to easily shoot the video... crazy!

(They're calling their unique video feature the "10-degree slant camera." I'm translating pages like a madman but I still have no idea what this really means. If anyone gets it, please post in the comments. -kc.)

Al Gore profiled in the NYT. Interesting excerpt: “Virtually the only structure is to be provided by three-minute “Google Current” segments at the top and bottom of each hour, in which the most popular Google searches of the day are to be mined for evidence of what is on people’s minds.”

The Peugot TV campaign for the new 1007 car offers SMS as the only contact channel, according to Mike Grenville for 160characters.org.

"Under the umbrella creative by Euro RSCG, Peugeot's TV campaign for the launch of the 1007 has the only call to action at the end of the advert is to text the word 'easy' to 81007.

By texting the branded shortcode, 81007, respondents can access a mobile portal for the car, where more information and entertainment can be accessed. Customers can book a test drive, order a brochure, see animated mobisodes of key 1007 features, download screensavers and ringtones, and preview the 1007 ad two weeks before it was launched on TV.

Peugeot 1007 News

Link: Blog Power - Forbes.com.

"In reviewing the entries for this guide, I was especially struck by the growing movement of video bloggers, or "vloggers", online. More and more people with digital video cameras are easily creating mini-documentaries, newscasts, parodies and "television-like" reality series on their own. One New York City vlog, Rocketboom, reports the "news" every morning at 9 a.m. for three minutes in an irreverent, but endearing style. It has formed alliances with other vloggers so that it effectively has correspondents in Minneapolis, Boston, LA and Switzerland."

"Elsewhere online, there are video directories forming so that one day soon you will be able to click onto a "guide" and watch whatever you want, whenever you want. Sound like Tivo? So just as 500-channel cable television disrupted the big powerful networks, thousands of vlogs could one day challenge now-thriving cable channels like MTV or CNBC."

"So grab a bucket of popcorn, dim the lights and pull up to your browser. Thanks to the explosion of blogs and vlogs, the action online is about to begin."

Via The Last Minute

More upstream Bandwidth; aside from price-cuts, it's one of the top demands of our readers. PC World waxes poetic about the aspect of your connection most ISP marketing departments just don't talk much about (256kbps just isn't sexy). Digital photography, on-line backup services, video, and place-shifting devices like the Slingbox are making customers more aware of their sluggish upstream speeds.

(Years ago someone suggested to me that upstream bandwidth could one day move from being just a consumer demand to becoming a true human rights issue. As monmentum continues pushing us towards a more participatory media, I expect to hear more stories in support of such an idea wonder if we'll start changing the ways we think about bandwidth. -kc.)

I've been remiss in announcing this fantastic collaborative site:
We Are the Media: News from the Vlogosphere

If you're interested in videoblogs (and I hope to God you are, otherwise you must surely hate me) you should be gobbling their goodies every day. That sounded kinda dirty.

Via Blogumentary

Boing Boing takes a look at the looming PromiseTV box, a prototype DVR being shown off at London's OpenTech conference. The unit, through a ridiculous number of hard-drives, claims to be able to record every show available on television over a one month span. Sounds nice, but will that much storage come cheap? Will it compete with other DVRs or cable on-demand plans?

An experiment that could rearrange the tectonic plates of the movie business is being conducted by the owners of an American movie theater chain, a movie production company, and a High Definition cable TV network, writes Scott Kirsner in his superb blog, CinemaTech. He spoke with Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner about the movies they're producing, and their innovative plans for distribution:

Scott Kirsner: … [Hollywood has painted itself] into the "Innovator's Dilemma" corner. They can't make a movie for less than US$50 million, and they can't market anything for less than -
Mark Cuban: They can't take chances. They can't say, let's change the way we do business. Which is truly the innovator's dilemma. Somebody else comes in and pre-empts them.

Scott Kirsner: With the films that 2929 Entertainment is making, is the production going to be all digital?
Mark Cuban: 2929 not so much, because that's more Todd Wagner's baby. But HDNet Films, that's 100 percent HD.

Scott Kirsner: So with 2929, if a director wants to shoot on film, you say, go ahead.
Mark Cuban: Yeah, because that's Todd's baby, and that's the way he runs that side of it. He just wants to make great movies, and he'll follow the director. Whereas with HDNet Films, it's the exact opposite. Here's the rules of the game: it's going to have a day-and-date release, [on] any platform and every platform that makes sense for us, and it's going to be shot in high-definition 1080.

[Mark Cuban, Mike Homer at the AlwaysOn 2005 conference]

Download Movie Magic Screenwriter from the Writers Store Now - for only US$199.95

ChapterToolMe is a nice GUI for the Apple ChapterTool utility to make simply chaptered AAC file for your podcast.

posted by exiledsurfer to unmediated podcasting software mac osx tools podcast apple ... and others... bookmark this

Frances Pabon over at Good Bloggin' alerts me that Yahoo 360 has added (finally) the capability to pipe in feeds to your personal page there. ... This is a much better alternative to expecting overblogged folks like myself to both posting in yet another location. ... Also, I noticed that Frances' most recent feed entry was what showed up on my Yahoo 360 start page, in the "Latest from my friends" area. Not sure if she had to configure something or if it was just a matter of that being the most recent item available. ... I can't see how I look to other people in that view, so I can't verify if my feed entry will show this item first after I post it and Yaho picks up the update to my monolog feed. [by Christian Crumlish]...

Let's play a game. Here's how it goes: I read a headline, you feign surprise. "Sony-BMG engaged in widespread payola." "Sony-BMG settles in case regarding payments to radio stations." "Radio groups refuse to comment." (see Digital Music weblog or your local paper) Okay, well here's one that brings a little surprise. According to Billboard Radio Monitor, the one radio group that is being outspoken about cleaning out the corruption is uber-evil media giant Clear Channel. On the other hand, payola isn't exactly part of Clear Channel's business model -- they're too busy going after the big bucks by being the Wal-Mart of radio. Meanwhile, Sony is mum about whether it will take any disciplinary action or make any real changes to how it does business, other than to say: "Sony-BMG looks forward to defining a new, higher standard in radio promotion." Hate to break it to you guys, but higher standard ain't sayin' much when the status quo is a decades-old system of bribes. And the damage inflicted by New York state's Spitzer? A "punishing" 10 million dollars. Pardon me, Bill Gates, but can you spare a tuppence? You know what, though? Payola sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Maybe it's not too late to save it. Here's CDM's evil plan:... 1. Promote independent music, distributed on the Web... 2. Turn online music, indie labels, music podcasts, and indie record stores into an industry-crushing sensation... 3. Let the payola from the industry (now geared at the Web, instead of radio) pour in... 4. Use the cash to start a new record industry, printed entirely on (wait for it!) -- vinyl records. That'll work, right? (Why are you snickering?).

Now that Esthr has announced it, I can finally blog Simon Grice's 'Personal Identity Summit' in London for Nov. 17-18.

Simon originally planned this event for last February, and then in Sept. - but he's finally settled on Nov. 2005 - as the beginning of a while new thing in London-town.

Simon's company - Midentity (where Esthr is an Angel investor) has a deal with British Telecom - and they're about to launch their services under the BT brand. I leave it to Simon to announce the servcies, but let me tell you - the world won't be the same.

I can't wait to see all sorts of gateways onto and off of mobile devices and see them tie into a DLA driven world.

See Russ! I DO think about mobile - in fact everytime I pick up my 6630. But we need entreprenuers like Simon - 'cause I can't do everything myself!

Midentity and Broadband Mechanics will be doing something together - which we'll let yah know about - once we've figured it out ourselves.

UPDATE: Simon has corrected me. Esthr got it wrong - and I jumped to conclusions. I'll repost this a bit later to remind folks - as more details are unveiled.

Via Marc's Voice

: () Broadband Directions has come out with a report on cable TV's efforts into broadband-delivered video, a hot topic for sure these days. It is available as a complimentary download here (69 page PDF).
The report contends that cable TV networks get it, and are responding to the changes. It also does a review of the video initiatives offered from the ites of the 75 most highly-penetrated basic cable TV networks. Some interesting figures: 91% (68) of the top 75 basic cable TV networks now offer video online...100% of the top 40 basic cable TV networks do so.
Another good data point: Of the 32 basic cable TV networksÂ’ web sites that provided broadband-delivered video primarily to generate incremental revenue, 26, or 81%, used an advertising model, 4, or 13%, used a subscription model and 2, or 6%, were pursuing an e-commerce model.

: C-SPAN, which has a history of tapping in to new technology, adds podcasts to the variety of ways viewers and listeners can tap into the cluster of public affairs nets. It's not the House or Senate -- although some podcasters and bloggers I know are longing for a day when all of the congressional audio and video is available online for public use. Instead, C-SPAN is launching its podcasts with three popular shows: After Words, Q & A and segments from American Perspectives. I heard about the pod trio from network execs Peter Kiley and Rob Kennedy as I was heading out of CTAM tonight. I wanted to ask about the congressional material -- we'll talk about that another time -- but the podcasts are a good sign given C-SPAN's cable roots.
Our CTAM Summit coverage is sponsored by Maven Networks' IP VOD Broadband Delivered Video Solution.

Corante has launched a blog on Rebuilding Media -- and God knows, we need to rebuild the media.

The authors are two of the superstars of the new media constellation: consultant Vin Crosbie and former SF Chronicle new media chief Bob Cauthorn, along with others they'll be adding to the mix. Says Corante's editor-publisher, Hylton Jolliffe: "The blog takes a hard look at the media biz and in particular the factors and forces that are leading to the disruptive change we all know well and are working hard to accelerate."

I've already added it to my RSS reader. Check it out.

Via New Media Musings

Series of articles interviwing game industry figures. Filled with the usual hype and hollywood lines, but worth reading to compare the different perspectives:
BBC articles

Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft: Our goal is to do what they do in movies, but where you are the actor.

Michel Cassius, Xbox: When I look at this and the number of games in development right now, I definitely think the next generation, and even current generation, can tap into broader audiences...Broadening will come as well through different experiences on the Xbox 360. We want one billion people to experience gaming in the next generation.

Kathy Vrabeck, Activision: But it is not a big focus for us. There is so much untapped opportunity for us among the core male gamer, that going after the female gamer is not high on the priority list for us.

Tameem Antoniades, Ninja Theory: There is an understanding among a few companies but you don't see a lot of it. I can't remember the last time I felt emotionally attached to a game.

David Gosen, I-Play: Look at DS. Through the touch screen approach it created something that is innovative and new...That is a small example of how technological advancement can create new gaming experiences and that is the challenge for the three console manufacturers.

Via USC Interactive Media Division Weblog

The Zig Zag Musig Block is a three-block-structured visual music toy.

Blocks are working as the sound controller as well as the visual container. ZZMB allows players to compose a new character's moving image by mixing and matching four singing characters by twisting around the blocks. ZZMB takes this physical building of visual character blocks into a musical composition. Each top, middle and bottom block plays character's voice, harmony (chord) and rhythm (beat) of music, which are written as parts for complete scores.

When blocks are matched to compose one identical character, users can hear the specific score. But they can also can make variation to the music and apply different voice, chord or rhythm by rotating or sliding the blocks. The linear position of the blocks controls the pitch of the sound, resulting in a new harmony or cacophony.

Check the movies 1, 2, 3.
Author: Inhye Lee
Picture from Create Digital Music.

Windows Media Player  |  Quicktime

This screencast teaches you how to use the "Sync to PSP" feature in FireANT for Windows.

Select videos to transcode to PSP format and they will automatically transfer to your PSP the next time you plug it in.

Simple. Easy. Done.

via: http://GetFireANT.com/psp_sync/

In their most recent survey, The Diffusion Group reports that although not widely discussed, both XM and Sirius have their eyes set on much larger prizes - in particular, providing a range of media services including music, video, and even data services to both mobile and fixed subscribers. They even mention rumors that XM and Sirius are considering merging into a single entity, something that seemed unlikely a few months ago but that makes more sense when considering their multimedia aspirations ....

That reminds me of a technology development I've done back from 1999/2000 - certainly too early for the time. Sketch of a the project is on Wireless Networks Handheld Devices and FM/Satellite Radio. In brief, the solution combines three global networks: Internet, SMS and FM or satellite radio stations. The flow of information is asymmetric: SMS is used to send the Internet request, while response is delivered through much broader channel of data embedded in the FM or satellite radio signal.

I even had a discussion with Palm about the technology, but they said that they "are developing integrated GSM devices that have GSM and GPRS capability (future)" ...

Publishing of video torrents to DV Guide is now substantially simplified, especially for the clips that are already on the Internet - but need always functioning BitTorrent seed.

Reloaded "DV Guide in 5 Easy Steps" document is available here. Please drop me an >email if you want to join DV Guide ...

Rebecca Lieb has some good comments that are pertinent to television content making its way onto web sites.

As recently as five years ago, media companies safely considered their Web sites mere brand extensions; summoned into existence to promote a core print or broadcast product. A site wasn't a product unto itself.

… In this new landscape, every medium must master all the media, and the real media masters want to master the Web … It must have been part of the reasoning behind AOL TimeWarner and Barry Diller's IAC. It's why top Yahoo! executives, such as Terry Semel and Lloyd Braun, were plucked from Hollywood studios.

… Will old dogs learn new tricks? … Somewhere between citizen journalism and global media conglomerates … a lot of media companies out there are cramming on new skill sets.

Is it really so much to ask to have people who are making and enforcing laws concerning technology actually understand the technology they're dealing with? Following the series of recent arrests of people for using open WiFi networks, the definition of illegal equipment is being stretched. In the UK arrest, the guy was arrested for "possessing equipment for fraudulent use of a communications service," which all of us who have WiFi in our laptops probably are guilty of. At least that's just in the UK. Over here in the US it's apparently still legal to have WiFi equipment -- but if you dare try to boost your signal with an antenna, watch out. According to the head of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force, the popular "cantenna" device is completely illegal. For those who don't know, someone a while back worked out that you could boost the range of your WiFi router with a Pringle's can. It requires a bit of work, so a small operation sprung up to sell Cantennas. They're quite popular with people who want to spread WiFi around a house where the basic router won't reach certain parts of it. Hell, even CompUSA sells them! But, according to this "high tech" police officer: "They're unsophisticated but reliable, and it's illegal to possess them." The article includes a story about how the police arrested a high school student for breaking into his school's network to change his grades and they (gasp!) found a cantenna in his room! Again, the crime he committed has nothing to do with having an antenna booster, but that doesn't stop the reporter and the cop from talking about the evils of connecting to WiFi networks.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the three main Long Tail business opportunities are:

1. Long Tail aggregators (that include both the head and tail of content and products)
2. Niche suppliers/producers (who get aggregated by someone else)
3. Filters (which help people find what they want)

    Most of the examples I've been using to date, such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, fall into the first of these categories, aggregation. But as the smart kids in the front row always point out, there's a seeming paradox at work in that category.

    The Long Tail is all about the shift from hits to niches. But aren't all those aggregators "hits"? They're not only the largest players in their category, but they seem to be getting even larger, gaining market share at the expense of their competitors. Is there something about aggregators that tends to favor a few big winners, even as the other two categories fragment into a million niches of varying size?

    That's certainly the way it looks now, but I suspect it won't last, or at least won't last as it is. I'll give an example by starting with the biggest of them all, Google.

    In a sense, Google is a classic Long Tail aggregator, one that uses great filtering (its PageRank algorithms) to improve the s/n ratio of the tail. And not just one tail. They aggregate the tail of information, the tail of advertisers and the tail of publishers (see this post for more). But is plain old Google enough for all of this? Or is there something more appropriate for many needs than one-size-fits-all search?

    The question can be generalized to this: how finely can you slice aggregation? The answer, in the case of search, turns out to be quite finely indeed. The rise of the "vertical search" market is simply a case of slicing aggregation into niches, optimized for different needs. (Actual examples here; imaginary ones here)

    In fact, Google itself is already doing this, with Google Local, Google Scholar, Google Maps, Froogle, Google News, Google Print, and so on. Each has a specialized presentation and pulls from a subset of the information universe that gives more appropriate and useful results in that domain. Right now that's Google fine-slicing its own aggregation--the emergence of a long tail of search, but within a short head of search companies--but there are plenty of other firms that are rushing into this market to do the same.

    Now let's apply the same approach to media and entertainment aggregation. I've already argued that any Long Tail aggregator has to include both the head and tail of content, to allow the recommendations and filters to carry users from the known to the unknown. But does that only work in broad categories, such as music and film, or could it work just as well, if not better, at the sub-genre level, aggregating the head and tail of just jazz, for instance, or documentaries?

The advantages would be that, instead of a one-size-fits-all presentational model, such as is currently the case in iTunes, you could have a model customized for a genre. I don't know much about jazz, but I'll bet that it might be useful for a jazz music service to have links for each one of the musicians on an album (because they often shift from group to group), much as IMDB tracks the careers of each movie actor and director independently. But that wouldn't be appropriate for pop music, because the individual musicians aren't as important.

    Likewise for documentaries. Wouldn't it be useful to have documentaries accompanied by related information and news articles, so the films could be a launching-off point for further exploration of that subject? Or a site just for TV-show DVDs, complete with all the entertainment news and gossip around their stars?

    No doubt there are already companies working on all of these and many more. What's important, however, is that these fine-slice aggregators allow themselves, in turn, to be aggregated by the larger, more general aggregators. Those niche music services should, for starters, be fully searchable by Google and anyone else. Could they also do deals with iTunes to be niche specialists, the way individual merchants are integrated into Amazon's Marketplace and eBay's Stores? I'll bet they could. It's the Long Tail of aggregation, coming soon.

If you've been looking for some ways o convert DVDs so you can play them on your PSP, here's a big ole' Flash movie that will walk you through this step by step. You'll DVD Decrypter, PSP Video 9 and a PC. Once you get the files out using DVD Decrypter, then you convert them with PSP Video. Link.

TENORI-ON (sound on your palm) is a novel personal digital instrument for playing sound and ambient light patterns. This instrument was developed by Toshio Iwai and Yamaha Corporation and will be showcased at SIGGRAPH 2005 which will soon take place at Los Angeles Convention Center (July 31 - August 4).

[TENORI-ON: What is the right instrument for the "real" digital age?]

TENORI-ON is operated by touching 16x16 LED switches. You could think of them as musical keyboards that respond to the subtlety of your finger touch by emitting light waves, creating afterglow, and making soothing sound sequences. The instrument knows how long and from which direction the player touches each LED switch as well as the tilt angle. ITRON is used as the computational engine that handles complex processing in real time. It has a jog dial, LCD display, hi-quality stereo speakers, and four function switches in the frame. On the back side of the device are additional 16x16 LEDs that allow audience to see the light patterns as well. Multiple TENORI-ON devices can be connected for collaborative sessions and exchanging songs.

"Controlling light and sound as comfortably as playing musical instruments or painting pictures" -- Toshio Iwai has long been interested in adressing this challenge. TENORI-ON, which is designed for esthetics and comfort, can be used as an ambient interior decoration object as well as an instrument. "A violin doesn't work if any of its beautiful shape, sound quality, and usability is missing. However, electronic musical instruments often fail to create this inevitable relation of shape, sound, and usability. My goal with TENORI-ON is to make it the right instrument for the real digital age by rethinking what musical instruments should be." (Toshio Iwai)

Related:
"Touchable Media Art" game

So legal downloads are up, tripled in fact, over the past year.

Lobbyists for the record industry have had a field day, touting their battle against file-sharers as the reason paid downloads have finally started to make a return.

Here are several reasons why it is not so cut and dried.

Online music sales have come of age in the past year. As paid downloads have tripled, so have the number of online music sellers, up from 100 last year to around 300 now, and especially, Apple’s triumphant run from iTunes shop to iTunes software to everyone’s favourite Christmas present last year, the iPod.

Paid downloads have increased – 180 million single tracks downloaded in the US, Britain, Germany and France between January and June this year, compared to 57 million last year – but file-sharing still dwarfs its respectable sibling, there are at least 900 million files available on sites around the world.

Three years ago, researchers said that "active usage of online music content is one of the best predictors of increased consumer purchasing." Parallel research found that 81 percent of music downloaders reported that their CD purchasing remained the same or increased. Many people reported they would like to pay for downloads but couldn’t do it simply enough. In fact, there’s been a constant stream of evidence that file-sharing is a positive tool for the music industry. See articles in USA Today and Wired.

Although big record industry litigation claims to have successfully sued thousands of infringing music copyrights, it’s fair to say in practice they’ve been primarily about fear. RIAA president Cary Sherman said as much, "The lawsuits are an essential educational tool.'' Most (all?) of the people sued by the music industry have settled before appearing in court, they barely have a choice, either settle for a small slap on the wrist or fight against the big labels in court.

Certainly some people are scared of litigation, but most are paying for their downloads because (a) it’s easier to do and (b) there’s wider range of music and (c) possibly most importantly, broadband take up means a wider demographic is getting their music from the Internet.

