unmediated

"The concept behind psix originally started life as pspOS, which was to create a homebrew application capable of managing files on the memorystick, and allowing access to them through friendly user interfaces, and a unique 'windows' style desktop which would display currently installed homebrew applications and allow the user to launch them, navigation though this shell is possible via both the d-pad and analog stick controlled cursor."

(There's no public release yet, but according to the folks at PSPVideo9 it supports uncompressed AVI support (NOT MPEG-4), full psp res support (480x272) as well as multiple framerate support (23.976 fps). Nice. -kc.)

What Lucas learned from making the WebJay API

"ZS4, the new incarnation of Zwei-Stein, is an advanced video editing and compositing program with over 100 built-in video effects. It runs on Windows, Linux and OSX and is free for personal use. ZS4 is still in the alpha stage."

"Aggregation of knowledge/information sources has really changed over the last few years. Until about three years ago, most of our information was delivered through a centering agent - a television, newspaper, magazine, or radio. In this model, our primary task was to absorb or consume the structure of information created by a third party. The level of trust attached to this third party largely determined how much we valued the information (for example, Forbes suggesting investment in Apple carried more weight than hearing it from a stranger at a bus stop).

Recently, the centering agents have come undone. I no longer read newspapers or watch the evening news. I used to go to one source of information to get a thousand points of information. Now, I go to a thousand sources of information to get one point of information. I have become the filter and mediator.

While this process is effective on many levels, it has its challenges. Going to one source of information is much simpler than attempting to consume many different elements. It's less stressful. And requires less thought (or foraging for needed knowledge). Questions of validity and trust are answered with each information source (at least until a relationship has been developed).

Centering agents provide significant value in creating come focal points for members of society. These agents serve a diverse base and are structured to provide appeal to many different individuals (race, religion, politics, etc.). People of different political stripes, for example, are able to dialogue (in some cases at least :)) because of the common language and understanding created by centering agents. What happens when we no longer share centering agents? What happens when all of my information comes only from sources that promote view points I already hold? I am concerned that this process is creating a serious divide in the ability of people to dialogue and share common understandings. Now, if I'm so inclined, I can listen only to perspectives of my own political party. If I follow Rush Limbaugh or Daily Kos, I can receive a constant message that assures me that I am right, and the other side is wrong. I think this is dangerous. The breakdown of common understanding and dialogue poses a real risk to the civility of society...."

The BBC reports that it's "TV channels will be made available on the internet,BBC Director General Mark Thompson has confirmed.He announced plans for the MyBBCPlayer,which will allow viewers to legally download seven days of programmes,at the Edinburgh Television Festival.He said he hoped the service would launch next year".

BBC TV channels to be put on net

Via Smart Mobs

Pixelworks, Inc., a leading provider of system-on-chip ICs for the advanced display market, announced the first demonstration of the AMD co-designed Sailfish II platform, which will be shown at the upcoming IFA 2005 consumer electronics show in Berlin beginning September 5, 2005. The reference design based on the Pixelworks PWBSP-16 Broadband Signal Processor IC and the AMD Alchemy Au1550 processor enables 'triple-play' set-top boxes (STBs) integrating broadband video, voice and data access into a single device.

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

A new service from Amp'd that seems to have a unique interface and strong emphasis on content. Announced this summer and about to be released next month, expect to see a lot of efforts like this aimed at the mobile youth market. Amp'd has also signed an exclusive with WIlliam Morris agency for talent and content aquisition.

Founded by the same guys who started Boost, Nextel's youth-oriented pay-as-you-go service, Amp'd is a new carrier aimed at teens and twentysomethings. Its phones will have dynamic, Flash-style user interfaces, lots of content from familiar TV shows and musical entertainers, as well as the ability to connect to your PC to download content you already own.... Amp'd appears to be making wide-ranging deals with TV networks and music labels, and will even run its own exclusive broadcasts of events using its own satellite truck.

News from PC Magazine: Amp'd Announces First Handsets and via Gizmodo

Upcoming can now act as an ad-hoc Meetup replacement

"On Thursday, Boing Boing ran a story "Alleged subway wanker caught on cameraphone, Flickr" which tells how a young woman, Thao Nguyen, was allegedly flashed by a guy who completely exposed himself to her and masturbated on the NY subway..."

"...While I'm 100% comfortable with everything up to Thao Nguyen posting the image in her Flickr account (which is her right as the person taking the shot), I'm less comfortable with the media reportage thereafter. Sure, this case seems very straightforward: flasher guy is bad/evil/deranged. But, what if "the flasher" has a mental illness of some sort and didn't understand what he was doing? What if there are other extreme circumstances behind his action? Now, let me state clearly: I would never wish this situation on anyone and am sure the trauma Thao Nguyen felt is very real and should not be in any way trivialised. However, beyond this image, nothing else is know about the guy on the train..."

(I guess Dog-Shit-Girl finally makes its way to New York. -kc.)

: And high time they did...hopefully they'll have some trickle down effect for online movie service. Robert Iger, CEO-elect of Disney, recently suggested the day could come when a DVD is released while the movie is still in theaters...and of course, for studios, DVD is still the cash cow, despite doomsday prophecies circulating these days.
The gap between a movie's opening weekend in theaters and its debut on home video has been narrowing from about six months in 1994 to about four months in 2004.
"Why do we make the assumption that five months later people are still interested in your product?" said Todd Wagner, co-owner with Mark Cuban of 2929 Entertainment. "If I hear a song on the radio, they don't say, 'Five months from now you can buy the CD.'"

An impressive location-based database system that releases information based on the user locality, to 'examine the enrichment of real urban sites by a virtual dimension of information & networking, accomplished by localisation of the virtual'. QR-codes (2D barcodes) are used to physically 'tag' buildings & urban sites, which can be scanned by normal mobile camera phones to receive localised information of the specific place. a virtual online map visualizes the database content, the emergent interconnections & the resulting urban densities. the maps can be explored interactively by adapting various data mapping settings. [dencity.net & konzeptrezept.de|thnkx Kai & Philipp]

There is A LOT of potential for what kind of collaboration could happen if valid Final Cut Pro XML files could be generated by a web application like Drupal where hundreds of people could collaborate on one project.

I just wrote about the Choice and Freedom that XML provides consumers of products from software giants, and I'll talk a little bit more about some of the implications of being able to export Final Cut Pro projects into an XML format. Right now, a very limited number of Google hits on "Final Cut Pro XML" indicates that there are only a few proprietary software add-ons available to take advantage of this capability.

And what exactly does this amazing XML capability mean? Quoting from Volume IV of Final Cut Pro 5's user manual:

Because Final Cut Pro supports XML, you are no longer limited to creating clips, bins, and sequences within Final Cut Pro. This means you can create your own Final Cut Pro projects outside of Final Cut Pro, using any software or platform you want, as long as you generate a valid Final Cut Pro XML file.

This basically means that I can use an open source content management system like Drupal to collaboratively edit my film.

In truth, I think the new bottom-up media genres -- blogs, podcasting, wikis, social networking, peer-to-peer, sampling –- represent a perplexing dilemma for the guardians of MSM: they can’t ignore them, but they don’t really understand them either.

Take a virtual tour around Seattle using Google Earth and stop by to see some videos from our archive. GeoVlogging is the process associating a geographic location to a video blog post. In our first virtual voyage, you’ll be able to watch time pass over

MyBookYourBook. Is this the world’s first P2P book club, aka online co-operative library? Join up, submit a list of 10 of your paperbacks and become part of the online library.

Instead of throwing messages at people, messages are sent back and forth across secure RSS feeds.

BY JORDAN S. HATCHER, EDINBURGH (CINEMA MINIMA)

The U.S. Copyright office has finally updated the search capabilities of their copyright registration records. The new search tool, called eCO Search will “offer new features, including keyword searching and the use of a single database containing records since 1978 for monographs, serials, and recorded documents.” eCO Search will debut on October 1.

For more, see the Copyright Office website

The latest data from p2p monitoring company CacheLogic indicates users are migrating away from Bit Torrent, and towards EDonkey (and back towards the Gnutella network). EDonkey is now the most commonly used p2p system in Japan, Germany, Italy and Spain. 60% of Internet bandwidth use can be attributed to p2p file sharing.

Ajax Office - A complete office suite usable via your browser. Your documents are safely stored on a server so that you don't have to worry about backups and you can access them from every computer in the world! AJAX OFFICE is to Microsoft Office what GMa

The goal of Simple is to bring the power of simplicity to the world of server side Java. The primary focus of the project is to provide a truly embeddable Java based HTTP engine. It also provides a component based framework for extendability, which is use

Imagine doing Structured Writing. Each Information Block is an "item" in the Data Store. It has a label, bodytext (in Smart Ascii), one or more images (blobs) as properties.

Open source software MediaPortal turns your PC in a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC.

"Use Project Neon software to:

Keep it in the family - privately stream your videos to your friends, even behind firewalls.

Be famous - create public video albums that can be searched and streamed by other Project Neon members.

Get curious - find public video content from other Project Neon members.

Be versatile - stream all your other digital media privately and securely."

"What happens when a group of hundreds of young people -- many tech-savvy, toting camera cell phones and camcorders and running their own blogs -- are present at a dramatic, chaotic event?"

More importantly read the first comment, which is from an ex-designer at MySpace.

An Ikanos marketing Exec makes the case for VDSL2 at Converge Digest: "Greater than 80 percent of remote terminals worldwide are within 5000 feet of the customer, and at that range, VDSL2 can offer up to 25Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream, delivering enough bandwidth to support 2 HDTVs, videoconferencing, VoIP, and higher-speed data services." That's the plan for both BellSouth and SBC, who are not thrilled by the cost of running fiber straight to the home. Skeptics however wonder about a narrow fit (particularly for multiple HD streams). The article offers both downstream and upstream distance/speed charts for those unfamiliar with VDSL2.

Podcast search using speech-to-text technology.

With video search and Hollywood muscle, Yahoo hopes to dominate the million-channel universe. By Josh McHugh of Wired magazine.

Calling all: Chatbot users and Chatbot Makers

If you have used or have built chatbots, or conversational agents, please participate in my online study of these research communities and their priorities. (Chatting with Non-Player Characters in video games counts here, too).

I am looking to get a sense of who make bots, who use them, and in what ways. The questions will only take a few minutes to answer, but participants can return to participate in ongoing discussions.

To participate, go to: http://wrt.ucr.edu/wordpress/chatbot-survey/


The study will continue until October 15.

This is a confidential study. Please see the site for information about privacy and participation.

I am a new lecturer in the Writing Program at USC, so contact me if you'd like to discuss more of this in person.

Mark Marino
Ph.D. Candidate, UCR.
Mmarino [at] WriterResponseTheory.org

EconoMeta attended Bar Camp and wrote some thoughts about microformats:

Beyond their technical usefulness and practicality, microformats are interesting to me because so many of them seem to be centered around de-coupling personal data from application that might use that data.

Absolutely. This kind of modularity is core to microformats.

My focus here is on the economic value of stuff about stuff, and one example of that is that as a user on the internet, a lot of value is resident in the data about you, or the data that you create. If microformats help to separate this data from applications, it becomes easier to put it and its value under the control of the user, where I think it belongs.

This echoes a value many of us developing microformats have been promoting: users should own their data.

Microformats can do more than simply allow users to transfer their data from app to app, though. For public data, microformats enable a new model of application, where user data is crawled, aggregated, and made searchable in the same way that the raw text of web pages are now.

The plug-n-play application, assembled with small pieces loosely joined.

I hope that as things evolve, users who may not be interested in having a blog might nevertheless have an easy way to create and store data on the Internet, and control how it is used by these kinds of applications.

This is exactly correct. Microformats work very well not only for structured blogging, but what Brian Dear of EVDB called “structured webbing” this past weekend at Foo camp. All of this makes sense, as microformats are designed to enable and encourage decentralized development, content, and services.

It seems to me that this is a big part of the potential of microformats — a standardized way for users to allow access to their data and thus participate in a distributed application.

Introducing distributed applications. Powered by microformats.

Sorry. Just woke up. Google has what now? A Jabber server? Yep, that's right. Someone deep with in Google Headquarters high on Mount Kilimanjaro is planning world domination by cornering the IM and VoIP market, stealing that potentially lucrative corner of the Internet away from, oh, I don't know... Skype? Microsoft? So let's see here: voice chat, IM, email, search, all done 100% better than any rival. That GoogleOS is coming sooner than we even expected.

Ultimately, I'll be excited when I can pay Google 1 cent a minute to call around the world via my cellphone. Until then, I'm going to make my own Jabber server and show you all.

Product Page [Google]

Jan Schaffer's J-Lab, New Voices launches J-Learning, to help citizens produce their own media. Here is an explanation at its website:

J-Learning is a companion to J-Lab’s New Voices project. It is designed to help individuals, civic groups and school groups jumpstart their own community media projects. It offers basic training in Web site creation, HTML, page design and use of photos, audio, video, animation, surveys and databases. It also offers tips on advertising, fundraising and e-commerce to help sustain these community efforts.

Some of its free online offerings include: Learning Basic HTML, Building in Interactivity, Using Databases, Tracking Users.

A photofeed is to images what a podcast is to MP3 files.

Jason prognosticates on the future of the web.

A must read piece on piracy. "after much analysis Microsoft had realized that some piracy is not only inevitable, but could actually be economically optimal"

Dvorak was right, who needs the Creative Commons when rights are so simple?

Distribution is not king.

Content is not king.

Conversation is the kingdom.

The war is over and the army that wasn’t even fighting — the army of all of us, the ones who weren’t in charge, the ones without the arms — won. The big guys who owned the big guns still don’t know it. But they lost.

In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, gift-economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is no longer in owning content or distribution.

The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.

::::

I’m writing this post — grappling with perhaps the most fundamental truth of my brief blogging career — because I still hear big-media colleagues insisting — or perhaps they’re praying — that content is king, that owning content is where the value is, that equity will still grow from exclusivity.

But no: Content is transient, its value perishable, its chance of success slight. You think your article or book or movie or song or show is worth a fortune and in a blockbuster economy, if you were insanely lucky, you could be right. But now anyone can create content. And thanks to the power of the link — and the trust it carries — anyone can get the world to see it. Is some of this new load of content crap? Sure. Lots of content in the old media world was crap, too. But don’t calculate the proportions. Look instead at the gross volume of quality: There’s simply more good stuff out there than there could be before. And it can be created at incredibly low or no cost.

There is no scarcity of good stuff. And when there is no scarcity, the value of owning a once-scarce commodity diminishes and then disappears. In fact, it’s worse than that: Owning the content factory only means that you have higher costs than the next guy: You own the high-priced talent or infrastructure while your new competitor owns just her own talent and a PC.

::::

Distribution? It was already dethroned — though, again, the old barons of bandwidth don’t know it. Owning the printing press, broadcast tower, cable plant, movie theater, or chain of stores is a cost burden when your competitors and customers can, without friction, effort or cost, bypass your distribution and even your marketing. You thought you “owned the customer.” But all you owned was the bill they didn’t want to pay — that and assets that cost you money. It just doesn’t pay to own the assets anymore. Oh, yes, you can still milk cash from them. But can you get growth?

Over and over, I hear old-industry guys arguing that you have to own these assets because that’s where the equity is, that’s where Wall Street puts the value. But since when was following Wall Street a strategy?

::::

So where is the value now? Is there value now? Of course, there is. The value is — thank you, Cluetrain — in the conversation, in the relationship. The value is in trust.

This is so hard for those of us trained in the old economy to get our heads around. That is why, like an ape on 2001, I keep poking at this obelisk to figure out what it is.

But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

And once you get your head around that, you will see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.

So don’t own the content. Help people make and find and remake and recommend and save the content they want. Don’t own the distribution. Gain the trust of the people to help them use whatever distribution and medium they like to find what they want.

In these new economics, you want to stand back and interfere and restrict as little as possible. You want to reduce costs to the minimum. You want to join in wherever you are welcome.

So in the content world, it is better help enable and be part of fluid networks of content than it is to create and own content (see: open-source ad networks, specialized search, remixing tools, sharing communities). It is better to find new efficiencies than new blockbusters (see: Lulu.com, the Redhat founder’s new on-demand book publishing enterprise). It is better to gather than create (see: hyperlocal citizens’ media vs. big, old, expensive, exclusionary newsrooms). It is better to share trust than to horde it.

In this model, newspapers have a problem: They want to control information and the means of sharing rather than enabling that sharing. Book publishers are inefficient as hell: They have to guess what the audience wants rather than helping questioners find answerers. Entertainment producers are doomed to support extravagant costs: They have raised the bar to success beyond their own reach. Cable companies and broadcasters are lost: They have no idea how to serve people, only masses. Marketers and their agencies are befuddled: They have evolved into beasts without ears. And — here’s my favorite — AOL has it utterly, completely, spectacularly wrong: It wanted to control content and distribution and controlled nothing at all.

I like to think that I live and work at the intersection of big, old media and small, new unmedia. But I may be wrong. I sometimes wonder whether there is an intersection after all. I hope there is. But I’m still looking for its exact coordinates. I wonder whether they are compatible, because their business models and worldviews and DNA are just so different. It’s hard for somone raised on the value of owning content and owning distribution to let go of exclusivity and instead value openness and participation.

If I have to pick sides, you can guess what side I pick: small, not big; open, not closed; shared, not owned; enabled, not excluded.

Yet once you think about it, this isn’t so new, really: Isn’t journalism supposed to be about building trust (so how did it become so untrusted?)? Aren’t brands supposed to be about communicating trust (so how did so many of them become so untrustworthy?)?

In the end, isn’t the only asset worth owning trust?

Content is not king.

Distribution is not king.

Trust is king in the kingdom of conversation.

At its core, Patchouli is a unique new application that let's you record videos from your webcam, camera and video camera and publish them instantly to your web site.

ReactOS is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows(R) applications and drivers.

The XML You Need to Know for Web Services
Article title says it all...

local report: home
For those of you wondering what I have been up to for the past month or so, here is your answer: Called, Whitman Local Report, this is a performance piece utilizing mobile phones to create a montage of video "reports" and phone "reports" all in real time (live).
I created some custom software that runs on the phones (Nokia 6710's) to shoot and automatically upload video from the participant's phones (30 of them) and more software to playback the videos as they come in (with some controls for play, pause, stop, next and previous).
Hans, my technical collaborator, took care of setting up an Asterisk server and queue to receive the phone in reports and play those out as they came in.
We have one performance to go, please tune into the live stream, come to the live event or check it out afterwards. The previous 4 are available now if you would like a taste.

Integrating Google Maps into Your Web Applications

Mitsubishi Electric has released in Japan two DVD recorders capable of finding and replaying the best moments from televised sporting events by analyzing the sound tracks of the programs.

The recorders identify the highlights by checking the applause of spectators, cheering and other sounds, so users can quickly see what happened during an overseas event that aired in Japan late at night.

The Raku Reco DVR-HE50W comes with a 250-gigabyte hard-disk drive and retails for about 90,000 yen (some $818). While the DVR-HE10W model features a 160-gigabyte HDD and sells for some 80,000 yen ($727).

Via Nikkei.

"Classic Cat is a directory with links to over 2500 free to download classical performances on the internet, sorted by composer and work. To find the classical music you select a composer, a work and a performing musician. Then you are transported to the page of the musician(s) where the music is hosted and you can download it."

It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict the future of broadband consists of one massive fiber or coax pipe, connected to a residential gateway, from whence springs forth a handful of different services. Telephony Online points out that the DSL modem market is taking a hit as broadband customers switch to combination modem/router/VoIP TAs, and even in some cases battery backup.

a flexible database schema visualizer for SQL databases, showing the relationships between database tables (i.e. the foreign keys that define the relationships between two tables) to supports developers in the tedious, error-prone & slow schema development process. the database visualization orders tables along a circle in which table relationships are drawn as curves or straight lines. using an input configuration file, all elements of the 'schema ball' can be configured. [bcgsc.ca|via loadaveragezero.com]

Not massively compelling but a nice little hack. Pod2Mob has created a system for turning podcasts to files that are playable through a mobile applet on almost any phone. Considering most phones have pretty crappy audio playback and no one in the US listens to music on their phones—yet—it's a great way to become an early, early adopter.

Product Page [Pod2Mob]

Via Gizmodo

The Quake III Arena "engine" has been released as GPL free software code, continuing id Software's tradition of releasing their older software to the public for free (as in libre) use. Why is this interesting? Because what they're doing isn't giving away an old game that nobody would buy, they're giving away a toolkit for virtual environments that is much more sophisticated than casual observers might expect.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the genre, Quake III Arena is the third iteration of the "Quake" series of first-person shooter computer games. The "Arena" aspect means multiplayer capacity is built-in; with very little difficulty, a dozen or so friends can connect over a network and play against each other. By releasing the source code under the GNU General Public License, Id Software isn't making the game itself free to download -- the various textures and maps and sounds remain proprietary. All that has been released is the "engine:" the core software that controls things like the physics model, the interaction between objects, player motion, networking, communication between players, and so forth.

What this means is that developers can use the Quake III Arena engine along with their own graphics and maps to create their own virtual worlds.

The vast majority of software coming from this release will be derivative games, or tweaks to the Quake III engine to make it run faster or on new platforms; Quake III already runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, but id Software founder John Carmack argues that mobile phones are getting close to the point that they'll have the hardware to run something like Quake III. Once mobile phones can run it, multiple other devices will be able to, as well. (To see an example of this progression, check out It Plays Doom -- a website devoted to listing the myriad devices, from iPods to PDAs to phones (and more) able to run ported versions of the game Doom, an older first person shooter game from Id.)

But that doesn't mean that games are all that can be made. Consider: abstractly, the Quake III Arena engine is a compact, multiplatform system for multiple users to share an interactive environment with controllable physics. Just because the original version included shooting at each other doesn't mean that every iteration has to. A Q3A-derived environment could just as easily be a virtual meeting space, an environment in which to demonstrate physics principles under un-Earthly conditions (how would it feel to run and jump on Mars? Why is zero-gravity hard to move around in?), or a set for virtual moviemaking. This last, referred to as "machinima," will be the subject of an upcoming piece on WorldChanging, or so Emily promises.

Mostly, I find this interesting because it's an example of how proprietary and free code can co-exist in a larger software ecosystem. Id recognizes that some people will play free games derived from the Quake III code release instead of purchasing Quake 4, but also knows that many more will end up having a greater interest in Q4 based on their experiences with Q3-derived code. Moreover, Id also sees this as a way of encouraging coding creativity; it's a platform to try something new and unexpected, which is good for the industry as a whole.

