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 thes