Mexican telcos are gearing up for mobile TV services: Iusacell, owned by media and retail billionaire Carlos Salinas, will be the first to roll out mobile TV services later this summer. MobiTV is providing the technological platform and licenses that will allow Iusacell to offer Toon World, Fashion TV, Comedy Time, ABC News and TV Azteca’s national channels.
Telcel, owned by Latin America’s wealthiest businessman, Carlos Slim, tied up last week with Motorola and Fox Latin American Channels to offer “24: Conspiracy,” the first made-for-mobile series. It has already been released in the U.S. and U.K.

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting yet disturbing take on suicide bombs and their coverage in today's mediasphere.

Via Clippings.reblog

The New York Times shallowly surmises videoblogs in their Critic's Notebook article, Watch Me Do This and That Online. Writer Sarah Boxer concludes: Congratulations. It's television!

Sorry Sarah, videoblogs are not television. Here's why.

First off, here's a news flash: You can link to videoblogs. Unlike the excellent Wired News article on the same topic, the New York Times doesn't link to any videoblogs or any videos. Their thumbnail photos show a Quicktime player, yet they lead nowhere. For some reason they do link to Neopets.com. WTF? Perhaps they have a wrongheaded policy of only linking to "whatever.com" which clearly fails. The New York Times is doing a great disservice by not linking to the subjects of their article, which are frigging web sites.

The first half of Sarah's article is nice enough, giving the reader a few dollops of vlog from across the spectrum. She gets into trouble when her thesis arrives: Already, though, it's beginning to look a lot like television, at least in spots. Some vlogs even share television's worries, chief among them the burden of coming up with fresh programming on a regular basis.

She cites Rocketboom's recent request for the audience to send in story ideas. While it's logistically true that story submissions will make life easier for Rocketboom, the comparison to television programming is way off the mark.

CLUE #1: Videoblogs interact with their audience. This is not a weakness. It's a strength.

Television transmits one-way information to its audience. Weather photos emailed to local news represent a lame exception, but it's a start. Videoblogs exist in the realm of links and conversation. It's sort of like Burning Man - everyone is a participant. Sure, you can passively watch videos, but everyone is encouraged to comment and make their own videos.

We are all potential creators and participants. We all have a voice.

The very concept of audience begins to melt away.

In his book We the Media, Dan Gillmor says "My audience knows more than I do." Rocketboom opening its doors is a celebration of the geekosphere; an invitation to be creative and hijack the "channel." Indeed, Minnesota Stories is built on the concept of people with video cameras hijacking the channel.

Everyone is creative and has a story. Want to borrow my transmitter? Go for it. Better yet, build your own. You won't hear these words from television.

ips into the vlogosphere's real reality show, The Carol and Steve Show: It wants to sell out, but who would buy? Maybe a laugh track would help.

CLUE #2: Do not confuse the packaging with the contents.

Videoblogs are authentic voices. The Carol and Steve Show is a superb expression of "Mundane is the new punk rock." Sure, it hearkens back to TV Land sitcoms, but then you see... Carol and Steve watching TV. Or running out in the rain trying to grill. Or sitting in bed. In other words, they're going about their real lives on camera. And there is no laugh track.

Who would greenlight this show? Carol and Steve, that's who.

Sometimes there's a laugh track on ZipZapZop, but you know what? I hung out with Clark, and he had the little laugh track/applause toy with him. He really does hang out with his guitar and play goofy songs. ZipZapZop is one genuine facet of the scintillating human we call Clark ov Saturn.

We may well be in the television radioplay phase of videoblogs. The "show" is one of many forms a vlog can take. Sometimes the wrapper looks like the old medium. But what's inside is real people, without a producer, without a middleman. What's inside you can't buy at the candy store. It's homemade and one-of-a-kind.

s on one of my favorite videobloggers, Ian from The 05 Project. She says he's beginning to look a lot like "Fear Factor" and gives him some deserving compliments: He has Conan O'Brien's direct delivery and David Letterman's deadpan. In short, he has television charisma. I'm thrilled about all the nice things she says here, but...

CLUE #3: We don't look like television. We look like ourselves.

Ian isn't great because he vaguely resembles an amateur amalgamation of late-night talk show hosts.

Ian is great because Ian is Ian.

Bored kids were daring their friends to do outrageous things long before Fear Factor or the invention of television. The difference is, Ian has never met his new friends. But that doesn't make them any less real.

To say we look more like television personalities than our own personalities is wrong and perverted.

more I think about this the more shallow and ridiculous it seems. Videoblogs are lightyears away from television. I've got this little planet it my hands; I can spin it around and jump into someone's life. I can talk to them. I can show them my life. We could not do this before. Television doesn't have anything to do with it. The comparison is lazy and, frankly, embarassing for the New York Times.

You can lead a horse to vlog anarchy, but you can't make it understand the revolution.

A company called Massive is testing full-motion video ads inside online games.

Via Lost Remote

The TV::Anytime module parses TV-Anytime bundles. TV-Anytime is a format organised by the TV-Anytime Forum (http://www.tv-anytime.org/). These are open standards (see ETSI TS102822) for the rich description of Radio, Television and other types of media. The metadata specification includes a comprehensive genre scheme, methods of linking and grouping programmes, listing credits and lots of other data fields.

A new Public Radio International show, "Open Source" draws on listeners' ideas posted on a blog to drum up ideas for the program.

Growing up in the 70s on Long Island, I had a pretty set after-school routine. Throw my coat over the living room railing, throw my books on the kitchen counter, grab a soda and a big bag of chips or cookies and throw myself on the couch in front of the television set. Most afternoons included F-Troop, The Munsters, I Dream of Jeanie, Batman, The Beverly Hillbillies and of course, The Addams Family. Most people who know me, blame my ADHD personality of the amount of TV I watched as a kid. I’m sure they’re right.

Back then, I knew that Channel 11 (WPIX-TV) and Channel 5 (WNEW-TV, now WNYW-TV) were “my” channels – especially from 3pm to 7pm on weekdays. Saturday afternoons belonged to ABC’s Wide World of Sports, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Back then we enjoyed a 25 channel universe, but all the cool stuff (from my point of view) was happening on two or three channels. This is a very old story and everyone in the business knows this, so what’s the point?

Well, as it turns out, the advertisers who supported those shows knew a great deal about me. In fact, they knew that I wanted a Johnny 7 OMA, they knew exactly which Hotwheels cars I was going to need and they knew exactly how important Fritos were to an adolescent living in suburban New York in the 70s. I was part of the Pepsi Generation -- Commin’ at ya ... Goin’ Strong!

I couldn’t talk back to the television set (if I did, I certainly was not expecting a response), but it could and did talk to me. The box held my attention, I watched the commercials that interested me, and ignored the ones for Barbi and Easy Bake Ovens. They weren’t really meant for me anyway. Let’s fast forward 30 years to this week’s announcement about Apple iTunes and the very probable future of Apple introducing a family of Video iPods. Imagine a video experience that works with playlists and podcasting schemas that are in tune with your behaviors, wants, needs and desires. This will be a completely personal video experience unlike anything we have ever experienced before ... or will it?

The deep, dark, dirty little secret is that most of the big brands can’t even begin to plan media campaigns around individuals. The optimization programs just don’t exist. In fact, most media optimization programs are totally quantitative and don’t really look at the creative or qualitative element in the optimization algorithms. What they actually do is look at populations and predict, as best they can, where you will be at a given time and what the likelihood of selling you something will be. That’s how media is planned and purchased and that process is not going to change overnight, it will evolve over time.

So, how personal is personalization? How important is two-way communication? What is the compelling reason to get granular and, if you can, what should you get granular about? These are just a few of the questions that we, as in industry, need to answer and we’d better do it soon. I’m pretty sure that my teenage, weekday afternoon playlist is going to hit my iPod before you can say, “Tish ... I love when you speak French!”

TV Week reports that Stern is in negotiations with Comcast to produce a new TV show to be aired on a subscription on-demand basis. "Having Howard Stern on subscription VOD is a killer application for the platform," said Cathy Rasenberger, a cable distribution consultant. "It would draw a lot of viewership. It would be as big a coup for Comcast as it was for Sirius."

Only 5 per cent of American movies made over the last five years have come from spec scripts … and only an additional 3 per cent have come from pitches, observes Derek Haas. He offers this analysis: These statistics strongly imply that over 95 per cent of the movies made in the last five years are written by someone who is already a professional. A “spec script” is Hollywood argot for a script which is written without an assignment from a producer, on the “speculation” that it would sell. [The Blank Page] [Pie chart by Cinema Minima staff]

• Shop the Writers Store for screenwriters’ supplies, books, courses, and software — even those little brass fasteners for your script (tip: in Hollywood, writers only use two fasteners — never three). Your purchase through this link supports Cinema Minima

• Download Movie Magic Screenwriter from the Writers Store Now — for only US$199.95

Apparently in response to Google Earth, Microsoft has launched MSN Virtual Earth. According to blog chatter (also see Slashdot), the system may not function at full capacity until Monday, when Microsoft is expected to make an official announcement.

Having made the 7-day BBC TV schedule data available TV-Anytime format on backstage.bbc.co.uk, we're now keen to see what you can do with it!

The way people watch television - and choose what they are going to watch - is changing. More channels, new delivery platforms, new ways to consume television programming...

For the first backstage.bbc.co.uk competition, we are offering you the opportunity to innovate and build prototypes that demonstrate new ways of exploring the BBC TV schedule. Plus we have arguably the ultimate "geek bling" prize for the producer of the winning prototype.

Some possible ideas you might like to incorporate include:

• Combining schedules with web services such as del.lici.us, furl, flickr and technorati to open up each programme to external annotation.
• Focusing on specific genres (contained within the TV Anytime metadata). Promotion of signed programmes, etc.
• Introducing a social element to a schedule or channel (such as bookmarking programmes, rating/voting, vertical searches by genre).
• Alerts, SMS, email broadcasts and other client-push delivery mechanisms.
• Combine the schedule data in interesting ways with existing BBC feeds or non BBC information feeds (such as IMDB, Google images, Wikipedia, Google Video, Yahoo Video).
• Explore new ways of users tagging the TV data and aligning that with tags attached to existing tag based web services

winner of the competition will receive a rackmount server, delivered to their door! Whether they chose to co-locate it in a data-centre or run it from their bedroom, we hope it will prove useful for their future backstage.bbc.co.uk prototype hacking.

The winner will also be invited to the BBC to discuss their prototype and take a tour of the department as guests of the backstage.bbc.co.uk team.

We also have two 1Gig USB MP3 players to give away as runners-up prizes.

The competition closes on Monday 5th of September, so get cracking!

The competition is only open to residents of the UK. Overseas users are still welcome to submit their prototypes, however they will not be eligible to win prizes.

Please check out the full competition terms and conditions for details.

The goals of the Forum are to: Create a public voice on the issues raised by the relentless expansion of what are considered to be patentable products, processes, discoveries, inventions and appropriated goods, or what is commonly referred to as intellect

Copyright resource for all active artists in australia.

RSS aggregator and reader. MyNewspaper is written in Python with a bit of javascript and uses sqlite as permanent storage for the articles.

"What happens when you open up media platforms to bloggers, amateur critics, self-educated experts, passionate commenters, and independent reviewers? You get insightful, surprising and highly original content, not to mention entirely new products and services from GARAGE INFLUENTIALS: amateurs-turned-professionals posting their reviews, criticisms, software, solutions and God knows what else on the web, ready for reading or downloading."

Awesome. this is what citizen media is about

"Lux Mean works for the IRI.  He is currently training young people in Cambodia's provincial areas how to blog.  His organization is excited about the potential for Cambodian blogs to generate more political dialogue.  Mean was only recently introduced to blogs and the organization got the idea of doing a blog projects from one of Cambodia's better known bloggers, Ex-King Sihanouk."

via adrian miles: Newsmasters are an emerging group of news editors which utilize new tools and techniques to create unique content streams on specialized topics by tapping largely into the RSS content universe as well as in other openly reusable sources

Bitflux Editor (aka BXE) is a browser-based (currently mozilla only) WYSIWYG XML editor which is written in JavaScript and uses XML, XSLT, and CSS for rendering. It is usable with any XML document and features tables, lists, images, special chars, clipboard, undo/redo, and easy customization.

I wrote about how the Simputer arrived this past Wednesday, and I've been playing with it off and on as time permits - between projects and work. I tried taking some photos, but they didn't come out very well - but I'll do more as I go into the features of the Simputer. Of course, I need to update that Wikipedia entry!

reactions were obviously glee. To be honest, my Simputer and I are still in the honeymoon phase - but there's no denying how easy it is to use. The documentation for the Simputer remains untouched; I have explored almost all of the features except the internet connectivity. I've done the diagnostics, set calendar appointments and even linked it to my laptop, though I have to do some work on the laptop to make it Simputer-developer friendly. That's no reflection on the Simputer :-) Basically, it's an excuse to fully install Linux on this thing, and I finally have all the tools I need to do it. That probably will get done this weekend.

Jon Udell has an interesting piece on (among other things) the use of del.icio.us tagging by InfoWorld editors as a way for them to work with each other and also interact with their readers.

We’re finding similar things at Nature. First, our social bookmarking service for scientists, Connotea, is proving useful as a collaborative tool for our journalists and editors. For example, editorial teams can use tagged links to communicate ideas and leads among themselves. Also, journalists researching particular stories can use the system to store and retrieve informative links under suitable tag names — and can choose to keep those links private, at least temporarily, if they’re worried about being scooped.

Second, Connotea enables greater interaction with readers. For example, collections of links gathered by a writer during their research can be released on publication of their article in order to provide readers with further sources of information. A recent example of this was Declan Butler’s Nature article on the new generation of laboratory information systems, which pointed interested readers to his accompanying collection of links.

As Jon Udell points out, such collections are future-proof because they can grow even after the URL has been distributed. This means that sometimes, as with Declan’s own collection of avian flu links, they can become important community resources that continue to be tracked by significant numbers of interested readers, potentially even long after the original article has become obsolete. Of course, readers can themselves contribute simply by using the same tag names. For example, the Connotea collections on bioinformatics and open access have attracted groups of users that turn these pages into something like pared-down group blogs.

With participative (or grassroots or citizen) journalism becoming an increasingly important theme inside media organisations and beyond, it’s intriguing to see that tagging also seems to have a role to play in facilitating exchanges between writers and their readers, and in blurring the boundaries between those traditionally distinct roles.

Birds have started to imitate ring tones, warns Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation centre in Germany. He says birds have an uncanny ability to mimic ring tones and are suddenly doing so.

The worst offenders are the jackdaws, starlings and jays. Apparently they see bird watchers, with their maps on strings around their necks and binoculars, and watch them scrabble for their mobiles, with a cunningly mimicked call.

Schneider said the phenomenon was that these birds were increasingly common in German cities and were adapting to their environment -- which includes ring tones.

The scary thing is that some birds were marking out their territory and hoping to attract mates with cries like the crazy frog song. He suggests in the interests of ecology that mobile phone users convert their tones to pop songs which are too complex to be mimicked by the birds.

I couldn't pass this up. I had a bachelor mocking bird in my backyard for a couple of nights and the variety of songs it sang were incredible, some of them MUST have been ring tone inspired.

Fuji Work's PvrAlex is a video recorder unlike any other recorder, with a sole purpose of recording in the H.264/MPEG-4 format in real time, which is the video format for the...

Lawmakers Allow Voters to See It Now - Jul 19, 2005
Finally..

We're glad you are enjoying our detailed list of Internet TV stations and appreciate your feedback. As promised, we're working to improve the experience.

Here's a list of updates:

• We added the Telewest TV stations which includes blueyonder 01, broadsports, broadway, and broadwise. You may have recently read about this via our news report, Narrowstep Creates Multi-Channel Internet TV Solution for Telewest. We recommend checking out blueyonder.
• France has been added along with a number of French-speaking stations
• Major Fix: We became aware that if people using Internet Explorer have the check box "Show Friendly HTTP Errors" checked in their options, Windows Media streams beginning with the mms protocol (mms://) will show a DNS error when redirected. (joy) After several hours of pulling hair, we resolved the error by simply "not forwarding URLs beginning with mms://!" We apologize for all the Windows Media feeds that were not playing because of this weird scenario.
• The Legend will now properly hide and show in Firefox
• Fixed other alignment issues in Firefox such as the search box and navigation bar
• Several other countries will be added this week along with enhancing our current lineup

Now we would like to recommend two Internet TV stations that have impressed us.

• ManiaTV - Move over MTV and make room for ManiaTV. ManiaTV is working to bring back the music MTV started out playing but later gave up on.
• ROO TV - Wow. ROO claims they have over 4000 video clips and we have no reason not to believe them. Their entire web site is blended into the player for a really clean TV guide of sorts. You can watch video clips of music artists, news, sports, entertainment, video games, commercials, and much more.

You can watch video from both stations via our de.

More to come, stay tuned!

---

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

We reMediated this a little while ago, but it is definitely worthy of an update.

The folks at the MIT Advertising Lab point us to where television, cell phones, and french chic may be headed. They write:

"France Telecom’s wireless unit, Orange SA, will soon roll out a new mobile video service that will let cellular phone subscribers view TV, movies, photos and broadband Internet content with a big screen viewing effect using Kopin-enabled [head mounted displays]."

I include it here because every once in a while we should look at cool gadgets worn by french chic models dressed in black.

However, I am trying to wrap my head around (oops, poor choice of phrase I suppose) exactly what the target market is here. Perhaps Parisians who want to be somewhere besides their living room; are still within a cell phone service area; and have nothing else happening around them so they watch TV?

All I know is that if the U.S. had these things, we could go to a baseball game and watch a movie instead.

It is being reported that Time Warner Cable has "quietly embarked on a trial in the San Diego area" that delivers 75 channels - all of Time Warner's expanded basic tier -- via IP to the PC.

This news was first reported in The San Diego Union-Tribune and is said to be a "six-month trial." About 9,000 customers who take the MSO's video and Road Runner data services are participating. According to the paper, the service is powered by a RealNetworks media player. Users must log in via a special Web site.

CED Broadband pointed out that this "service creates an automatic rival to non-cable affiliated companies such as Sling Media and Orb Networks." Perhaps, but I feel certain that this was not the motivating factor.

I am looking at recent actions occurring inside other Time Warner divisions. How about TBS and TNT going more into VOD. Or AOL starting up a joint venture that will deliver live and on-demand concerts and comedy shows. Or that Warner Brothers says it has already digitized most of its library of 5,000 films and will start selling some of them online later this year.

The more plausible explanation is that Time Warner is tired of its status as a slumbering giant of the "old media." It sees that Google is a media company that Wall Street gives a higher valuation! If you are Time Warner with all its assets, now is the time to start figuring out how to be a "new media" powerhouse. Some experiments may fail, but you don't get there without trying.

Read my analysis about Time Warner's undervaluation.

Most people know that Nielsen Media Research measures television audiences. Nielsen says that it has decided to prompt audience panel members who are using its new Active/Passive Meters every 42 minutes rather than whenever they change channels.

The shift to time-based prompting is because of the growth of non-linear viewing options, such as VOD and PVR, that render the old channel-based prompting model inadequate.

This new service level should really endear Nielsen further into the bossum of America.

More buzz words than you can poke a stick at. Videoblogs, Screencast, blogcasts...Robert Scolbe points to the rise of the concept of Screencasting, basically video blogging but video of the actions on a computer desktop, then also links to another site that refers to it as "Blogcasting". Personally I didn't even know half these terms [...]

This is old hat for us but it good to get a different perspective now and again.

Tom Watson went camping with his kids last weekend and came home to find 242 new items in Bloglines to read.

It's a common occurrence.

I have given up on my feedreader for exactly that reason.

I had lunch with Nick Denton yesterday and he asked me what feedreader I use.  I told him that I use many of them for many reasons, but none of them for the purpose of reading all my feeds.

What I do these days, I told him, is use the blogroll on the right hand column to read the blogs I like.  I go down that list every day.  When I find myself skipping a blog on the list frequently, I take it off.

I use the linking from other blogs, delicious, digg, and other cool apps to find new stuff. Discovery is the big deal now and I have seen some other interesting discovery apps that will be coming soon.

I do have a database of feeds, which I keep in Bloglines. But to me that's just a UI into an OPML file.  Every time I find a blog I like, I add it to Bloglines. Since I can export the OPML file, I'd really like to find an application that manages feeds as its sole utility leaving the reading part out.  I'd move to that pretty quickly.

If I find myself visiting a new blog frequently through my various blogreading activities, I'll add it to my blogroll.

The other feedreaders I use are Newsgator (for mobile), MyYahoo (for feed headlines I need to see every time I start my browser), and iTunes (for audio and video content).

Why do I tell you all of this?

Because after finally getting around to reading and thinking about Microsoft's vision for RSS in Longhorn, I think my kludged together approach happens to be the future of feeds.