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in WorldChanging Weekend at 01:15 PM)

"As I learned more about how Japan operated, I became less sure that it was simply the case that consumers were in charge of the wholesome or sophisticated products I was seeing on sale everywhere. I heard about cartels, anti-competitive practices, yakuza control, government regulation. And somewhere along the line I stumbled on the ideas of economist John Kenneth Galbraith"

File-sharing networks are teeming with remixed versions of Windows that claim to be better and more secure than Microsoft's own offerings. By Joel Johnson.

Well, there's just so much stuff coming through the Yahoo videoblogging group it boggles the mind. The mind inside my brain, which I keep in a small aquarium with a beautiful red beta and a snail.

Biopsy vlogged

MSNBC soliciting citizen journalist content

Lots of video from Camp Casey in Crawford, TX

USA Today: RSS feeds college students' diet for research

Veoh uploader tool for their "Internet Television Peercasting Network". They've done a bit of spamming but the CEO put the kibosh on that and gave out his personal cell#. Halcyonworks for them.

Sure wish I could afford to attend Vlog Europe...

videoblogging classes at IFP and SPNN. Spreading the good vlog gospel, far and wide. And deep. Very deep.

(Also see: Rocketboom on CBS News.

-kc.)

"Consumers who participate in 'citizen journalism' sites, also known as 'open source' publications, don't want to replicate their more traditional counterparts."

For the past 50 years, the media equation has most often been solved for the largest audience.

That is changing and its happening pretty quickly, brought on largely by digital media.

I think the media equation is going to get solved for attention, passion, relevance, and meaning going forward.

I need a good word for the combination of all of those metrics, but for now I am going to use impact.

I often come to these realizations by a series of conversations and this one was brought on by three of them.

The first was a lunch with a friend in the music business.

The second was an email exchange with my high school friend and frequent commenter Tony Alva.

And the third was an extended discussion about video blogging with Heather Green of the terrific Business Week blog called Blogspotting....

(Continued at A VC. -kc.)

Warning: It took me reading this about six times before it made sense. That's either a commentary on me or the time of night.

Anyway, Classified Advertising Plus has launched myclassifiedads.net, a site that allows businesses to basically see what is out there in the way of classified advertising content and format. For a segment of the industry that's increasingly being seen as irrelevant it's a pretty bold move to launch a site soley devoted to it. I guess my point is that, with classifieds now seeming quaint with the advent of communities which function as classifieds such as Craig's List and gargauntuan jobs sites like Monster.com and HotJobs what was the demand for a site like this? Maybe I'm just missing it but it seems like the time of traditional classified advertising is coming to an end.

The Business of Social Media; October 17-18; Copacabana, New York City, NY.

NY Times: The changing of the guard among the anchors of the three evening network newscasts could accelerate the shifts in audience that have already led Madison Avenue to reconsider how advertising dollars are spent.

ubermiester writes "The Washington Post is reporting on a newly released study by the American Psychological Association, claiming that 'exposure to violence in video games increases aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior and angry feelings among youth.' This partly contradicts another study released a week before by a University of Illinois Professor claiming that 'game violence does not prompt players to project violent tendencies into real life.'"

Melodeo does MobCasting. Russ says a phone is enough to hold a day’s worth of podcasts, and soon you could hear it over the air when 3G arrives.

Via Om Malik on Broadband

I just received this month's Wired, and a big chunk of the magazine looks at the future of television (it's not online yet). I just started reading it, but the interview with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and executive producer Ben Karlin is terrific. "I'm surprised people don't have cables coming out of their asses," Stewart said. "Everything is geared to more individualized consumption. Getting it off the internet is no different than getting it off TV." When asked about what he thinks about the popularity of The Daily Show video online, Karlin responds, "Not only am I not aware of that, I don't want to be aware of that." But he adds, "If people want to take the show in various forms, I'd say go.... because that is one of those things that you truly have no control over. The one thing that you have control over is the quality of the show." Right on.

The new Nokia phone features a "VHS quality" video camera (MPEG 4 352x288), built-in video editor and a two megapixel still camera with Carl Zeiss optics and autofocus. You can email or upload pictures and video to the web -- and even perform two-way video calls (if you're on a 3G network). ABC News Now is buying the phones for some of its reporters, and I imagine many other news organizations will follow even with the $900 price tag.

MSN Encarta has an article for all those looking to make their living in the game design world someday.  While motivational and somewhat informative, bear in mind the article reads like one of those “live life by proverbs” essays the business world often hands down.  Your headings for future sevben day weeks of bliss read : Prepare to work hard, Learn by doing and Specialize and stand out.  Mysteriously missing from this list is what many know as the number one means by which jobs come into place - Connections.  Make connections whenever and wherever you can.  It is very unlikely that anyone in your immediate circle of friends knows a great deal more people than you do… therefore, you have to get online, or on the street, and meet people.

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(Also of interest: Gamasutra feature on getting started in the industry via Athena's Legacy. -kc.)

The BBC will launch a new interactive local television news service on satellite and broadband before the end of the year.

The nine-month pilot scheme costing around £3 million will provide a new service in five areas of the West Midlands in the UK, offering ten minutes of local news once an hour for satellite viewers, available through an interactive application, and on-demand bulletins and clips accessible online for broadband users. It is also hoped that the bulletins will be available as a video-on-demand service on cable television.

akamai technologies, which hosts & caches Internet content for other major companies, has just launched a new website that shows the aggregate network traffic to indicate the interest in major news events in real time. the website tracks the number of viewers per minute by geography from about 100 major news sites, & identifies the times of day when news viewing peaks in different parts of the world. the according visualization displays spikes in network traffic, revealing a 'coming wave of news demand' so websites can get prepared in time. see also buzztracker. [akamai.com|via boston.com]

Novell's Open Suse project opens the development process for Suse Linux by giving developers in the open source community access to the review, testing and development of the Suse Linux distribution.

Podcasts can be hacked and pirated. An enterprising listener could pull songs out of a podcast and turn them into music files or CDs. That's why many record companies say the technology is promising but problematic.

(Why they continue to focus on protecting the media is beyond me. The obvious solution is to regulate and apply rights management schemes at the sense organ level. -kc.)

WKRN in Nashville is soliciting video from its audience and training locals, according to Broadcasting and Cable.

In July, it hosted 20 area bloggers, including Chenoweth, for a crash course in video production. At the workshop, station photographers gave instruction on basic videography and critiqued the students' work. "The biggest problem is that people shoot great images but it's shaky and they zoom in and out," says Terry Heaton, a TV-news consultant working with WKRN. "If they find themselves in a spot-news situation, we want it to be usable."

The workshop also gives WKRN a chance to screen bloggers as potential sources. "We've started relationships with them," says station President Mike Sechrist.

ile, is also planning on incorporating local contributors into its newsroom, B&C says. Under a new pilot program, the broadcaster is launching 60 stations and plans to have community reporters generate one-fifth of the content.

(My favorite quote from the article:

"Another dilemma, news managers say, is that overly eager people could become community paparazzi, getting too close to victims or disrupting police work. “In television, we have sensibilities about shooting video,” says TV-news consultant Valerie Hyman. “We mute the sound or shoot from far away. People in the general public have none of that discussion—and who would expect them to? They’re not journalists."

-kc.)

USAToday points out that there are now 2.7 million VoIP subscribers nationwide, up from 440,000 one year ago. The study finds Vonage leads the charge with 750,000 subscribers, with Time Warner Cable close behind. A little sense of perspective though: the $1.3 billion in revenues the industry saw in 2004 were less than one percent of the total voice revenues in this country.

(No mention of Skype. -kc.)

For All Seasons, by Andreas Muller, is a piece about memories, seasons and using the elements of the textual representation of the memory to create an interactive one.

A poetic recollections of the seasons of Muller's youth put into enchanting, kinetic typography.

Download.

Grand Prix at the Tokyo Type Directors Club.

Via elastico.

Yet more Nintendo music-making -- this time with the strange and fascinating ElectroPlankton music game for the Nintendo DS. Thomas at MileZero has started a tutorial on starting a "one-man band" using ElectroPlankton:

Part one: introduction and why he did it
Part two: Working with Luminaria (don't ask; think you have to try it!)

If anyone is going to make music with game systems, this is really the way to do it. Like the music software homebrewers have created for the original Game Boy, ElectroPlankton is really tailored to the game hardware on which it runs. And it offers something different: not just a drum machine ported to a game system (like the games available for the PSP) or another look-alike synth we see every day on computers -- it's a truly unique experience.

nk soon you'll see an increasing number of musicians building their own tools on computers, too. And if you want some inspiration for out-of-the-box design, pick up a game system. It's a terrific tax deduction..

NY Times article with a rundown of a private game conference put on by Ziff Davis Meda:

Two major themes emerged. First, much of the industry remains somewhat underwhelmed for now by the prospect of the new generation of video game consoles. The second, somewhat related, issue is that for all its growth in recent years, much of the industry fears that it is stagnating, both creatively and financially...

"We're running out of talent in our industry, and to a certain extent we are running out of creativity," Neil Young, general manager of the Los Angeles studio of Electronic Arts, acknowledged during his insightful talk at the conference.

Always good to hear some concern for creative content, and that there are signs that the bottom line is being threatened by derivatives.

Meet the DReaM Scheme

You read it right.

Sun Microsystems has set up an “initiative” to stymie attempts by Microsoft, principally, in its efforts to dominate the copyright protection arena, such as it is.

Sun’s Open Media Commons will mean royalty-free copy protection technology for all or, as Reuters puts it, “The issue of digital-rights management, or DRM, has spurred a number of plans to protect content, ranging from standards for mobile phones, digital music players, CDs, DVDs and other media, available from InterTrust, Microsoft Corp, Apple Computer Inc, Sony Corp and others.”

(More info at Open Media Commons. Also check TechDirt's take on Sun's Open DRM. -kc.)

: Some interesting digital content related patents granted this month, by the USPTO:
-- # 6,925,504: Methods and apparatus for obtaining content from a content-originating device within a computerized network: Assigned to Cisco.
-- # 6,931,660: Interactive television system and method for simultaneous transmission and rendering of multiple MPEG-encoded video streams: Assigned to OpenTV
-- # 6,931,657: Methods and arrangements for providing a novel television and multimedia viewing paradigm: Assigned to Microsoft
-- # 6,931,656: Virtual creature displayed on a television: Assigned to Philips Electronics
-- # 6,931,593: Automatic channel generation for home network systems: Assigned to Gateway
-- # 6,931,536: Enhanced copy protection of proprietary material employing multiple watermarks: Assigned to Macrovision
-- # 6,931,545: Systems and methods for integrity certification and verification of content consumption environments: Assigned to ContentGuard
-- # 6,925,469: Digital entertainment service platform: Assigned to Intertainer (Defunct now!)

Google launched Monday a comprehensive Internet application service.The Internet search engine is now offering Google Desktop 2, which is available for free as a download and allows users to find information and store their personal files on the same application.

Usefulapps - Skype and VOIP for Nokia and more cellular phones,
smartphones and PDAs over Bluetooth, WiFi, GPRS and 3G
Very nice! Can't wait to get to work to try!

Asynchronous JavaScript Technology and XML (AJAX) With Java 2
Of course, AJAX = Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
Just completing my research for my next project which will use AJAX, Derby and Servlets instead of my standard LAMP development styel.

InstantSOUP - Cover
From the site:
InstantSOUP is a path into electronics using an approach of "learning by making", introducing electronic prototyping in a playful, non-technical way. It was developed following the experience gained in teaching physical interaction design at Interaction-Ivrea.

Uses the ealier linked to Wiring language and prototyping board.

Researchers use a motion detector and Wi-Fi to create immersive computer versions of school-yard games like red light, green light that put participants in the middle of the action. By Rachel Metz.

Was just reviewing the premium services offered for paying members of last.fm music service.

It contains a few nuggets that, suitably re-interpreted, could point the way that the future of, for what of a better term, “telephony” networks will take (at least once telephony is an embedded feature in every other application).

Here goes…

What features will I get?

Extra features for upgraded accounts include the following:

Updated Username Bullets. Usernames are prefixed with a coloured bullet denoting their status.

Aha! Presence is a chargeable feature. (Music isn’t.)

What are your friends/neighbours listening to?

Tee hee! More presence!

See what your friends are listening to on one page.

Great for keeping up with the latest and greatest tunes your friends and neighbours are listening to.

Yep. Presence. It’ll cost ya.

More Radio Options.

username’s radio. Play songs from one specific profile only, such as your own. The best way to explore somebody’s music taste.

Social networking!

loved tracks radio. Want to just get the sure fire hits? Listen to anyone’s Loved Tracks, the cream of the crop of someone’s or your profile. Positively no more need for radio DJs.

Personalisation!

personal tag radio. You tagged your music, and now want to listen to one of your tags? This is for you. Get organising that profile. And then check out what other people have tagged.

Social networking and personalisation!

All your upgraded radio modes also become available for non-upgraded users, so you can shout about your music taste, and everybody can listen to your Über-radio.

Hmmm - kind of social networking meets gifting. Maybe one day the kids will get their pocket money by spending time talking to grandma…

Recent Visitors displayed on your Profile Page. People who have recently visited your profile page are listed in your sidebar. This is a fun way to keep track of who is checking you out ;)

Yup, more social networking.

Guaranteed Streaming Slot. Our radio servers can get overloaded during peak times. As a subscriber you’ll still be able to connect - we will kick out a normal user to give you a slot. This is class war!

QoS. At least they’re brutally frank about it.

Discovery Mode for the radio. Got all excited about the above? Switch on Discovery Mode in the Player and we will only play you stuff you have never listened to before. How is that for discovering new music? Same tag, new music!

Hmmm — just a hint of social networking — but with a twist of lemon.

No Ads. NO ADS! Don’t really need to explain this one … Oh, and if you subscribe ads are removed for anyone viewing your page, not just you.

Attention protection. This is now officially a telco marketing feature.

Jump the Web Request Queue. Due to increasing popularity sometimes the website gets slow. As a subscriber our loadbalancing software puts you at the front of the queue and you get faster response time from the website.

More QoS.

Anyone who thinks that there’s no innovation left in voice service, err, hasn’t been to one of Martin and the crew’s consulting workshops :)

And remember: these folks give away the music, but charge for social contact. Exactly the oppostive of your IPTV triple-play push.

Posted by Martin at 03:15 PM

---

Comments: (post your comment)

This article in the Guardian says that "in many parts of the world, mobile phones aren't a convenient alternative to landlines but the only means of communication:they provide connectivity where there was none before.In Africa,to take the obvious example,mobile phones mean real change.By any development measure,Congo is a pretty poor place.Yet it is heading towards two million mobile users: one network has 850,000 subscribers.Subscriber growth in several sub-Saharan African nations was more than 150% last year,and there are eight mobile phones for every 100 people in Africa,up from three in 2001".

Upwardly mobile

Alex de Carvalho compares mobile phones and iPods in a question that reaches into the power of mobility: solitary or social?

"... most people chose to carry their mobile phone in their pocket and not an iPod / mp3 player (or for that matter, a compact camera.
[...]
Your choice depends on whether you value solitary mobility or mobile sociality:

h an iPod while on the move, you create solitary mobility, by 1) signalling to people you are not available to socialize because you are wearing your headphones; and by 2) shielding yourself acoustically from your environment, by building your own private sound bubble (ie., listening to music).

* With a mobile phone, you achieve mobile sociality and can connect with the world while on the move, through voice, SMS, MMS, e-mail, internet access, etc."

:: read the full post

Cory Doctorow: Darren sez, "The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has locked out 5500 workers -- producers, on-air personalities, engineers, etc. Tod Maffin, a freelance broadcaster with the CBC, is doing a great job offering coverage of the labour action. Locked-out CBC producers plan to create shows and serve them as podcasts over the Web." Link (Thanks, Darren!)

And with that, my last reblog post, I say thanks for reading and posting me worthy content to reblog. I've had a great time. And now back to work for my usual authorities. --sarah

Statistical analysis of the Wikipedian Community.

quick fast little javascript app to test your connection speed via your borowser

A comprehensive HOWTO for setting up a server from home. Includes a list of ISPs that don't block server ports (80, 25, etc.) and exhaustive instructions from start to finish.

"I realized at that moment, that our species is going through a phase change. Collectively, we are turning into one big brain."

Uh oh. The Huffington Post has discovered Gaia Theory. ;) -kc.

Airhook is a reliable data delivery protocol, like TCP. Unlike TCP, Airhook gracefully handles intermittent, unreliable, or delayed networks. Other features include session recovery, queue control, and delivery status notification.

"The problem with big online editorial real estate, of course, is that it cannot overwhelm the countless smaller properties that exist today in a new media economy."

The authors are studying Internet filtering in countries worldwide, including restrictions on Web access in China. There is no master list of blocked sites that we (or, from what we can tell, anyone else) can access. Rather, we test "twenty questions" style, asking about individual URLs, whether based upon a domain name or an IP address.

This one should make TV news people shiver. The Knoxville News Sentinel is using little Sony Cybershot DSC-P93 cameras ($300) to make videos for its Website. Take a look at this one shot at, of all places, a shooting range.

Firstly, this is not even a "real" video camera, or is it? Granted, it's not broadcast quality video, but it works just fine in a smaller, online resolution. And what will it be like five years from now? The point is people in the industry are bitching about what my clients are doing in Nashville with the VJ concept of newsgathering, when a newspaper (probably more than one) is putting simple pieces like this online with what looks like a still camera.

Secondly, let me repeat what I've said a million times. The local newspaper is beginning to compete with television stations (and lots of everyday folks) for the video news niche in your market. TV executives simply cannot overlook what's happening here.

(Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, who uses the same kind of camera.)

Scott Bradner’s latest column in Network World is well worth reading. I’m in agreement with most of the comments that Scott makes there. The FCC under Chairman Martin is moving in some very unsettling directions on a number of fronts. In particular, the recent set of principles covering consumer entitlements for Internet services issued by the FCC bothers me a great deal. As I see it, a large part of the problem with today’s FCC becomes clear when you look at the choice of words that is used to convey their decisions. In their current framework, we’re all ‘consumers’. This usage fits quite nicely their ‘command and control’ method of operation. However, today’s Internet demands a somewhat different perspective. It would have been much better to refer to all of us as ‘citizens’ or ‘participants’. This better reflects the end to end architecture of the Net. If they had come at the problem from this perspective, then outcomes of the statement of principles would have been quite different. As it is now, we ‘consumers’ are entitled to very little.

The content industries say violent criminal syndicates are muscling into the counterfeit DVD and CD business. But evidence of digital gangsters is hard to find. By Abby Christopher.

Akamai has unveiled a nifty new site that allows you to watch how online news is being consumed around the world - all in real-time. Unfortunately it doesn't include blogs at all. (via MediaPost)

This paper looks at aspects of Wikipedia’s structure and process, with specific focus on its community (or organisational) learning. Learning is conceptualised as a collective, collaborative process, whereby multiple perspectives are shared and meanings are constructed. Fundamental to this learning are Wikipedia’s policies and the procedure of collaboration in an often conflicting environment. Conflict is viewed as a key component in the process of creating the content of Wikipedia as well as a key factor in people’s participation in the project. The consequence of conflict is of central importance, both in terms of how or to what extent it is resolved, and how a number of users end up leaving the project as a result. Throughout, the focus is on how individual users communicate their opinions and feelings to other users and how these communications are read and/or understood by individuals and/or the community, especially in the light of it being mainly a text-only medium.

MercuryNews: "When it comes to blogging, big corporations are turning to twentysomething mavericks for advice. If they can't lick them, they may have to join them."

"Someone once described Flickr as “massively multiplayer online photo sharing.” I think that’s a good description. There’s kind of a feeling of exploration within Flickr. It feels like a world where you can move around and find wonderful things – the wonderful things being the great photographs that people upload.

And because it’s got the social network aspect of it, you can kind of build neighborhoods within Flickr. The page in Flickr that shows you all the photos from your friends and family is very much a space like you might find in a game. It’s a place where you go and interact with the people you know."

I guess in a way you might think it's odd for a principal author of iPodder Lemon to link to a competing product. I don't mind, for a number of reasons. First, if you're following what we're doing you might like to know. Second, Ray is a nice guy, I like him. Third, iPodderX is commercial software while iPodder is Free, and to the extent that we make money, we do so on different value propositions.

On a related note I get a fair amount of flack from friends and even family when I tell them that we don't charge a license fee. Especially as we approach the 1 million downloads milestone. I'm ambivalent about it.

Like a lot of open source projects we started as a group of guys fooling around building cool stuff in our spare time. We like money, sure enough, but that wasn't the point. The point was to innovate, and at that time in podcasting, money wasn't a prerequisite for innovation. It might have even been a barrier.

At one point, I think it was last Christmas, when we got a sense for the growth, the team had an intense discussion about charging per-copy. Though the code is GPL licensed, we could charge a fee for the binary installers that make iPodder accessible to ordinary humans. I was against it at the time, arguing that if we could innovate on features, surely we could innovate on making money. And further that there's nothing to get people hating you like discontinuing a free product in favor of a for-pay product (if you're going to charge per copy, do it from day 1).

To some extent we've achieved our goals with red-carpet branded iPodders and the cheaper automated builds on offer at the store. It's fun, but it isn't a living, not by a long stretch.

As we approach the 1 year anniversary of the iPodder 1.0 release, I wonder, can we go on doing this as a hobby project for another year? another two years? another five?

Podcasting is attracting ever greater investments. As it does our ability to keep up with the rest of the market will be seriously challenged if we don't grow. Should we keep it strictly non-commercial but try to grow the base of volunteer programmers? Or build a company around it? I think we've got a tremendous asset on our hands with iPodder, so it ought to provide a strong starting point for whatever paths we choose.

One final thought for now. It doesn't bother me that we've given our work away so far. This could be my pride speaking, but it's not clear to me that podcasting would have grown as quickly as it did without our contributions. I'm sure our software has been downloaded and installed by high-level people at big companies, startups, investment firms, and that it made them think, "hey, this podcasting stuff is for real, we'd better pay attention to it." Perhaps iTunes is filling that role now, but remember iTunes is a relative newcomer, and goes to great extents to hide the underlying open formats and protocols that make podcasting viable for all entrants. Anyway, I hope folks will recognize all of the free R and D they've benefitted from, and do right by us should the opportunity to do so arise.