Longhorn is going to offer a central repository of feeds.  Think of it like the printer list in Windows.  You add feeds like you add printers.  Then every app that runs on Longhorn has access to those feeds natively.

In that world, you don't need to add feeds into iTunes, iTunes just looks at the feeds in Longhorn, figures out which ones are audio feeds, and gives you the option to get the audio files once or every time.  iTunes can also give you a UI to enter new feeds into the Longhorn repository.

Every app will be that way.  Outlook Calendar will look for feeds that have scheduling information and give you the option to add those events automatically to your calendar.  And Outlook Calendar will have a UI to enter new "schedule related" feeds into the Longhorn repository.

This is how I am using feeds already so this vision works great for me.  Feeds are becoming so present on the web that the idea of reading them centrally seems badly broken to me.  But managing them centrally and making them available broadly to whatever apps they can add value to makes a ton of sense to me.

So what does this mean for RSS investment opportunities? 

I haven't solved that problem yet, but I am working on it.  I think it means that we need to "go up the stack" as they say and look for applications and services that can use the infrastructure that Microsoft is building into the operating system layer to add value.

I haven't gotten beyond that.  But I'd be interested in talking to any entrepreneurs who have interesting ideas how to profit from this new world of feed ubiquity we are going to have soon.

/feeds.feedburner.com/AVc?g=1274"/>

I spent the morning with Clay Freinwald, corporate engineer for Entercom. Who is that? They own several Seattle radio stations, among others. Clay has built seven HD stations in the Seattle area. Picture of him demoing HD for me is here.

Clay is one of their top engineers and has been in the radio business for 40 years. He invited me to talk about the radio business and to show me how the new HD Radio worked.

So, we climbed into his red Toyota pickup and headed off to Starbucks.

So, what's HD Radio? Well, it delivers a digital version of FM and AM radio stations along with the traditional FM and AM signals. In Seattle there are 13 stations already broadcasting the new HD signal.

So, when we got into Clay's pickup he took me on a radio tour of the stations and let me listen to the old FM signals as well as the new HD signal. He had a new Kenwood radio, picture here, that received both the old signal as well as the new HD one.

My conclusion? It rocks. Every station was clearer and had better detail. Far less noise and distortion. Particularly on cruddy signals.

How did it compare to my new Sirius satellite radio? Well, it's different.

First, HD radio is for the existing radio transmission system. It's free, where satellite radio costs money. Satellite radio has a lot more stations (about 150 on my radio) but doesn't have any local stations.

So, I see them as complimentary.

But, it's an impressive technology. On the radio station side, Clay says it costs about $20,000 to retrofit an existing radio station with the HD gear. But, here's the kicker. A station that usually spits 15,000 watts into the air can get HD into the air with only an additional 150 watts of power. Turns out using digital delivery makes it far more power efficient.

But, that doesn't matter to normal people. This technology has a long road ahead of it to get mainstream acceptance. Updating car radios is expensive and many people might see satellite radio as a more interesting choice (I told Clay that I rarely listen to local radio stations anymore because of satellite, for instance).

That said, the quality difference is stunning so that alone will get some people to try it out.

He also showed me how one Seattle station is multicasting two separate content feeds in one radio band. That is impressive cause it lets a radio station owner get twice the content into one bit of spectrum.

Anyway, here's a Wired article on HD Radio if you're interested in learning more.

I should hook Phillip Torrone up with Clay. They'd get along real well. I can see the Make Magazine article now: hacking a radio station.

This is a great overview article of a lot of the social software that’s available now. It works well as a primer for the uninitiated and is a good read for anyone in the know as well...

Another example of newspapers desperately trying to maintain their position as gatekeepers of information

"we see now that in many cases op ed pages are pushing government to use their websites for disclosure about campaign finance laws, about congressional trips. We see government websites as the place where governments can spread information for citizens. And in this case they have the benefit of being archival, they're easily searchable, unlike, you know, pages of newsprint. But instead, you know, you have sort of governments and newspaper publishers in this ongoing racket to keep this news hidden away in the back of the paper where nobody will ever see it. "

Pretty hip! Would be useful in dealing with data that is already in media files.

MMPython is a Media Meta Data retrieval framework. It retrieves metadata from mp3, ogg, avi, jpg, tiff and other file formats. Among others it thereby parses ID3v2, ID3v1, EXIF, IPTC and Vorbis data into an object oriented struture.

Harness the wisdom of crowds

We've released an early set of XML REST APIs for CommonTimes.org, a social bookmarking community for news readers. If we get requests for CommonBits or CommonTunes APIs we can add those pretty easily.

The CommonTimes.org APIs allow you to remix the news - essentially, you could build your own news Web site with any design. We are especially interested in designers and coders who want to remix the design of our front page news site and user channels. Be sure to let us know about the cool stuff you create.

MediaMatrix is an online application that allows users to isolate, segment, and annotate digital media. MediaMatrix is an ongoing research project at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online based at Michigan State University. MATRIX is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. The Center creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies, and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies.

The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) has released its final report. For very quick readers: The report recommends a permanent forum for dialogue and presents four organizational models for global public policy development and oversight. It’s not exactly light reading, since it introduces no less than five new ghastly acronyms - GIC, IIC, GIPC, WICANN and GIGF - for a topic area which already is overcrowded with acronyms.

A darkened theatre. A full house. A heroic act. A mighty roar from the crowd. This is the delight of good cinema.

I love going to the movies with people, even people I don’t know. I love to hear others’ reactions, and discuss the movie with people afterwards. In fact, I love it so much, that when my neighbor shows movies in many languages from all over the world in his backyard on Saturday nights during the summer, I often go down for the movie and end up enjoying the wine, cheese, and conversation more than the images flickering across a bedsheet waving gently in the breeze.

So, I got to thinking: What if you could rent a theater for a night? Then I read this: “At this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, filmmaker David LaChapelle screened his new hi-def movie, Rize, by streaming it from Oregon and then transmitting it through a WiMax station in Salt Lake City. It worked flawlessly - soon even theaters won’t have to rely on physical media anymore” (from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/start.html?pg=2).

Improvements in bandwidth and compression will usher in the possibility of streaming movies directly to local theaters.

The cost of streaming cinema could be as low as free, depending on the film’s provider. What this means is that films can potentially be shown to smaller audiences. And this, in turn, means that those audiences could select the film that they want to view and schedule the theater in advance. Moreover, there’s no reason to think that audiences merely want to watch only new films. Imagine a small (but big enough) cadre of film buffs pitching in to watch Citizen Kane on the big screen for a Saturday night. Or how about an all-day Star Wars or Star Trek marathon? These scenarios become not just possible but likely, given the technological transformation. The notion of a film having a “run” becomes meaningless. Films could be made available permanently and would continue to pay the creators back over a very long lifetime of being accessible. It need scarcely be mentioned that this would dramatically change the social dynamic of moviegoing: no more "opening weekend" mega-stats, and films would no longer need to be judged on how much money they might make in a single season.

Continued...

Washington Post is running an article about a TiVo upgrade that allows instant response to ads. Sounds like it will be the feature to send your contact information to companies running ads you're interested in. This is useful for people that view the long commercials in the showcase area about say, a car, and want to know more (and get a brochure sent to their house).

One concerning aspect of this update is thrown in at the very end though:

In addition, ads embedded with special "tags" will pop up as small pictures, sporting branded logos, even when users are fast-forwarding though commercials. The upgraded system will be launched with campaigns from General Motors Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s WB Television Network.

Sounds like the pop up adverts while fast forwarding is also in this update, though TiVo's PR is spinning it as a small side feature of this larger contact information opt-in. It will be interesting to see how well the final implementation looks and acts, and if it will be anything like the early betas.

A research report reveals that over half the potential users of interactive advertising in the UK are not engaging with interactive TV because there are either too few incentives or they are still daunted by the prospect.

amateur: Home

From the site:
Amateur is a free clone of Apple's QuickTime Player implemented in Swing using QuickTime for Java. However it is uncrippled and does not require registration or a serial number to provide full functionality.

Very nicely done..

I am a Verizon DSL customer. Perhaps once a month I receive a newsletter, generally marketing their latest product or offering some tips. In the latest newsletter, they have a little tidbit regarding P2P and filesharing. Here is the paragraph that troubles me:

"Remove file sharing software from your computer. The way many popular file sharing software programs work is by allowing other users to access music or other files on your hard drive. P2P file sharing involves one Internet user requesting files from another unknown source. Aside from being illegal, file sharing can open your PC up to viruses, Trojan horses, and theft of your personal information."

While P2P file sharing services are often used for illegal purposes, such as sharing copyrighted music, pirated software and movies, it is NOT ILLEGAL itself. Verizon is perpetuating a myth and discounting any legitamite uses for P2P software. For instance, I utilize BitTorrent to distribute videos that I have made or worked on to whomever is interested. This is clearly NOT illegal

Vinat Venkatraman and Pei Yu's Book Radio takes the mental model of a physical book where user can browse by flipping pages, read by keeping a page open, and create a reminder of a specific page by placing a bookmark.

Each page of the Book Radio represents a frequency. You flip pages to scan the frequency spectrum; open to a specific page to listen to a station; place the bookmark on a desired page to listen and store the station; and slide the bookmark up or down to control the volume. Besides you can scribble in it, place stickers or take notes while listening.

Check the videos on the webpage.

Via Prototype.

Sharp has apparently developed the first liquid crystal display that shows two completely different images depending on where you are sitting.

Equipped with DualView, a TV can be showing news to everyone sitting on the right-hand side of the sofa, while those on the left (wearing headphones) could be playing a video game. It all depends on the angle from which the viewer is watching the screen.

At about 3ft from the screen, two people sitting just a foot apart would see different pictures.

The DualView works by introducing a minute filter in front of the existing LCD display. The filter sends the image from the backlight in two directions. The same barrier serves to block the unwanted image from the viewers on either side.

One of the first applications for the DualView will be in cars, where the screens used in navigation systems could be put to double use — the driver would see only the map and traffic information, while the passenger could be watching a DVD.

The first working versions of the TVs should be in Japanese stores in time for Christmas and cost around 50 per cent more than a normal LCD screen.

Via The Times.

Julian Gallo is having fun in Buenos Aires, Argentina, bringing Google Maps in the real world. He takes pictures of his confluence point holding a big pushpin with the exact latitude and longitude.

Via Joho the Blog (Thanks, David!):

Henrik Schneider points out that an Hungarian woman living in London went to a public webcam in Covent Garden and used her cell phone to record her observations and feelings. A colleague videotaped a monitor displaying the webcam footage and an Hungarian news channel, NNTV.hu picked it up. You can see her report (in Hungarian) using the webcam as her video studio here.

Now this isn’t a gizmo, but it is a very interesting twist on using new media in a clever new way. Several of America's most talented and intriguing rock and hip hop music artists will perform in a series of free, up-close-and-personal "flash concerts" for fans across America this summer -- but there's only one catch, they're keeping the details secret. [via Gizmag]

Ford Motor Company in collaboration with Sony Pictures Digital have created Fusion Flash Concerts, a series of ten free unannounced-until-the-last-minute concerts performed by hot and emerging music artists in secret locations across the USA.

nced to "Insiders" at the last minute and you can be an insider if you visit the Fusion Flash Concerts website and register all your details.

Now Flash Mobbing isn’t new – but using it for commercial ends is a new spin on the anarchic beginnings of the trend. Fusion Flash Concerts is a commercial take on the underground "flash mob" phenomenon.

The inspiration for the above picture comes from my post about Les Moonves and VOD. I recalled that while reading Charlene Li's blog today, specifically her entry entitled Google Video potentially offers business model options. She wrote:

"I want to propose another business model option – advertising. What if instead of charging consumers [they] could get advertising dollars...? Hmmm, Google has this little thing called AdSense that it could easily tap for advertising – I’ve written in the past how they could expand their text ad networking into rich media and video."

I state without hesitation that advertising is inevitable business model for this type of platform/service. People do not want to pay more money for their video on demand. One could argue that there are a number of people will not pay anything – micro-payments not withstanding.

Heck, around 25% of the television households in America still don't pay for either cable or satellite hookups. Of the other 75%, how many think their monthly bills are too low or reasonably priced?

Comcast and Time Warner determined that many people were unwilling to pay 'per viewing' or pay additional subscription fees (SVOD). I remember early on when one Comcast official discussed the vital role the UI played in customer acceptance of VOD. When VOD first appeared, many people would not click to the free content because they were worried that each click meant a larger cable bill and they were not taking any chances.

People understand that advertising is the necessary annoyance that keeps their bills lower. Ideally, the advertising model that would work best for non-linear video is similar to the ROI based models used throughout the Internet today (with a few twists). A VOD ad model could possibly carry themes from Google’s AdSense: that is, context sensitive placement.

This posting is not intended to convey the details of the ad business. Instead, the point is to state that VOD’s ultimate business model will have a strong advertising component to it.

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ivar writes "The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has open sourced (Apache License 2.0) the code used to build ZeD.cbc.ca. The corresponding TV show (typically consisting of content uploaded by the community) aired the announcement last night (Jan 6_, along with the Canadian broadcast premiere of Revolution OS. It's always heartening to see cool things come from a state run corporation..."

...More

(via developers.slashdot.org)

ZeD is definitely leading the way towards what TV may become -shawn

Brian Flemming has two rules for your film. One: you can t spend any money making it. Two: you have to let everybody copy and make new things from it. Else, you have no part in his experiment. Or the future of film. Flemming is the filmmaker and mad scientist creator of Free Cinema, a film activism experiment inspired by the free culture and open source software movement. Essentially, the project's aim is to introduce independent filmmakers to the free culture business model (make it free > give it away) and observe the results.

Flemming is becoming notorious in Hollywood for this brand of salt. In 2002 he released Nothing So Strange, an uncomfortably realistic mockumentary on the assassination of Bill Gates, and made the 80-90 hours of footage open source. He recently kick-started the hype machine for his newest film, The Beast, which is also expected to be open source. The first official project of Free Cinema will be a film centered around a high-speed car chase on a San Diego highway. For most of the chase scenes Flemming is using free public-domain footage of high-speed chases shot by local police departments.


Free footage will naturally be a critical part of making free cinema. Consequently, the Prellinger Archives just became your new best friend. The archives host a collection of more than 48,000 “ephemeral” films (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) collected over a twenty year period that are available under a Creative Commons license. The material has already been successfully used in a number of films. Soul in Code briefly describes how The Corporation, a recently released film by directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, based on a book by Joel Bakan, intersplice footage from the archives to turn a critical eye on the corporate man. Another resource worth taking a look at is Common Content, which collects contributions of free content in all types of media. Also look out for the much hyped Open Media, which should be launching soon.

...More

(via unmediated.org)

Educause is offering a free online seminar about narrowcasting: Narrowcasting 101: Using Blogs, Podcasts, and Videoblogs in Higher Education, Date: July 21, 2005, Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT. Registration is required. They have nice pages about podcasting and blogs, too: podcasting blogs...

Microsoft’s OPM for the masses. by Peter Rojas, Endgadget, Jul 14, 2005. From "The Clicker, " a weekly column on television and technology. Microsoft's next operating system, "Longhorn," will, according to this article, have something called PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path – Output Protection Management), which "is the first play in Microsoft’s game plan to ensure that protected content stays protected." This technology will detect the capabilities of your computer monitor and manage what, if anything, gets sent to it. This will be one more way that the combination of operating systems and hardware will be able to impose digital rights management (DRM) on users and interfere with your unrestricted use of your hardware. So what will happen when you try to play premium content on your incompatible monitor? If you’re “lucky”, the content will go through a resolution constrictor. The purpose of this constrictor is to down-sample high-resolution content to below a certain number of pixels. The newly down-sampled content is then blown back up to match the resolution of your monitor. This is much like when you shrink a JPEG and then zoom into it. Much of the clarity is lost. The result is a picture far fuzzier than...

Bill Patry has a very depressing account about a "a horrific DMCA et al. suit filed against the Internet Archive."

From Victor Stone, the amazingly talented musician/coder who is building ccMixter.org:

About 36 hours after the London bombing ASHWAN and Curious uploaded a rap in reaction specifically to the bombing. Almost immediately they were asked to upload the a cappellas. A few days later the remixes are starting to come in...

http://ccmixter.org/file/ASHWAN/40

A hybrid of film festival and music festival, Optronica is a brand new five day event focusing on the convergence of visuals and music.

Odeo and the Association of Music Podcasting will work together to showcase the best in legal, independently produced music in an open, device-agnostic platform.

"In an agreement that capitalizes on the huge potential of independent music podcasting, Odeo and the Association of Music Podcasting have joined forces. The organizations will work together to showcase the best in legal, independently produced music in an open, device-agnostic platform. As part of the agreement, Odeo and AMP will engage in cross-promotional activities, collaborate on ways to better serve their users, and increase the amount of rights-free music available for podcasting. "

a Half-Life 2 adaptation of a scene from the movie A Few Good Men

(Thx Rocketboom -kc.)

"I've been using the social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, for a while now, and have watched similar tagging features move from site to site as a flexible way to lightly categorize various resources: bookmarks, blog posting, photos, etc. It’s therefore a little strange that no one has written a simple utility to give you similar category construction capabilities on your typical Unix-like file system. In this post, I propose a simple, portable design, contrast my design choices against some other possibilities, and then provide an initial implementation of that design in Perl."

Collaborative publishing using a free, open source content management system called OpenMute. This site has three main features: a blog, a wiki, and a discussion forum.

WinMobile Torrent is a sophisticated and easy-to-use BitTorrent client that allows you to leech and/or seed multiple torrent files.

As the more dynamic Gillmor brother Steve says, People are starting to smell money."
Everyone needs to get paid and Doc's making sure that all parts of the conversation are geting heard.

That's about the best you can do - let everyone have a say and leave some money on the table for others. PubSub HAS been providing better results - and that keeps Technorati honest. Watch for all sorts of other players to milk the tit of the blogosphere - showing how a little seed planting and a little foresightedness can pay off.

It's a free marketplace - and may the best women (and men) win.

The package now includes support for in-database XSLT transformations and a flexible new xpath_table function which evaluates a set of XPath queries and returns the results as a virtual table.

WASHINGTON (REUTERS) — U.S. Federal Communications Commission regulators have — unexpectedly — put off launching an effort to revise media ownership restrictions. The commissioners were unable to agree on several issues, including how many public hearings to hold. [Reuters: Entertainment]

Via Cinema Minima

Today brings the official announcement of Yahoo! Research Labs Berkeley, an experiment in which we'll see what happens when we take the mobile media and social media research we've been doing at Garage Cinema and supercharge it with Yahoo! brains and backing.

This is really exciting: it means that great ideas from Garage Cinema, unmediated, and elsewhere will have a chance to be implemented and deployed to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Even better, Yahoo! is committed to making the Berkeley Lab a place for open, collaborative research-meaning we can publish and exchange ideas with colleagues at Berkeley and everywhere else. It's a fantastic opportunity, and I feel lucky to be a part of it.

So next time you're in Berkeley, stop by the Lab and say hi!

(Congrats to Ryan and the folks at both Garage Cinema and Yahoo! -kc.)

"Castpost is a new web-based service that offers the easiest way to broadcast your personal video and audio clips.

With Castpost, you can share your personal media – like a home movie, a reality TV show audition, a voicemail message, a weekly podcast show – with family, friends, and other folks. Your clip can be seen and heard both online and offline – from your Castpost account, from your existing Typepad or Blogger blog, from another website, or from a mobile media player like an iPod."

I listened my way through ear-aching hours and stacks of records while I was at university. Every week, probably far more than I should have. Carefully avoiding the glare of shop assistants, who rumour had it held the best records from any imported vinyl shipment for their friends. If you didn’t dig out the music, you didn’t hear it.

Technology has democratised the process of finding music. Digital downloads, blogs, podcasts, netlabels, MP3 blogs, file-sharing, online communities, radio streams, message boards, messaging, ezines, moblogging, wireless. Probably many more, that neither my dictionary nor I have heard of yet. They make a space for people to give and receive comments on new, old, obscure and mainstream music, they even let you download it.

But that democracy has resulted in reserves of music, many times bigger than the huge record libraries at HMV or Tower Records here in Tokyo. Where 20 or 30 years ago, you could be abreast of popular music, it’s near impossible to keep track of it all these days. Not only that, but popular culture itself is changing as a result of technology.

(Continued at morph.)

A great article in Washington Post about the fact that electronics companies less reluctant towards enthusiasts’ modifications. what is interesting here is that you cannot suspect journals like the Washington Post to be really hacker-driven. The trend now seems to be recognized at the business level.

Sometimes, tinkerers become a consumer electronics maker’s unofficial research-and-development team, with innovations winding up as built-in features down the line.
(…)
Saffo said he thinks it makes good business sense for gadget makers to keep an eye on the enhancements, tweaks and hacks that users are making. It’s not the executives in the boardroom who figure out how to make a gadget great, Saffo said, but the "fanatics and renegades and people in garages. . . . Hackers create markets."

Unfortunately some companies are still nervous with it:

But many consumer-electronics makers discourage such activity. At the very least, anyone who cracks open the case on a new handheld computer, video game console or digital music player is probably voiding the warranty. At worst, hackers can undermine a company’s business.

However Torrone has a relevant final word:

Phillip Torrone, an editor at the techie-oriented Make magazine, said Sony’s hard-line stance could be self-defeating. Each attempt to thwart hackers makes them more determined to do their tricks, he said.

Even mainstream users who want to jazz up their devices wind up turning to the Internet for underground help, where they also can learn how to get pirated software and movies. Torrone, who plays a homebrewed version of chess on his PSP, said he thinks he has a better idea for gadget makers. "I think the really smart companies should release their products to the alpha geeks for six months and let the alpha geeks play around with them," he said. "It seems to me they’d save a lot of money on R&D, and they’d come out with much more solid products."

Why do I blog this? I am definitely convinced that allowing users to tinker with products is a great a source for new ideas. I’ve heard that Nintendo may allow users to develop their own independent game which is even more interesting. It also reminds me what Frederic Kaplan from Sony CSLtold me at the CAIF workshop: some innovation are influenced by the tremendous feedback AIBO designers and researchers receives from fans. They go to robot conventions and exchange a lot with those people, allowing them to improve their R&D ideas.

Sharp has developed a new LCD, which can simultaneously display different information and image content in right and left views in a single unit by directionally controlling the viewing angle of the LCD. This feature makes it possible to provide information and content tailored to specific users depending on the angle at which they view the screen. Volume production of the LCD will begin in July 2005, marking the introduction of the world`s first practical application of this technology. A new LCD television technology will allow two different programs to air at the same time depending where one sits.

Broadcasters accept cutoff date for digital migration. Broadcasters told Congress [yesterday] they would agree to give up spectrum for analog channels and begin broadcasting in all-digital format by 2009. Uncle Sam is eager for the transition - going so far as to set up a DTV promotional website - since they stand to make an estimated 30-70 billion dollars off the resale of the spectrum. That spectrum is freely loaned to broadcasters, and would be re-used for high-speed wireless voice and data services.

Editing Out the Transamerica Pyramid. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that copyright concerns caused the producers of BEWITCHED to edit the Transamerica Building out of the movie. The pyramid-shaped skyscraper is a copyrighted image. [Television Archiving]

DBin, is a novel kind of web application: a "Napster like" Semantic Web P2P and/or a Semantic Newsgroup Client.

Similar to a filesharing client, DBin connects directly to other peers. Instead of files, however, it will download "relevant information" about topics you specify. More tecnically sharing and receiving "Semantically structured information" using RDF and other components of the W3C Semantic Web Initialtive.

Odeo podcasts pulled from del.icio.us media feeds

If you imagine the mainstream media exists at one extreme of top-down content control where a small group of editors determine what appears in the News, CommonTimes is exactly the opposite.

Use your webcam to record messages, then invite your friends and family to view the message online

Via The Revolution Will Be Televised

A research team from Sony Corp. and Riken, formerly the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, has developed a new type of display panel that is not only extremely thin and flexible enough to be rolled up like a piece of paper, but also boasts an industry-high resolution of 79dpi. Other kinds of rollable displays have been developed, including various kinds of e-paper, but the new display has sufficiently high resolution for practical applications in televisions and cellular phones. Sony aims to commercialize products based on the new display technology around 2010. Read more...

OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers.

Any computer can join the infrastructure, contributing storage or providing local user access in exchange for economic compensation. Users need only subscribe to a single OceanStore service provider, although they may consume storage and bandwidth from many different providers. The providers automatically buy and sell capacity and coverage among themselves, transparently to the users. The utility model thus combines the resources from federated systems to provide a quality of service higher than that achievable by any single company.

The first edition of the STRP festival will take place in Eindhoven (Netherlands) between the 18th and 20th of November 2005. Its focus is on the commonalities between art, popular culture and technology. As part of the festival there will be performances, exhibits and presentations in a historical space. STRP will take place on the 'holy' ground of the forbidden city of Philips, where in the 20th century numerous technological innovations were made. A place where Einstein worked at one point and where one of the most ambitious amalgamations of the arts and technology took place: "Poeme Electronique," a collaboration between the architect LeCorbusier with architect/composer Iannis Xenakis, artist Jean Petit, composer Edgard Varese and filmmaker Phillipe Agostini. Coincidence or not, Dick Raaijmakers also was closely involved in this project. STRP gets its inspiration from this amalgamation of technology and art.

STRP Art & Technology Festival : Eindhoven, Netherlands

Yes, I know it's a bit past the date for submissions - but hey - you never know…

The Found Footage Festival is a one-of-a-kind event that compiles over an hour's worth of footage from videotapes that were found at garage sales and thrift stores, and in warehouses and trash bins throughout the country.

posted by yatta to unmediated film film.festival ... and others... bookmark this

: Where's the reportage on this? Where's the debate? Where are the bloggers? I'm amazed only Times UK thought this was worth doing a story on. (IHT did a story on this a month ago).

In what could potentially change the landscape of European media, especially online and mobile TV, Viviane Reding, the European Information Commissioner, has released a series of consultation papers which seek to redefine European TV regulation rules. These rules, which will be adopted in Septmber after public comment, will cover audiovisual content services, whether linear or non-linear, whatever the delivery platform (e.g. broadcast, broadband, 3G mobiles).

Among other things, the new regulations are aimed at IPTV and online TV providers, attempting to get them to adhere to the same set of rules (on decency, accuracy, impartiality and more).

These rules pitches EU against UK's media regulator Ofcom, which favors more liberal rules for online players and believes that traditionally strict broadcast regulations should not be extended to the internet.

Anyway, I hope there's more open debate on this before September...

Via PaidContent.org

If only Rather had a blog...

: CBS News announced its big new internet strategy after hiring CBS Marketwatch founder Larry Kramer as the head. They invited a bunch of bloggers to the press announcement (but I couldn't attend, being off in my mountain retreat).

Full disclosures (it's a day for full disclosures): In their early stages of planning, I spoke with Kramer, CBS News President Andrew Heyward, and CBSNews.com editor Dick Meyer offering my two cents.

Features of the new CBS News strategy include:

: A new blog that will "create a candid and robust dialogue between CBS News journalists and the public -- a move unprecedented among CBS's peers in broadcast and cable television journalism." It will "serve as the conduit between the public and CBS News to take viewers and users inside the news gathering, production and decision-making process via the use of original video and outtakes, interviews with correspondents and producers, and input from independent experts, among other methods." It's not an ombudsman; it's not an anchor blogging; it is an effort to open up two-way communication with CBS' audience about how CBS News makes its decisions.

They say it's to be edited -- not sure why they don't say written -- by Vaughn Ververs, the National Journal's editor of The Hotline.

: A "cable bypass strategy" -- which is to say that CBS News missed the cable train and so now it's trying to catch the internet plane. So they will serve news directly to the internet. Broadcasting & Cable reports that this will include a video player called The EyeBox to show 25,000 news clips and an initiative to get TV staffers to feed news to the web 24 hours a day. Let's hope they have more luck doing this than newspapers have had....

This is a response to many developments: missing out on cable... the growth of the internet as a primary means of delivering news... the shrinking (and aging and dying) of the network news audience... and, yes, l'affaire Rather. If they'd had that blog when the Rather scandal developed, we would have had a place to look for and demand their response and they would have had to have responded. Things might have turned out differently....

spring_alpha is a free software sim-society game based on drawings by Chad McCail which narrates a community's attempt to create an utopian society.

Set in a fictitious industrial town, typical of many in Britain, the game aims at changing the rules by which the society in that world runs. This is done through hacking and altering the code that simulates that world, creating new types of behaviour and social interaction. How effective this becomes depends on the players' ability to spread these new ideas into the society.

Within spring_alpha, social change is linked to changes in the fabric of the simulation code. The task of re-imagining society also means reimagining the software. spring_alpha is an exploration of software and social governance in relation to Free Software and Open Source practice.

A work by Simon Yuill.

The project will be presented at the Media Centre - Huddersfield, UK, 14 July - 14 October 05.

(Editor's Note: This article gives a detailed summary of the project. The source code (in Python) for the demo module is available here. -- Jamais)

(Posted by Regine Debatty in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 01:27 PM)

"Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough,but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications,say US researchers",New Scientist reports."Email forwarding is a familiar part of modern email communications,and has spawned many an internet phenomenon,the Star Wars kid,the Numa Numa dance,and Oolong the rabbit to name just a few.Benjamin Gross at the University of Illinois,US,and colleagues studied email forwarding behaviour by conducting informal interviews among email users.He says forwarding emails plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining modern social ties,despite the phenomenon receiving scant attention from social scientists.Forwarding a genuinely amusing or interesting link to a friend,for example,shows that you are thinking of them and are aware of the sort of content they like,Gross says.But passing an irrelevant or out-of-date link on to contacts can be annoying,thus lowering the sender's social status in the recipient’s eyes".

Email forwarding amounts to ritual gift exchange,

Via Smart Mobs

[The BBC has] just launched BBC OpenSource – the new repository for open source code released by the BBC.

For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit. Releasing open source software helps our audience get additional value from the work they've funded, and also get tools for free that they couldn't get any other way. It also allows people outside the BBC to extend projects in such a way that may in future be used in the BBC.

We hope there will be opportunities for cross-pollination between backstage.bbc.co.uk and BBC OpenSource.

If you would like to know more, check out the BBC Open Source FAQ or visit the site directly.

Quite a day for the Internet Archive. First it gets sued for letting lawyers access some websites that a company wished had disappeared for good, and now it turns out that Canada may be outlawing the Internet Archive, as well as Google's cache feature. The details aren't entirely clear, but that's because the bill as currently presented isn't entirely clear, either. It's worded in a vague way that could certainly be read to suggest that Google and the Internet Archive are violating copyright law by caching or saving internet content that was created by others.

Urbanseeder is a flirting service that increases your chance of running again into people you find attractive. Using minimal digital technology, the game plays out unpredictably in real space and tries to preserve the spirit of flirting.

As a member you have a web page in which you enter the events you plan to attend and stickers ("urban seeds") with unique codes linked to the page. Then you secretely -with the help of friends or bar staff- stick the seeds on the belongings of the person you fancy. He or she will follow the seed to your webpage, imagine you from the events listed and perhaps will attend some of them. You stay anonymous until repeated co-attendance to events may gradually draw you together.

Another version allows a more passive use of the seed. Its code is replaced by a pattern unique to you which can again be printed on stickers but can also be woven into or printed on your clothes or accessories. If someone is interested by you, s/he will take a picture of you with a camera phone, send the pattern to UrbanSeeder and be sent to your page. The game starts again...

By Maya Lotan.

Got room for one more online media trend? Here come the vloggers, who have added video shorts to the user-created media mix. Part 1 of a three-part series. By Katie Dean.PLUS: The Vlog World's Greatest Hits.

By Mark Glaser: Cameraphones and videophones on the scene were important tools in giving the world the first look at the horrific London bombings. But what about people with cameraphones who vied for the most gruesome shots of victims?

RFID Keychain Detector

Zapped! Workshop by Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Heidi Kumao, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer): July 15, 2005 - 6:30 - 9:00pm at Eyebeam, NYC.

You may have heard the term RFID and possibly even brought one home unknowingly. But what exactly is a Radio Frequency Identification tag? Why are Wal-Mart, the Department of Defense and the Food & Drug Administration sinking big bucks into these little chips and paving the way for mass implementation? After a brief overview of the technology and its potential impact on our lives, each participant will receive a Zapped! RFID Kit complete with a colorful workbook and materials for the hands-on portion of the workshop. Preemptive Media will guide the group through building an RFID keychain detector that plays a jingle when a reader is within range and scanning the airwaves for data. Participants can program tags that "talk back" to a RFID reader uncovered by a Zapped! keychain. Registration fee is $25 general public, $20 for Eyebeam members. Sign up here.

Popcast - Open Access Internet TV.

Can you guys check this out and report back?

I'm off to Macworld for the day.

Somebody has not been taking their happy pills. Here's a good look at the 3D shooter industry, and how Id used to be kings of the castle, but these days, are just another player. It's make some interesting observations on Doom 3, which I have no doubt will generate heaps of hatemail from Id fanboys.

In it's own special way, this article brings up the classic graphics over gameplay issue. Once Doom 3 had created such wonderful visuals, there wasn't much left to create the bad guys. Remember the rooms full of monsters in Doom? I remember stumbling into rooms with 20 or more bad guys ready to eat me. Those were the days...

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Creative Arts & Sciences in Virtual Environments

Creative VR Futures: Creative Arts & Sciences in Virtual Environments, 22-23 July 2005--A two day symposium for professional artists, designers and creative practitioners offering a range of artistic presentations, demonstrations and hands-on experience of current immersive and augmented virtual environment research. The event will take an in depth look into current artistic applications and developments of virtual/mixed reality, ranging from telepresent networking, tele-immersion and collaborative VR interaction to both painted and virtual urban landscape panoramas.

Following the symposium participants will be invited to apply for one of two artist-in-residence opportunities at The University of Salford Centre for Virtual Environments for a period of six months to develop and showcase their work.

This two day event is free. For further information and symposium booking details please contact Nathalie Edwards on 0161 295 2801 or email n.j.edwards[at]salford.ac.uk

Friday 22 July, 9.30am to 5.00pm

Centenary Building Lecture Theatre, School of Art & Design, The University of Salford, Centenary Building, Peru Street, Salford, Greater Manchester, M3 6EQ

Presentation by:

Maurice Benayoun - Interactive Media Artist, Paris
Steve Benford - Mixed Realities Lab, University of Nottingham
Monica Fleischmann - Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen
Horst Hoertner - Ars Electronica Futurelab
Ben Johnson - Commissioned Artist for Liverpool Biannual
David Roberts - The Centre for Virtual Environemnts, Salford
Paul Sermon - School of Arts & Design, Salford
Anthony Steed - University College London
Wolfgang Strauss - Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen

Saturday 23 July, 9.30am to 5.00pm

The Centre for Virtual Environments, The University of Salford, Business House, University Road, Salford, Greater Manchester, M5 4WT

Presentations and Demonstrations of:

Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen - Introduced by Monica Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss
Ars Electronica Futurelab - Introduced by Horst Hoertner
World Skin - Introduced by Maurice Benayoun
UCL EQUATOR - Introduced by Anthony Steed
The Centre for Virtual Environments - Introduced by David Roberts

Support by The Arts Council England and The University of Salford

Presented in association with Futuresonic 05 http://www.futuresonic.com

From Brandweek:

Ford is touting its forthcoming Fusion compact car via the digital/sociological phenomenon of "flash mobs," a cell-phone enabled act of mass performance, in which people show up unannounced at stores in droves, do something weird, and leave. 

I'll confess it's kind of nice seeing marketers assume the role they have traditionally played in the culture: way behind the curve. As my friend Becky said, maybe Ford should cash in on Macarena-mania before it's too late.

(Thanks, Becky Ebenkamp)

(Next week, we'll put a web-log on the interweb. ;) -kc.)

Something is up. People are behaving strangely and unlike the family friend that used to become apoplectic when the quarterback on the television clearly disregarded his urgent instructions to "Pass! Get rid of the ball boy! Pass!!!", it seems to me that now, when WE talk to the TV, the TV not only listens but talks back.

According to a post by Tomi T Ahonen who's the co-author of Communities Dominate Brands and the blog by the same name:

SMS-to-TV is already one of the largest "Value-Add Service" revenues for the mobile telecoms industry, right behind ringing tones, logos and games. Already a billion-dollar business in its own right. Endemol, the producer of "Big Brother" earns 25% of its revenues from SMS voting etc. In An Italian SMS dating service on TV generates 5 million Euros per year, while the birthplace of SMS-to-TV has innovated with over 20 separate "shows" and content all based on SMS-to-TV. Starting from the rapidly world-conquering SMS-to-TV chat, to SMS games to the latest, SMS-to-TV Rap. Yes, if you feel you would make the next 50 Cent, Nelly or P. Diddy, then just send your lyrics to the TV screen where the animated digital rapper will perform your rhymes.

SMS-to-TV is the most profitable TV content of all time. With premium SMS charges anywhere from 5 times to 10 times to even 20 times more than regular SMS text messages, and as 1000 messages come in per hour, 5 hours per night, 365 days a year, on three commercial networks in Finland, YOU do the math.

(Continued at The Mobile Technology Weblog)

I couldn't help but notice how different my media consumption has been surrounding the terrorist attacks in London from September 11th. When my girlfriend came and hammered on my door on the morning of September 11th I turned on CNN and just watched. When I heard about the bombings in London I looked it up on Flickr, Nowpublic, Wikipedia, Wikinews to mention a few.

It seems the editors/writers/journalists at the dinosaur blogs did the same. In fact, not only did these old school media folks go online for their news gathering, but they took citizen's media and ran front page stories with it....

(Continued at The Last Minute)

Citizen Paine has a bunch of links about a fair use debate regarding big media use of citizen created content (Use of G8 Protest Pics Stirs Fair-Use Debate). It isn't only big media that wants too much control through copyright.

Adobe and Macromedia must provide more information to the Department of Justice before regulators will approve their merger.

Adobe said in April it would pay $3.4bn for Macromedia, maker of Flash animation software.

The two companies have now received their second "Request for Additional Information and Documentary Materials" from the DoJ. The request covers web authoring and design softare and vector graphics illustration.

The two firms are gathering info for the lawyers now and will continue to work closely with the DoJ, according to thisstatement.

Adobe is still hopeful shareholders will approve the deal in September and it will close in Fall 2005. It expects the deal to add a little to earnings, or have no impact.®

Are you ready for Internet TV? TV stations are popping up all over the Internet and are waiting for you to tune in.

Check them out with our new guide of Internet TV stations.

The listing of TV stations can be searched based on several options including, country, language, category, media type, and stream type. Rather than having to enter your search criteria each visit to the site, the page can be bookmarked after you revise your search criteria so that you can easily return and receive your specified results.

Additionally, we have opened a new forum for Internet TV stations and we look forward to peoples' opinions of the various stations.

Lastly, we are currently asking for Internet TV station suggestions to increase the size of our channel database. Please see our contact form or forums for submission. We will continually strive to improve our listing so that we can provide one of the most comprehensive and detailed lists on the web.

---

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

"Do your brand managers know how many WOM Units they’re getting out of next year’s media plan?" asks a AdAge. The answer is NO because you don't know what is a "Word-of-Mouth unit". maybe you will have to know more about this notion: "That’s a media-neutral way of referring to a consumer comment... “If a company purchases an ad, it’s an ad. If people talk about the ad, it’s a WOM Unit”... It also includes “depth” -- which evaluates the “richness” or amount of information available in a WOM Unit, “assuming that these aspects increase message persuasiveness.” That means, a video e-mail would be deeper than, say, a text message." I am sure this idea of WOM units could be developed in online and print newspapers, article by article or section by section.

AdAge through MediaPost

I heard that line yesterday from Jason Calacanis. 

Specifically, I said, via email, "check this out, somebody stole a post from my blog"

Jason replied, via email:

"welcome to my world! people are stealing out stuff every day.... it never ends!

RSS=really simple stealing.

It's pretty obvious to me what's going on.  Subscribe to RSS feeds, pump them into Typepad, viola, you've got a blog.  Put adsense and some other link farm stuff, and you've got a money machine.

Brad Feld talks how easy it is to do this in his More Feedburner Magic post yesterday.

This is officially now an addition to my Internet Axis of Evil.

Really Simple Stealing joins the litany of other Internet crimes:

/feeds.feedburner.com/AVc?g=1270"/>

Saul Guzman writes in about a new citizen journalism site, iTalkNews.com: "I would like to tell you guys about a new site www.iTalkNews.com. iTalkNews.com, part of the Oak News Network, Inc., is a breaking news forum and a forerunner in a new kind of news journalism, where everyone can participate in current events. A site where you can post your own articles. You can write on any topic as long as it relates to current events/news. We here at iTalkNews.com felt a need for an interactive community where people can read breaking news, discuss it, and post their own articles. Our goal is to foster diversity and offer a wide range of opinions on any topic in the news, while creating a nationwide network of writers and thinkers."

Starting July 15, some of the site's editors are planning a road trip to get to know potential contributors. "We will be conducting a membership 'story drive' – set up stations and have people become members and pledge stories for the site," the site says. "We are serious about actively going out there and spreading the word about citizen journalism, and how it can empower many people whose stories may not get heard otherwise."

PVP4U reports about the viliv P1 portable video player that not only shines through it's innovative feature list but also through its Video iPod looks.

The PMPEvent viliv P1 could be a vision of what an Video iPod could look like.

Still the viliv P1 is quite interesting. The PMP has an all Macromedia Flash UI, 4 inch 16:9 screen and a 20GB hard-drive. Another Apple iPod similarity is the click wheel.