With the hype around podcasting reaching stratospheric levels, it seems that a new study might put a damper on the space. It found that fewer than expected people are listening to podcasts, and the hotly targeted "youth market" is barely listening to podcasts when compared to their elders. Of course, how you interpret these results can differ on a number of factors. In some ways, people may consider this a good thing. There's no law that says that only 15 to 24-year-olds are the important demographic. Finding a good way to communicate with an older demographic can be quite useful as well. However, it could be worrisome to those dumping tons of money into the podcasting space, as it may mean that the market for podcasting won't grow in the same nature as other things that have been hot among younger people. This, in no way, diminishes podcasting as a tool for people who want to communicate (or listen) in that way. However, it does raise questions about all the hype from the business side. In many ways, it seems like the marketing/business hype around podcasting is an attempt to make up for being slow to catch on to other internet success stories in the world of content creation. Of course, we've seen podcasting stats falsely pumped up in the other direction as well -- so who knows how valid these numbers actually are. As for it being older folks who listen to podcasts? Maybe the next big thing will be the iPod that slows down how fast those crazy young podcasters talk.

Blinkx TV co-founder Suranga Chandratillake discusses the future of multimedia search on John Furrier's the infoTalk podcast.

Brad Inman, who runs the real estate-focused Inman News Service, told the Real Estate Connect conference the other day that he's "obsessed" with video. "Not television video, just Internet video." In a few years, he said, text and still images on webpages will be passe.

"Let me just explain it this way: Every webpage will become a television station," he said. "Think of the webpage as a video magazine. ... In a few years, if people open the page and see words and data, they might change the channel on you."

His company has launched a video-production and -distribution unit called (...)

Entry continued...

According to Ziff Davis Media's annual "Digital Gaming in America" survey, cell-phone gaming continued its meteoric rise in 2005.

The survey reported the number of households engaged in cell-phone gaming nearly doubled again, jumping from 16.3 million last year to 27.9 million this year.

Mobile-phone gamers in the study reported spending 19 minutes per gaming session. They spent an average of $13 on mobile-phone games in the last 60 days, and core gamers spent even more on mobile-phone games -- $19 in the last 60 days.

"Core gamers" are defined as those who bought four or more games in the last six months and play 10 or more hours per week.

Respondents who do not play games on their phones cited small screen sizes as the primary deterrent (cited by 49 percent of respondents); they also cited a lack of desirable games (46 percent) and high costs (35 percent) as reasons they don't yet play cell-phone games.

The study also tracked future-purchase intent for both mobile phones and portable gaming devices, revealing strong sales prospects. Eighty-six percent already own a cell phone this year, and of these individuals 48 percent play games on their mobile devices. But the mobile-phone market for gamers is by no means saturated: More than 50 percent of gamers plan to purchase a new cell phone within the next 12 months.

Chris Anderson takes another look at movies and the long tail, and this time he wonders, "Are Niches More Profitable than Hits?."

What you see here is that the economics of new releases these days are simply awful. The studios charge $17-$19 for the DVDs and the "big box" retailers (Wal-mart, Best Buy) sell them for $15-$17 for the first week or two, for an average loss of $2 per DVD (this is before overheads; the actual loss is larger).

After the first month or so, the wholesale price of the DVDs goes down faster than the retail price, and they gradually move into profitability. Yet 70% of DVD sales are of titles within their first two months of release, before they're profitable.

disagree with is his claim that Netflix underbuys new releases. I haven't had a problem getting a new movie in a long time. Maybe they've figured out the right number of movies to purchase?

Via Hacking NetFlix

Dave Zatz continues to notice that TiVo's job openings seem to be revealing where the company is headed next. This latest one hints at the CableCard supporting HD Tivo is being developed/produced.

Senior Network Porting Kit Engineer - CBD038
TiVo is seeking a senior software engineer to join the Network Porting Kit team. This team is responsible for providing abstractions and programming interfaces for multiple broadcast networks including satellite, cable, and over-the-air sources. Your code will manage mission-critical data at the heart of the TiVo service: channel and line-up information, program guide data, network-specific tuning, on-screen display of messages, and more. Furthermore, you will gain experience in open standards such as CableCard and proprietary service provider systems.

They announced a CableCard dual-tuner HD TiVo at CES this past January, and personally I can't wait to buy one, so this newest job posting is a good sign of things to come.

List of who's "using blogs well to expand news coverage and in newsrooms and who’s using the internet well to change how news is gathered and distributed."

Chris Anderson puts the list kerfluffle in context, arguing as I have that counting the top blogs is not only old-media think but is also a meaningless shuffle of unrelated things that share nothing more than the tool that created them:

To use an analogy, top-blog lists are akin to saying that the bestsellers in the supermarket today were:

2% Vitamin D Milk
2. Hayseed Farms mixed grain Bread
3. Bananas, assorted bunches…

Which is pointless. Nobody cares if bananas outsell soft drinks. What they care about is which soft drink outsells which other soft drink. Lists only make sense in context, comparing like with like within a category….

My take: this is another reminder that you have to treat niches as niches. When you look at a wildly diverse three-dimensional marketplace through a one-dimensional lens, you get nonsense. It’s a list, but it’s a list without meaning. What matters in the rankings within a genre (or subgenre), not across genres.

The first question is how to organize these things into niches; that’s not easy. The next question is what you measure: Traffic, unique audience, link love all matter but all say different things . And we need to measure new things: meme-starting (the cutting edge), meme-sniffing (cultural canaries), influence (mavens).

And why does this matter, besides mere ego? Because if we are ever to convince advertisers that citizens’ media offers much greater value — greater influence, deeper relationships — than mere content, then we need to provide aggregations and data in a meaningful manner. Oh, yes, there are other things to measure, too: quality and trust. But machine rankings won’t do that. People will. Remember that blogs aren’t technology and they’re not just content. They’re people.

: Take this: A Wall Street Journal report on personal finance blogs.

A thing about Flock which catches my eye is that it's based on Firefox. I think that Firefox-based apps are an idea whose time has come.

Ajax applications are often just as good-looking and almost as responsive as local applications. They're only really bound by the security limitations of the browser, in particular that they can't write to disk, read from disk, or act as handlers for MIME types.

So the point of a Firefox-based app is not to have a custom browser, it's to use web standards to build applications that sit on the other side of the firewall.

What's so great about that? It allows you to build client applications that are cross-platform without having to use a windowing toolkit. It allows web developers and unix developers to build Mac and Windows applications without having to convert to the Mac and Windows religions. It allows client apps to have really fantastic web functionality, including skinnability with HTML and great support for HTTP caching.

That's a lot. The one problem is that packaging up a custom version of Firefox is rather a drag at this point. There's a lot of obscurantia to learn, plus you have to write a custom installer. That doesn't seem like a big deal, though -- it wouldn't be hard to write a tool which automated the packaging process, so here is my LazyWeb request: I want a tool to generate an install binary for a Firefox-based application.

LAIR: Location awareness information representation by Kottahachchi, Laddaga and Look, WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications, Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2005, Pages 1144-1149 .

Current location representations model only the geographical aspects of a place. While this is a necessary feature to capture, it is far from sufficient. As a result, many location-aware applications reason about space at the level of coordinates and containment relationships, but have no means to express the semantics that define how a particular space is used. The latter is particularly important in modeling location in the pervasive computing domain. We present LAIR, an ontology that addresses this problem by modeling both the geographical and topological relationships between spaces, as well as the functional purpose of a given space.

Also more information in this paper: A location representation for generating descriptive walking directions

lair (Location Awareness Information Representation), a model of space that can be used to create location-based services. lair can be used to represent not only where a person is, but also what a person is near and what he can do at those nearby places. lair incorporates concepts that people commonly use when thinking about space. Current representations model either the physical relationships between different spaces or the functional purpose of a given space. lair models both of these aspects. (…) lair is an ontology inspired by Ben Kuipers’ TOUR model of a person’s cognitive maps of large-scale spaces

Why do I blog this? the representation of space/place provided in this LAIR model seems interesting, at least in terms of existing ontology of space.

Worldwide, consumer VoIP subscribers using wireless IP phones are grow from two per cent currently to 73 per cent in 2009.

Credence is a distributed object reputation management scheme that counteracts content pollution in peer-to-peer filesharing systems. Our system relies on honest peers judging the authenticity of online content, and allows clients to securely tabulate and manage object endorsements across the network. We employ a novel voter correlation scheme to weight the opinions of peers, which provides an incentive for peers to vote honestly and mitigates the impact of dishonest peers.

From New Scientist: Computer characters mugged in virtual crime spree [pdf] [via Slashdot]

A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software “bots” to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash.

The Chinese exchange student was arrested by police in Kagawa prefecture, southern Japan, the Mainichi Daily News reports.

Several players had their characters beaten and robbed of valuable virtual objects, which could have included the Earring of Wisdom or the Shield of Nightmare. The items were then fenced through a Japanese auction website, according to NCsoft, which makes Lineage II. The assailant was a character controlled by a software bot, rather than a human player, making it unbeatable.

Ren Reynolds, a UK-based computer games consultant and an editor of the gaming research site Terra Nova, says the case highlights the problem of bots in virtual worlds.

See earlier A Problem Yet To Be Faced

This blog examines the issues resulting from ordinary citizens producing their own content, and the potential for ‘citizen spin’.

Despite widespread adoption on the publishing side, RSS feeds are failing to find significant use by the general public.

American artists make their cartoon strips available to cell phones around the world and look for foreign cartoonists to join them, reports Symbian1.

A group of American cartoonists is selling their comic strips directly to people around the world through an Internet website: fulltiltmobile.com.

Users may download the comics to their computers and then transfer the files to their Nokia Series 60 Smartphones using Bluetooth or other means.

Dawn Douglass, president of Full Tilt Features, says this allows anybody anywhere to read their comics, no matter what wireless service they may have.

Full Tilt comics are presently available in English only, but they hope to offer translated versions in the coming months. "Many people enjoy practicing their English with our comics," said Annie Taylor-Lebel, a Full Tilt cartoonist who lives in Canada and also speaks French. "But if people want our comics in other languages, too, then we will work to make that happen."

Why these folks don’t consolidate their web sites and come up with a single name, I don’t know, but their services look great. I’d be curious if anyone reading this has experience with them.

DigitalSilo offers low cost conversion from film and video tape to DVD, and QuickTime, Real, and MPEG formats, as well as public and secured online storage. Subscribers pay $9.95 per year to store up to 240 hours of video online. Video tapes and film can be shipped to their facility for digitization, which costs $44.95 per hour of video (Betamax, UMatic, VHS, VHS-C, SVHS, Video8, Hi8, Digital8, miniDV, MicroMV), $249 per hour of 8mm and $339 per hour of 16mm film. VideoSilo has a slightly different pricing structure, and focuses on converting home videos to DVD. DigitalSilo also has a division called MPEG Nation, which converts .avi, .mov, .mp4, .wmv, .asf, .dv, .mpg, .rm, and .mp2 into low, medium, and high-res Real, Windows Media, and Quicktime streaming and download formats.

Technorati Tags: video

: Google's buyout of startup Android (reported here) has been the subject of much speculation. BusinessWeek, which first reported on the July acquisition, says that the small company, co-founded by Andy Rubin, who earlier started Danger Inc., was developing software for mobile phones, possibly a mobile OS.
But according to a VC who looked at the company as an investment option and passed on it late last year, the presentation from Android was for an OS for digital cameras, aimed at lower- end original design manufacturers (OMDs) like BenQ and Acer. The idea was to couple the camera OS tightly with other media software and hardware like iTunes and iPods.
Of course, since then, the company may have changed directions ... or maybe not. Or maybe both ... tying into Picasa and mobile enabling pictures in some grand way. At that time the company was looking for a $3-4 million round, the VC ventured.
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Gillmor Gang dissects the emerging podshow:

"Bloom also said that his podcasting model is different than blogs–he isn't looking for 100 million content creators. Instead, he prefers 15,000 content creators and 100 million listeners, and demand driven programming."

Listen to the podcast.

I'm gonna try, it's 85 minutes long.

Here are a few places to help you find videoblogs on the web:

Search:
Yahoo! Video Search
Google Video Search

Directories:
iTunes Music Store Podcast Directory
Videoblogging Universe
FireANT Directory
vlogdir
vlogmap

Hosted Videos:
Blip TV
Our Media

Filtered Sources:
WatchThis tag on Deli.cio.us
Steve Garfield's WatchThis tag on Deli.cio.us

Mefeedia - Tagged video

Grid-like Program Guides
OMN.org - PC now, Mac version coming
MediaTuner

On TV:
Akimbo

Coming Soon:
TiVo

Viewing Tools:
FireANT - Mac/PC based video aggregator and viewer
DTV - Internet TV on your Mac

MobZombies is a zombie-fleeing game where a player's movement controls an avatar in the game space. Players run away from virtual zombies by really running.

You have to stay alive as a horde of the undead slowly moves towards you. The longer you survive, the more zombies appear and the better they get at following you.

Just because there are no obstacles in the virtual world doesn't mean that there aren't obstacles in the real world. Imagine running away from a zombie and realizing that the only way you can continue to evade it is by somehow negotiating a brick wall in the physical space or running through the football practice field during a scrimmage.

MobZombies is inspired by mobile games such as Botfighers or Mogi, where the player's movement in the physical world correlates to the game space. Because we carry mobile devices with us everywhere, it becomes fun to think about a version of MobZombies that kicks in at random times during the day, forcing you to stop whatever you were doing and try as hard as you can to avoid the undead.

Developed at at USC Interactive Media Division by William Carter, Todd Furmanski, Kurt MacDonald and Tripp Millican.

Michael Johnson writes that he proposes on Ideologi.com the creation of a large-scale open source project.

He developed what can best be described as the conceptual model of a Universal Exchange of Ideas.

(Thank you Michael!)

ideologi is an Internet-based system that facilitates ad hoc brainstorming sessions that individuals and organizations around the world can join. Users of ideologi can either submit answers to a countless number of active Exchanges, or submit their own questions to initiate an Exchange within ideologi.

"In 2002, Professor Benkler published a seminal essay with the provocative title "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm." In Coase's Penguin Professor Benkler states that for decades we have lived with two major ways in which individuals organize economic production: "as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals." What we are now seeing, he writes, "is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode commons-based peer-production, to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands."

(Continued at Robin Good's Latest News.)

AJAX editor for tagging music in Last.fm/Audioscrobbler. Hot, but would be nice to be able to tag artists from their pages as well

This is an invitation by the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge to groups and individuals to submit proposals for exhibition of interactive art work and projects reflecting on the thematic of the transvergence.

More Information Here

Creative interplay of disciplines to catalyze artistic, scientific, and social innovation is evidenced by decades of multi-/ pluri-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary discourse and practice. Emphasis on the dynamics subtending this interplay has led to the notion of transvergence, a term coined by Marcos Novak which overrides discipline-bound issues and demands, and serves as the focus of the present call. Proposals are sought that address but are not limited to themes outlined below, challenging the boundaries of disciplines and conventional (art) institutional discourse, and indicating creative strategies for overriding them. Proposals may consist of art projects, residencies, workshops, standalone conference papers, or group conference sessions.

Version 1.0 released...

We have first-person video games, typically where the player looks over the barrell of a gun. We have third-person video games, where the player watches themselves jump around and navigate the game world.

Musing over these two with friends and researchers, I've wondered - what are second person games?

we make money not art mentions a recent stab at Second Person Gaming, with Shoot yourself to survive from a game-based artist named Julian Oliver. Basically, you control your own avatar, but see yourself through another character's eyes in the game. Psychonauts had similar moments, on the wonderful Milkman Conspiracy level, and other games have players control their characters while watching over a security camera or the like. They were odd moments, but brief, not extended forays into perspective, control and detachment.

Oliver is working on a multiplayer mode, so the other player is you. Or the other character is you. Something like that. It's a bit of a brain bend, probably because we don't know what second person video gaming is yet. But if it encourages creative multiplayer? Bring it on!

I’ve updated my MSMDX diagram, which illustrates how media and metadata flow to and from different activities around media on the web. The old diagram, which Chris Anderson called “one of the more cogent graphics illustrating the new architecture of participation in a remix culture,” and Howard Rheingold described as “a kind of mandala of technologies of cooperation in many-to-many cultural production,” was nice, but it had a few serious problems:

1. It didn’t include any metadata flows from casual consumption to the other activities. This was a serious oversight, as this “attention metadata” is one of the most important and useful sources of information about the meaning of media. I strongly believe that “consumers” need to be viewed as active cultural participants and producers, not just passive receivers of “content.”
2. It didn’t show that each kind of metadata is potentially useful for each of the other activities. This is mostly because of the way I designed the graphic: the arrows were too big to show too many of them.
3. It wasn’t sufficiently Powerpoint-friendly.

So I attempted to correct these deficencies in the new diagram, which isn’t quite as aesthetically pleasing but is, I think, more useful. Comments and criticism welcome.

A user-friendly tool developed inside the aceMedia project that allows the semantic annotation of images and videos for multimedia analysis and retrieval.

The new Fluidlens achieves optical zooming through altering its focal length by changing its shape which mimics the action of the human eye and is no bigger than a contact lens.

Now that’s my kind of “Crossfire”: This Spartan Life is a “talk show” that takes place in net-connected Xboxes running Halo. It’s the thinking man’s Red vs. Blue, with brainy guests like artist and filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh and interactive guru Bob Stein. The best part, aside from watching guests get shot at, is the occasional dance routines involving the “Solid Gold Elite Dancers” and the Game Boy-produced soundtrack. The 8-bit music from Bitshifter, Bubblyfish, Nullsleep and Glomag represents some of the best virtuostic chiptune music. So far, there’s only one episode up, but it’s worth checking out for the beepilicious Nintendo tunes.

This Spartan Life [create digital music]

This content-based image search and automatic learning-based linguistic indexing project was started in 1995.

CJR attempts to define and draw a distinction between participatory journalism and citizens' journalism:

First, there's the move of established newspapers and news sites to solicit and publish material, such as photos or personal accounts, from their readers -- that we'd like to call "participatory journalism." Then there's the creation of blogs and unedited news sites that allow users to write and post their own content. That one we'll call "citizen journalism."

A very well researched addition to the growing body of writing on this topic, Constance Steinkuehler makes a solid case from a healthy mix of ethnographic study, gameplay and a hell of a lot of reading.

One of the few papers that really captures the MMORPG as a richly conversant platform in which the user actively shapes the culture of their environment.

Ty Marta!

The Current Studio is CurrentTV’s back-end site, where you can actually make stuff for the CurrentTV network. The indefatigable Robin Sloan, in the Current Blog, points to an overview, remarking, “I recommend scoping out the the VC2 Survival Guide; it’s really useful already (and there is a lot more on the way). When you’re done lurking, and you want to get talking: There are groups and profiles (here’s mine).” [Current Studio] [Current Blog] [t d f] [t d f]

The Japanese Communications Ministry is to establish a research group that will work to commercialize virtual reality television by 2020.

VR TV will enable images to be seen in 3D from any angle at a quality equivalent to that offered by high-definition TVs, and allow viewers to feel and smell the objects they are watching.

Users watching a home shopping programs will be able to examine products from various angles and feel them. VR TV technology will also likely be used in telemedicine and other fields.

To simulate the sensation of touch, researchers are considering using means including ultrasound, electrical stimulation and wind pressure. For smells, the development of a device that mixes natural aromatic essences to recreate particular scents will likely be given a major focus.

In addition, studies of human neural pathways and an array of related basic research are expected to be carried out.

Via Nikkei and Japan Today.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger,IBM's Vice President, Technical Strategy and Innovation, has posted an entry on his blog about The Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation, which echoes many of the themes we've been exploring at The Cooperation Project:

I have personally thought a lot about this question, and I sometimes wonder if there isn't something deeper going on beyond the rational answers discussed above. I wonder if there isn't something about the human condition that urges us to collaborate, work as a community and solve problems together (as just one example, see the World Community Grid Project). Making money is important to us all. But so is gaining the respect of our families, friends, colleagues, and the community at large -- maybe even more so for most people. Why is that? Allow me to speculate. We are, after all, social animals, and perhaps some of the answers are found in evolutionary biology and our continuing attempt to become alpha members of the group. For many, what brings us together in communities is perhaps something more spiritual. While I do not think of myself as religious, I found a quote from Rabbi Tzvi Marx in Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" (p 438) particularly moving in this regard: "Collaborating so mankind can achieve its full potential is God's hope." Human beings respond to many things.

I think that all these motivations have always been part of economic activity and of capitalism. Open source doesn't change that. What is different today is that for the first time, in large part because of the Internet, we have the capacity to self-organize into groups fluidly and globally. The firm is no longer the only -- or, in some circumstances, the optimal -- institution for organizing productive, value-creating work. And that promises a much more diverse and exciting -- and very innovative -- kind of marketplace.

Diane Mermigas tackles the real issue of how new forms of distribution are throwing a wrench into traditional TV licensing deals -- like cable carriage and network affiliation agreements. "Leverage is not what it used to be," she writes.

Fred von Lohmann’s paper argues that the DMCA has failed to keep infringing copies of copyrighted works from reaching the masses. Fred argues that the DMCA has not prevented “protected” files from being ripped, and that once those files are ripped they appear on the darknet where they are available to everyone. I think Fred is right that the DMCA and the DRM (anti-copying) technologies it supports have failed utterly to keep material off the darknet.

Over at the Picker MobBlog, several people have suggested an alternate rationale for the DMCA: that it might help raise the cost and difficulty of using the darknet. The argument is that even if the DMCA doesn’t help keep content from reaching the darknet, it may help stop material on the darknet from reaching end users.

I don’t think this rationale works. Certainly, copyright owners using lawsuits and technical attacks in an attempt to disrupt the darknet. They have sued many end users and a few makers of technologies used for darknet filesharing. They have launched technical attacks including monitoring, spoofing, and perhaps even limited denial of service attacks. The disruption campaign is having a nonzero effect. But as far as I can tell, the DMCA plays no role in this campaign and does nothing to bolster it.

Why? Because nobody on the darknet is violating the DMCA. Files arrive on the darknet having already been stripped of any technical protection measures (TPMs, in the DMCA lingo). TPMs just aren’t present on the darknet. And you can’t circumvent a TPM that isn’t there.

To be sure, many darknet users break the law, and some makers of darknet technologies apparently break the law too. But they don’t break the DMCA; and indeed the legal attacks on the darknet have all been based on old-fashioned direct copyright infringement by end users, and contributory or vicarious infringement by technology makers. Even if there were no DMCA, the same legal and technical arms race would be going on, with the same results.

Though it has little if anything to do with the DMCA, the darknet technology arms race is an interesting topic in itself. In fact, I’m currently writing a paper about it, with my students Alex Halderman and Harlan Yu.

" Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge."

Video Traces is a system that makes it easy to capture a piece of rich digital media, such as video or a digital image, and to annotate that media both visually (using a pointer to record gestures) and verbally.

"What Is It? It's a viewer/editor for all the spiffy metadata you can put into QuickTime movies. You know how you can view, edit and sort by your mp3s' ID3 metadata in iTunes? Well, a similar metadata system exists for all your QuickTime movies, too, but until now the only way to access it was through the horrid interface of QuickTime Pro Player (You can see certain metadata items in QT's Info window, and add them in the Movie Properties window under Annotations)."

Turning Wordpress into a tag-based blogging application - Summary: How to forego categories and date-based archives and turn your Wordpress-powered blog into a tag-based blogging system. Like del.icio.us, but a blog

"Below are a set of nested value nets, from the perspective of providing video-to-PC services. I choose to nest multiple value nets – instead of displaying linear value chains – to ensure we have a superior framework in which to illustrate the complexity and inter-connected nature of firms who are simultaneously compelled to compete and complement, sell and buy, i n quickly forking and evolving environments, in order to provide video-to-PC oriented services."

(Also see their New Broadband Video Services Report. -kc.)

Instead of weeks or even months to develop a full-text search for your data, if you know how to use DBSight, you can easily create the full-text search literally in minutes.

First vinyl, then 8-track, then tape, then CD, then MP3, now . . . Dashboard widget?

Yes, you heard that right. Sexohol is releasing its album Enjoy as a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. It's free, and includes pictures of the lovely couple in the band plus lyrics. Only downside is you have to be connected to the Internet to listen to the music streaming. "But, Peter!", you say, "I need to feel the hot loving of Enjoy even when I'm not connected to the Internet!" Sexohol hears you; US$9.99 buys you a Widget you can listen to anywhere. (Music without a live Internet connection? Who wouldathunkit?)

Sounds like the best way to enjoy this band is at their Bacchanalian performances, but if you can feel the love on your Dashboard, more power to you.

The press release is hilarious, so I've broken with normal CDM policy and posted it after the jump, along with a picture of bassist Logan for those of you who like young bass-playing boys (Shedonists, Gay/Bi Hedonists, etc.). Just promise you'll pretend to act surprised when you find out this band is from L.A..

...at the journalism professors' annual convention. "To learn, when you are ready to pass the torch, that some of the best and the brightest don't want your torch, because they think it went out a while ago, counts as a sad day for J-schoolers of a certain generation."

The networks are jumping into your iPod with mixed results. News shows and episode commentaries are big, but forget about an audio version of 24 for now. By Randy Dotinga.

EFF Attorney and lead counsel in many high-profile P2P litigations, Fred von Lohmann has authored a paper discussing whether the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998 to circumvent and solve issues of digital copyright infringement, actually works to inhibit such infringements. (PDF of the paper here.) As Fred notes, much has been written about the collateral damage wrought by the DMCA, but little analysis has been given to whether, despite that damage, the thing actually works. Fred’s conclusion: No.

”This paper argues that the DMCA fails in light of its stated goal—namely, reducing the threat of copyright infringement in the digital age. Tredns in digital sitribution technologies, moreover, indicate that any regulatory regime focused on TPMs [technological protection measures] as a solution to this problem may be doomed to fail.”

The Picker MobBlog is hosting a roundtable discussion of the paper, featuring Fred, Ed Felten, Bill Rosenblatt, Bill Patry, Julie Cohen, Tim Wu, and several others. The complete roster of blogging panelists is listed in Ed Felten’s announcement of his own participation. Fred von Lohmann posted the first entry, a summary argument of his paper. This is the XML feed address of the Picker MobBlog.

A tremendous use of blogspace, this promises to be a terrific discussion among some of the most knowledgeable thinkers in the field.

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Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable has posted a very interesting summary of a discussion on the various mobile efforts by the biggest Web 1.0 properties, Yahoo!, Google, AOL,Handset Manufacturer Nokia, and Search Engine and Mobile Technology Guru Gary Price.

It's worth a read and the links are worth a closer examination and a few bookmarks, especially if you enter them on your mobile so you only have to enter them once.

Go here to read for yourself.

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Missed an entry? - Search it

Nokia Launches Smartphone Mobile Search Tools... - Aug 08, 2005
Talk Five... - Oct 21, 2004
Search on the Move... - Aug 03, 2004
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Tristan Lewis reports that NPR is dropping Audible while it develops "a new strategy for making NPR content downloadable and portable".

The main problem will be what in sales they call call "channel conflicts", which are more political than technical. NPR essentially wholesales programming to local stations, which retail them to listeners. The new strategies will need to help, rather than hurt, local stations and networks, which are the final "sales channel" of programming to listeners (and sponsors).

Kevin Burton writes ""Technorati recently published that they're seeing 900k new posts per day. PubSub says they're seeing 1.8M. With all these posts per day how much raw bandwidth is required? Due to innefficiencies in RSS aggregation protocols a little math is required to understand this problem." And more importantly, with millions of posts, what percentage of them have any real value, and how do busy people find that .001%?"

The Blogday Buzz is spreading. Bloggers from around the world wrote about it and placed buttons in their blogs.

Nir Ofir is the initiator of BlogDay 2005. Nir envisions that in one long moment In August 31st 2005, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs (at the same time) - preferably blogs different from their own in culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, all blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.

Hilary Rosen, the former president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is guest blogging over at Lawrence Lessig's blog.

She follows Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, on the slate of excellent guest bloggers during Larry's summer vacation.

Comment - TrackBack...

This week TiVo begins its downloading tests with video from the Independent Film Channel. Also, Engadget found an Orb Networks hack called TiVoAnywhere that’ll let you remotely access shows recorded on your TiVo on a PC.

Update: Here's the press release on TiVo downloads

The Financial Times is reporting that Rupert Murdoch and company are in negotiations to buy Blinkx, the video search engine. Last week, Murdoch said News Corp is in "advanced negotiations" with a search engine, but he wouldn't name names. Meanwhile, Blinkx has been steadily adding content partners, including Internet Broadcasting's affiliated TV websites. Blinkx would give News Corp instant competency with video search -- an increasingly critical component of successful media companies. (Thanks, J!)

Lately, I've been using private wikis to manage information for a variety of collaborative projects -- including an upcoming Poynter NewsU online course on covering hospitals. It strikes me that this is a tool that reporters who work on team projects probably should try.

Here's what I mean: Say a team of five reporters, working at a total of three locations, are collaborating on an investigative project. How are they divvying the labor, organizing and sharing the information, and plotting the story line? Chances are they're using a haphazard mishmash of e-mail, phone conversations, faxes, photocopies, etc. They (...)

Entry continued...

In his new paper, Fred von Lohmann argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, when evaluated on its own terms, is a failure. Its advocates said it would prevent widespread online copyright infringement; and it has not done so.

Fred is right on target in diagnosing the DMCA’s failure to do what its advocates predicted. What Fred doesn’t say, though, is that this failure should have been utterly predictable — it should have been obvious when the DMCA was grinding through Congress that things would end up like this.

Let’s look at the three assumptions that underlie the darknet argument [quoting Fred]:

1. Any widely distributed object will be available to some fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
2. Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
3. Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.

When the DMCA passed in 1998, #1 was obviously true, and #3 was about to become true. #2 was the least certain; but if #2 turned out to be false then no DMCA-like law would be necessary anyway. So why didn’t people see this failure coming in advance?

The answer is that many people did, but Congress ignored them. The failure scenario Fred describes was already conventional wisdom among independent computer security experts by 1998. Within the community, conversations about the DMCA were not about whether it would work — everybody knew it wouldn’t — but about why Washington couldn’t see what seemed obvious to us.

When the Darknet paper was published in 2001, people in the community cheered. Not because the paper had much to say to the security community — the paper’s main argument had long been conventional wisdom — but because the paper made the argument in a clear and accessible way, and because, most of all, the authors worked for a big IT company.

For quite a while, employees of big IT companies had privately denigrated DRM and the DMCA, but had been unwilling to say so in public. Put a microphone in front of them and they would dodge questions, change the subject, or say what their employer’s official policy was. But catch them in the hotel bar afterward and they would tell a different story. Everybody knew that dissenting from the corporate line was a bad career move; and nobody wanted to be the first to do it.

And so the Darknet paper caused quite a stir outside the security community, catalyzing a valuable conversation, to which Fred’s paper is a valuable contribution. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to weigh the consequences of the DMCA in an alternate universe where it actually prevents online infringement; but if we restrict ourselves to the facts on the ground, Fred has a very strong argument.

The DMCA has failed to prevent online infringement; and that failure should have been predictable. To me, the most interesting question is how our policymakers can avoid making this kind of mistake again.

The point isn't the features, it's the underlying philosophy of relinquishing control

Chinese fans of Harry Potter have been translating the book faster than the official publishers, causing IP conflicts. Potter author Rowling is OK with fan translations; Chinese publishers are not.

Veoh software, installed on PCs or Macs, creates a virtual television network, that is able to distribute TV-Quality, Full-Screen broadcast video to hundreds of millions of users with broadband internet connections.

Online publishing salaries of recent graduates are higher than broadcast or print media salaries, according to the 2004 Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduates conducted by The University of Georgia’s James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research.

The survey found that the media online publishing salary in 2004 was $32,000. By comparison, the median salary for TV was $23,492; for cable TV was $30,000; for daily newspapers was $26,000; for weekly newspapers was $24,000; for radio was $23,000; and for consumer magazines was $27,000.

A software program called SopCast, based on P2P technology, allows you to watch streaming television or other media on your PC via the Internet. It has 3 modes, official channels which are supported by sopcast.org, user channels, and test channels. Users in our Cool Broadband Bookmarks Forum take a closer look at the program and its capabilities. The software is available for free download on the SopCast site.

music band that performs over bluetooth.

"The paper offers a framework to explain large scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of distributed computing and carpooling as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for “shareable goods” as goods that are lumpy and mid-grained in size, and explains why goods with these characteristics will have systematic overcapacity relative to the requirements of their owners. The paper then uses comparative transaction costs analysis, focused on information characteristics in particular, combined with an analysis of diversity of motivations, to suggest when social sharing will be better than secondary markets to reallocate this overcapacity to non-owners who require the functionality. The paper concludes with broader observations about the role of sharing as a modality of economic production as compared to markets and hierarchies (whether states or firms), with a particular emphasis on sharing practices among individuals who are strangers or weakly related, its relationship to technological change, and some implications for contemporary policy choices regarding wireless regulation, intellectual property, and communications network design."

"Yes, there’s a clear transfer payment in favour of people who are unwilling to pay the current market-clearing price of a broadband connection. This is a net loss of utility to society, since the taxpayers whose money was confiscated had other, more pleasant, ways of spending this money in mind.

But there are also reasons to consider the free flow of information via telecom networks as a special and unique case. Information goods may not always conform to classical economic models, such as rivalrous consumption."

This it to announce a new service at OPEN4ALL.INFO: SocialSWF. Here is a short HOWTO document:

Ranking and Selection

Clips from movie sections at del.icio.us( mov, mpg, mpeg, wmv and avi) are ranked according to number of blog posts with direct links to them (checked via Technorati). The number of occurrences for each clip at del.icio.us and the number of linking blog posts at Technorati are then taken as the input to produce a popularity rank for each clip. After probabilistic analysis - consisting of a test to confirm that sample distribution is consistent with exponential distribution - top 80% of most popular clips are selected.

Download and Convert

Selected clips are then downloaded and transcoded on the fly to Flash (SWF) format. MPlayer and FFmpeg are used to test, download and convert clips from any format to Flash SWF. The list and clips repository refresh twice per day ...

Instructions

In order to play a clip, please click on corresponding thumbnail image; for Technorati cosmos, click on the text link ...

Tom's Hardware is running a story about proposed new copy protection techniques that could be used in the next generation high definition Blu-ray DVDs. This is incredible:

One part of the announcement that had been anticipated by experts was Blu-ray's embrace of Advanced Access Content System (AACS), one version of which has also been adopted by the HD DVD Forum. This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet, making it possible for discs that fail a security check to trigger a notification process, enabling the provider to send the player a sort of "self-destruct code." This code would come in the form of a flash ROM "update" that would actually render the player useless, perhaps unless and until it is taken to a repair shop for reprogramming. The Blu-ray statement noted that certain elements of AACS have yet to be formally approved by the BDA.

When will the studios get it? Make DVDs so affordable and so easy to use that we'll glady give them our money. Instead, it looks like they want to be able to "blow up" a possible pirate's DVD player. This should make for some interesting tech support calls from innocent people: "What? You blew up my DVD player because my copy of Bambi was scratched?" or "I can't watch Star Wars on DVD because my cable connection is down?"

Anything that can be encrypted will be decrypted. When will they realize that? I give the pirates a few weeks to break this (the story mentions how one earlier scheme was defeated by a permanent marker).

Calling all indie gamemakers: entries for the 2nd Annual Independent Games Competition at Slamdance are due October 24 for a modest $40 fee, or submit by Sept 30 to save $10. The competition, held in January in Park City, Utah alongside the Slamdance and Sundance film festivals, includes a category for student work. Check out last year’s finalists and winners.

In the past at other festivals there’s been some contention over what “indie” means; here are Slamdance’s rules this year:

Developer(s) cannot have sponsorship money exceeding $25,000.

Games published or distributed for profit before the final deadline of October 24, 2005 are ineligible.

Innovative and unusual formats, such as interactive fiction and drama, are encouraged to apply. Games must display interactivity, and be in an electronic format to be considered for the competition.

(More info at Grand Text Auto -kc.)

Some serious ninjas devised a way to properly play videos on an older V1, 2 or 3 iPods in all their black and white glory. Unfortunately this method won't play back sound and video at the same time, so all the porn will have to be silent. Still interested? Sure you are.

Instructions [Via DAPReview]

...even if their record company tells them not to.

Downloadable music wasn't much in Japan, until about a week ago. Then iTunes hit the Japanese market and four days later a million new downloads had been racked up. The company's local catalog boasts about a million song titles from fifteen of Japan's record labels.

However, some of those left out want in, even if their nominal record label (*coughSonycough*) would rather they sat home. According to an AP wire story (here on SiliconValley.com) at least one individual artist and a major management agency are seeking to do deals directly with Apple.

The snark factor here is incredibly high. Not only does music want to be free, so do musicians. That's "free" as in "free to pursue new and potentially profitable ways to connect to fans." Once again the Cartel puts control over all else - Sony wants to control the download of music from production through distribution, through the service you use and all the way to the devices you're allowed to use to listen to it. This control serves only the corporate interests, despite their attempts to dress it up as being in the artists' interests. Given even the slightest crack of light the artists will promptly bolt for the door.

Run Sano-san, run!

Rex Hammock says that President Bush is podcasting.

Technorati Tags: Bush

At OSCON 2005, I was lucky enough to get a demo of Flock, the new "social web browser" based on Firefox, from Chris Messina, Flock CSS and design guru, at their launch party.

I was blown away! Drag and drop blogging - drag text from a blog post and it automatically creates a cite tag with a link to the original post and the quoted text is indented using a blockquote tag. Drag and drop Flickr photos (I do this painfully every day for Urban Vancouver e.g. check out today's East 12th and Commercial photo). And Chris teased me with some more future features like having del.icio.us as your bookmarks (goodbye to useless local bookmarks).

Some random thoughts:

• In one fell swoop :-), Flock threatens to render platform specific blog editor programs like BlogJet and Qumana obsolete. Why use a Windows only app that isn't open source and that evolves slowly when I can use an open source app that works cross platform on Mac, Windows and Linux?
• This is the future. Cross platform apps that work on Windows and Mac and Linux without the slings and arrows of outrageous 'porting'. And I assume Flock will incorporate the Firefox updater system so upgrades will be painless.
• Don't know what Flock's business model is! Ads? Acquisition? Doesn't matter, because no matter what happens to them, since the code is open source their innovation will live on! Rock on Flockers!

Disclaimers:

• Flockers Chris Messina and Andy Smith are my friends.
• I am friends with the Qumana team (and Qumana solves the Windows blogging pain today and is NOT in beta so if you must blog on Windows, I'd recommend Qumana until flock is in open beta) and have tried to push them in the direction of cross platform, so guys and gals just consider this another push :-)
• I have not had the opportunity to use Flock, just got the Chris demo. So it probably has lots of bugs especially since it is only at version 0.2 (where is my beta code :-) ?)
• I am not 100% sure it is Mac, Windows and Linux compatible. I just assume it is because it is based on Firefox which works on all 3 platforms. I'd be disappointed if it wasn't.

Here's the link to the 19 Weeks to Go video courtesy of Peter Jackson's video blog for King Kong.

It was a relatively quiet week for IPTV and Internet TV.

• Companies continued to report their second quarter results this week.
• Telecom companies won a large battle against the cable companies in Texas.
• Powerline networking continues to show no signs of a short-out.
• Our Internet TV station listing continues to grow.

Here are some other interesting reads...ontains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

Processing 1.0 (BETA)
From the site:
http://mobile.processing.org (coming soon)
Processing Mobile, a programming environment and library for writing software
for mobile phones.

Esme Vos of MuniWireless points to what she calls a 'devastating critique' of the FCC’s findings in its July 2005 FCC Broadband Report. The Free Press report and analysis (which Vos consulted on and found here (PDF)), states in conclusion: "Wireless technologies can offer incredibly fast connections at a fraction of the cost of cable or DSL. But these technologies are being crippled by the wasteful allocation of the public airwaves and by incumbent-backed legislative efforts to stifle competition and innovation at the local level," and that "Congress must enact clear statutes that will free the broadband market from duopoly domination and promote new market entrants. Congress should authorize any entity, public or private, that seeks to offer broadband services to American consumers, open up more spectrum for wireless broadband, and ensure open access to all high-speed communications networks. Advances such as these will promote a strong American economy, one able to effectively compete in the global marketplace."

Meetro is a new location-based community building software. Using Wi-Fi signals, it can discover the general location of a user using what can be non-technically described as an alternative form of GPS technology. City residents are visually shown exactly who’s in their vicinity and the general interests they share. [...]

Chris at Pixelsumo points out that tonight on Resonance FM, London's 24-hour art radio station, OpenLab is hosting a program on using free and open source software tools for music. Sounds like chat, discussion, and some live sets. 7 PM London time, but of course they've got MP3 and Real Audio streams, too, because the sun never sets on the British art music empire. I'll try to record it, so if you happen to miss it and want to hear it, contact me and I'll hook you up.

Listen to the show online

OpenLab info (London)

What's OpenLab you ask? It's a London-based collective of people using open source software for their art, complete with IRC chat, mailing list, workshops, and in-person get-togethers. Even if you're not in London, some interesting ideas there about how to put together such a group. (See also: ptop music collective here in NYC. Other groups?).

The Media Center is offering 15 fellowships to enable independent, non-profit or academic participants from any country to attend "We Media: Behold the Power of Us," an Oct. 5 conference in New York City, hosted by The Associated Press. Details here.

Ashwin Navin has the self satisfied look of a cat that just licked a pint of cream. His eyes gleam, when he talks about BitTorrent, where he has a lofty title of chief operating officer. Navin, an investment banker-turned-Yahooligan doesn’t need a jolt of Starbucks double shot, when exulting about the future of his little start-up. In the ephemral world of digital content, Bit Torrent is as close to a sure thing, you can get.

All he has to do is mention Bram Cohen and Bit Torrent. In the ever mutating peer-to-peer networking universe, Cohen is like New York Yankees’ short stop, Derek Jeter. In less than two years, their client software which allows users to share big files such as video clips with remarkable ease through smart technology, has been downloaded nearly 45 million times. That’s about 100 million less than claims by Skype folks, but its only getting started. In less than a year, Bit Torrent has gone from being an illegal file sharing network to being the network that is being used to distribute legal content. “We are now in a position to promote free, or paid content,” says Navin. And that explains why MPAA and RIAA are both responding nicely to Bit Torrent’s overtures.

The Bit Torrent search engine, and soon a torrent directory service will bring the company one step closer to becoming an even more legitimate part of the broadband world. Navin explained that distributing video games, short video clips, ancillary audio information and software are key areas of focus for the company. Blizzard, Linspire and a slew of other companies have used Bit Torrent for content distribution over the Internet in recent past. [ If I am C/Net’s Download.com, I need to be worried, for Bit Torrent can quite easily replace their digital download directory. (Yahoo, how about stepping in, and buying this before it gets too expensive?)]

For now thanks to advertising dollars, donations from users and other projects, the company has enough to pay the bills, keep seven employees well fed, and hire another 13 by end of the year. How about more venture capital? I have heard rumors that Doll Capital might have invested in Bit Torrent. Navin says the company hasn’t taken any VC money thus far. “But we are opportunistic,” he says. Not that opportunity is not knocking on their door. A recent San Jose Mercury News article resulted in over a dozen VCs reaching out to the company. Bit Torrent could be one of those start-ups, that VCs can go nuts about.

Think about it. In today’s Silicon Valley, there is so much cash sloshing around, that some of the smartest money managers on the planet, the guys who have turned more pennies into dollars than I can even dream off, aka Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, are ready to pump in $8.5 million into a promise of an aging hipster’s ability to turn podcasting into a mega-business. Or that, another equally pennywise bunch is ready to invest a few million more, in another Podcasting start-up, Odeo.

If those companies can snag millions, then Bit Torrent is definitely worth a lot more. Let me put it in the old world terms. The podcast start-ups of today are like Wine.com, while Bit Torrent is Cisco of the digital content revolution. It has actual technology that will help grow the open media. It has the technology that will help distribute the “video content” next generation bloggers will create or whatever. It is infrastructure - and we know who makes all the money. That explains the cat who licked the cream smile on Navin’s face.

Interesting points by Simon Judge and Capgemini/INSEAD (see picture). Needless to say that I fully subscribe to them.


Image from Capgemini/INSEAD

Users Think They Don’t Want Advanced Mobile Services

First of all, as the report suggests, it opens up new opportunities for network operators to innovate with simpler pricing and services. However, we should not rule out new advanced service just because people don’t want them. People might not know what they want until they see it. People have responded to the survey in terms of the services offered now. As for new advanced services, they must be clearly priced and made as simple as possible.

Application Developer Perspective: Part 1: Payment

In summary, I believe existing and new solutions should…

• Be affordable compared to non-mobile alternatives
• Have transparent pricing
• Easily allow providers to accept payments
• Easily allow end users to pay

IODATA presents the Movie Tank II in Japan, a casing for a 3.5" HDD, that will be available without or with a 160 or 250Gb HDD. It has a SIGMA EM8510 chipset that renders it 720p (D4 in Japan) compatible. when it comes to video, it's Mpeg1/2/4 compatible and for the audio part, it can read MP3, OGG, WMA and WAV files.

Four main challenges relating to file management emerged from the research: effective and efficient file storage and retrieval; the lack of an industry standard file format enabling consistent capture and population of metadata fields; the learning curve; ime spent at the computer, rather than taking pictures.