More details on PVP4U.

(I'm intrigued by this emergence of Flash licensing for UIs in gadgets. -kc.)

Google has opened up its  contextual Adsense ads for RSS feeds to any web site owner. There's one catch, however. You must have more than 100 feed subscribers to sign up. Most people don't have any idea how many people are pulling their feeds - unless they use a service like Feedburner. Although 100 readers is certainly a low bar, this gets me wondering if Google is perhaps going to count a feed's RSS subscribers as part of some broader master plan for feed monitoring or perhaps searching. Is some roll up with newly-acquired Urchin in the cards?

Via Micro Persuasion

: As [PaidContent] reported first last night, the new AOL-AEG-XM venture is being announced today at a press conference by AOL Chairman & CEO Jon Miller...the venture is called "Network Live". Besides Kevin Wall, Andrew Thau, the former president and CEO of VOY, the Latino-focused media company, is the COO of the venture. Mike Bonifer, former creative head at iXL, is the VP of Creative at Network Live. Brad Barrish, who previously worked at Wherehouse Music, is the VP of content development.
Also, correction: Allen DeBevoise is not related to this new venture...he is working in consulting capacity with AOL.
We'll have more details soon...

This guide contains links to many RDF resources including examples, documents, software, tools and projects that use it.

Turkish mobile content provider Logizmo allows users to receive updates from their favourite blogs via SMS.

Future Tense: "Minutes after last week's terrorist attacks in London, eyewitnesses uploaded digital images to online photo-sharing sites."

TagandScan is a service for your mobile phone that enables you to mark real physical locations with an electronic tag.

An amazing glimpse at the cell phone of tomorrow, via Core 77.

ECCO Design, a NYC based multidisciplinary creative team of designers, researchers, and analysts, has recently completed a cellphone design concept for Popular Science Magazine.

They were asked to visualize the cellphone of tomorrow, incorporating emerging technologies such as micro fuel cells, 3x optical zoom, and streaming video into a sleek, inspired design.

The ECCO team surveyed cellphone product engineers, industry researchers, and lab analysts in order to conjure up a realistic possibility for the soon-to-come super cellphone.

The most impressive feature of the phone is the varied use of fuel cell technology, providing 5 times more talk time per cycle than the existing lithium-ion batteries.

The fuel cells will also enable the pull-out tab used for messaging to have no physical screen by using the cells' byproduct of non-turbulent water vapor released in a continuous stream within the frame. A small projector inside the handset shines images onto the thin layer of vapor.

The phone concept embodies a myriad of hopeful and highly likely future innovations such as an LED-backlit, heat and touch-sensitive keypad and scroll pad interface for navigation, dialing, and messaging.

The phone will have multiple miniature antennas making wi-fi, cellular, and ultra-wideband networks available at the same time.

A software-defined radio will make digital streaming broadband video a hot new feature. A tiny liquid lens with 3x zoom and auto-focus will give handsets true digital camera functionality.

The lens, comprised of an oil and water solution between two glass plates, changes shape and focal length when an electric current is applied.

The phone will also be capable of storing 8 gigabytes of information by 2008 and a mind-boggling 60-gigabyte capacity is expected by 2013.

[reBlogged from Core 77]

K. Daniel Glover of the National Journal's Beltway Blogroll has crafted an insight into the adversarial relationship of bloggers and journalists. Bloggers shouldn't replace professional journalists, says Glover (himself a journalist), but the profession is better thanks to blogs:

Instead of being part of the Fourth Estate, [bloggers] are part of something new. I call it Estate 4.5 -- a nod both to the profession whose excesses galvanized many bloggers and to the medium they use. Bloggers are like inspectors general, the independent watchdogs of government. Just as IGs are not part of the agencies they oversee, bloggers are neither part of government nor journalism, but they keep a wary and watchful eye on both. And in so doing they provide a valuable check against the arrogance, inadequacies and abuses of all four estates.

Read Glover's whole speech, delivered last week at a DC roundtable.

(Posted by Emily Gertz in QuickChanges at 04:52 PM)

A little over a year ago, there was a lot of talk about the idea of broadcatching, where instead of focusing on a typical TV channel schedule, show producers would put shows online and offer up an RSS feed and some sort of BitTorrent like distribution mechanism. That way, anyone could just "subscribe" to the shows they wanted, and they'd receive them automatically (at little bandwidth cost to the producers) when a new episode was released. In some ways, podcasting has taken over that idea from the audio side of things. However, now the BBC is taking a very minor step in that direction, as they're going to debuting a new sitcom online. The show will go online a week before it actually airs on TV, and then be available to download until a week after the series ends. What's not clear from the announcement, though, is whether they'll offer up any kind of RSS feed or enclosures for this. Also, it's unlikely they'll be using any kind of BitTorrent-like P2P tools to ease their bandwidth needs. However, just the idea of offering up a new television show for download at the same time as it's playing on TV is an intriguing idea. Plenty of people probably won't be interested in watching the sitcom on their computers, but for those who do want to watch it that way (or who missed the original showing) it gives them the option. Of course, it's not clear why they won't leave it online after the show ends.

Via Techdirt

An unnamed Canadian bookseller in Vancouver, BC, jumped the release gun and started selling Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince even though it's not slated for launch until the weekend.

Now buyers have been ordered not to do anything – anything – with the book.

And to return it.

Immediately.

But as Canadian law professor Michael Geist observes:

"While that is understandable, the remainder of the court order is a bit harder to take. People have legitimately purchased the book, yet now face violation of a court order if they fail to return it immediately, discuss it, or do anything else with the book.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

JB is our new research associate just finished the description of his project related to interactive table. It’s all described here. The purpose of the project is to design, build and experiment furniture with embedded technology to support casual collaborative learning.

Currently there are 3 design that he is working on:

	Docking table: Arriving to the table with, or without, your laptop and directly accessing to your account, a shared space, the project portal, …
	Noise sensitive table: Using light patterns reacting from the noise level to provide a feed-back of the conversation dynamic.
	Social maps: Using the information collected by the tables to show, on the wall or on the web, some maps of: activity; work areas (social places or silent work area) ; communities (1st year, 2nd year).

Why do i blog this? I am looking forward to see what will emerge from this. My involvement on this project is related to our CSCSW course; as a teaching assistant we may have to test that with our students.

"Wireless companies are investing big in new infrastructure that can handle the ever-increasing demand for inexpensive delivery of voice and data. But the solid-state amplifiers that the nation's roughly 200,000 wireless base stations now use to communicate with cell phones and other electronic devices are costly, generate excessive heat (requiring bulky cooling equipment) and need large backup batteries.

MIT researchers are developing an alternative: the first radio frequency (RF) power amplifier based on a ribbon-beam vacuum electron device. The new amplifier combines a half-century-old technology-vacuum electron devices, or "vacuum tubes" in the old terminology-with a recent MIT breakthrough: an elliptical, or "ribbon," electron beam. "

Vendex International Ltd. announced the launch of its free software, EpyxMobile, which for the first time enables people to make free calls from their mobile phones to users of Skype, the hugely successful Internet telephony network.Using a standard Bluetooth connection, the software, which takes minutes to download and install, bridges the gap between free VoIP and standard GSM mobile networks, taking mobile communications into new and uncharted territory.

Via Physics Org

Catalin Lazia' Living Jukebox is a modular interface designed to browse, explore and experience music in your living room.



The horizontal display provides a unified gateway to access music from different digital sources. To select the music, you just have to place a cursor object and move it on the surface of the display. Each object signifies a different way to browse the music collection, and the interface changes accordingly when a different object is placed onto the display.

If the you want to explore a music collection the interface will provide the physical artifacts – cover, artworks and extra information – at a glance.

Two different modes were designed. The album collection mode provides easy access to tracks inside of albums or playlists. The internet radio mode allow a quick selection of a radio station, while having a multitude of radiostations displayed on the screen.

a treemap representation of the time-averaged links on the del.icio.us most popular list. del.icio.us contains personal collections of links, categorized by keywords, which can be shared with other users. [codecubed.com]

I’ve found the recent controversy over the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sex mod / unlock extremely fascinating (thanks Gamespot). If you believe what the modder and critics are saying, Rockstar left the code for the sex mini-game in the final copies of San Andreas. For one reason or another, the theory goes, Rockstar blocked off the feature so it would be impossible to access. There were a few rumors that the code existed on the PS2 version, but it wasn’t until the PC version that someone actually unlocked it and made it available. Or modded it, depending on your viewpoint.

Now politicians and watch groups are up in arms. Folks who thought the cop killing and hooker stomping was bad are now going nuts over the prospect of young children pretending to have sex using an awkwardly timed minigame. Whether the code was modded or buried by self-censoring game makers, someone has added fuel to the fire and it won’t die down anytime soon.

"Think of the Xbox 360 Marketplace as your one-stop-shop for all of your downloadable content, both for games and for other forms of digital entertainment. It's not just games, but obviously games are at the heart of it."

A recent study by London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points.

CBS Digital Media and CBS News, today announced plans for a 24-hour, multi-platform, broadband news network, bypassing cable television in favor of broadband distribution.

CBS News will move from a primarily television and radio news-based operation to a 24-hour, on-demand news service, available across many platforms. The new CBSNews.com will include:

• an on-demand, 24-hour news network in the digital broadband space;
• a blog to be called "Public Eye" designed to provide greater openness and transparency into the newsgathering process;
• a newly-configured homepage including The EyeBox, an on-page video player showcasing the free broadband video of CBSNews.com including over 25,000 clips -- and video yet to be broadcast on the network;
• a commitment by CBS News fully to integrate its personnel and other global newsgathering resources to provide exclusive, original reporting and commentary around the clock.

re-launch -- including greatly enhanced video streaming capabilities, more on-demand features and greater participation from the CBS News correspondents and producers who will also be reporting directly for the web -- will dramatically improve the content, delivery and navigation of the website", said CBS Digital president Larry Kramer (founder of Marketwatch.com).

Not everyone is enthusiastic about Black Rock's makeover.

"CBS News president Andrew Heyward wants a god damn Broadway production taking place during the CBS Evening News, even if that means Bob Schieffer has to put on a top hat and tails — and sequins."

No word on any Global Mobile Television encounters.

In related news, Comcast, the nation's largest broadband provider with 7.4 million broadband users, today announced 6Mbps/384kbps and 8Mbps/768kbps speeds.

Comcast subscribers automatically will be upgraded to 6 Mbps for free, as long as they also are cable customers. Those who want to get the fastest connection will have to pay $10 more a month.

The speed upgrades will begin this month in eastern and central Pennsylvania, New England, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan and Washington, D.C., with nearly all Comcast markets scheduled to be complete this summer. The speed increases will be automatic, which means customers are not required to download any special files or upgrade their connections.

The new 8Mbps and 6Mbps downstream speeds will allow customers to instantly access their favorite content and features on Comcast.net.

According to P2PNet and Digital Music News, p2p use inched up in June, despite entertainment industry efforts. The average number of simultaneous users on P2P networks reached 8.9 million, a 20% jump from this time last year. File trading levels are now double what they were in September of 2003 when the RIAA began initiating lawsuits against file-traders.

The FCC is looking for more input on low power FM (LPFM). (Hmm... That's a very ugly .txt file. Do they work at making them that awful? The original .pdf is here.)

WCOM is a good example of a new LPFM station. Though I'm betting the religious broadcasters will probably grab up most of the availabe channels. They're good at that, and the prevailing political climate favors them.

Background here, here, here, here, here.

Via The Doc Searls Weblog

Google has moved the Google SMS service from its 'Labs' section, where its weirder and wackier offerings reside, to official beta status.

I don't know how much deep thought was involved when George Bush called the Internet "the internets" but this reflects a real risk that we face today. If you look at the traffic of many large countries with non-English languages, you will find that the overwhelming majority of the traffic stays inside the country. In countries like China and Japan where there is sufficient content in the local language and most people can't or don't like to read English this is even more so. I would say that the average individual probably doesn't really notice the Internet outside of their country or really care about content not in their native language.

Physical mail inside of these countries is delivered with addressing in their local language. It's not surprising that on the issue of International Domain Names (IDNs) there is a strong and emotion position inside of these countries that people should be able to write URLs in their native scripts. Take my name for example, the same Chinese characters for my name can be transliterated into English as either Johichi Itoh or Joichi Ito. This problem is aggravated in languages such as Chinese where there are more dialects and many more readings for the same set of characters. Why should these people be forced to learn some sort of roman transliteration in order to access the company page where they know the official Chinese characters for the names.

Similarly, there are people who don't like the policies of the Internet and either want to censor or otherwise manage differently THEIR internet. Others who don't like the way DNS works, have proposed alternative roots. This is possible and easy to do, but you end up with "the internets".

It is the fact that we have a single root and that we have global policies and protocols which allows the Internet to be a single network and allows anyone to reach anyone else in the world. Clearly, allowing anyone in the world to reach anyone else in the world with a single click introduces a variety of problems, but it creates a single global network which allows dialog and innovation to be shared worldwide without going through gateways or filters. This attribute of the Internet is a key to the future of a global democracy and I believe we need to fight to preserve this.

Since more and more people are using the Internet, there are more and more diverse views about the policies and control. This is clearly making consensus more difficult and ICANN is one of the groups which is having to adapt to the increasing number of inputs in the consensus process. This is all the more reason to work harder to keep everything together. Please. Lets fight to keep the Internet and not let it turn into the internets... It is a difficult process with various flaws, but if we give up, it will be very difficult if not impossible for all of to talk again very soon.

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"For years any fool with a guitar and a PC has been able to make a CD, and now that same fool can pick up a cheap video camera and produce an award-winning documentary for just a few thousand bucks. Until now, though, live TV production has remained the domain of professional studios. No more. The new TriCaster from NewTek puts an entire live television control room into a customized PC for just $5,000. Add in the overpriced optional switching keyboard and a decent monitor, and the full package costs under $6,500—replacing hardware that can cost ten times as much. The TriCaster itself is built into a customized Shuttle small-form-factor PC, which makes it portable as well as powerful. The TriCaster includes NewTek's VT4 video production card and a 250 gigabyte hard drive."



No one has been able to channel the power of the PC to multi-input, live-switched video events at less than $10,000 so far. This looks like a really good solution for about half that cost. And from this Extremetech review, it looks like a very stable, powerful and portable solution.

Via Digital Media Thoughts

An IPTV Interoperability Forum has been established to support the implementation of systems for internet protocol television, including interactive TV and video-on-demand services.

The creators of the free documentarty Gamer Br (GTxA post, English home page) are gearing up for another project: a three-episode video on the way digital technology is influencing cultrual production, and the distribution and reception of media, in Brazil. The first, “Skip the Intermediary,” will cover the struggles of musicians and record labels. The second will cover the IP revolution that Creative Commons licenses and other challenges to traditional copyright are bringing in Brazil. The final video will cover the free software movement and its cultural effect.

The plan is to make the video available for free download, for free on DVD, and for free on VHS, so that poorer Brazilians with older consumer electronics can view it, too. The filmmakers (who provided well-translated English subtitles for Gamer Br have an English version of the prospectus online. (I hesitated a long time before clicking on this, but yes, the domain “nakedpictures.utopia.com.br” is actually the wiki for this documentary project.) Good luck to these gamers as they head to the next level and start on this project!

(Excerpted from Videobusiness.com) )

Cable operators bemoan the fact that, "For the first time, cable is actually in the lead in deploying something," says Time Warner Cable Digital Services Director Glen Hardin, referring to HD over VOD. Nonetheless, fear of piracy and a reluctance to release films to undermine the value of the DVD window have led the studios to keep their most valuable high-def content away from VOD.

"High-def DVD hasn't come out yet. So if you're the studios, do you want to have a high- def product in the marketplace that's more convenient than DVD?" InDemand president- CEO Rob Jacobson said. "DVD has been a phenomenal product for Hollywood. They don't want cable operators to come out with a better product that isn't as profitable to them."

Jacobson predicted that studio attitudes toward a high-def VOD service would not begin to soften until a high-def DVD format is established in the market.

High-def VOD content also is caught between programmers' desire to charge a premium for high-def programming and cable operators' drive to include as much on-demand programming as possible on free or subscription VOD tiers.

It’s clearly no iPod shuffle, despite the lanyard, but Microsoft labs’ life recording device may be an important step toward constant recording and amalgamation of a user’s sensoria.

Via Futurismic

A relatively new blog worth noting is Media Law, which tracks news relating to the First Amendment, access to public records, open meetings laws, journalist shield laws, libel and other legal issues relating to news reporting. The Media Law blog is written by Bob Ambrogi, a lawyer and former editor in chief of the National Law Journal and current the executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association.

Cellular phone subscribers can now view TV, movies, photos and broadband Internet content with a big screen viewing effect with Kopin CyberDisplay video eyewear from MicroOptical. This sleek eyewear allows users to privately view large-size video or pictures equivalent to a 12-inch screen as seen from three feet away, delivering crisp, full-color video with a 17-degree field of view. This eyewear is connected to a cell phone through a thin cable, and allows up to five hours of video with three AAA batteries. Since it accepts composite video input (NTSC or PAL), the eyewear can be plugged into other devices with composite video outputs such as portable DVD players.

Philip Jeffrey points Smartmobs readers to this article in MIT Technology Review as an example of the power of the many as Wade Roush posted drafts on his blog in order to get feedback.

This is similar to what David Weinberger did while writing his Small Pieces Loosely Joined book.

(Thanks Phillip !)

Constant connectivity has changed what it means to participate in a conference or any other gathering. Using chat rooms, blogs, wikis,photo-sharing sites, and other technologies, people at real-world meetings can now tap into an electronic swirl of commentary and interpretation by other participants--the "back channel" mentioned by Campbell.

by way of Jyri Engeström's blog

Emily Bell analyses and comments in the British Guardian Unlimited the worth of London's citizen reporters with their coverage of bombing.

It certainly represents a new dynamic in newsgathering and a fulfilment of the blogger's adage on journalism: "There's always someone closer to the story than you." At a time when the media have, we are often told, all but exhausted the public's trust, the engagement of the public in disseminating and surrendering news footage must mark progress.

eight of content that will increasingly be available from "citizen reporters" provides a challenge as well as an opportunity for "big media". After all, authenticity is fairly easy to establish when you have clear footage of train carriages being evacuated, but as the net spreads wider to catch the words and images of ad hoc reporters, verification becomes far harder.

This level of difficulty will alarm some organisations into keeping away - many already refuse to run blogs or open comments on quasi-blogs for fear of increased legal risk - but this will inevitably shut off an avenue of debate and a new dimension to coverage.

The BBC, with its unrivalled new media resources, has led the field in soliciting and using images from its audience. It has taken steps to engage with, and even offer tips to, citizen reporters in a quid pro quo. As eyewitness accounts become increasingly common, the media have to engage with the idea that opening doors and distribution platforms to everybody will carry a risk as well as a substantial reward.

It might take only one faked film, one bogus report to weaken the bond of trust, and, conversely, one misedited report or misused image to make individuals wary once again of trusting their material to television or newspapers.

We are in the earliest stages of a revolutionary relationship, and its current urgency is bound to be tempered by setbacks. But it is important that all media owners engage as fully as they can in ensuring that it is a mutually beneficial relationship - one where the public becomes a partner rather than simply a resource.

Emily concludes: (..) "there is an ocean of difference between keeping open a space for your audience to participate in and allowing anyone to trash your journalistic brand. The public have shifted up a gear, and now those in the media have to decide how they wish to keep pace".

Addition from todays Financial Times 'Mobile phone images present dilemma for TV':

"The BBC has received more than 1,000 still pictures of the unfolding events and 300 different bits of amateur video since the explosions, prompting senior executives to reassess internal guidelines governing use of unsolicited material.

den, BBC director of news, said: "No one knows where this is going to take us. The gap between the professional and non-professional news gatherers is getting narrower."

(..) Ms Boaden said the BBC would also consider requests from the police and security services to scrutinise the material, particularly images that had not been broadcast.

She insisted, however, that the increasing use of amateur footage would not have any impact on news budgets or technology spending at the broadcaster".

Chris Lanier has put together a nice little list of plugins to make podcasts work with Windows Media Player (on Windows) via

Alicia Parlette, 23, is a successful recent graduate of our journalism school, the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. Alicia, who is working as a copy editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, was recently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. As she dealt with the shock and endless rounds of doctor appointments that quickly engulfed her life, she began chronicling her experiences in emails to a group of close friends. One thing led to another, and in June the Chronicle published a front-page, seven-part series written by Alicia about her experience.

The series attracted an overwhelming response from readers -- more than 2,300 people responded to the series through email, postings, letters and phone calls to the Chronicle. The Chronicle has produced a podcast with managing editor Robert Rosenthal and Alicia about the story behind the story; the series is available online and as a paperback book.