Mobile Research

The Mobile Device Database Solution
The Mobile Device Database is a comprehensive collection of data for each device on every carrier. Mobile Research has a team dedicated to researching every device in your market, in detail. Device data is gathered from actual devices by our researchers using in-house profiling tools and processes. The Mobile Research device profiling process provides the Mobile Device Database with an unprecedented level of accuracy and scope. The XML formatted data is designed and presented in a format that is easy to parse and load into a relational database server for programmatic use. Mobile Research continually adds new mobile devices as they hit the market, enabling subscribers to support new handsets immediately. Mobile Research will continue to expand the scope of data that is available for each device as devices become more complex and as the market embraces new mobile media types.

In what relation does this stand to WURFL? Anybody?


Via Russ

Memory, Memory, Memory

The biggest enemy when creating Flash Lite content is not performance, but running out of memory. I touched on this already in various places throughout this article, and it really is most likely the issue on which you'll spend most of your debugging time. First, you need to realize that file size is not equal to memory used. File size is an important indicator, but it is simply not the same as how much memory your movie needs to run.

from Best Practices for Porting Flash Animation to Mobile Phones

Via Weekly i-mode Business Newsletter

There has been a lot of talk about citizen journalists' photos and videos from the tsunami and London bombings and how news organizations are making it easy for citizen journalists to upload their photos.

But last night Alejandro Junco de la Vega, publisher of Mexico City's Reforma, Guadalajara's Mural, and Monterrey's El Norte told an AEJMC audience that journalists must remember to ask citizens to contribute not just with their eyes and ears, but with their minds too.

I hope to have more from the AEJMC conference as I get time.

... The combination of powerful personal computers and high-speed access to the internet has already begun to transform the way many schools approach teaching and learning. Martin Owen, Director of Learning at NESTA futurelab, is confident that mobile phones will have the same impact: "The notion that you've got this tool which can be a camera, a cinecamera, a television, a computer and a calculator as well as something you use for talking to other people in your pocket all the time means that you're armed with a very powerful learning tool."

Mobile phones are already being used in education, but so far the uses have been fairly modest. "We already see some education authorities sending truant 'text alerts' to parents. It's also used for notification of lesson and classroom changes, as well as to relay information about health visitors coming in," says Mike Short, Vice President of Research and Development for O2 and chairman of the Mobile Data Association.

In Higher Education, says John Traxler, Research Fellow for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wolverhampton, text messaging has been used in several small-scale projects, for example, to inform students that a lecture has been cancelled or that library books are overdue...

Read full story in NESTA futurelab in colleges and schools within the next five to ten years.

[via Putting people first]

"ibiblio.org has entered the fray, launching an enhanced BitTorrent site. Among the torrent offerings (all legal) are Linux kernels, distros, Project Gutenberg texts, and the ibiblio Speaker Series, which includes videos of talks by Larry Lessig, Robin Miller, and Dan Gillmor. ibiblio developed and open sourced the Osprey and Permaseed software to make BitTorrent seeding reliable, persistent, and suitable for large-scale content providers. Yes, you can find these torrents later."

Personal computers could soon fit entirely on a key ring. Researchers at IBM have developed the SoulPad system to carry a powerful, personalised virtual computer from one PC to the next, without losing the user’s work.

The virtual computer is stored on a USB key, or any portable device with substantial storage space, like an MP3 player. The virtual computer’s "soul" can then be uploaded to another PC by plugging the portable device in. This host machine needs no special software or even a network connection to take on an entirely new personality.

The SoulPad system does not provide an instant switch, however. A user must wait a couple of minutes while the software configures the host system for use.

IBM expects other devices, such as cellphones, to be launched with large storage capacity in the near future which would be able to carry SoulPad.

Video demo.

Via New Scientist.

Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture

In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems -- understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as "things" -- have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality -- how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, "to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials."

Fuller draws on texts by Félix Guattari (and his "serial collaborator" Gilles Deleuze) as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of "media ecology." Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies -- "taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously," as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the "medial will to power" illustrated by "the camera that ate itself"; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in "abnormal" relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, "Cctv -- world wide watch," that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams.

Contributing to debates around standardization, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture "an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo."

To order this book and to learn more about other titles in the Leonardo Book Series please visit the Leonardo Book Series website.

MEMBER DISCOUNT! Leonardo/ISAST Associate Members are eligible for 20% off all Leonardo Book Series titles and also receive a number of other membership benefits! Visit http://leonardo.info/members.html for more details.

: Remember ICraveTV, the site streaming U.S. television out of Canada until it was shut down through legal action? A new contender is trying a variation on the theme: CraftyTV offers free streams of popular shows like "Desperate Housewives," "Sponge Bob" and "The Office;" the site boasts a library of thousands of hours. Viewing is no charge but users can pay $8 a month or $50 a year for "private bandwidth" that provides a stutter-free stream. As more people stream, the limited bandwidth streaming gets rockier and private bandwidth becomes more appealing. The domain registration is private.
For justification, the site refers to a section of U.S. copyright law that allows an exclusion for non-profit transmission and charges that defray costs. Sounds good but not likely to stave off legal challenges by the providers or content owners.
If you're going to try it out for research purposes, stick to IE; Firefox is being banned.

Two podcasting related venture funding announcements in a day: Odeo, the much-hyped podcasting distribution and tool firm started by former Blogger founder Ev Williams, has received first round of funding. The round was led by Charles River Ventures, along with Amicus Ventures, and a substantial group of individuals in the funding round: Mitch Kapor, Joe Kraus, Tim O'Reilly, Ron Conway, Josh Kopelman, Don Hutchinson, Dave Pell, Mike Maples, Francesco Caio, Barbara Poggiali, Emanuele Angelidis, James Hong, and Ed Zschau.
Earlier today, Adam Curry's company Podshow also announced funding.

Via PaidContent.org

Mizuko Ito, one of the primary sources for Smart Mobs, and in my opinion one of the most astute observers of soci-technological practices, is the co-editor of a new book from MIT Press. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the relationships between technology, social communications, and culture:

The three terms - personal, portable, pedestrian -point to a technological imaginary embedded in the social and cultural specificities of Japanese mobile phone use, interpreted ona transnational stage. In contrast to "the cellular phone" of the US (defined by technical infrastructure), and "the mobile" of the UK (defined by the untethering from fixed location) (Kotamraju & Wakeford 2002), the Japanese term, "keitai" (roughly translated, "something you carry with you"), references a somewhat different set of dimensions. A keitai is not so much about a new technical capability or freedom of motion, but about a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life.

STAMPS is a little program that allows you to see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map.

You can write: "this is my favorite pizzeria!", as a piece of advice to your buddies. The messages left in the system say something about the city where you live: what are the sport locations, the place to eat, the meeting spots. After a while, all this information could help users navigate the city. You can ask the system, for instance: "where is a pizzeria near by?", and the system will search for other people's messages which refer to the term pizzeria to give you an advice.

Full featured prototype is due by the end of this month.

[via Fabien]

Cairns appears to be literally a tool for finding and forming smartmobs, a research project by the looks of it, that uses visualization, social network analysis, collaborative filtering to enable you to find and form groups and tools to solve collective action problems. (Thanks, Ed!)

Short Description: Cairns is a web-based tool designed to connect people interested in finding collaborative and participatory ways of working.

What Problem Does It Solve?: It overcomes barriers to engaging in collective action.

How Does It Do That?: This open source too captures information about the way groups work together. Like a map, its unique visual interface allows participants to see what others are doing and to find and communicate with a community of practice. It also helps match those 'doing collaboration' to those studying and documenting participatory practices.

Why Is It Different?: Cairns is the first knowledge management tool to use visual interfaces to connect the community of collaborative practice.

Who Will Use It?: All groups engaged in collaborative or participatory ways of working and all those wishing to find people, methods, tools and groups working in collaborative and participatory ways.

Implementations: Pilot implementations include groups working in:

* Labor organizing
* Deliberation and dialogue
* Democratic and E-democratic organizing
* Citizen participation and consultation
* Political activism

Other Potential Uses: While Cairns is currently being implemented to build and connect those interested in collective action, the software is a visual knowledge management tool that can be re-purposed to connect any knowledge network.

Participatory Culture: News and Ideas
From the site:
This is a big day for us we just released a Beta of DTV for Mac OS X.

Nice interface, easy to use.. Great stuff!
A couple of important things missing: Comments and Permalinks to the vlog entries. Vlogs aren't vlogs without them.

Darknet
From the site:
Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation is a new book that offers first-person accounts of how the personal media revolution will impact movies, music, computing, television and games

The Hunting of the Snark Project - BitTorrent Application Suite

Streamingmedia.com: Multiple Delivery Mechanisms for Streaming
Interesting discussion regarding some obscure and emerging areas of content delivery: P2P, Quality Layers and Personal Area Networks.
From the article:
P2P, personal area networks, and progressive layering of downloads are just a few of the mechanisms that will ensure streaming's success in the future.

Via sLop

Via MIT Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology

The aftermath of the London bombings is a big moment for citizen journalism, but now a British journalism organization is blasting news organizations for motivating the public to cover the news. "Attempts by television channels to actively encourage their viewers to go out and get news pictures and then transmit the results direct to them, are totally unacceptable and border on the irresponsible," wrote the Chartered Institute of Journalists in a letter. The CIJ also criticized CNN for "sheer effrontery" in expecting viewers to send in video without getting paid. This debate is just warming up, folks.

Known as the "father of podcasting," former MTV VJ Adam Curry has secured $8.85 million in backing for his venture, PodShow Inc. (Free reg. req.)

Billy Wright has been named VP of worldwide wireless for Warner Bros. Online. "We fundamentally view wireless as a whole new distribution opportunity, and we want to develop it for movies, television, marketing, promotion -- all of our divisions," said Warner Bros. EVP Kevin Tsujihara.

Another great CVS camera hack HOW TO...When I first saw the CVS disposable camera, I knew that it would be hacked soon. I also knew that as soon as it was, I would have to buy one, and I knew exactly what I wanted it for: Mountain biking. Here are directions for building a helmet mount for the CVS one-time-use camcorder. Includes photos and a 10 minute trail riding video. Link.

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Alison Mealey is creating procedural visual art using Unreal. She sets up custom maps, has AI bots play against each other on the map, logging each bot’s (x,y) location once a second, and then uses Processing to render the log file as an image. Thanks to Jose for the pointer.

The Mac mini is an ideal low-cost, high-performance PowerPC development platform for numerous applications. Learn how to install and configure Linux on the mini. Future articles will add the software required to make it into a stand-alone multimedia appliance.

DesktopBSD aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for desktop users

Check out this new free visual effects website directory called VFXY, which allows users to add links and store their favourite sites. It also syndicates vfxblog's news.

Google have just launched RSS and Atom feeds for Google News.

RSS feeds can be outputted by adding the argument "&output=rss" to any Google News search (for example a search for backstage.bbc.co.uk in RSS).

No doubt there will be all sorts of new opportunities to include Google News results in backstage.bbc.co.uk prototypes.

And here's a tip from Ben: Don't forget you can use the "source:bbc_news" modifier in a Google News search to return results just from the BBC News website. For example, "Space Shuttle" news from BBC News in date order.

>CacheLogic has sorted through "terabytes of data" from a number of tier one ISPs and offers up their findings on p2p traffic:

Overall Mix of Peer-to-Peer traffic by volume, across the 4 major Peer-to-Peer networks. Audio: 11.34%, Video: 61.44%; Other: 27.22%

Microsoft video formats represent 46% of aggregate worldwide Peer-to-Peer traffic

65% of all audio files by volume of traffic are still traded in the MP3 format, but a surprising 12.3% are in the open-source OGG file format (almost all exclusively traded on the BitTorrent network, particularly in Asia)

BitTorrent is increasingly being used for the distribution of legitimate content

eDonkey is now the network of choice for video file trading

The 2nd International Video Reporting Awards is an international competition for innovative short documentary and non-fiction movies by individual directors. Video Reporting refers to cinematography, editing, sound, and direction by a single person. The jury will place great emphasis on the ways filmmakers deal creatively with this new digital authoring principle.

Public screenings, panels and discussions, and the awards ceremony, will be held in Weimar, Germany 2005 November 5 - 6. Video reporters, video journalists, documentary filmmakers, program managers, journalists, and TV directors from across Europe and USA will discuss the potentials of Video Reporting and Video Journalism in contrast with mainstream television. The awards are given by the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Hessischer Rundfunk, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, and Deutsche Welle TV. Deadline 2005 September 15 [Video Reporter] [FWD CALLS] [t d f|t d f|t d f]

The third annual Machinima Film Festival will be held at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York 2005 November 12 Saturday. Machinima is movie making using real-time 3D game technology or virtual reality applications. An example of Machinima is RED VS BLUE. 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 technique. Machinima filmmakers will be recognized for excellence by the 2005 Machinima Awards, which will be given at the Festival. Deadline 2005 October 6. [2005 Machinima Film Festival] [t d f | t d f]

Exploring the Content Network, Thomas Stovicek's thesis project, is a a set of screen-based software and hardware interactions between devices that looks at new ways to access, view and filter this growing store of information.

This is an adaptation of In The News, a project that heat-mapped Google News mind-share from Spring 2004 through Summer 2005. I have stopped collecting information from Google News, and started looking at the Del.icio.us Popular list of highly-linked websites.

QTAmateur is a small, simple QuickTime video player. It can play any format that QuickTime can understand, handle fullscreen video playback, and export files to any format that QuickTime can write.

VisGenie is a generic video based information visualization system on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems. capable of rendering video data in a manner suitable for the research / development purpose instead of entertainment, and visualizing the associated metadata streams. For this purpose VisGenie provides three basic functions.

But there is nothing to say that these media are preordained as the best methods of sharing knowledge and getting things done in society. They were the convenient ways. Emphasis on the past tense.

The FCC's decision to remove the requirement for phone companies to provide access to high-speed lines by rival ISPs is raising concern on a number of fronts. The requirements were replaced by a statement on consumer rights that has no official standing; David Isenberg uses it to explain the differences between Michael Powell's FCC and that of his successor as chairman, Kevin Martin. For instance: Powell, "Freedom to access content;" Martin, "Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice." His conclusion: "I'm scared." (via Joho the Blog.)
The Wall Street Journal has a good overview, including what worries business. For instance, the entertainment industry needs access to deliver movies and TV over the internet and rely on networks owned by competitors or potential competitors. They and others are relying on net neutrality, equal access to high-speed lines and equal service. From the Journal: "Last Monday, an unlikely coalition of lobbyists for Dell Inc., Microsoft, Vonage and three consumer-advocate groups fanned out across the FCC's offices to plead for enforceable net-neutrality rules." But not everyone agrees there's a problem that needs to be regulated. Dan Brenner, SVP-law and regulatory policy for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (not National Cable Television Association, as in the WSJ, told the paper: "It's a solution in search of a problem." He argues that there's no proof of market failure at present. Meanwhile, the cable industry sees the decision as more ammunition on its efforts to make sure the playing field for video is equally level.
Don't expect a resolution any time soon.

a cooperative, serverless email system. Each user contributes a small amount of storage and network bandwidth in exchange for access to email service.

The matrix...net of all nets

"...Indeed, radio — and therefore the beginning of all electronic mass media — is invented by receivers, not by broadcasters. One might modify Duchamp's famous quote that the onlookers make the pictures: "Ce sont les récepteurs, qui font les médias." And even though today it seems as if the broadcasters alone possessed all power over the mass media, there is an almost anarchical criterion, on which all is based and in which the power of the receivers has been preserved: In TV ratings are everything.

How could the power of the receivers be great enough to turn the entire media machine upside down and change it from a strategic into a distributive system? What fascination initiated all that constitutes our present-day electronicized worldview?..." From Sending and Receiving by Dieter Daniels, tout-fait, issue 2. [via]

When Mary Hodder of Napsterization digs into a subject, stand back and look out, world!

In her latest, "Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts" (caution, techie talk here), Mary follows up on a discussion begun first at Les Blogs in Paris and then at BlogHer last weekend -- namely, that raw link counts and Top 100 standings don't tell you much. What's more meaningful are the social interactions that take place within niche topic groups. She goes on to suggest the ingredients of an open source algorithm around blog influence. Excerpt:

I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others. What I love is that people who read blogs are assessing them over time to see how to take a blogger and their work. But more recently, as I said, I'm seeing these poorly done reports floating around by PR people, communications companies, journalists, advertising entities and others trying to score or weight blogs. And after hearing the degree to which people are upset by the obtuseness of the top counts, and because they do want to monetize their blogs or be included into influencer ranks, I'm at the point where I'd like to consider making something that we agree to, not some secretly held metric that is foisted upon us. ...

Game Insider reports an Interfax China article reading that China's Ministry of Culture has just moved to ban minors from playing any massively multiplayer online game that allows for player-killing (PK).

The statement reads, in part:

"Online games that have PK content usually also contain acts of violence and leads to players spending too much time trying to increase the power of their characters. They are harmful to young people."

Kind of reminds me of my childhood when mom would say, "You've been playing those games too long... why don't you go outside?" Only, you know, reinforced by Chinese police.

I think we can be pretty sure that this is going to change the way that Asian MMOs are made, since almost all of them currently contain large amounts of PvP content.

DirecTV on Thursday became the latest to express more than a passing interest in WiMax, says Red Herring.

The company said that it was “actively engaged” in finding ways to enter the growing market for wireless broadband services. Chase Carey, chief executive of the biggest U.S. satellite operator, said after announcing the company’s second-quarter results that no strategy had been decided yet in this growing area but it has become an area of focus.

“We are actively engaged in talking to an array of parties that are participating in [wireless] broadband… about various forms of relationships,” he is quoted as saying in The Financial Times, adding this could involve partnerships, alliances, or investments.

ecTV, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., said yesterday it added 225,000 subscribers in the quarter ended June 30, the smallest gain in two years, for a total of 14.7 million in the United States.

Rumor has it that Skype was almost sold to Murdock for $3 Billion last week. The FCC’s plan to deregulate DSL could boost the prospects for WiMAX but since 2.5 GHz spectrum is taken, that leaves the unlicensed 5.8 GHz band. That won't penetrate homes, so an external antenna would be required. Satellite television already has one. Adding a $100-200 WiMax client for both broadband and VoIP connections would not be rocket science.

It enables the triple play. It's cheaper than running fiber to the home.

“There may not be a great need for a fiber deployment that’s high in costs and provides few returns,” says a new Yankee Group report. Local providers can probably meet the community’s needs through other, less expensive means.”

Verizon and SBC are spending $1000-$2000 per home.

Qwest and Bell South have the need (but not the bucks). They need a WiMax partner with money. Who would be hot? Clearwire? SK Telecom? The Carlyle Group? You tell us.

Related DailyWireless stories include;

DailyWireless has more on Duopoly Laws, FCC To Lock Out DSL Competitors, U.S. Telcos Test WiMax, Qwest Testing WiMax, Satellite WiMax, Buckle Up, Qwest, Do WiMax. Like Speakeasy, Telco TV Architecture, DirecTV8 Launches, Voom Sold, Consumer Phased Array Sat Antennas, BellSouth Adds Satellite TV, CBS+Echostar Together Again, Sprint Bundles EchoStar, WiMax + Satellite?, Sprint + Qwest + Satellite, and Qwest + Echostar + DirecTV.

A list of TV shows in the public domain.

I originally reported on Orb as a sexy Home Media server platform, and I kept my mouth shut whenI heard about their announcement of going open source and their Sprint deal. I even reported when Russ Beattie started to grok them.

Orb has lots of fans - and this one could just make it!

Now I'm here to tell yah that there are APIs in place for Orb, so we now have a virtual file system in place - which can leverage our own Home Media LAN - with as much storage as WE wanna put onto it.

The Orb platform not only gives us access to TiVO and Windows Home Media Center live streams and recorded TV shows, but also acts as a general purpose media server. So we can write DLAs that access your personal media collection - whever it resides on the net.

Orb navigates it's way through your personal Firewall and NAT crap, and gives you access to all your files - anywhere you travel on the web.

Orb takes care of down sampling the media to adapt to your mobile phone, but scales itaself up for better bandwidth and devices - if that's what you got. So I could view live TV or recorded TV shows from my high speed bandwidth connection at work, and get at the same programming at mid-band resolution from my hotel room and lo-band resolution on my cell phone.

Sprint is using it for it's Personal Media Link service and now we all can build this functionality into OUR software. I'd say that's a pretty important piece of the puzzle.

As long as Orb gives away their server software - we're in like flint. The EULA says we gotta call them up - if we wanna distribute the server code ourselves - but I'll give yah Ted's phone # if any of you wanna do that.

By making Orb open source, and by giving us APIs - Ted and his company are providing us both a gateway into our Home LANs, but also connecting us to our Media devices.

Thanks Ted - and thanks Orb - for doing the right thing.

Ted writes......

One of the developer's challenges is still having to host an application somewhere on the Internet to make it accessible to users. Orb makes the user's own home machine into the server. So a developer can build an application and deploy it directly to the consumer -- then Orb makes that application web-accessible from any device.

In the first phase the API is all about personal access to content or applications. But in the second phase (later this year) we will also start exposing a collaborative framework... developers will be able to leverage all of the functionality of orb to build mobile collaborative applications and deploy them to the marketplace through P2P infrastucture. This is what Web 2.0 is all about.

one rocks the house.

Russell Beattie will be happy. And Simon Grice - too.

Get out the record books—JVC is proud to announce the world’s first compact high definition 3-CCD Camcorder with interchangeable lenses. This camera has enough features choke an HD-compatible horse. I am sure that the AV club kids of the world are jumping with joy with the release of this new $5,300 camcorder. Some features include HDV format, 720P signal, XLR audio inputs, SD slot, NTSC and PAL support and 1/3" 3-CCD system. If all goes as planned this camera will take the pornography industry to a whole new level. The quality of the close-ups is almost clinical, let's just say.

JVC VICTOR GY-HD100 HDV Camera [I4U]

Lazy, warezing, PSP hacking people of the world, this product is for you. It is a Memory Stick Duo video recording device. Rather than dealing with the hassle of video conversion and file formats and codecs just stream the video directly to your Memory Stick Duo. Four quality options are available. They range from 150 minutes of the highest quality to 1070 minutes of the lowest quality on a 1GB stick. Price will be around $105, but unfortunately the outlook is grim for a United States release. Japan only folks.

Memory Stick PRO Duo Video Recorder [PSP 411]

create a full-motion video using only pictures and a web browser. To add an audio track, you simply make a phone call or you supply text to be read aloud using our text-to-speech system.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says the wiki Web encyclopaedia written and edited by Internet users from all over the world plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content.

Following the election of the new Pope Benedict in April, a user substituted the pontiff's photo on the Wikipedia site with that of the evil emperor from Star Wars, Reuters says. "The picture was only on the page for a minute. But whoever opens the article at this moment will get annoyed -- and therefore doubt our credibility," Wales told German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Reuters explores how many customers are complaining about the DRM on the new Foo Fighters album, which is incompatible with iPods. Of course, despite the DRM, P2PNet points out the album is still being freely copied, one of the songs off it holding the number one spot among illegally traded rock music files. Despite that, the album has topped the charts - selling 736,000 units since launch, (and 23,000 digital copies).

BY CYNDI GREENING, PHOENIX, USA (CINEMA MINIMA) … I was reading the Times today and was surprised to see an article on Machinima. As you may recall, at Sundance 2005, we attended a panel discussion on using game boxes to produce real-time animation (the notes from the discussion can be found in this Summary of the Machinima Panel). Since I teach Maya (3D Animation), I got excited about the possibility of creating custom characters and environments that could be loaded into an Xbox (or similar device) to produce animated films. I lectured the process at school and Ross Ingle produced a Machinima Music video (see below). Further proof that one of the best things about Sundance is that you’re a year ahead of the rest of the world.

Ross’s First Machinima Movie Makes for Perfect Day (26 Feb 2005)

One of the GREAT things about going to Sundance is being able to come back and share what I discover with other folks who love independent film production! This year, there was an awesome panel on MACHINIMA. Basically, it’s using a video game device as a real-time virtual production studio with animated actors. I’m betting they’ll find a way to incorporate Maya models and Photoshop backgrounds soon. While I was at Sundance, I blogged about the process to create your own Machinima movie. Then, when I got back to teaching at MCC, I shared the process with students and other faculty.

Not surprisingly, Ross Ingle took in the information and immediately made a very clever MACHININMA MUSIC VIDEO He used WARCRAFT to cover Duran Duran’s Perfect Day. As usual, the production quality on Ross’s film quite high with an amusing twist at the end!!

Media Matters, a technical consultancy specializing in archival audio and video material that has been cited here before, has just launched DAVA, the Digital Audiovisual Archiving blog. It’s worth adding to your RSS feeds…

Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are developing and using online games to train computers to better see according to this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

One of these games is Peekaboom, used online for free by teams of two players. The first one, designated as "Peek," sees on his screen an image -- initially empty -- and a word that describes the image or one element of the image. The second one, named "Boom," gradually reveals the image or gives hints to "Peek" until he correctly guesses the word associated to the image.

And this use of "segmented" images might improve "computer vision" by "teaching" them how to identify objects. But read more for other details about Peekaboom before playing...

Although summer months are typically the P2P slow season, there were more people using P2P than ever before in July.

June 2005 saw a record of 8,888,436 simultaneous users. This number would jump over a half a million to hit 9,496,203 in July. This marks a substantial increase, considering it took the P2P population almost six months (January 05 to June 05) to grow the same amount. The P2P population in the United States, where file-sharers are most subject to copyright enforcement, saw its population grow from 6.5 million to 6.87 million in the last two months, according to BigChampagne.

Originally posted by Jessica Helfand from Design Observer: writings about design & culture, reBlogged by ts

Jessica Halfand has a good essay on Design Observer about the proliferation of bugs - from station IDs to animated ads - overlaying TV content, which she says "have become their own horrifying visual idiom: graphic lunacy." As someone who's had a little to do with inserting bumpers and bugs on the networks (at least where interactive TV and mobile were concerned) it's interesting to hear about the resistance to this growing practice, and to read the comments on her piece.

Some excerpts:

On today's TV screens, the station-identification logo sits tethered to the surface, like an annoying rash that won't quite disappear. You think you ve kicked it when -- WHAMMMO -- there it is again, blemishing the patina of an otherwise perfectly good viewing experience. Once a translucent image that surfaced only intermittently, today's screen logo has become a monstrous exaggeration of its former self. While this speaks poorly for broadcasters, it represents an even greater shame for designers, many of whom would like to think they can rescue their clients from making appallingly bad choices, like displaying large, pulsating logos in the corner of a television monitor.

...

In an effort to retaliate, some viewers opposed to these corporate (and graphic) interventions have formed grass-roots posses hoping to take on the broadcasting heavyweights with a kind of critical mass. Watchdog groups like Squash the TV Bugs in the US and Logo-Free TV in Britain have been moderately successful in raising public awareness, writing manifesti and sharing useful links with their equally annoyed brethren -- yet in spite of such admirable intentions, there remains an air of inevitable despair about it all. Will the TV bugs continue to grow in size, noise and frequency, until we all succumb to a state of passive acceptance? Can TV bugs ever be restricted, minimized, abolished altogether? (TiVO, where are you?) Late-night TV host Conan O Brien offered his own remedy not long ago: reaching for a can of insecticide during his show one night, he sprayed the famous NBC peacock, whereupon it dissolved and dripped right off the screen.

(read the rest)

Growth in the Digital Special Effects and computer animation industry, a sub-segment of the media and entertainment industry, is exploding world wide. A number of reasons have caused this growth and they involve the merging of technology and imagination.This article illustrates the dynamics and business model and processes of the animation effects industry and introduce the existing infrastructure.

I love culture jamming. I've even done my fair share of it. But I've never believed that it, or protests (the original and non-subtle, non-ironic culture jamming), are effective for solving problems.

Of course, this begs the question of what "solving problems" means. Culture jamming must be good for something other than making activists feel all clever and hip for their satires on the dominant paradigm, right? I'd say there are multiple things it's useful for.

Culture jamming is useful to the extent that it catalyzes outreach and solidarity. These are necessary (though not sufficient) ingredients for a successful movement.

It can help outreach by functioning as normal advertising does, influencing viewers to change their ideas and behaviors, or reinforce the attitudes of those who already agree. (As a result, it can even be somewhat useful for making change directly for issues the public has scant awareness of.) Advertising is a numbers game, where repetition wins the day, and culture jammers don't have the budget to saturate society with their images like commercial advertisers do. Small cheap ads (like bumper stickers) can be rolled out fairly ubiquitously without too much expense, and the Internet has helped to level the playing field somewhat, but in the end jammers will never approach the scale of commercial advertising.

Culture jamming can help solidarity both by functioning as normal advertising for the viewers (helping those who already agree with the message to feel like an "in" crowd), and also by functioning as a group project for the creators (helping build community and a sense of involvement). Group projects are underestimated as a way of building social capital in a community, and it often doesn't matter what the project is, as long as it gets people together on a regular basis. Robert Putnam's books Bowling Alone and Better Together describe the value of group activities in building civic involvement, tighter social fabric, and even better personal health.

On a more subtle level, culture jamming sometimes helps build counter-culture, which is necessary for change on the large-scale society level: as Einstein said, "Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them", so people need to step out of the dominant culture in order to solve our problems. But stepping out of an entire worldview doesn't last very long unless you have another worldview to step into. The book The Cultural Creatives argues that most of the people who are part of alternative culture got there because something in their lives caused their dominant-paradigm worldview to break, and culture jamming is a constant effort to chip away at that dominant zeitgeist so that it crumbles more easily. But the book also argues that "While Cultural Creatives are a subculture, they lack one critical ingredient in their lives: awareness of themselves as a whole people." They also argue that this lack of self-awareness as a culture is the reason for the American left's political impotence. They've seen that there is no socially-recognized worldview for people to land in when they have stepped out of the dominant one. That's one of the reasons we at Worldchanging work to show people the positive actions being taken all over the world: we think that a sane new culture of ecological and humanitarian values exists already. (Hence the phrase "another world isn't just possible, another world is here.")

Some culture jamming helps create new culture, though most of it only attacks the old culture. And new culture is only as effective as its actions. It doesn't matter how edgy you are, it matters what you get done, and generally speaking, the largest-scale, longest-term changes happen when people wield the tools of money and law.

Using money as a tool means not just pollution markets and trans-commercial enterprises and all that fancy stuff. It mostly means the simple age-old tool of spending choice: buy things you want to encourage, avoid buying what you want to discourage. This is where societies use money as a tool. As the book The Rebel Sell points out, "the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than 40 years." The authors argue that in modern counterculture's race to escape consumerist society, it has made itself more brand-conscious and instilled more social status in bought objects than any culture in history. To some extent this self-contradiction is probably why the subculture has failed to gel, but to some extent this is a very positive development: it means that people have learned to use money as a tool on a culture-wide level.

Money is not the right tool for all jobs, though. Legislation and lawsuits are the other big tools for long-term large-scale change. Suing pollution offenders and pressing legislators to reform tax laws aren't as much fun as taking over a billboard, but they get results. This is why one of culture jamming's most important functions is to create solidarity--effective lobbying requires large numbers of people and a lot of persistence. But in the end, jamming is only one of many elements of successful legal campaigns, as John Emerson's Examples of Effective [internet] Action illustrates well.

So keep on adbusting, folks, but do it with some awareness of what it can and can't accomplish, so you can do it better.

(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 12:28 AM)

Information on Amazon.com indicates the retailer might be preparing to enter the U.S. online DVD rental game, taking on Netflix and Blockbuster. By Holly J. Wagner.

When I look for the things which distinguish Web 2.0 applications from earlier ones, I don't see chromed-up DHTML interfaces, I see DOM hacking, REST, semantic HTML, microformats, end-to-end design and other things more associated with consensus than innovation. The movement is about orthodoxy, not radicalism.

In this sense, Web 2.0 is an indicator of the long-term shape of the web: what we are seeing is the rise of a canon.

The rise of this canon is fueled by increasing returns. As more sites use HTML semantically rather than presentationally, the benefit of doing so grows; ditto for REST over RPC, a common DOM for Javascript, and for features which allow systems to be extended at the endpoints. Though it has always been beneficial to stick closely to standards, it is now more beneficial than before, and in the future it will be fatal to not do so.

Microformats as retro-radicalism

For example, let's assume that microformats make sense for business. The h* family of microformats, like hReview and hCard, are a sort of HTML fundamentalism. The premise is that HTML already supports most of the semantics a new data format would need, and that reinvention is destructive.

I don't love this way of thinking, in the sense that it doesn't give me warm feelings. It's too confrontational for me. On a practical level, though, the benefits are overwhelming. If you use h*, you can easily take advantage of the Javascript DOM and REST, and these are powerful tools.

Microformats are a bleeding-edge idea at this point, and at the same time they are a retrenching. That is the tension driving the web towards orthodoxy both in the long term and in the 2.0 generation.

MYSQ (My Style So Qute) is an interactive "video booth" for shooting 30-second movies that can be viewed on mobile phones. It resembles Purikura, one of the most important machines ever invented for the Japanese arcade game industry.

[Dancing in MYSQ.]

Here's a link to a video clip that explains how it can be used.

The booth can accommodate up to three people so you can shoot Prikura style video clips with your friends. Inside the booth is a fluffy thing called a MYSQ ring – you wear it on your hand. A camera detects the movement of your MYSQ ring. Also, floor sensors detect your foot movement. So, the system can control video effects based on your (and your friends') hand/foot movement.

   
[move your hands and feet to explore various video effects.]

After a session is finished, the system processes the captured video and generates a movie file that can be viewed on mobile phones. When the movie file is ready, a QR code is displayed on the screen. Scan the QR code with your camera phone and then download the movie. You can of course send the downloaded movie to your friends, etc.

MYSQ is exhibited at KDDI Design Studio in Harajuku since this March.

via QR Code Blog

We told you a little about it a few weeks ago, now Broadcasting & Cable has the details of Time Warner's trial in San Diego that gives 9,000 broadband subscribers access to up to 75 cable channels on their computers.

Via Lost Remote

"The brouhaha over accreditation for TV ratings services smacks of corporate self-interest masquerading as righteous indignation over the measurement of minority viewing," reads this week's editorial in TV Week. "It is almost always a mistake to try to stop technological advances."

Via Lost Remote

Nice hack! I have connected a Lassen iQ GPS module to my serial interface. Maps are downloaded from Google Maps servers with a small script. Google maps consist of 128x128 pixel tiles. You have to specify your address, so that map tiles around your area are downloaded. There is also a parameter for number of tiles you want. Zoom levels are possible but require to have a few tile-sets, one for each zoom level. Link.

The Freesound Project - a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. It is developed for the international computer music conference 2005 to be held in Barcalona Spain in September. The site has a very advanced search engine. The best was recently introduced: geotags were added for the field recordings in the database. This means that you can look at your google earth and see all these cool sounds from all across the globe. Thanks Anton! Link.

David Pescovitz: BB pal Douglas Rushkoff, whose new book Get Back In The Box: Innovation from the Inside Out comes out in December, lays out why he thinks Al Gore's Current TV was a missed opportunity. Doug participated in some of the first brainstorming sessions for Current TV and he's disappointed with what it evolved into. From his blog entry:

I've never raised money, never done a multi-million-dollar project, never had to deal with investors. But television is a powerful force - a powerful medium. A very strong flavor to bring into the recipe.

But it's also *last* century's big medium. It's not the best platform for a participatory media movement. And so the priorities of the project, understandably, shifted to the priorities of TV: looking cool, creating an aspirational culture, and so on.

On the first broadcast day, one of the hosts said it all: "send us your tapes, and if we think it's cool and relevant, we'll put it on the air." If *they* think so. Because they're the arbiters of cool and relevant. And who are "they"? Former programming executives from other TV stations.

I like Al Gore, and I like most of the people I know who are over at Current. They are well-meaning, and they are not dumb. But cable television is not the place to launch the great interactive media experiment for the 21st Century. The great cable TV revolution already happened with CNN and MTV. Those were the watershed cable innovations, along with payTV channels like HBO. It already happened.

The "next big thing" in media will not happen on TV - or at least not primarily on TV. It will happen on or through the Internet. The great possibility here was that Al Gore's vision and the goodwill his presence generated could have been enough to surmount the challenges of making a new kind of media. He had my vote, as well as my promise of support. Yes, there were a great many of us who were willing to work for free to help create a participatory mediaspace. That's how the Internet culture of which we're all a part really developed in the first place.

Link

360 degree recording of your environment concept

"The concept for Report-wear is primary focused on assisting professional reporters to sense environments. Its trench coat style features the modern trend of nomadic life style."

"Loudblog is a sleek and easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS) for publishing audio content on the web. It automatically generates a skinnable website and an RSS-Feed for Podcasting. Just upload your audio files, add some notes and links, and you’re done!"

The Cultural Dynamics Map is an on-going attempt to apply the methods and modeling language of systems thinking to the world of arts and cultural production, consumption, support, and experience in the United States.

A comprehensive package for the analysis of social network data as well as other 1-mode and 2-mode data. Can read and write a multitude of differently formatted text files, as well as Excel files. Can handle a maximum of 32,767 nodes (with some exceptions) although practically speaking many procedures get too slow around 5,000 - 10,000 nodes. Social network analysis methods include centrality measures, subgroup identification, role analysis, elementary graph theory, and permutation-based statistical analysis. In addition, the package has strong matrix analysis routines, such as matrix algebra and multivariate statistics.

The examples are drawn from the Kosovo conflict, cryptography policy, human rights in China, support for the Mexican Zapatistas, and other areas of conflict.

"The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Internet is altering the landscape of political discourse and advocacy, with particular emphasis on how it is used by those wishing to influence foreign policy. Emphasis is on actions taken by nonstate actors, including both individuals and organizations, but state actions are discussed where they reflect foreign policy decisions triggered by the Internet."

(It also takes a look at B92 Radio which Drazen was heavily involved with. -kc.)

AviSynth is a powerful tool for video post-production. It provides almost unlimited ways of editing and processing videos. AviSynth works as a frameserver, providing instant editing without the need for temporary files.

This guide is to show you how to rewire the DSL circuit from the phone Company's NID to your modem and hopefully you’ll gain about 100 to 150kbps in speed, lower Latency and even get rid of all the Filters that are attached to your phones.

"The following is a graphical presentation of a multi-year field study of the market for musical acts in Bigtown (a large city in the Northeastern United States). Building on the cultural industry and art worlds theories of Paul Hirsch (1972) and Howard Becker (1982), I have explored how gatekeepers in a local cultural industry use their social ties to make sense of and operate within a market characterized by risk and uncertainty. Like these scholars, I see cultural industries as networks of collaboration and competition among actors and organizations engaged in the production, selection and consumption of cultural products (e.g., movies, books, music and art)."

A UK firm has launched a video download service that allows customers to purchase and download films to their computer, just as they are able to do with music from online music stores such as Napster or Apple's iTunes.

Boxoffice365.com, from the British Internet Broadcasting Company (BIBC), currently offers video of live music and stand-up comedy, but is currently in negotiations with Optimum Releasing, an independent UK film distributor, over the possibility of offering films for download. There are other outlets who currently offer movie downloads, but, due to the film industry's deathly fear of piracy, the only films generally on offer are B-movies few people have ever heard of.

BroadSnatch wants to help you pick (or snatch) some good media files to feed your favorite media aggregator, such as iTunes, iPodder or FireANT, using social tagging and rating.

When estimating losses due to piracy in the media, movie studios are fond of using the full purchase price of the pirated DVD or movie ticket. So if I download a copy of Bewitched off of the internet, Sony (and associated companies, the theater, distributors, etc.) feels like they've lost $10.50[1], even if I had no plans to ever see the movie in the theatre.

So why is it when Sony defrauds their customers by fabricating movie reviews to promote the theatrical releases of some of their films, they're only refunding $5 of the total ticket price for those that actually saw those films? Why not the full price? Or better yet, how about a refund for transportation costs, the price of any concessions purchased, estimated loss of wages for time spent watching the film, and compensation for any emotional trauma suffered as a result of thinking the movie was going to be great when it in fact sucked? That sounds about fair.

[1] Well, $10.50 if you live in Manhattan. If you live in rural Wisconsin, you're only cheating Sony out of $8.00 or so. Well, until the movie comes out on pay-per-view and it costs $3.95. But then when the DVD comes out, Sony's loss will shoot back to $26.99. Twelve months after the DVD release, when Bewitched is available in a value two-pack with Anchorman, Sony will only be losing $6. Whew, must be hard to keep all those losses straight.

I've been on the road a lot this summer, but now and especially after the Wake Up Call conference on August 9 I should be back into blogging form.

Here is something I saw over at E-Media Tidbits about video storytelling at the Spokane Spokesman-Review. I like the moose story because it's relaxed and fun, without the over-hyped feel of most newscasts.

If you could ask the collective wisdom of the world any question, any question at all, what would it be?

Absent a post-singularity realtime network of our unconscious minds, Dropping Knowledge may be the closest we get to such an opportunity.

Dropping Knowledge describes itself as "an educational resource and online network that connects people around the globe seeking to exchange ideas and solutions to the most pressing issues of our day." Participants are encouraged to ask questions of the collected wisdom of the assembled crowd about the nature of the world and human society. These questions will be combined with a broader international poll, seeking to build a "social issue framework." A thousand participants will be assembled to form a web-based research group to start to frame answers; this frame will be used by a group of over a hundred global leaders (including Umberto Eco, Bill McDonough, Nelson Mandela, and Bono) to assemble more specific answers. The results will then be put into an interactive online archive, designed to encourage further discussion.

If this all sounds ambitious, it is. Dropping Knowledge claims to have no underlying bias, and to seek only to reflect a multiplicity of viewpoints; the spectrum of perspectives represented by the 112 leaders is somewhat debatable, but the list does include a greater number of non-US and non-European names than one typically finds in these kinds of events. They claim that "generating wisdom is the ultimate goal" of the project. The website goes into great detail about their agenda, and if they are even close to successful, it will be a remarkable accomplishment.

I do wish, however, that they had greater trust in the assembled wisdom of non-famous people. I'm quite sure that the chosen participants will come up with compelling and fascinating ideas, but I want to hear more from voices who don't normally have an international stage.

Maybe what we need is a Wikiwisdom project.

(Thanks to Joel Makower for the tip.)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in Triggers for Innovation – New Models for Change and Social Entrepreneurship at 07:16 PM)

In my reckoning, there are two business propositions right now in microformats: 1) Structuring data for search and business intelligence, already successfully demonstrated by technorati; 2) Structuring content for collaboration, likely monetized through a service similar to BasecampHQ.

Microformats are really just a way to combine human and machine readability in one web page. Microformats are superior to similar infrastructure plays because the average web designer can incorporate them with very little work.

So, what's the business proposition for combining human and machine readability? Right now, I can come up with two.

The most obvious is structuring content for search and business intelligence. For instance, technorati has raised its own search visibility with the reltag microformat. By helping determine the relevance of given content, reltag also enhances technorati's ability to sell its index data for market intelligence.

A less obvious business proposition for microformats is structuring content for collaboration. Over the past month, I've been having conversations with Mike Migurski of reblog fame and various others including Mark Rickerby and Lucas Gonze. In these conversations, we have focused on microformats as easily identified packets of information inside of web pages.

With the right infrastructure, people could pass these packets around and share them. Mike Migurski and his team are already doing this with full blog posts using reblog. In the course of our conversations, Mike has decided to extend reblog to allow people to redirect microformatted content and html form data to it. In turn, reblog will output microformatted content. On the output end, all sorts of converters can be built to take the microformatted content and allow it to be input into other programs (address books, spreadsheets, etc.) for further processing.

How do you monetize this? I see two possibilities. Installing and adapting reblog to different organizations is a design business, playing into Mike's current business model at Stamen Design. The second is to develop a subscription service for small groups that want to share particular types of data. The trick is to come up with right combination of services similarly to what BasecampHQ has done with project-based collaboration.

Parks and Associates was generous enough to provide ZDnet with their analysis on the most popular functions for the mobile devices people use most. No real surprises here, but some very good intelligence if you are a content developer or a handset manufacturer...

» Most popular functions for frequently used mobile devices: picture taking, location information, TV | IT Facts — Your Daily Research Synopsis | ZDNet.com

8/4/2005
Most popular functions for frequently used mobile devices: picture taking, location information, TV
-Posted by ZDNet Research @ 12:10 am

Parks Associates asked Internet users regarding required functionality on their most frequently used mobile device. Picture-taking, location-specific information and TV streaming were among the most popular functions.

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People Want TV on Mobiles, But Won't Pay... - May 18, 2005
Magazines for Mobiles... - Jul 16, 2004
Wear Your Mobile... - Nov 25, 2004
Mobiles are GOOD 4 Kids... - Sep 24, 2004


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Vital Signs, by nARCHITECTS, is an interactive installation project designed to disseminate breaking news about science to visitors in the Liberty Science Centre (NJ). A continuous moebius strip of LEDs interspersed with projections would allow visitors to view streaming information from all sides of the atrium. A ladder-rung structure consists of an outer aluminum edge rail joined together by intermittent rungs. Plexi ribs supporting the LED’s and translucent plexi projection surfaces span between the edge rails. Visitors can dynamically select topics or upload information from various points along the mezanine handrails.