In looking through some of the links to the story posted online, I was struck by comments made by blogger Gary Goldhammer, on Below the Fold. Goldhammer uses the series as an example of new "new" journalism, a form of storytelling that crosses the line from traditional journalism to a form of citizen journalism. He says: "It’s hard to see where the AP style ends and the freestyle writing of a blogger begins."

His point is that this personal style of journalism could be considered an example of citizen journalism because it is written from the vantage point of a citizen -- one who also happens to be a journalist.

ipodlounge has a great feature up on creating podcasts. Their iPod 101 tutorial Beginner's Guide to Podcast Creation walks through the different elements you need to create a simple podcast, from computer and microphone through to the finished product.

Via Micro Persuasion

The Blog Business Summit has posted their event details marked up with hCalendar.

Graphs aggregate mood from LJ users.

Rich Ling, who ought to know, says this long PDF is "a pretty massive analysis of research on mobile communication. If you don't have any books for the beach, this might be the one." I know Castells to be thoughtful, insightful, and thorough. Castells, M., Fernandez-Ardevol, M., Qiu, J. L., & Sey, A. (2004) The mobile communication society: A cross-cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technology

careful, that link is a pdf --dgoodwin

A technical glitch briefly exposed what could be the new Netflix download service. Tom writes:

I just noticed in my account info page, there is a section for "Netflix Player" with a link to "Register Player". If I follow the link, there is a form to "Add a Netflix Player", and it asks for "Registration ID" and "Name your box". I haven't noticed this before. I wonder if this is a new service that they are rolling out. Could this be something to do with movies-on-demand? Or do they have a netflix-branded movie player of some kind? Interesting....

Here's the screen he captured:



Ian noticed a new genre: "I can't seem to find any information about it, but Netflix now has a "Downloadable" genre (with subgenres of Foreign and Drama)."

Looks like we got an early look and possibly a name for the new Netflix movie download service. I'm wondering if the "Netflix Player" is a TiVo or possibly a new device.

Anyone else see something interesting on the Netflix site recently?

A distributed EPG, in which the Web - or more accurately IP-distributed communication between IP-enabled devices - will form a lattice of connections to media, including all the associated comments and interaction around shows.

...you might not notice that there are sites on the Web that are offering downloadable MP3s. Some of these sites reside in countries that have different copyright laws, or laxer enforcement of laws, than the US and other Cartel-dominated countries. So everyone pretend you didn't read this blog posting, ok?

One site that is raising the ire of the Germans is AllofMP3. In particular, Web sites in Germany have been asked to take down links to the site. This puts news sites in a particular bind. Take the story from heise online covering this takedown notice. They are, themselves, German. They've been asked to "remove all links to www.allofmp3.com" (sic - no using your copy-and-paste functionality there, kiddies). In the story covering these events they have one hyperlinked word and one literal reading of the URL. Which of these will be considered "objectively supporting the illegal dissemination of copyright protected sound recordings" is anyone's guess.

Next, I'm sure, the Cartel's lawyers will be asking Google, Yahoo! et al to edit their search results not to return hits to these sites. It feels like we keep revisiting this "Is Linking Legal?" question every few months.

Last week, IBM announced a dual-core version of the PowerPC 970 along with another low-power version. This comes just one month after Steve Jobs dropped the Intel bombshell at the WorldWide Developers Conference. With Jobs naming IBM's failure to provide a low-power CPU for laptops as one of the reasons for dropping PowerPC CPUs after 11 years. What gives?

Hannibal lifts the embargo on some information that he had been holding close to the vest, and there are a couple of surprises. There's definitely more to the story than meets the eye—think video iPod.

Via Ars Technica

LightSurf has developed a technology that allows different cell phones and providers to share photos and video. Yesterday, Sprint and T-Mobile USA announced an agreement to let subscribers exchange pictures and video. Earlier, Cingular struck an agreement with No. 2 carrier Verizon Wireless allowing their subscribers to send mixed-media messages to each other. Technology from LightSurf, owned by VeriSign makes it possible.

LightSurf GX-MMS (below) enables subscribers to send and receive photos and videos. Currently, third parties like TextAmerica, provide that interoperability, but most cell phones don't allow direct exchange of photos or video clips between different carriers.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

great tip on keeping up with torrents using Gmail

"First, find a few good RSS feeds for BitTorrent downloads. I'm using a feed each from Mininova.org, Rokanova.org, and NewTorrents.info.

Next, go and visit the free RSS-to-email service RssFwd and subscribe to your chosen feed(s).

Lastly, log on to your Gmail account and create the appropriate label(s) and filter(s)."

The open-source swarmbot concept continues to spread.

We've touched on the subject before, but a recap may be fruitful: in order to better understand changing local environmental conditions (for agriculture, conservation, health, etc.), it helps to have a multiplicity of sensors providing data streams; those sensors can cover more area if they're mobile; rather than having to control each individual mobile sensor, "swarming" or "flocking" behaviors allow the bots to position themselves to maximize coverage yet retain local communication; by making the project free/open-source, people in low-income or resource-restricted communities can still take advantage of the system's capabilities.

The Flockbot Project, at the computer science department of George Mason University, is an attempt to design mobile, swarming robots able to perform useful actions, all at a (relatively) low cost.

This website describes an open design for a small, $800 robot suitable for "swarm"-style multiagent research, robotics education, and other tasks. Our goal is to get as much functionality as possible from $800 per robot, replicate the robot many times to create a small collaborative swarm, and document the results to make it easier for you to do the same. We hope to foster collaboration in the wider community and, ultimately, lower the entry-level costs for building such robots.

The robot design is remarkably complex, given the limited resources. It combines a Linux-based computer, wireless networking, a camera, a gripper, and multiple IR sensors, all on a 7" diameter wheeled platform. Future modifications include a move to a smaller control system, better mobility, and a price cut to below $500.

The Flockbots site focuses on the design and construction, with little information about actual experimental use. But the online materials are more than sufficient for hobbyists and hackers to follow in their footsteps. Who will be the first to use garage robot swarms in the field?

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Tech Bloom – Collaborative and Emergent Technologies at 03:01 PM)

...in the US, that is. The Los Angeles Times reports (registration required, try BugMeNot) that, by the end of 2004... there were 181.1 million cellphone subscribers, compared with 177.9 million access lines into U.S. homes and businesses, the Federal Communications Commission said in a biannual report. [...]

ago, the industry had 25 million customers... it should pass 200 million this year.

India reached this point last year, as well, underscoring just how global the mobile information transformation is.

(Via Engadget)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 11:40 AM)

Speaking from the Sun Valley media mogul retreat, Summer Redstone declared that the "age of the conglomerate is over."

Via Lost Remote

Al Gore says he wants Current (launching August 1 in about 19 million households) to give voice to the voiceless and bring the interactivity of the Internet to TV by letting vloggers out on the airwaves. In this article at Salon.com the voiceless are already expressing their doubts if the promise is deliverable. Is the revolution already on? Check for yourself at www.current.tv, where a number of submitted shorts are viewable.

Via Lost Remote

Another day, another PSP hack. The madmen at PSPUpdates.com posted PVNC v1.1, a VNC client for the PSP that allows you to connect to and control other computers running a VNC server. The program recreates the desktop of a remote computer on your PSP screen, a boon for the busy sysadmin who doesn't want to leave the toilet stall where he/she is playing Lumines to check on a server.

In related news, they've also created a nice FTP client for downloading non-pirated ISOs. Non-pirated. Remember that.

Related
Retail PSP Games Run from MemoryStick
American PSPs Run Unsigned Code: DRM Still Important, Says DRM Makers


PVNC v1.1 Released for your PSP [PSPUpdates via i4u]

The Eskimos have 27 words for snow … The Great Wall of China is the only manmade object you can see from space … there is more than 20% of the value locked up in the Long Tail.  These are all myths that have such romantic power, you just want to believe them – but they are myths.

Before the Long Tail (a wonderful, well-written article by Chris Anderson that appeared in Wired Magazine a while back) there was Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who created a mathematical formula in 1906 to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country.  He observed that twenty percent of the people in Italy owned eighty percent of the wealth.  In the 1940’s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran attributed his own observation of "vital few and trivial many" to the 80/20 Rule which he called “Pareto’s Law” or the “Pareto Principle.”

That’s enough history.  The practical reality is that in almost all of the observable universe the 80/20 rule applies.  20% of the distribution embodies 80% of the substance.  You fill in the discipline, you fill in the variables, it holds up time and time again.  If you make a graph of Pareto’s Principle, you get a bell-shaped curve … The Big Hump.

Now, one of the few places it does not hold up is in the area of Video On Demand or Video Rentals and of course, the business of hits. Hits are unusual (not hits to your website) hit records, hit movies, hit books, etc.  They follow a different curve known as a Zipf’s Distribution. Originally the term Zipf's law meant the observation of Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf that the frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n.

The classic case of Zipf's law is a "1/f function". Given a set of Zipfian distributed frequencies, sorted from most common to least common, the second most common frequency will occur 1/2 as often as the first. The third most common frequency will occur 1/3 as often as the first. The nth most common frequency will occur 1/n as often as the first.  Zipf's law is an experimental law, not a theoretical one. Zipfian distributions are commonly observed in many kinds of phenomena.  The curve that illustrates Zipf’s law looks like a long tail (hence the title of Mr. Anderson’s article). 

Since both of these distribution models are fairly common in everyday life, why would I have the temerity to call the Long Tail a myth?  Let’s review: With regard to content (audio and video on the Internet), there is a pretty good theoretical argument (note the word theoretical) to be made for the value proposition of the long tail.  After all, in theory, it goes on forever and it is full of valuable things like old Sidney Bechet and Bunk Johnson recordings. If you had the pleasure of hearing these guys play, you would immediately understand that the 78 RPM records from which the files were made are truly priceless.  These artists, by default, have a place on the long tail.  But, how will you find them and if you do, who will get paid? (Fodder for a different article, sorry for the digression.) You may have heard of these guys and even be willing to search for their stuff, but who has heard of the 70’s disco band Demon Rum whose recordings are also on the tail?

There is a very real point where marginal cost exceeds marginal gain and it happens very close to the borderline of the top 20% of the selections available on the long tail.  So, in essence, The Big Hump (my name for the bell curve that illustrates Pareto’s Law) is still the appropriate model for investors and content owners to follow.

Take a movie that already exists.  Retain counsel (internal or external) to get all of the appropriate clearances for reduction of the work to the final form factor – ones and zeros.  Rent a film chain and color correction suite for the day.  Make a 4K file of the entire movie.  Down-convert it to every usable format for current distribution (Windows Media, Real, Quicktime, etc.) now create files in every resolution required from 56k up. (56k, 300k, 500k, 800k, 1.2Meg, etc.) Now the fun starts.  Create meta-tags and descriptions that are meaningful to search engines so people can find the work.  Add a DRM (digital rights management) wrapper, so you can get paid.  Come on, take a guess … how much have we spent on this single title?  Call it $15,000 sitting on a server ready to go.  Now remember, we don’t know who wants to watch this movie, we are just sure that in time, every movie will be watched according to the Zipfian distribution.  Add the cost of money to this equation and multiply by every title in your library.  Still sound like a good idea?

I didn’t think so.  You probably want to do an analysis to determine which movies are the best investments: Which will bring the best return in the shortest time frame.  In other words, you will apply The Big Hump to the Long Tail to determine if your content is worth encoding at all.

But isn’t the Long Tail an accurate way to look a content usage?  Yes, it is.  It’s just not a profitable way to look at a back catalog that was not created with the Long Tail in mind.  The marginal cost of creating these files for a current production is diminimus.  It is never less expensive than in the original edit suite.  But after the fact, there are very real costs associated with encoding and storage.  When you calculate those costs and the cost of capital, the value chain (or lack thereof) is clear.

So, as it has been for time immemorial, The Big Hump is the clear winner for modeling return on investment in the information age or any other.  No disrespect to those who have been spinning the tale of the Long Tail.

UK broadcaster Channel 4 has announced it is to make all of its television programming available for streaming over the internet.

The service is set to launch by the end of the year, and will see all television programmes broadcast to televisions simulcast over the internet via an in-house-developed media player.

Ethertouch is working with the likes of Nokia, Bang & Olufsen and Microsoft to create applications for its touch-free technology, which can sense your finger movements in 3D. The system would replace keypads or mice with non-tactile control via motions or gestures that will enable you to simply point at a desired area of a display screen and zoom in on the relevant section.



An array of Ethertouch sensors track the position and velocity of your finger or hand as it passes through the field and convert the data into a digital signal, which is then processed.

This ability to measure velocity as well as position makes the technology particularly attractive to the computer games industry, where it could enable a new level of immersion in VR gaming.

The touch-free interfaces could appear on the market by the end of next year.

Via The Engineer Online.

Other Minority Report-like interfaces: Geo-spatial gestural interface, "Data-rich" environment for scientific discovery, Raytheon's, etc.

Law enforcement officials want to eavesdrop on air passengers' internet use with a court order. The federal agencies are concerned that terror attacks could be coordinated using new in-flight broadband connections. By Kevin Poulsen.

A description of agents and an ontology for supporting entertainment and broadcasting applications.

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

Over a billion text messages are sent every month by India’s 56 million mobile phone subscribers. SMS is especially popular with young people for whom the mobile phone is a welcome and private channel of communication with members of the opposite sex. Especially important in a country where ‘dating’ still does not enjoy widespread parental sanction.
The soaring popularity of SMS has inspired 52 year old musician Remo Fernandes to compose a pop track: ‘Love on SMS’ in his new album. In the video, Remo plays a Pied Piper kind of character who helps a young boy fumbling to declare his love for a girl. Remo hands him a cellphone and tells him “SMS is the way to do it.” The video is being premiered - where else - but on a mobile phone. (via our sister site ContentSutra)

Sony Connect, the online/digital music service from Sony (which is among the worst services in the market currently), has formed a mobile division–called Sony Connect Mobile–and is hiring for multiple positions (go down the page to “Marketing”). Connect has been repositioned as the digital media brand (not just music, but movies and others media products)…
I’m assuming this is the division that would work with Sony Ericsson’s Walkman phone division….

My question: what then happens to Sony Pictures Digital, the division which works on Sony Picture’s mobile products and services. Has this been morphed into Sony Connect? Or is this the famous Sony dysfunctional family at work? If you know, e-mail me and put it in comments…

: Walt Mossberg tries podcasting. "The good news is that, with its iTunes move, Apple has made receiving podcasts as simple as downloading music. The bad news is that neither Apple nor anyone else has made it nearly as simple to create a podcast and get it online as it is to create and post a text and photo blog. Until that happens, podcasting won't be truly mainstream."

-- Mark Cuban compares streaming a decade ago to podcasting now. "For those who are tying to jump on the podcasting bandwagon and create a 'hit' podcast that you plan on selling advertising in, it's cheap and easy to do, but even with Google Adsense for RSS it's going to be really tough to do it as a fulltime job and make minimum wage back. Podcasting is right where streaming was about 10 years ago. Before you dive into podcasting as 'the next big thing', you would be wise to do some homework on how the streaming industry evolved. Try to find any of the many that created original content for PSEUDO.com, TSN, EYADA.com, Broadcast.com and others that i have long forgotten. There is a good chance that their history is your future."
Be sure to read the comments.

-- Over at Corante, Matt May takes a critical look at Apple's foray into podcasting. He notes mostly positive reviews since the 4.9 iTunes launch but chides Apple for failing to communicate with podcasters, for causing bandwidth problems and for lagging behind on its podcast directory. (Mossberg singled out several issues with the directory, including long lag times and inconsistancy about which podcasts get listed.) May also highlights Apple's creation of a new RSS 2.0 element without working with the RSS community. "Apple has time to fix all of these problems and regain the goodwill of podcasters. But they will need to deal with us directly..."

"Though less than a year old, the RocketBoom video blog has seen a dramatic growth in popularity reaching recently over 200,000 downloads in a week.

RocketBoom doesn't cost thousands of dollars to produce, though ver 4 hours a day have to be spent on scripting, shooting, editing, titling and encoding the daily RocketBoom show before it goes live. Since it does take all those hours to create a 3-minute piece, our friends work often the night before until late to make sure their show goes online by 9am the next day."

YOU-WHO is a social game for mobile phones that makes use of the personal area networks created by Bluetooth technology to allow players to connect, play with, and meet new people.



(Thanks Adam !)

The game can be played in any public space where people tend to linger, such as a train station, airport, café or bar. With these varied public settings, the chances are that every time you play, it will be with a completely different person, and result in a unique game experience.

here is a pdf and a walkthrough on how YOU-WHO works

Darren and I presented an hour-long Ask The Experts session at at Flash Forward in New York this morning.

Slides from our talk are available for download. There are also BSD-licensed demo files that demonstrate Flash implementations of various map projections and some helpful linear algebra.

Five articles I need to read very soon, in Seth's Transparent Bundles:

1. Media Futures: AUTOMATA: "The most exciting new Internet companies are focused on lead generation, behavioral targeting, co-registration paths (aka coreg) and domain name brokerage. I seem to stumble every day across some new firm propping itself up on the shoulders of Google, Yahoo! or others to take advantage of a current wrinkle in an otherwise perfectly efficient landscape."
2. Media Futures: ALGORITHM: "An Algorithm is a set of instructions or procedures for solving a problem. In the same way that computer scientists 50 years ago focused on the single problem of designing a general purpose computer, there is a similar focus in 2005 among leading Internet service architects: creating a social media computer that leverages user generated content to automate the production of commercial content."
3. Media Futures: API: "...But now, in tackling the concept of API, even as it relates to something familiar like Internet Advertising, I am intimated by the history of professional, enterprise computing...."
4. Media Futures: ALCHEMY: "In considering Alchemy as it relates to the Internet, I have been spending my time trying to reconstruct my college readings of Walter Benjamin, the beautifully melancholy German essayist from the 30's."
5. Media Futures: ARBITRAGE (II, III, IV, V): "Arbitrage is the fifth and final part of the Media Futures series. It has taken me a full month to establish enough contexts for the word so as not to reduce its meaning."

Linux frees iPod's inner recording studio

Via sLop

Intel has banded together with well-known technologist Morgan Freeman (hey, he was the tech guy in Batman Begins) to form a new movie-download venture, ClickStar, because, you know, the movie download business is just booming. But what makes Intel think it can succeed where others haven't is that it plans to release movies for download before they're available on DVD, because, you know, you can't already do that on pay-per-view without having to hook your PC up to your TV, and it sounds like movie studios -- the most progressive of businesses -- will be really receptive to anything that could cut into their DVD sales revenues. But the most laughable claim comes from the company's CEO, who says ClickStar's motto is "Anytime, anyplace, on any device." Presuming that device has an Intel chip. And supports Windows Media DRM. And you're in the right part of the world. But hey, did you see Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman there?

Via Techdirt

Price wars between DSL and cable providers helped lead a surge in new broadband homes. DSL led the charge with a 45% jump in 2004.

Via Lost Remote

You can create a real-time GPS tracker using Google Maps API. Don't worry about having a GPS device, you can emulate a garmin using GPSGate. Then later you purchase fancy gps devices and JunxionBox. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

Web show from Robert X. Cringely coming this fall. NerdTV is pretty much as I described it back in 2002: a downloadable video show that features long-form interviews with notable nerds. I was definitely ahead of the curve with that download feature. What has changed about the show is just the episode length, which is now about an hour up from 20 or so minutes, and the bandwidth required, now 183 kilobits-per-second up from 128. [via] Link.

Send parts of webpages to mobile phones over SMS

The shoebox is a system for bookmarking photos that are stored around the web (e.g. Webshots, Flickr, blogs, other websites).

"Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?)."

Malleable modules can be as convenient as ringtones to purchase, while the Social Remixes that are created with them are dynamic, connection-based services.

"There is a contradiction in the current marketplace – as CD sales are falling, ringtone sales are exploding. Music has deep cultural value, while ringtones are basically sound icons. Why are people ready to pay for a ringtone when they expect to access music for free?"

I know this is a bit off-topic for HackingNetflix, but I'm helping host an OPML meeting in NYC on Tuesday, July 12th at 7pm. Dave Winer will be demonstrating his new OPML editor and he says we'll have a "conference-room style meetup to talk about OPML, publishing, knowledge, scholarship, news and the World Outline."

If you're wondering what OPML is, here's the Wikipedia page on OPML.

Here's the location of the meeting:

Steve Smith at Ritchie Capital has generously offered the use of their 38th floorconference room (great view of midtown skyscrapers, including the Chrysler Building). A fairly inspiring location. 747 Third Ave (at 46th).

Post your name in the comments before noon on Tuesday if you're attending. I have to give the list of names to security and if your name is not on the list they will not let you in the building (be sure to bring a photo ID, too).

E-mail me if you have any questions (mikek at hackingnetflix.com).

JotSpot Live is a real-time wiki interface that allows multiple users to edit the same page at the same time. Calling it “SubEthaEdit for the web” is an oversimplification, but that’s probably the quickest way to wrap your head around the concept.