Recently, nARCHITECTS had also created the Party Wall for the SoHo gallery Artists Space. The installation created a variable boundary in the gallery, dividing visitors into different sides of the room. The 5 cm-thick foam panels connect to servo motors, proximity sensors as well as pulleys and cables that react when the sensors detect motion nearby. The motors exert pression on the pulleys, lifting, depressing, expanding or compressing the foam into waves visitors can interact with.

Future versions of Party Wall could respond to light, heat or sound, and correspondingly modulate optical, thermal or acoustic attributes of a wall.

Movie.

Cell phone customers have long been plagued with poor reception issues. Up until now, cell phone purchasers have been in the dark about reception. Wireless servers do not guarantee coverage and consumers had no reliable way to check.

CellReception.com has come up with a simple solution. They call it the "Cell Phone Reception and Tower Search." By combining the FCC's database of registered towers with Google Maps, CellReception.com is able to provide a graphical display of towers nationwide.

By giving users an easy and graphical way to access tower locations, they can make better choices of carriers who offer the best coverage in their area before buying.

[via mocoblog]

Our friends in Europe are putting on a conference in Amsterdam next month.

It will cover two weekends to accomodate everyone who plans to come to town.
September 9th-11th and September 16th-18th.
Ryanne and I are thinking of going and spending the whole week as a vacation.

Here is where you can get the info. As far as I know it's free.
VlogEurope
VlogEurope Yahoo Group
VlogEurope Wiki

Just check out the Vlogmap to see all the european videobloggers popping up.

INTERACTIVE FUTURES is a forum for showing recent tendencies in new media art as well as a conference for exploring issues related to technology. The theme of this year's event is Audio Visions. IF06 will explore new forms of audio-based media art from a diverse body of artists, theorists, and sound practitioners. Sound poetry, web-based audio and multimedia, mobile audio performance, new forms of music theatre, synaesthetic performance, hybrid forms, sound-based installation, video and sound, and environmental sound are all of interest to Audio Visions.

Portable Power 2005 claims to be the premier industry event for designers, developers and manufacturers of power supply systems, batteries, software, and microelectronics.

The event will investigate the unique power issues of handheld business and consumer devices, as well as battery and power technologies that make these small devices possible. The 2005 program will feature keynote speeches, feature presentations, educational sessions, and technical workshops on topics including:

• Countermeasures to battery counterfeiting
• Novel power management technologies
• Next generation battery technology
• Portable fuel cell technology
• Emerging applications for non-cell/non-computer VoIP
• Global supply chain
• Wide area data services/WiMAX
• New semiconductor structures

ory.aspx?symbols=CCN:100&story=200508041218_CCN_0804038n" target=new>It happens next month; September 18 - September 21, 2005 at The Palace Hotel, in San Francisco.

Sponsors of Portable Power 2005 include SANYO, Call2Recycle, HYB Battery Co., Nexergy, Portable Design China, Advanced Battery Technology, Advanced Fuel Cell Technology, analogZONE, Appliance Design, Bityard Magazine, Electronic Design, e-Power Magazine, Fuel Cell Magazine, Power Management DesignLine, Technology Review, Wireless Design & Development and Wireless Watch Japan.

Lea Barker, one of our citizen journalists here, asked me some questions about interviewing, which I've answered in our forums. I've also pointed to a bunch of other articles on interviewing techniques.

Both the FCC and the Justice Department approved Sprint's $35 billion merger with Nextel yesterday, creating the third largest wireless company in the United States with more than 40 million wireless subscribers and $40 billion in annual revenue.

"This action will ensure that consumers continue to receive the benefits of wireless competition, such as reduced prices and increased coverage," said the commission's chairman, Republican Kevin Martin. "In addition, consumers can expect improved service quality and more advanced services."

Consumer advocates worried that the deal may leave just three major players.

"The good news is that the merged companies should be able to better compete against Verizon and Cingular," said Gene Kimmelma, senior policy director at Consumer Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine.

"The bad news is that we may have lost the opportunity to also preserve enough spectrum for a fourth strong competitor in this market," Kimmelman added.

int gets access to Nextel's 15.3 million subscribers and Nextel avoids a costly upgrade of its own network. The two companies will own and control most of the licensed 2.5GHz frequencies available for WiMax in the United States. Craig McCaw's Clearwire owns a majority of the remaining frequencies.

The new Sprint Nextel Corp. plans to spin off Sprint's local telephone service as its own business early next year. That would form what would be the fifth-largest local telecommunications company in the U.S., with 7.6 million access lines in 18 states.

Meanwhile, the FCC wants to allow telephone companies to stop competition from independent ISPs.

Under the Supreme Court's "Brand X" decision in June, cable companies can bar rival Internet providers from their networks. The FCC wants to extend that right to telephone companies.

Martin has said it is a priority to relieve the "Baby Bells" from the 1984 breakup of AT&T, of their historical obligation to allow others to lease access to their networks.

Among the issues on the table are whether to continue the old rules of guaranteed access and regulated prices for some period, giving ISPs such as EarthLink Inc. and America Online Inc. time to adjust. Others include guaranteeing "net neutrality" so that the regional phone companies could not bar access to any Web sites and ensuring law enforcement's ability to wiretap Internet phone services.

The approval also bodes well for other pending telecom mergers. Verizon is seeking to buy MCI for $6.7 billion while SBC has a deal for AT&T at $16 billion.

Eliminate the FCC? It will never happen. Who else can prop up and maintain monopoly interests?

As Dana Blankenhorn says:

When you buy from iTunes, the only folks involved in the sale are the store and the supplier. The ISP isn't sitting there demanding a cut.

When you buy over a phone, the cellular carrier is demanding a cut. A big cut. They're also laying on a heavy DRM that won't let you take that song and put it, say, on your PC, or on your iPod.

So where are you going to buy your music from?

to the new world order.

Capitalistic countries with open competition and broadband wireless everywhere -- like Japan and South Korea -- are about to soar.

The American TV program “5 Takes Europe” chronicles the adventures of five young filmmakers traveling to Europe, each with a US$50 a day budget. Each is equipped with Mini DV cameras and laptop editing facilities to produce independent short daily web logs (blogs) and frequent video logs (vlogs) of their experiences for the Travel Channel website. Because of the innovative production techniques employed as well as ongoing viewer–”Video Journalist” (VJ) interaction over the six-week series, the first episode will be broadcast less than a week after the five VJs begin filming. “Using M3 Media’s method of one-person production, the participants on “5 Takes Europe” have been turned into viable citizen journalists; able to act as reporters, camera persons, sound engineers and editors simultaneously,” said producer Michael Rosenblum. “This Travel Channel series proves that one-man reporting can go beyond home video, and even the newsroom, to produce quality programming. Through this revolutionary method, anyone can create high level entertainment at low cost.”

Rosenblum was founder and president of NYT Television, currently the largest producer of non-fiction television in USA. He was also the founder of Video News International, a global, VJ-driven news gathering company, with more than 100 journalists around the world. Michael has designed, built and implemented VJ news-gathering units around the world for Time/Warner’s New York 1, Associated Newspapers (UK) London-based Channel 1, Switzerland’s TeleZuri, Eritrea’s ERI-TV and Sri Lanka’s SLBC. He teaches Television and the Information Revolution at New York University. [Lost Remote: where TV finds the future]

•  BUY Sony DCR-HC42 1MP MiniDV Digital Handycam camcorder w/12x optical zoom at Amazon — your purchase through this link supports Cinema Minima

Yikes - I posted that last item too soon. It turns out that Yahoo has also launched a comprehensive new audio search tool in the US that, among other features, searches podcasts!

Technorati Tags: Yahoo

PC Magazine via Extreme Tech reports on an afternoon panel at 2005 SpeechTEK conference where representatives from speech technology companies said that voice recognition will soon be playing a more integral part in cell phones, video games and automobiles.

"Thomas Schalk, ATX vice president of Voice Technology, demonstrated how his company's route assistance service can help a user find driving directions, route summaries and traffic updates.

The service also offers more advanced features, such as telling the user how long it'll take to reach the parking lot or to walk from the parking lot to the final destination spot."

In the comments, Ryan Shaw points to the interesting MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project at UC Berkeley, whose goal is "to create a platform for collaboratively annotating, retrieving, sharing and remixing multimedia content.". It's just getting underway, but it has already produced one of the more cogent graphics illustrating the new architecture of participation in a remix culture.

This also suggests the start of a field guide to Long Tail producers of all sorts. Or perhaps a chapter. Hmmm.

Trying to capitalize on its hopeful future, ArtistDirect has purchased the copyright guardian, MediaDefender. The merger should prove to be an interesting one, as it is the first time an authorized music distributor is also directly in control of a P2P flooding firm. MediaDefender, headed by the outspoken front man Randy Saaf, appears to have a knowledgeable foundation on the difficult plight of the music industry. Its also a pretty good sales pitch.

(Continued at Slyck)

- We want people to be addicted to their neighbours, to themselves
- What happens if the next tsunami hits, or the US attacks another country, and we can hear the voices of the people involved?
- Your favourite TV channel will be someone you know.
- What will we watch on our cellphones? Seinfeld re-runs?
- We aren't creating tools, we're creating a channel, a network, an audience.

(Continued... )

Lost Remote's 11 ideas for "saving" Current TV.

While cable companies focus on adding data and voice services, telephone companies get ready to roll out television programming using IP technology. The goal: beat cable at its own game. By Michael Grebb.

Over at I, Reporter, I've just posted the audio from this past weekend's BlogHer panel on citizen journalism entitled: "Suffragette Journalists: Op-Ed Pages of Our Own."

In this session, I raised a question that's been nagging at me: Can simple first-person accounts of newsworthy events that involve no additional reporting work or perspectives be considered journalism?

This is an issue I've struggled with since the London bombings, and I'm not sure how to answer it. I realize that professional journalists are very likely to believe that first-person accounts are not acts of journalism, but I ask my journalism (...)

Entry continued...

Samsung just sent out a massive release on their new and update products. This little bugger really stood out. It's a flash-based PMP weighing in at just under 2 ounces includes an FM tuner and recorder, MPEG4/OGG/MP3/everything else playback, and up to 1GB of storage. The 1-GB model with 1.8" screen is priced at $299.

Samsung really did a nice job on this tiny player. Very small, slim, and priced just about in line with similar MP3 only PMP devices [Sorry, got confused - Ed.]. It's great to see that a) we're getting cool PMPs b) we're getting cool PMPs. An aside: Also, guys, what are we thinking about the model used in this product shot. I'm sure she's nice in real life...

Press Release [Samsung]

A lot of hacks consist of "I pulled this thing apart and saw that it contains a flash card." This hack, on the other hand, turns the CVS Camcorder into a USB-capable, CVS-subsidized video recording device. Any hack, however, that requires the following descriptive paragraph:

Interestingly, there seems to be a flaw in the code Pure Digital wrote. You can request the 128-byte challenge by sending a specific USB command with an index number of 0-127. But, if you send an index number between 128 and 255, you'll get back the secret response it is looking for that's needed to unlock. It looks like the firmware tried to prevent this by performing an "AND" operation with the value 0xFFFFFEFF, but that doesn't do it -- a value of 0xFFFFFF7F would be needed. Or, maybe it was on purpose :-) we'll see if (or how fast) Pure Digital closes that door.

...probably won't fly in a lay-person's hands. After all, my Aunt is great at reading byte-code but she just doesn't know her hex values like she used to!

Related
CVS One Time Use Digital Camcorder Reviewed (Verdict: One-timey)

CVS camcorder usably hacked! [Make]

: MTV is joining the online-first debut parade: it will debut a concert special featuring Eminem and 50 Cent on its recently launched broadband property, MTV Overdrive. The program will debut six days before TV showing.
Sister network Nickelodeon recently debuted the new series Catscratch on its broadband property, but the move sparked the ire of some cable operators, who complained about the potential negative effects the practice might have on the perceived value of cable properties among consumers.
Related:
-- MTV Releases Broadband Video Service Beta
-- More Details On MTV Overdrive

Via PaidContent.org

The last issue of ACM’s Computers in Entertainment is finally released (a july issue released in august ). It has a very insightful section about pervasive gaming. Here are authors and titles:

• Pervasive games: bringing computer entertainment back to the real world by Carsten Magerkurth, Adrian David Cheok, Regan L. Mandryk, Trond Nilsen
• The Drop: pragmatic problems in the design of a compelling, pervasive game by Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Anthony LaMarca
• Albert in Africa: online role-playing and lessons from improvisational theatre by Ken Newman
• Sports over a distance by Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller, Stefan Agamanolis
• Atomic actions — molecular experience: theory of pervasive gaming by Bo Kampmann Walther

hy do I blog this? even though this is not an exhaustive review of what is going around in pervasive gaming, the section is very relevant. I found the first paper as the most interesting since it gives a pertinent overview of the field ranging from “smart toys, affective games, tabletop games, location-aware games, and augmented reality games“. I really like Trond Nilsen’s work (already explained here9 as well as what Adrian David Cheok does at his lab in Singapour.

Besides, there are also 2 papers I found interesting, the one by Nicolas Duchenaut I already blogged about as well as another one that concerns a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games by Penelope Sweetser, Peta Wyeth (which I found relevant for my work with video-game companies)

Technorati Tags: mobile game, pervasive gaming, pervasive, puppy, puppy

Chris Davis writes:

Got a service message from Tivo last night with the title 'An Important Message on Privacy from Tivo' which sounded boring, but I read it anyway. The interesting part is the third sentence of the second paragraph:

'For this notification, the updates [to the privacy policy] pertain primarily to the addition of new functionality that will enable TiVo subscribers to download content to their Series2 DVR.'

I dont really care about the privacy policy updates - I already assume somebody can see every little thing I do with my tivo. But 'download content to their Series2 DVR' ?!? Yowza! I just hope the download TO the tivo isn't as stupid slow as download FROM the tivo is...

Hmm, that sounds pretty cool if it's true that users will be able to move video to their TiVo for playback. I would guess it'd require an application to transcode your own video to TiVo MPEG2 format and send off to your TiVo, and perhaps a new version of the TiVo desktop is coming to make that happen.

We Media: Behold the Power of Us will take place October 5, 2005 at the headquarters of the Associated Press in New York. A quick synopsis:

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: More than a billion people are online. We Media brings together the trailblazers, leaders, movers and shakers of a movement that is connecting people everywhere. Their collective efforts are spawning new ideas, information, services and businesses utilizing the power of mass collaboration. What's happening? How are talent, resources and dollars from individuals and organizations worldwide gathering and being marshaled?

More info on the event is here | Click here to register.

Now, whether you can attend or not, we'd like to hear from you! What questions or issues would you like discussed by a particular participant? By all of the participants? Please post your comments below, and we will do our best to make as many of your voices heard as we can.

Cory Doctorow: The Craftrobo Pro is a new inkjet printer that can also "die-cut" patterns into the paper as it is output -- brilliant for downloaded papercraft projects.

The craftrobo site features a library of downloadable patterns with novelties like robots, and dinosaurs, but the real fun begins in the box & bags section, where kids can download and print out their very own candy-colored “suspicious container” for anonymous deposit at their local train station. yay!

Link (via Gizmodo)

I could use this as well --MK

Vin Crosbie and OJR's Mark Glaser talk on NPR about citizen journalism. (While I'm a big fan of both Vin and Mark, maybe next time NPR might want to talk with some folks who are actually doing citizen journalism.) Here's Vin's thoughtful prologue to the interview.

More People Turn to the Web to Watch TV - New York Times:

"An Internet commercial typically costs about $15 to $20 for each 1,000 viewers, nearly as much as broadcast networks charge. The price is high because there is more demand from advertisers than there is Internet video programming available."

If a videoblog averages 2,000 hits per episode, would you pay $40 to place a short video at the end of the video?

Via Off On A Tangent

(Via Mobile Technology Weblog)

i-mode Business Strategy blogs about Philips' program to create ultra-low-cost phones:

"Right now, 77 percent of the world’s population lives within range of a mobile phone network, but only 25 percent of the world’s population subscribes to a mobile phone service (Sources: World Bank and EMC). All around the world operators have the infrastructure in place for mobile services, but the relatively high cost of mobile phones is holding back potential subscribers," said Thierry Laurent, executive vice president of business development, communications businesses, Philips Semiconductors.

Philips has pioneered the system solution approach, with one in seven GSM handsets built on the platform. The scalability and flexibility of its Nexperia system solutions is at the heart of enabling Philips to deliver its low-cost solution, which can easily be integrated into mobile handsets by its customers.

The first product from the project will be a sub-$5 system solution - a GSM device capable of making calls and sending SMS messages. It will have a black & white screen and will be able to play polyphonic ringtones.

By bringing to market a sub-$5 system solution, with all the hardware, software and peripherals necessary for building mobile phones, Philips is enabling its ODM, OEM and operator customers to dramatically reduce costs and bring sub-$20 handsets to the consumer.

Barry Fox of New Scientist has found "Sony Ericsson’s latest idea is to sell phones which automatically change the way they behave, depending on the time,date and place.For example,the wallpaper display on the screen shows pumpkins when the phone’s calendar sees the date is Halloween, and Christmas puddings on December 25th. Network roaming,or GPS,can tell a phone what country it is in,so the ring-tone might change to a reggae tune as the plane touches down in Jamaica,for example.A restaurant could use short-range Bluetooth signals to deliver the specials menu direct to the phone's screen, and a cinema or church could use Bluetooth to switch it to silent mode.Stockbrokers could enable an option to display the latest share prices every 10 minutes and golfers could use continually updated weather forecasts for wallpaper".

Invention: Shocking airport scans

The A1U is the first pro HDV camera to shed its 3 CCD chips for a single CMOS board.

Akimbo Systems announced the addition of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom Feeds to its Web site. The feeds equip viewers with automatic updates on the latest movies and television programs available for download from Akimbo's video-on-demand service, providing users a faster way to find newly added programs. More than 150 programs are added to the Akimbo Service each week. Now, users have various ways to choose new Akimbo programs for download to the Akimbo Player: from the TV, Web or RSS or Atom readers.

---

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

An umbrella group representing several Quebec arts and cultural organizations has submitted a formal complaint over the CRTC's decision in June to allow satellite radio into Canada. The complaint, addressed to the Privy Council, asks that the CRTC's ruling – which allowed bids by three prospective satellite-radio broadcasters to proceed – be overturned. The group says that the decision violates Canadian broadcasting policy.

According to a press release, it believes "the CRTC has made a grave error in judgment that threatens the foundations of the broadcasting system in Canada – the very system that the CRTC should be protecting."
Made up of 10 member organizations, the coalition wants the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, Canada's broadcast regulator, to be forced to hold public hearings on satellite radio.
More on cbc.ca/arts: Coalition officially objects to satellite radio ruling

O'Reilly Media launched the beta version of O'Reilly Connection at their Open Source Convention (OSCON) today. It's a tech-centric jobs and networking site for developers and those who want to hire them.

Sam Mohamad, CEO of Greenplum built an initial version of the service, and then, to make it widely available to the community, decided to contribute it to O'Reilly. "We're really committed to what Tim O'Reilly calls the architecture of participation, in all aspects of what we do, whether that's software development or marketing," added Mohamad.

On O'Reilly Connection, developers build a professional profile that lays out their skills, experience, and network in one place. They can connect with peers and designate "go to" people--other site members whom they consider experts in a particular technology area--and keep tabs on those alpha geeks through personalized watch lists.

Employers can quickly search through O'Reilly Connection to find job or consultant candidates with the specific qualifications they need. Because profiles on O'Reilly Connection display members' networks, they provide a richer picture than a standard resume.

During the beta period, O'Reilly Connection is offering free job posts.

It's been amusing to hear those in the mobile space and the music space insist that ringtones were the second coming of both music and mobile data, when it seemed pretty clear to many outside observers that it was a huge bubble in the making -- not just because the idea of ringtones could certainly be viewed as a fad, but because those offering up ringtones were doing everything possible to screw up the market. They were increasingly trying to squeeze more and more money out of buyers by jacking up the price of ringtones to a point where people began to question why they were paying three or four times as much to get a snippet of a song that only played when someone called you, as they paid for the whole damn song on iTunes. On top of that, people started to realize that many of the songs they wanted as ringtones were songs they had already bought elsewhere, and it seemed a bit silly to pay for the same song again (especially as it's getting easier to create your own ringtone). However, the final straw was probably the fact that many ringtone aggregators and sellers were most focused on tricking users into signing up for a subscription when they simply meant to download a single ringtone. This nasty practice is leading to calls to regulate the sale of ringtones to avoid such sleazy practices. However, in the short term, with or without regulation, all of these things combined may have popped the ringtone bubble. That isn't to say the ringtone market is dead in any way, but it looks like it's going to start deflating. It does show how the industry has done its best to kill the golden goose as quickly as possible, rather than giving it a chance to keep producing for a while longer. If they were smart, the mobile industry would be working hard to transition this attention on mobile data into some other outlet, but it's unclear if they've got anything that will really sustain much interest just yet.

Mobile games have become a big industry, but so far only 5 percent of people with cell phones have downloaded a mobile game, according to a survey by research firm SKOPOS on behalf of mobile games company I-play. [via The Mercury News Interactive]

"The survey of 2,500 cell phone users in the U.S., United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Germany showed many people aren't even aware their cell phones can play games. Following are some tidbits from the research:

-- About 30% of respondents did not know whether their handset is capable of downloading games.

-- Spaniards are the most savvy with 80% of respondents knowing that their handset is game capable, compared to just 60% of Germans.

-- 17.5 % of overall respondents said they have not downloaded a mobile game because they do not understand what to do.

An article attributed to the US Federal Communications Commission addresses the issue of adult content being made available to children via mobile devices, and what parents should be aware of and can do about it. “Adult material is available through numerous sources, including magazines, television, movies, songs, telephones, gaming systems, and the Internet. But neither a blocking technology – like those used on televisions, telephones, and home computers – nor a ratings system – like those used for movies, games, and music – has been developed for wireless phones/devices. The wireless industry is working to address these issues, and the FCC is monitoring the situation.”
The advice seems pretty good, such as monitoring how children use the phone (whether primarily for voice or for data) and checking the phone bill for unusual downloads. It also suggests calling the phone company to find out what content is available on the childs handset and plan and whether it can be restricted.

Via MocoNews.net

We've created a special version of Technorati especially for handhelds and mobile phones. If you've got a web-enabled mobile device, just visit m.technorati.com for a Technorati experience designed especially for small screens.

Take Technorati with you wherever you go for the latest on what bloggers are talking about right now. I enjoy using the mobile site just to check on the most popular Technorati searches and explore emerging trends.

Please let us know how it works for you and what else you would like to see from Technorati!

I just tried it out with the search "Seitenwechsel". It's a start and I really welcome it.
I see several problems though:

1. Too many results
2. I couldn't figure out the blogs name
3. When I clicked on a link, I arrived on the html version of the blog - downloading KB after KB
4. All Umlaut's didn't display well

I think with some work this could become a cool mobile service, probably a future killer app;)

A Very Important Post by Fred Wilson on how blogging is far more than blogging, about how blogging, subscribing, and tagging.

Any time someone throws up a Top 100, a lotta fussin’ and whinin’ is sure to follow. Yeah, we agree with some choices, but a list that doesn’t include the original Legend of Zelda and relegates Final Fantasy VII to the #88 spot just doesn’t sit right with us—I’m sure you’ll find your own glaring omissions and questionable ranks. Of course, these lists are all about controversy, why else make them?

We figured you’d be most interested in IGN’s Top 10, so here it is (from 10 to 1):

• Super Metroid
• Star Wars: TIE Fighter Collector’s CD-ROM
• Street Fighter II (arcade)
• StarCraft
• Sid Meier’s Pirates! (original)
• Super Mario 64
• Sid Meirer’s Civilization II
• Tetris
• Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Super Mario Bros.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

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Last year when I was visiting India, I meet with some of the officials of Indian version of FCC, TRAI. They pointed to the FCC definition of broadband as the one they were going to adopt for India as well. I argued with them, passionately trying to explain that it was an ass-backward legacy defined definition of broadband, and India needs to be braver than that, and instead take its cue from South Korea. Their argument was baby steps. Perhaps which explains why they are stuck in the morass of 256 kbps passing as broadband. In fact, I have often said that 256 kbps is nothing more than mid-band, and true broadband doesn’t make its impact felt below 6 megabits per second… at the very least. Here is my op-ed from CBS Marketwatch …. Broadband? What Broadband?

fatter pipes and faster connections can help Bells reverse that trend and in fact increase their revenues in the process. Phone companies across the world have caught on to this and are busy upgrading their networks to capture the “triple play” customers.

Ironically, this 200 kbps definition of broadband is becoming a noose around our necks. Bruce Kushnick, the founder of Teletruth in an report points out that 13 years ago, the definition of broadband was 45 megabits per second, but then FCC changed it. To 200 kbps. He thinks precisely for those reasons FCC might be inflating the broadband penetration rate data. [Good time to insert your won Enron joke.]

According to TeleTruth, the U.S. is actually 16th in the world in terms of broadband connectivity. “We’re asking the FCC to use the Telecom Act’s broadband definition — any service capable of delivering HDTV quality video services in two directions … High-speed and advanced should not be included in this definition. Unfortunately, the data presented using words like ‘high-speed’ and ‘advanced services’ do not match the Telecom Act’s definition of broadband — being able to handle high-quality video,” writes Kushnick.

I don’t think the numbers from FCC are inflated since they sync-up with the data provided by phone and cable providers, who face a lot harsher scrutiny that FCC which is a private fiefdom and a political playground for whosoever is in power.

Kristin Thomson from Future of Music Coalition wrote to let us know about the FMC's upcoming Summit event. There's an impressive list of attendees (Senator Maria Cantwell, Michael Geist, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein) and the sponsors include ASCAP, BMI and the EFF. They've even got a nice discount attendee rate for students.

Microsoft markets a prepaid credit card to German teenagers (14 years and older) to be able to sign-up for the Xbox Live gaming service.

In Germany there a still lots of people not owning a credit card. This is one of the reasons online shopping is not developing as fast as in the US for instance.
Now German parents can get their kids a prepaid credit card, if the kids are able to convince them. This might be especially difficult if the parents do not have a credit card themselves.
The credit card terms are not bad. There are no yearly fees, 2% interest on the prepaid balance and the card works like a normal Visa card.
More details on Xbox site (German). See also Heise.de (German).

TivoTool is a pretty cool new app for managing your TiVo video on the network through a nice OS X GUI application. There aren't a lot of TiVo tools for macs so this is a nice new development.

It's not for the faint of heart -- it does require some fairly sophisticated hacks to be running on your TiVo in order to download and stream video unencrypted, but if you've gone that far with your TiVo, this app gives you a nice TiVoToGo-like interface on a mac (there is also a command-line version that works with both mac and linux).

Check out the screenshots of it in action. The integration with iTunes is very impressive stuff and being able to transcode video or send it to iMovie is an added plus. Hopefully when TiVo releases an official TTG mac client, their app approaches the usefulness of this package, allowing users to save and view video directly in iTunes (and transfer video to future video ipods).

The megaphones powering the Save the Children Rhetoric Society have found new sources of awesome, cosmic energy with which to boost their signal, lately. Their sound-waves, crushing intellect and creativity alike, have brought to light several instances of demonic perversion through which the medium of "Video," combined with that of "Gaming," shall engulf us all. Unfortunately, there usually is no save-us-from-the-save-the-children rhetoric to follow.

Those who would save our children from ourselves always seem to overlook a rather obvious factor of the meteoric rise in the value of the industry. "They"--the Masters of Decency--seem to assume that it has very much to do with an ever-rotting social fabric and the poor sheep captivated therein having an unconquerable addiction to violence and the sexy stuffs. I attribute it to gamers having grown up, getting jobs and doing what all adults in a free society have a right to do: choose what they wish to spend their money on. What makes the adult purchase of the game unacceptable to many is the same peculiarity that makes adult themes in games unacceptable: games are for kids. Unfortunately, like most absurd cultural anachronisms, things will likely only change once the elite elders that have a monopoly on thought have kicked it and today's gamegirl becomes a gamegranny.

This continued and fabulously erroneous idea is something that strangleholds artistic achievement more than any mere standards rating board could ever hope and I tend to think that we are, at times, showing up with the wrong counter-argument. Rather than address the issue on the grounds of their ruptured view of moral decency, we should let our own rhetoric take center stage.

Games are art--a fine art. They are expression and expression is not obscene. Mr. and Mrs. holier-than-thou don't get to judge for the rest of us what does and does not have artistic value or purpose in the medium. When we buy into the language that places the game developer and the game player on the defensive, it infantilizes the medium as a whole and elevates their parochial dysphemisms into memes. While events like E3 lower the IQ of the dialogue substantially--"oo! shiny!" and "oo! cleavage!"--we should be demonstrably angry over an art form being reduced to a cultural malaise instead of just lashing out at the other side's puritanism. As an art form as much for grown-ups as for kids (much like all the other arts) and as protected speech, it is "they" who should have to have the burden of trying to convince us that censorship is in the best interests of everyone and that such censorship won't kill the valuable expression inherent in a creative medium. You never hear politicians mention that "c" word because they know it's a deal breaker. Over the long term, "The People" tend have a nasty reaction to anything being censored, and rightly so. Censorship is a slippery slope that you don't need a Masters in sociology to understand.

Force them into declaring that they don't want to censor an art form and force them into upholding freedom of speech and expression as the most valuable of all rights in an open society instead of being forced into playing the game of defending ourselves into legitimacy. The legitimacy of new artistic means is already here, already inherent. It's "on" be default. Senators Jack and Hillary aren't "saving the children," they're latching onto a hot-button issue that plays well to whatever demographic their polling data says will get them re-elected and in the process, knowingly or unknowingly, framing the debate on McCarthyist terms which require us to extricate ourselves from obscenity instead of forcing them to extricate themselves from McCarthyism.

Delivr was also part of the Contagious Media Showdown at Eyebeam --MK

the title is a bit strange, but how can you summarize a phone nowadays that has like 15 basic functions? AU presents the W32H, a 3G CDMA-1x EV-DO phone (yep, it's still a phone after all) that is capable of downloading music (MOD) and has a MiniSD card to store all your MP3 files, that has an FM tuner, that has the Felica-function (electronic wallet), that has an Internet browser to surf the web (similar to Opera), that has a digital camera and that is compatible with PDF/Word/PowerPoint/Word files.

Everyone gathered in the main room at the conference center at the end of the day. Jory thanked everyone that helped put the conference together, the advisory board, even the "guy fridays" that helped with registration. There was a lot of applause for everyone, and later on Lisa Stone got a standing ovation.

Then Elisha led a wrap-up discussion about what participants learned from the conference, our "next steps," and any feedback about how to make the conference better the next time around.

There were some interesting ideas thrown around. Mary Hodder suggested putting together a list of women speakers so we have more visibility at tech and business conferences. Debi from Mobile Jones took that a step further and suggested that we "get women to smartmob the next male-dominated conference!"

Another participant said she felt that people often don't go beyond their comfort zones and tend to only read blogs written by people just like them. She suggested everyone "find five blogs by people that don't look like you and learn something about them." Someone else suggested that everyone identify three people they know and help them create and learn how to use a blog.

The only negative feedback was from one participant, who asked that next time around they don't put so many good sessions on during the same timeslot. That's positive when you think about it - there was that much good stuff!

All the sessions were recorded for later podcasting and there are a ton of people blogging at and about BlogHer so there's plenty for you to read and listen to.

The evening ended with a cocktail party sponsored by Yahoo! I mentioned to Lisa that the fact that so many people were hanging around afterwards and chatting was visual testament to how successful the event was. The networking and relationship-building outside the conference rooms are just as important as the sessions and speakers, especially at a conference like this.

Jet lag is starting to set in so I'm going to sign off and order some room service.

Over the past few months Yahoo has been recruiting a slew of veteran online journalists. In many cases these hires have a particular expertise in social media. The latest, according to Matt McAlister (one of these smart folks), is pioneer Elizabeth Osder. She reported to work yesterday at the Yahoo Media Group as its senior director, social media, reporting to Neil Budde, executive producer of Yahoo News. Matt writes...

“She'll be responsible for what Yahoo Media VP Scott Moore tells me is one of his top three initiatives. (The other two are broadband and the user experience.) Moore said Osder's hiring is 'a clear indicator of our intention to go deep in social media and user-generated content.' Her initial task will be to set up a plan that integrates Yahoo's growing phalanx of social media tools -- Yahoo 360, Flickr, etc. -- with an emphasis on interesting user-generated content.”

So what's going on at Yahoo? Here's my bet. The company - at least in news - has never been one to succeed by creating a lot of content of their own (who remembers Yahoo! Finance Vision?). What's more, Fortune reports that the company's relationships with content partners is tenuous at best. Finally, Yahoo is dabbling in news blogs. I think you're going to see them turn to citizen media and blogs to continue doing what Yahoo does best, differentiating through human aggregation.

Technorati Tags: SocialMedia, Yahoo

Because sometimes the scheme that works for baf’s guide is not enough: M.D. Dollahite offers IFMES (Interactive Fiction Metadata Element Set), derived from the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and invites comments on this proposal. The plan is to use this system to create a Mozilla-based IF organizer application, one that is already in development and sounds similar to the “iFiction” front-end that Andrew Hunter’s Zoom interpreter provides on the Mac. For compatibility with the Semantic Web and to foster the re-use of work, Dollahite has offered this proposal for an open metadata standard, rather than just making up something ad hoc to suit a particular program.

The Electronic Literature Organization’s ELD (Electronic Literature Directory) has dealt with some questions of appropriate metadata for IF and other e-lit, but integration with an organizer application (potentially more than one) and integration with the Semantic Web makes certain questions more immediate and may lead to clearer answers. In addition to helping users sort their IF, IFMES also might provide a good example of how to use the Dublin Core to structure metadata about other sorts of e-lit. But any metadata experts in the house should certainly chime in, after taking a look at the proposal.

Samsung released the SCH-V670 today for the South Korean market, notable mainly because it can also be used in Japan. It's only the second handset with that capability to be released since roaming between the two countries was flipped on for the 2002 World Cup. It looks pretty much like any other Samsung you've ever seen, except it's black—although it's available in the ubiquitous silver as well. It uses the EV-DO network, 1.3 megapixel camera, GPS, MP3 playback and can read Office and PDF files. It can also act as remote control for TV sets, game consoles and—wait for it—air conditioners, and works with the Moneta contactless payment system. It can also access the streaming video and music services offered by SK Telecom's June brand. It's available now for 500,000 won, which is about 485 yankee dollars.

Korean rival Pantech announced its PT-S130 today too, calling it the world's first Digital Multimedia Broadcast handset with Bluetooth. Be still, my beating heart. In any case, it's got a 2-megapixel camera, MP3 playback and 3D stereo sound, but the key feature is the rotating LCD that turns into a 2.4-inch widescreen for watching DMB video. Too bad that using the phone for that makes it look like a Gobot hammer, though. — CL

Samsung SCH-V670 [Digital Chosunilbo]
Pantech PT-S130 [I4U]

Flickr now automagically identifies "interesting" photos

"Check out the CamcorderInfo.com blog, on it you’ll find the latest news on camcorders, video editing, DVDs and related subjects. Every Tuesday we post a how-to article showing you how to take, edit and produce better videos. Every Friday, we feature a movie of the week, where we look at a cool online video and talk to the people behind it about how they put it together."

(Finally! But seriously, good to see you guys blogging over there. -kc.)

Via CamcorderInfo - default

The final issue of Phrack has been released- For 20 years PHRACK magazine has been the most technical, most original, the most Hacker magazine in the world. The last five of those years have been under the guidance of the current editorial team. Over that time, many new techniques, new bugs and new attacks have been published in PHRACK. We enojoyed every single moment working on the magazine. Link.

Nokia has released the final version of JSR 234 - Advanced Multimedia Supplements. "This specification will define an optional package for advanced multimedia functionality which is targeted to run as a supplement in connection with MMAPI (JSR-135) in J2ME/CLDC environment. Java equipped terminals are evolving into general multimedia and entertainment platforms. Features like camera and radio which have traditionally belonged into different device categories are now integrated into same terminals. Increase in the processing power of modern mobile phones allow more sophisticated media processing capabilities. Displays will remain relatively small due physical limitations but rich aural experience can be achieved without adding the physical size of the terminals."

(Para ti Mr. Van Every. -kc.)

p2pnet.net News:- It’s almost six months since David Sifry and the folks at Technorati put together a report detailing the number of bloggers, and the growth of new blogs per day. The numbers were startling then, but now they're staggering.

Blogs are going online at the rate of about one every second, says Sifry. “As of the end of July 2005, Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links,” about double the number tracked five months ago.

“In March 2005 we were tracking 7.8 million blogs, which means the blogosphere has just about doubled again in the past 5 months, and that the blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months,” he says.



(Continued at p2pnet.net)

: Current TV, doomed to be known as Al Gore's network no matter how many other people are involved, already has fixed the most-complained-about online feature. Would-be viewers can now look up Current's status in their area without giving up their first-born; requesting Current on the cable lineup still takes some details including birthdate. The network and a revamped site showing content in sync with the broadcast launched Monday; the participatory backend -- called Current Studio -- is still to come. CNET News.com reported that the site suffered traffic-related performance problems on opening day. Some react so far:
--John Little: Started out blogging that he'd "seen worse." By the end of the day added, "I can offer a more enthusiastic endorsement of the network after catching a few more hours this evening. I really like the "pod" format. Not because I'm a brainless soundbite oriented twit, or at least that's what I like to think, but because I just don't have the time to watch much TV."
-- TVgasm: "a noble but intensely bland attempt to wrangle in America's digital generation with an assault of "pods" and wooden hosts. The entire look and feel of the network, at least in this early conception, reeks of corporate Groupthink mixed with naive amateurism. ... On the plus side, the pod format is innovative, and the integration of the network with its homepage is impressive (the website provides live-updating info on when the next several pods will air)" (via Current.)
-- Chip Crews, WP: "It's unfair to draw conclusions based on a single day's offerings, but yesterday Current TV played a little like "Today" or "Good Morning America" on a slow news day. ... So okay -- this was just the first day. And Current TV, like the morning news shows, is probably best sampled, not swallowed whole. It appears that the channel's success really will rest largely on the quality and number of contributions it draws from viewers. ... in a cable universe that's made room for oceans of empty mediocrity, this island just might have a future."
-- BCBeat: B&C intern Rob Biederman live blogged the first day. He hated a feature on a sneaker collector -- "there's a fine line between 'off-the-beaten-path' and 'bores you to tears'" -- dissed the Google Current updates and praised a feature on a cliff jumper.
-- MediaWeek: "A cursory stroll through the Current Web site reveals that, at least in the early going, the net may be trying too hard to be all things for all people."

: So says News.com: Yahoo will launch a self-serve advertising platform for bloggers and other small Web publishers, on Wednesday. Like Google's service, Yahoo's product will display contextual ads, with CPA split.
Yahoo's new service will differ from Google in that it will add human editorial to the selection of ads for content pages. In comparison, Google's service relies on technology.
In April, Yahoo formally renamed Overture Services to Yahoo Search Marketing. Overture had served ads to publisher Web pages since 2003, in a program called Content Match, but it only catered to large publishers, such as The Financial Times.

Via PaidContent.org

Like ISBN for audio/visual.

"The ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) is a voluntary numbering system for the identification of audiovisual works. It provides a unique, internationally recognized and permanent reference number for each audiovisual work registered in the ISAN system.

The ISAN identifies works, not publications or broadcasts. The ISAN remains the same for an audiovisual work regardless of the various formats in which the work is distributed (e.g. DVD, video recording) or the uses to which it is put."

What stands out for me, however, is the degree to which both camps miss a third model for understanding games: games as ways of understanding the world, or (my coinage) paradigmology.

Digital Cinema Initiatives just released its specification for the creation, distribution, and exhibition of digital movies, writes Scott Kirsner. Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) is a consortium of the seven Hollywood studios. Of all the studios who claim to be committed to releasing all future digital films in compliance with the new DCI spec, only Warner Bros. actually mentioned a timetable for offering digital instances of its new releases alongside film prints. In The D Cinema roll-out: Shading, nuances, details, Kirsner offers analysis, and comment, including reaction from exhibitor-producer Mark Cuban. [Scott Kirsner: CinemaTech]

Via Cinema Minima

Nicolas Morel in Brussels is starting an initiative in open-source cinema, OPEN SHOOT. The project is starting by recruiting a management team. [Open Shoot] [Brian Flemming]

Via Cinema Minima

Just when I think I'm really getting way too theoretical here, the world suddenly proves that if anything I'm behind the times. Thanks to Mayhem and Chaos for pointing out that while I've been proposing the idea of fine-sliced (niche) music aggregators, Audiolunchbox (and, presumably, CD Baby soon) has been building them.

I finally realized that CD Baby is the perfect example of long tail -- a large chunk of the CDs at CD Baby sell only a few copies in their life-time, yet CD Baby makes them all available. The idea to create focused smaller stores that serve specific genres, are essentially tails within tails.

For instance, a micro store "louisianabeats.com" might focus on zydeco and other Louisiana centric music. Anyone who loves Zydeco and heads to CD Baby, might not be able to find the right CDs in the vast CD Baby catalog. Instead, CD Baby does the work of identifying all the zydeco music and focusing it on louisianabeats.com. This site in itself will have a long tail effect -- some CDs will sell much better than others. And because of this specific focus, these better selling CDs are getting another shot at becoming popular.

In the grand scheme of things, CD Baby is on the long tail side and Amazon is on the short head side. Inside of the long tail "louisianabeats.com" creates another tail, "ohiobeats.com" another and so forth. This could even go on to "calibeats.com", which in turn could have smaller "norcalbeats.com" and "socalbeats.com" tails within tails.

And to prove [CD Baby] is totally on the right track, online MP3 retailer audiolunchbox.com today [July 20] announced the creation of "7 genre specific digital music stores": themdirtyblues.com, pureclassical.com, punktracks.com ...

The others are CountryTracks.com, TheLoveOfMetal.com, DownloadPop.com and AudioFader.com, "which will encompass electronic, dance, house, trance and more." They're not up and running yet, but promise to launch this summer.

Bit Torrent's creator Bram Cohen is taking Bit Torrent "uptown" according to Mercury News. Ironically at the same time Cohen is meeting with Hollywood executives to explore legit partnerships, his website's new search feature points millions of users daily toward the latest pirated films. As for filtering results via the Bit Torrent website? "We're hopeful that Bram will be a partner in moving BitTorrent in that direction.'' says an MPAA Exec.

: For another sign that the U.S. Supreme Court's Grokster decision didn't resolve as much as Hollywood and the RIAA would have liked, read John Markoff's latest about more technically sophisticated P2P projects underway. Irish software developer Ian Clarke tried to punch through regulatory barriers several years ago with his Freenet; he's updating that vision now. Clarke and others envision darknets -- tight, usually anonymous P2P networks where users are recommended on a trust basis. For every one of these efforts we're hearing about, just imagine how many are out there.

Via PaidContent.org

MaxConsole (via Engadget) has more details on the Playstation 3, including the possibility that the unit could be used as a digital tuner and even have Slingbox-like functionality: "Sony is also making a lot of behind-the-scenes noise about being able to go on trips and download shows you've missed from your PS3 to your PSP -- over the internet. We imagine using a USB cable would work just fine, too."

TDL is an RDF vocabulary for describing threaded discussions, such as Usenet, weblogs, bulletin boards, and e-mail conversations.

Jamais' excellent speech on the rise of the participatory panopticon is now available, in full, as audio online. It's worth a listen.

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 08:44 AM)

From the Mit site:

We have captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. The research questions we are addressing include:

al networks evolve over time?
* How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives?
* How does information flow?
* Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data?
* How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning?

If you have a series 60 phone you can participate... check out the MIT site for details.
http://reality.media.mit.edu/
Wired article
MoSoSo's

"It looks like that future may well be by way of the computer, as big media and Internet companies develop new Web-based video programming and advertising that is truly under the command of the viewer. As Americans grow more comfortable watching programs online, Internet programming is beginning to combine the interactivity and immediacy of the Web with the alluring engagement of television."

mark cuban says it all, succinctly.

"Insanity is ignoring year after year, the demographics with more money than time. Those who aren’t willing, or don’t have the time to troll through the net to figure out which network has the most music to download, searching for songs, picking out which peers to try to download from and then hoping it all worked out right. Those who would prefer to just buy music in the easiest way possible so they can get on with enjoying their music and their lives. Isn’t that why we buy bottled water? It’s easy and convenient?"

easily locate rss feeds

Online RSS (or Atom) Newsfeed to PDF Generator

Stop reading the web, start watching it! (beta version)

"Pooxi.com is the first French-speaking video search engine coupled to a video guide indexing best the vidéos Internet. In real time, Pooxi.com publishes the boxoffice of the most consulted vidéos and apréciées."

Kevin Kelly writes and excellent retrospective (and indulges in predicting the future) of the web, something not a lot of people understand even now. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century.