Amazon.com has acquired CustomFlix, a company that publishes on-demand DVD titles. [Hacking NetFlix]

Via Cinema Minima

With this Free Art License, you are authorised to copy, distribute and freely transform the work of art while respecting the rights of the originator.

Daisy is a comprehensive content management application framework, consisting of a standalone repository server accessible through HTTP/XML (using the ReST style of WebServices) and/or a high-level (remote) Java API, and an extensive browsing and editing DaisyWiki application running inside Apache Cocoon.

The CC-Mixter web site has been rewritten by Victor Stone as a free-range open source app named ccHost and they're looking for beta testers.

What's it all about?:

The goal of this project is to spread media content that is licensed under Creative Commons throughout the web in much the same way that weblogs spread CC licensed text. The more installations of ccHost and its variations, the more content there will be available for enjoyment and artistic re-use in a sane and legal setting.

Via the weblog of Lucas Gonze

(via techdirt) With continuing questions and complaints about who gets to govern the internet, it looks like some are trying to build another internet that won't be mostly controlled by the US. Apparently, the idea would be to do away with TLDs completely.

More than 150 countries around the world are expected to nominate digital content in a variety of categories, such as e-government, e-education and e-entertainment, to compete among each other for the international award, to be announced later this fall.

So, the next generation XBox360 is going to have all sorts of cool multimedia abilities and its connectivity through XBox Live is being heavily touted (XBox360 Fact Sheet).

So, will Microsoft dare permit podcasting to the XBox? If they do, which artists will they allow to try to reach this market? How might podcasting be integrated with games? I think of the faux-radio stations in Grand Theft Auto, as a very basic example.

Dare we imagine the possibities for broadcatching video content, say for example, machinima? Doesn't it make sense to deliver machinima film festivals to gamers who would subscribe?

How forward thinking is Microsoft?

UPDATE 1530PT

What better way to deliver short video reviews of upcoming XBox titles? Of course, Microsoft could simply use it as some sort of advertising channel, but why not let known, responsible outlets have access to provide podcasts/broadcatch for their independent reviews?

Imagine a Penny Arcade feed - why not?

By Mark Glaser: Embarrassing juxtapositions have plagued contextual ads on media sites and blogs. But they can fit well with commercially focused content. Here's a deeper look at the pros and cons of AdSense and ContentMatch.

A beautiful vision from Derek Slater:

My hope is that these burgeoning taste-sharing tools can help restart a conversation about how technology can unleash a richer musical culture. We should be celebrating what technology can do for music. Who could object to consumers enjoying music more, enjoying a greater diversity of music, being more creative, engaging music more deeply, and coming together with each other because of music? That's the positive vision I'd like to explore in relation to these tools.

I think a lot about how the internet will change music itself, not just the distribution methods and containers but also the meaning.

Maybe musicians who can make good music on a bloggy schedule will prosper, and going faster will require a looser and more improvisational style.

Maybe popular musicians will have a more human and less god-like presence.

Maybe there will be more quiet music, made by people in their home studio for people listening on the PC in their bedroom.

Maybe songs will get longer as radio becomes less important.

Maybe listeners will learn to expect music to be more conversational, and remixes will become a major genre.

I've run across a couple composer bloggers, avant-classical types who put out a new piece of music once a week or so. And Smoothouse puts out mashups and remixes on blogspot. Are there other musicians like this?

If an online poker website with a questionable business model where the vast majority of its customers are probably breaking the law can go public at a ridiculous valuation, then perhaps we are reaching back into the ridiculous bubble years. And, what better type of company to pump up that bubble than a blogging company? Hopefully, something was just lost in the translation on this one, but the Blog Herald points out that a Chinese blog provider is hoping to go public in the US with a $1 billion valuation. There's a lot that just doesn't seem right about this story -- so it would be nice to see what really happens. First, anyone can say they want to go public at a particular valuation -- but actually doing so is a very different story. And, considering the two sources for the article are the company's founder/CEO and its primary investor, you have to imagine they have the incentive to pump up the possibility of a huge deal. Still, almost none of the additional numbers provided make any sense. The article notes that the company raised a seed round of $500 million -- which has to be a typo. If it's true, it's ridiculous. There's no way any blogging software provider would ever need that much cash -- and it's hard to understand why anyone would ever seed a company with that much. To support the idea that this has to be at typo, the company says it's about to raise a second round of $10 million. If the seed was $500 million and the next round is $10 million, you have to imagine that those new investors aren't getting any noticeable amount of equity. Also, if the company actually does go public the $1 billion you have to wonder how much of a return any of the investors could see -- as they already pumped half that in cash into the venture. The next problem with the numbers is they hype up how much money the company is making, shifting over to yuan instead of dollars to make it even more confusing. However, doing a quick currency conversion suggests that the company is making about $250,000/month, which might be a decent small business, but the company is going to need some hefty growth numbers to ever be worth a billion dollars. Finally, of course, there's the general business model question. The company makes its money by putting ads on peoples' blogs. Of course, there are a ton of blogging products out there that won't put ads on the sites, or that will let people put their own ads on their own sites -- allowing users to make money. So, even if this company makes some money, it's hard to see how it's sustainable.

Via Techdirt

As news and first pictures start to emerge of the carnage caused by multiple bomb blasts on the London Underground (the Tube) blogs and bloggers are providing news that cant be gathered elsewhere (the BBC is currently offline, possibly due to traffic)

The Guardian Newsblog is providing up to date reports from the chaos that combines the strength of the mainstream press with the imediacy of blogging.

Across the Atlantic has up to the minute reports from the BBC TV coverage.

More shortly as this is still breaking news, watch this space for updates

Updates: ABC TV here in Australia is running a live feed from the BBC: reports highly confused, 1, maybe more buses where bombs have exploded, multiple tube stations, reports of bodies in the street, 7 mbomb sites, mixed reports of “security incidents” in other English towns. BBC and CNN websites are both off line as at 10:20 GMT

Reaching for Lucidity is covering the story from Littlehampton.

Technorati coverage: bomb and London bomb. Flickr photos here

Mayor of London Blog…Bethlet is fine.

Another update: reports that the Army is being deployed onto London streets.

Moblog.uk.com (alfie’s page, cant link directly to it) has a shot taken from the underground directly after one of the bombs taken from a phonecam. scary. (same pic now on Flickr here)

As per comments Syntagma is covering the story, as is Darren Rowse at the Livingroom blog.

More: tip from Paul Short: Kids and Coping with ADHD is covering things as well

More: BBC on blogs covering the bombings.

: Verizon's first video deal for its FiOS TV puts 10 Turner Broadcasting channels in the programming lineup: CNN, TBS, TNT, Headline News, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, CNN International, CNN en Espanol and TNT in HD. (HBO and its networks are a different division.) It's a good move for both, particularly if being first in gives Turner most-favored-nation status that would promise matching license fees if others sign on at higher prices. It also puts Turner in the awkward but unavoidable position of bolstering the telecom's plans to compete head-to-head against corporate sibling Time Warner Cable for video customers. Other programmers are in a similar situation; Comcast owns a number of networks likely on Verizon's list including E!, The Golf Channel and regional sports nets. Press release.

Another move shows Turner's need -- and desire -- to move in multiple directions to get the most value from its programming: CNN.com's long-awaited broadband news feed. The plans have been pushed back several times so the working title of "CNN Pipeline"," as provided by TVNewser, sounds apropos for what is described as a 12-hour, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. eastern feed aimed at office workers who don't have access to the cable news net at work. CNN execs have been promising something new and unique; how it will differ from ABC News Now remains to be seen.

: This is sure to get my favorite browser Opera into trouble, and a lot of geek love: the next version of Opera, 8.02, will have an embedded BitTorrent P2P client.
BetaNews: Although Opera has not officially announced the beta, which is dubbed a "technology preview," the release is available from the company's FTP server.
Something similar to this is also in works for Mozilla...

Via PaidContent.org

As Friendster has methodically dropped out of existence - completely proving the theory that if you treat your users like shit - they will leave - MySpace has proven - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that if you GIVE your end-users what they want and a hot social environment to hang in - they will come - in droves.

3.9B page views in May '05.

Bands are getting signed, fans are finding new music and new friends and everyone seems happy.

Lesson to learn?

Maybe we can KEEP delivering value added experiences to people - and maybe more money will get made. Cause we certainly have plenty of evidence of what NOT to do - by now - right?

What befuddles me is Ziff-Davis. We set them up with a goldmine and yet they've squandered the opportunity. Oh well.

[via staci and PaidContent.org]

This Fall, Eyebeam R&D will launch the OpenLab, a new facility dedicated to public domain R&D.

We are seeking inaugural fellows to join us at Eyebeam. The ideal fellow has experience creating innovative creative technology projects, a love of collaborative development, and a desire to distribute his or her work as widely as possible. We encourage artists, hackers, designers and engineers to apply.

Participation in the R&D Fellows program includes:

• One year fellowship
• 4 days/week commitment
• $30,000 annual stipend + health benefits

Public Domain
Work created within the Open Lab will be widely distributed and freely available under open licenses. All code will be released under GPL, media will be released under Creative Commons, and hardware projects will be released with Do-It-Yourself instruction kits. The fellowship is a unique opportunity to participate in a new kind of research environment and contribute directly to the public domain.

Previous Work
The Open Lab builds on previous work developed within Eyebeam R&D. Some earlier projects include:

reBlog, ForwardTrack, FundRace, Contagious Media, Social Network Soiree, ACCESS, Carnivore, Noderunner

Extended project information is available on the R&D Areas of Research page

Facilities
The new Open Lab facilities are directly adjacent to a public gallery. Tools include a laser cutter, 3D printer, fully equipped electronics workbenches, multiple co-located servers, and general supplies. We also have a budget to requisition equipment to realize specific projects.

Application
Please submit your application here by August 15th; fellowships will begin in the Fall of 2005 (flexible start date).

Jonah Peretti and Michael Frumin will evaluate the applications with input from a special advisory committee.

If you have any questions, please email openlab@eyebeam.org

Advisory Committee
An advisory committee with expertise in creative technology development and public domain advocacy will assist in the selection process. The current members of this advisory committee are:

Mitch Kapoor
President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, Founder of Lotus Development Corporation, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

Joi Ito
General Manager of International Operations for Technorati, chairman of Six Apart Japan, Board member of Creative Commons, ICANN, the Open Source Initiative (OSI), and SocialText, and CEO of Neoteny.

Jason Kottke
Pioneering weblogger, designer, and technology enthusiast.

Via Eyebeam reBlog

Great article on vlogging.

"In the world's other high-profile democratization, the global democratization of media, vlogs appear to be the next stage. Whether by adding amateur video to blogs or by making video the focus, vloggers open windows into worlds, establishing direct lines of communication with content at once compelling and completely unfiltered by mainstream media."

Almost immediately, after posting their first coverage of the London bombing, BBC News had a page up to accept text, pictures, and video of the incident.

Small screens spell T-U-R-K-E-Y. Sales of movies for the Sony’s Playstation Portable (PSP) and Mini-DVD aren’t breaking box office records. Maybe consumers don’t like watching flicks on the small screen? By Holly Wagner. [Wired News]

From a particulalry unexciting article, a "new phrase" is born:

"Continuous partial attention is that state most of us enter when we're in front of a computer screen, or trying to check out at the grocery store with a cellphone pressed to an ear -- or blogging the proceedings of a conference while it's underway. We're aware of several things at once, shifting our attention to whatever's most urgent -- perhaps the chime of incoming e-mail, or the beep that indicates the cellphone is low on juice. It's not a reflective state."

For the first time in a while, I did not bring my laptop to any of the sessions at ALA (mostly because I didn't want to lug it between three hotels), using the old standard (pen and a notebook) to take notes on the sessions and then, hopefully, to blog about them when I returned to my hotel. I'll tell ya, I loved it. I'll admit that a good portion of my time blogging conference sessions is attempting to log onto any wi-fi signal. Without my laptop, I didn't have to futz with anything. It was liberating!

That said, I think that "Continuous Partial Attention" (CPA) took place anyway, although not as pronounced. CPA is going to take place at any conference session, unless you are sitting in a vacuum in a dark room where nobody can see, hear, or breathe on you. When I go to conference sessions, I usually sit next to someone who I haven't seen in quite a while and we whisper to each other while taking notes. In addition, we are also glued to the screen on the wall (PowerPoint or not, it will distract from what is being presented), or looking through handouts or figuring out where to go next (lunch, another presentation, or the exhibit hall) or who to meet.

My point: CPA will happen at every conference presentation. It's inevitable.

The vast majority of Internet users have changed their surfing habits to avoid spyware and other online threats, according to a study released today by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

If you're looking to control other PCs via a Playstation Portable, there's a new beta out that will allow just that. Uses the D-pad as the mouse and the PSP soft keyboard to enter text. PVNC Beta 1 release, still a little laggy, but will be faster in future releases. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

Places which are more accessible seem to get "closer" to each other while less accessible places become isolated. This fact affects our perception of the earth.

The main purpose of the Personal World Map is to give awareness of your actual position in the world in relation to other places by taking into account the "effort" you need to get to a certain destination.



Because the PWM is based on flight data, this effort is defined not only by time (travel time) but also by money (ticket fares). To visualize such "effort", the world map is immersed in travel time space and money space. These spaces are constantly changing and constitute geometries that follow different rules than Euclidean geometries.

You can choose the center of your world, and the PWM will be based on your time and money availability, showing the physical world and the actual possibilities for its exploration.

However, a more exhaustive look into the PWM reveals global issues such as the travel costs closeness of Europe, North America and East Asia, and the isolation of Africa.

Developed by Roxana Torre .

Via Informationlab.

A new communications tool that "whispers" on busy radio channels could enable broadband Internet services for on-the-go wireless devices or hook-up homes that cannot yet get fast Web access.

xMax, from xG Technologies, is a very quiet radio system that uses radio channels already filled up with noisy pager or TV signals. The system can emit signals that are too weak to be picked up by normal antennas, but that can be "heard" by special aerials which know where to "listen", thus enabling dual usage of the same scarce radio spectrum.

The technology could interest a telecoms or Internet operator with no radio spectrum because it can begin a wireless broadband service with very few base stations and add more stations as demand rises. It is also appealing for rural areas which operators find too costly to cover with the current 3G cellphone networks which need base stations every few miles.

The first xMax network is currently being built in Miami and Fort Lauderdale where one base station can deliver broadband Internet over a 40 square mile area.

Via IOL and TechWorld.

We like things that are free even more than we like things that relate to Google Maps, and when you put those two things together — man, that’s some synergy. Mobile GMaps is a Creative Commons-licensed app that’ll run on your Java J2ME-enabled cellphone (or other mobile device) to display both Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery. It’s the next best thing to actually cultivating an inner sense of direction.

[Via textually]

This sounds familiar...

Floogle SMS extends the Google SMS service with a user friendly Macromedia Flash Lite front end, enabling you to make Google queries without the need to remember short codes, query types etc.

from Mobile & Devices Gallery: Flash Content Contest Winners

Btw: According to Macromedia and Page 08.2005 there are now 35 millions mobile devices with a preinstalled Flash Lite Player. Nokia, Samsung and SonyEricsson have a Flash Lite licence. The leading country is again Japan where 15% of the population have a mobile device with a preinstalled Flash Lite player.

See also:
madsb.com, the creator of Floogle SMS
FlashCast

Cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito was one of the sources for my Smart Mobs research; she's now a researcher at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication. Together with cognitive psychology Dausuke Okabe of Keio University's Keitai Lab and Misa Matsuda, Ito has edited Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, an MIT Press book on mobile communication practices in Japan. This issue of Vodafone's receiver is dedicated to articles about mobile communications in Asia. . Okabe and Ito's contribution is a provocative and surprising ethnographic portrait of the way cameraphones have become a new kind of communication medium in Japan:

Most photos taken by camera phones are not sent or shown to others, but are captured more as a personal visual archive. Not posed, staged, or particularly well-framed, they are snapped casually, with the intention of recording a momentary slice of a viewpoint on everyday life. Most of these images are pedestrian and unremarkable; some are more personally significant. For example, a female college student says “… I took the photo of my professor’s profile … this photo is just an omamori (good luck amulet)”. In Japan, people often carry omamori simply to have a trusted spirit close by. This student sees her photo as a similar kind of presence.

Within the broader ecology of personal record-keeping and archiving technologies, camera phone images occupy a niche that is more personal, fleeting, and commonplace. One participant says, “The camera phone is my eye. The personal viewpoint is the most important thing”. These are not random photos, but are rather an individual’s visual perspective on everyday life, archived on a small screen always at hand.

"In most story-based games where you get to talk to characters, interaction is limited to selecting conversation options from a menu. Facade calls itself a one-act interactive drama, and is an attempt to create realistic 3D AI characters acting in a real-time interactive story, where you can talk to them via a natural language text interface. The player is cast as a visiting longtime friend of Grace and Trip, a couple in their early thirties, and ends up in a verbal crossfire resulting from their failing marriage. More info in the press release, an older conveniently mirrored NYT article and an Idle Thumbs review. It's available in the form of a rather chunky 800MB torrent."

It's time to put our collective thinking heads together and figure out if Jupiter Research's report entitled "Municipal Wireless: Partner to Spread Risks and Costs While Maximizing Benefit Opportunities" has any merit. Jupiter estimates that the average cost of building and maintaining a municipal wireless network is $150,000 per square mile over five years. They claim that 50% of current initiatives will fail to breakeven "even if the benefit of the initiative is assumed to be $25 per user per month."

I have not read the report but I saw a short article about it here.

"Because the benefits of municipal wireless networks are inherently difficult to measure, and because it is too early to look at outcomes, examining breakeven thresholds provides the best reference point for decision-makers," stated Jay Horwitz, Senior Analyst at JupiterResearch.

If any of you have read the report and agree or disagree, let me know and I will post your comments.

Here we go. I have made the "Video New England" project live at my site, NECN.com. People should be able to upload video directly to us from their desktops. We have built it... will they come?

Earlier: Sneak peek at NECN's Video New England, with Boston Globe article

CBS News President Andrew Heyward has asked a group of correspondents and producers to gather additional material as part of their current assignments that can be used to experiment with various styles of storytelling on the CBS Evening News, reports the LA Times. I imagine this will dovetail nicely with CBS Digital chief Larry Kramer's plans to showcase additional material on the web. Stay tuned, Heyward plans to pitch the sample idea to CBS Chairman Les Moonves in the coming months.

(Frontline's been doing this with much success for years. Good to see others finally getting it. -kc.)

Scoopt, a new service, offers to represent you in selling your cameraphone pix of news events to the press:

Who will take tomorrow's front page photograph - a professional press photographer or a passer-by armed with a cameraphone?

Virtually everybody now has a mobile phone, and virtually every mobile phone now comes with a camera. Britain on Britain supplementThis means that somebody, somewhere is in a position to photograph just about anything that happens on the planet.

If you photograph a newsworthy event, you could have a valuable scoop on your hands. Scoopt represents you, making sure the right people see your photo and ensuring that you get a good deal.

Via Smart Mobs

As we reported the game Lumines was the first Sony PSP game that runs from Memory Stick through the Code loader hack. Now Reuters picked up on the situation and reports that more games are already hacked.

The other games are Mercury, Coded Arms, Puzzle Bobble and Intelligent License.

Now that the big news networks picking up on the situation, Sony most likely will act soon. Sony, I suggest to release a Firmware with a nice web browser and WPA support, that will get a lot of people to upgrade.

SourceLabs has unveiled the first version of Swik, a community-based online catalog of open-source projects, which can be freely accessed and amended by end-users or developers, reports InfoWorld.

The Swik directory facilitates the sharing of information about open-source projects and includes project documentation, download sites, reviews and descriptions, using a Wiki structure for censor-free, user editable entries. It has lots of Linux, J2EE, LAMP and Ajax files.

SourceLabs sells support and maintenance subscriptions for tested, certified "stacks" of open source infrastructure software, but the software downloads are free of charge.

Source Forge is "the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications". They have a ton of free Communications and Internet applications for the downloading, including DailyWireless co-founder Don Park's AP Radar.

“Vast amounts of the knowledge and creative output of the last century is fated to turn to dust. Through technology we can blow off the dust and liberate these archives. Content can become the starting point for new stories instead of the final resting place for old ones."

I've written before about how podcasts are increasingly being targeted by advertisers as delivery mechanisms for their messages. The fact that iTunes now supports and lets people subscribe to podcasts (and the numbers for subscriptions have reportedly gone through the roof) only cements that this medium is here for a while. In fact, shortly after the launch of iTunes new release, Apple's Steve Jobs expressed his belief that ads will be "tagged onto" podcasts. But what does "tagged onto" mean? At first I thought he just meant ads would be part of the podcast, as they are now. But what if he's thinking of attaching a third party ad to the beginning of the podcast, something not produced by the show creator but which Apple would force to be played before the show proper started, much like video ads play before videos on CNN.com? An advertiser is sold space by Apple, who places the ad in front of the podcast in this scenario. Media buyers might be wary of dealing with some producing a podcast from their den but buying ad space from Apple is a no-brainer. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

posted by lendamico to podcasting... bookmark this

Still outraged by the criminal coverage of live8 event by MTV/VH1 ...

With their criminal (non)coverage of Live8 event last week, MTV and VH1 denied this generation of young people opportunity to engage in and create their own musical cultural signifier.

Text is here ...

The entertainment industry wants a broadcast flag (huh?) implemented so badly, one exec is trying to argue that the lack of one harms the emergency broadcast system. Ernest Miller and Techdirt explore how the argument is largely a straw man, designed to help push technology restrictions the public has clearly stated they don't want.

Via Broadbandreports

In an age when we're continuously told about the importance of intellectual property, it's amazing how few people understand the differences between the various types of intellectual property protection -- and how some use that ignorance to scare people into giving them all sorts of money. We recently noted that even politicians voting on the issue often don't know the difference between copyrights and patents, and how that could lead to more problems. However, it often seems like trademarks are the most misunderstood element of intellectual property protection -- leading to all sorts of wasted time and money in court. No wonder the lawyers love trademarks. The NY Times is running an article discussing how some guy claims to own the trademarks on a bunch of words, including "stealth," for "all goods and services." That's complete hogwash, of course. Like any other trademark, he only has the right to protect his brand against others using it in ways confusingly similar to ways that he is using it. Yet, he insists that no one else can use the word and sues any company that has a product with the word "stealth" in it -- including Northrup Grumman who tried to register a trademark on "the stealth bomber," an airplane they make. Can anyone seriously say that they would see a stealth bomber model set from Northrup Grumman and be confused that it was too similar to something made by this guy? The problem, though, is that even as he loses many of the cases that actually go to court, it's still too expensive (or too time consuming) for many of those he goes after to deal with. So they just pay him off -- and he continues to sue others. Basically, this guy has figured out ways to use the legal system to bully plenty of people and companies when he simply has no legal standing whatsoever. It's a pure misuse of intellectual property law to simply bully others to make money.

: The New York Times discovers advertisers and ad agencies want to use RSS as an advertising/marketing delivery system. No surprises -- if you're a regular reader here you already know there's increasing interest on multiple levels in making money from RSS even that has yet to translate into major dollars. Some see RSS feeds themselves as a marketing tool; others see ad insertion as a way of recouping ad revenue that may be missed when RSS subscribers skip the web site. Blogging and RSS PR specialist Steve Rubel is among those predicting RSS will take over as the primary one-way information conduit while e-mail will be primarily for communications.
-- Charles M. Smith, president and COO, Pheedo: The company is getting $0.50- $1.75 per click for RSS ads and 500-word ads work better than the brief text in search ads.
-- Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager, Google: "We need to preserve all of the things that are good about R.S.S. feeds right now and also introduce the opportunity for publishers to monetize those feeds."
-- Christian Romney, senior manager-e-commerce technology, Continental Airlines Vacations: "Over time, as R.S.S. continues to become more mainstream, we think it has the potential to compete with e-mail as an advertising medium."
-- Brad Adgate, research director, Horizon Media: "If they're getting the news they're interested in, because they said they're interested in it, then you have a very engaged consumer and that's appealing. They're very active, they're more likely to buy products online, to click on ads."

Via PaidContent.org

Fresh off its success with Live 8, AOL will announce a number of video deals with content providers HBO, New York Times digital, Warner Bros. Online, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the Times' About.com, Movielink, Broadway.com, CollegeHumor.com, and Jokaroo.com. (Free reg. req.)

MIT Technology Review: "Three digital-media technologies crossed a threshold last year; more than half of U.S. households now have a DVD player, a wireless phone, and Internet access...But what will make the biggest mark on the industry in the coming years? Digital video recorders, predict media executives."

Susan sez: How many media companies are starting to invest in digital video content? --A lot. Put the devices next to the boom in do it yourself media, the rise in video indexing, search, hosting and editing companies-- and you've got some new businesses--and revenue models?--emerging.

This is both a tutorial and an informational page about the Apple Podcast ChapterTool utility and Podcast Chapters in general. This article is a part of the iTunes tips entry. The tutorial section will show you how to add chapters, chapter images and chapter links to your podcasts. It is relatively technical, so hopefully a GUI based chapter tutorial program will come out soon, but in the meantime this is the best and only way to accomplish this task. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

Users are uploading copyrighted video like Family Guy episodes and the latest Matrix movie. Google says it's removing it as quickly as possible.

Doc Searls has an interesting post on his IT Garage blog, called AdTension. He's writing about the ability of users to block multiple types of online advertising, and how, to be successful in the online environment, advertisers need to understand that relationships with consumers must be built on something besides counting eyeballs. He writes:

We need to start imagining the marketplace as it exists now, and wants to exist, in the online world. This is a marketplace where customers are participants, and not just consumers. Where they are no longer just a mass of passive "eyeballs".

What can we do to enable conversations and relationships — and not just transactions — between sellers and buyers in a market category? This is a question we raised in The Cluetrain Manifesto more than six years ago; and we've still only begun to answer it.

What makes that question so hard to answer isn't what Bennie Smith calls "a negative vibe toward advertising". Its the persistent disdain by advertisers and media toward the customers they insult by calling "eyeballs".

This sounds remarkably like some of the justifications for engaging citizens in journalism. What would advertising look like that gave citizens broad and easily understood choices about what types of advertising to see, in what form, for what products, how and when? Choices that allowed them to engage and interact with the advertising, the product design, and with other consumers who have experience with the product?

What would a news site that practiced citizen journalism AND citizen advertising in the same place look like?

Stephen Baker wonders about how important blogs are (How to Appeal to Non-Bloggers? Think Virus Wikis).

I haven't been blogging. I've spent the best part of a week in Oregon, wandering from the misty coast to the high desert to the vineyards along the Columbia Gorge, and I have yet to meet anyone connected with the blog world in any way (at least as far as they told me.) To be fair, there were probably some bloggers or at least blog readers at those cafes in Portland and Bend. I didn't go around tapping on their tatooed shoulders.

Ok. And how many of those people with tatooed shoulders in those cafes read Business Week? Depending on the context, what medium doesn't seem disconnected? Isn't one of the major debates about broadcast television is that despite its wide reach it is pretty darn disconnected from the real world? Stephen continues:

My point is that blogging seems enormous and nearly omnipresent when you're doing it, but can seem marginal when you step away. Will blogging inevitably spread to rest of the world? I don't think so. Lots of people look at the computer as an information tool--a search engine and e-mail machine--but prefer to have most of their human interactions elsewhere.

But how long did it take email to really take off and become ubiquitous? I remember being exposed to email in the mid-1980s. It was very cool, sending a near instantaneous message across the country, getting two computers to talk to each other (which was a big deal at the time), but there weren't really very many people to email. Email was marginal. Very. Like email, blogs aren't a substitute for human interaction, they're a potential enhancement and it takes some time for them to propagate and be integrated into society.

It is still amazing to me how many people don't use TiVo. I can hardly stand to watch television without it. I grew up without the internet, yet it is difficult to imagine getting news without it. Currently, if I don't have access to my RSS subscription list, I feel disconnected. The internet, which just a few years ago was liberating for me, now feels limited and frustrating without RSS. Getting the news without RSS? Well, if you want to be all primitive about it, I guess you can try to make that work, but what a pain.

Do we need better tools? Absolutely. Do few people use blogs? Yes, but does that mean blogging is marginal? Only in the sense that all new technologies are marginal when they are first introduced. Ask whether blogs are marginal in ten years.

Fully automated music tv via sms voting. that's super. PunchMuch's screen will look something like CTV Newsnet, with several different feature running at once. The videos will dominate the screen, but there will also be the ticker with video titles that viewers can request, while other videos play. Viewers who want to request a song, can do so by text-messaging the network on their cellphone.

: Some IPTV related developments in the last week:
-- Ballmer denies technical problems with IPTV: Microsoft is on track to deliver version 1.0 of the MSTV IPTV Edition later this year, in time to support first customer deployments by the end of 2005, as planned.
-- IPTV grows up: Some of the largest U.S. carriers at the Supercomm show were talking more about proceeding cautiously into the market rather than jumping in with both feet.
-- Telcos have chance with video: Some 54% of respondents believe telcos will be strong contenders in video within three years. A majority, more than 52%, believe cost will be the most important factor for customers seeking a switch from their current cable/video provider.
-- IPTV Grows With Fastweb: Fastweb, the well-funded startup in Italy, has managed an impressive start, growing in part, ironically, thanks to the monopolies that rule its nation.
-- Triple Play in Asia: The active element of triple play, IPTV, has been putting some shine back into the results of long-suffering fixed-line players.
-- Network Convergence Brought to you by IPTV: Telcos plan to compete with cable companies by using a bi-directional communications infrastructure based on Internet protocol...and carriers' video decisions will determine the shape of this new IP network.
-- One size fits all networks: In the UK, the triple-play vision has been pushed by the main cable TV suppliers, Telewest and NTL. They already had the hardest part covered - the delivery of multichannel television - so they just had to add telephone and internet services.
IPTV Roundup Report is sponsored by thePlatform Media Publishing System...

"EasyWMA allows you to convert wma audio files to mp3 so that you can play your favorite songs in iTunes or any other player on your Mac."

From the IndieFlix web site: IndieFlix is building the world’s largest market place and community of independent film. How does it work? We are creating a system that lets people, not distributors, decide what they want to watch. We are providing a forum for filmmakers and their audience to interact, by building a community that will translate artistic vision into commercial success and redefine the distribution model. [IndieFlix]

Via Cinema Minima

Why today’s media professional will, at some point, necessarily collaborate with his audience to tell stories is the thesis of the latest work from Indiana University professor and journalism researcher Mark Deuze, “Towards Professional Participatory Storytelling.” [Hypergene MediaBlog]

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

Via Cinema Minima

AJAX: A Fresh Look at Web Development
AJAX is definitely the wave of the future with regards to web development and produces web pages that respond like regular desktop applications. (I hope this makes Flash go away, I really do but I know it won't)

Via sLop

Once a niche market and considered by some as a curiosity in the mid-1970s, the video game industry now takes in USD$10 billion per year worldwide. Contrary to the popular belief, the video game industry is not bigger than Hollywood. The film industry as a whole makes $180 billion per year, while book publishing makes $23 billion per year. (From Wikipedia)

The claim that the video game industry has surpassed the film industry has been made a lot in recent years. I'm not sure I buy it. I have heard reports that the game industry bloats their numbers by including console sales, while the film industry only counts the box office. If the two industries went head-to-head comparing everything specifically related to them (including motion picture cameras, projectors, DVD players, etc. on the one hand vs. consoles, high-end graphic cards, etc. on the other), I wonder which would truly come out on top. Anyone got hard numbers they want to show me?

IN a nondescript optics lab in tucked into an anonymous office park in the San Fernando Valley, the photon hackers of Deep Light are showing me the future of media. The object of their affection is a small screen on which an animated gladiator is clashing scimitars with a horned monster in a Coliseum-like setting. But this isn't a flat cartoon image: it's full 3-D space, the combatants circling each other inches from my eyes so convincingly that my hand twinges to grab them - and I'm not wearing those clunky red-and-blue cardboard glasses, either. I'm seeing a 3-D image with the naked eye. My host, Deep Light's co-founder Dan Mapes, bounces on his heels, giggling with delight. "It's cool, isn't it?"

Link

Congress is once again rallying to beef up protections for reporters, but online media might not be included. By Randy Dotinga.

via: Steve Garfield's "Off On A Tangent"

Videoblogging: Meet the vloggers

Apple Store SoHo
July 8th from 6:00 - 7:20 PM

Presenter:
Steve Garfield hosts videobloggers from around the country including Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson, Clint Sharp, Joshua Kinberg, Bre Pettis, Josh Leo, Adam Quirk, Andrew Baron, Christopher Weagel, and Schlomo Rabinowitz.

Topics of discussion:
Videobloggers show their favorite videos and viewing tools, discuss video blog creation, and share tips and techniques.

Hear how you can create your own video blog for free!

Videoblogging is a new form of expression centering around posting videos to a website and encouraging an audience response. It is the next step from text blogging and podcasting.

A community of artists, video editors, podcasters, bloggers, and software developers has formed around this new mode of communication. We are a group of people who use videos as a normal part of our blogging.

Speakers:
Steve Garfield - Welcome
Jay Dedman - I love you all, What is videoblogging?
Josh Leo - Show and tell, showing videoblogs
Joshua Kinberg - Watching video: ANT, iTunes
Ryanne Hodson - How to create a video blog, point people in the right direction, ex: freevlog
Bre Pettis - Show and tell, showing videoblogs
Adam Quirk - Vlogging without video cameras
Andrew Baron - Rocketboom: why I think Rocketboom is sucessful in terms of its growth rate
Christopher Weagel - Videoblogging allowing a much wider variety of content than anything mainstream
Schlomo Rabinowitz - Show and tell, showing videoblogs
Clint Sharp - Links as currency

7:00-7:20 Open for questions, show and tell, audience participation, etc...

Store Address:
103 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012
(212) 226-3126
http://www.apple.com/retail/soho/

After Party:
After the presentations we are going to go out and have some food and drinks. So stop by, let's meet each other and have some vloggy fun!

Citizen Paine: "What's really gotten everyone stirred up is the mob mentality that led people not only to out the young woman with photos online but then to try to identify her and her relatives."

John Palfrey : "The most important thing in support of this explosion is people themselves, people who are interested in and willing to experiment with new technologies and to join the growing online conversation."

Economist.com: The Supreme Court tried to steer a middle path between these claims, and did a reasonable job. But the outcome of the case is nevertheless unsatisfactory. That's not the court's fault. It was struggling to apply a copyright law which has grown worse than anachronistic in the digital age. That's something Congress needs to remedy.

If you want to podcast your mp3s but you don't want to figure out blogging, RSS, MIME enclosures, just use this single (free) PHP script to turn your folder of mp3s into a bonafide podcast. Thanks Canton! Link.

Via MAKE: Blog

How do you protect ads against commercial skipping? New research from Magid suggests ads should be produced so they still make an impact when viewers fast-forward past them. "You can’t just look at a spot at standard speed, you have to give it the fast-forward test," said Brent Magid, president and CEO of Magid Associates. Magid also says ad agencies should be careful to position text on the screen so it isn't covered with the DVR fast-forward bar. Sounds like good advice, but I hope the TV industry understands it's not an ad skipping solution.

Via Lost Remote

AOL has quietly launched a new service that offers free access to search and play more than 15,000 licensed video clips from Time Warner, including TV programs and music videos, movie trailers from Warner Bros. and news clips from CNN and MSNBC. You can preview the service on AOL's new beta home page by clicking the video tab. On Tuesday, AOL will also announce a new video hub that will launch later this summer.

Via Lost Remote

Apple announced today, that already 2 days after the new iTunes 4.9 software release users have subscribed to 1 million podcasts.

Apple seems to have succeeded to bring podcasts into the mainstream. If you are still in the dark regarding podcasts see the definition of it on Wikipedia. As the podcast audience grows, we will soon see advertisement models to monetize them.

More details in this press-release on Yahoo (Thanks Larry R.).

Talkr allows you to listen to text-only blogs on your iPod.

posted by badzen to podcasting audio blogs tools weblogs ... and others... bookmark this

Reader Dave Chalmers sends us a link to his blog; he writes:

It is a collection of tips and tricks aimed at the practicalities of doing live video on no money, but it is very applicable to VJs too, as it discusses playback formats, projector setup, etc. etc. This is all based on my own experience of doing dozens of live video events, and I am trying to pass some of that experience back to others.

Live video on no money . . . that sure sounds familiar! vloblive.info is in fact a terrific practical resource, and a reminder that practical info and affordable is truly essential. (Uh . . . I am sorry about all that coverage of $5,000 video mixers, okay?)

Speaking of practical tips, here's mine for the day: S-Video connections on PCs are problematic, as I discovered the hard way the other night. It seems many video matrixes/mixers have cable termination issues, so that when you plug a laptop into them, like my Toshiba, the video card doesn't recognize that it's been plugged in and won't turn on the video out port. I found that setting up Display Properties manually did nothing, but bizarrely, plugging into another device's video in worked like a charm. (If anyone has another explanation, let me know.)

Anyway, Dave, thanks for the site -- we'll be reading. There are absolutely all kinds of live video events out there, from religious events to concerts. And increasingly, some of these may tend toward VJ skills, as well. If you can keep it cheap, you can throw some imagery in with the music..

"Welcome to the Feednation 'Early Beta'. Our aim is to expand your world. We want you to use and enjoy Feednation to manage your information flow."

"SmartVideo Technologies, Inc. announced that short form video series from Two Minute Television Network will be available to anyone with a smartphone or PDA equipped with a media player. The free, ad-supported entertainment channel will put series such as Genius on a Shoestring; the first two-minute reality series, Adventures in Speed Dating; and News with a Punchline in the palm of their hand."

"It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he's recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street."

"COPYFIGHT abrirá durante tres dias diversas zonas de documentación y debate con el objetivo de contribuir a la información de productores culturales y consumidores. Ponencias y presentaciones, talleres de trabajo. programas de video, areas de descarga o una consultoría legal abierta al visitante se constituirán de manera descentralizada en tres jornadas centradas en areas de la creatividad como la producción digital, la música, la literatura y la cultura audiovisual."

Welcome to iGoJava - iGoLogic JBOX Java J2SE Embedded Development Kit!
Perfect for many of my projects, fairly inexpensive, powered by a Via single board computer, runs Linux and pre-installed with J2SE. Very nice..!

Via sLop

"New technologies that use spectrum more efficiently and more cooperatively,unleashed by regulatory reforms,may soon overcome the spectrum shortage,"this Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum online article says."We really don't know yet how the coming age of spectrum abundance will reshape the market for communications services. But it's tempting to speculate that as spectrum becomes ever cheaper, the wireless data and mobile phone markets will begin to look more like the computer industry. Both, after all, benefit from Moore's Law.In this new world, services may be driven more by the cycle of new receiver technologies than by access to spectrum licenses, more by engineers and entrepreneurs than by lawyers. The broadcasting business might change in a similar fashion, with content becoming more like network applications, available for a price anytime and anywhere, rather than at a fixed time on one channel. And in a world of spectrum abundance, regulators will be much less important. Spectrum users themselves will play a bigger role in mitigating potential conflicts and in putting spectrum to its highest and best use. At long last, the epoch of spectrum scarcity will be over,"the article concludes.

The End of Spectrum Scarcity

Spectrum chart (pdf)

Via Smart Mobs

TheFeature is folding. I'll put my own articles up on my site soon. It was great fun, and perhaps slightly influential.

Five years ago, we set out to build a community to explore the mobile Internet. Now, that community is strong enough to move ahead on its own.

When TheFeature.com was launched in the fall of 2000, it was a pretty revolutionary idea -- a corporation like Nokia setting up an independent, non-branded site with the task of getting people thinking and talking about the future of mobile communications. Its goal was straightforward: "TheFeature aims to be nothing less than a voice -- an opinionated, independent voice for the mobility community." With the dramatic changes in the Internet publishing landscape since then, and the rise of blogs in particular, TheFeature's role as a leader in the community perhaps isn't as necessary as it once was, with many quality sites discussing relevant topics and providing outlets for the vibrant community that's sprouted up around the mobile industry.

So in that sense, we can say "mission accomplished." It's with a heavy heart, then, that we must reveal this will be the last post on TheFeature.com. When the site launched, 3G was still a far-off, almost pipe dream concept, and GPRS was barely a reality. We helped begin a conversation around these ideas; we now leave that conversation to carry on in the community that supported us.

TheFeature has always, at its heart, been a community -- so we extend an enormous thanks to those who participated in it, either by commenting or interacting, just reading or linking to us and carrying on the discussion of ideas presented here in their own space. We couldn't have accomplished everything without you. We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to all our contributors, particularly those that have worked with us over the last two years. We've been very fortunate to assemble a staff of some of the best thinkers and writers, who in turn have worked tirelessly to come up with great stories to share.

Now is the time for us to step back, and let the conversation and community move forward on its own. It's been a great ride, and we're glad that everyone could join us. So, would the last one out please turn off the lights...

Via Smart Mobs

Royal College of Art show 2005, VII.

The Pancam, by Mark Hauenstein, is a low cost digital camera that makes infinitely long panoramic images. Once attached to the window of a moving car, train, boat, plane, Pancam captures a stream of images similar to a video camera. The images are then assembled by a PC application that links together the central strip of each consecutive frame into one single long strip.



The result is a map of the journey undertaken, with spatial and visual traces, but it gives also temporal information that reveal the changes of speed and movement of the vehicle.

Finally the whole image can be printed on a long roll of paper on an ordinary printer or as strips on standard sheets of paper.



Related: PanVideo.