unmediated

NSA site had been placing cookies that expire in 2035, despite strict federal rules banning this type of activity until an activist rang the bell and they took the cookies out.

I went over to visit some friends to write a song for the Spread Firefox contest. When I got to their house, I pulled up the Spread Firefox contest page and saw that the contest accepts videos, but not songs. "That's okay," I told my friends. "We c

a 100% free and registration free bittorrent tracker. host your files with no bandwidth costs, or running your own complicated tracker.

The Gamepark GP2X is a new dual core (ARM920T Host Processor - ARM940T Video Coprocessor) gaming machine running on Linux and enecouraging anyone to develop emulators, games, applications, practically anything for this device

a mashup of RSS and IM is just a very cool idea. The medium of IM has been underappreciated by nearly everyone in the "media" business for one reason - the leaders of the business didn't use IM

john batelle has an excellent discussion about makebot and how such bots could be the missing service link for mobile web 2.0 going on over at his blog, check it out

Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

U.S. Government backed policy changes that have led ICANN to redelegate top level domains in such a way as to provide 'greater state-controlled censorship on the internet,

This is SERIOUS trouble.

The folks at Microsoft Game Studios' Games User Research group have made many of their talks on research, usability and other topics available via their website.

• Link here...
• Papers and presentations available here...

.

If your website's message boards read like a men's locker room, that's a clue that you may be out of sync with society. A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life project points out that women now outnumber men online in the United States, and that's especially true in the troublesome (for newspapers) 18-29 age bracket.

Are they showing up on your site? Women tend to use the Internet somewhat differently than men. While there's not a lot of difference in many utility applications, women seem more focused on using the Internet to connect with other people, (...)

Entry continued...

editorsweblog.org: The idea that there is an essence of citizen journalism - as replacing the so-called traditional journalism - is dead.

Here are the top media sources bloggers linked to in 2005, according to BlogPulse: 1 Yahoo! News 2 BBC NEWS 3 The New York Times 4 CNN.com 5 Washington Post...

Steve Rubel's first prediction in a multi-post series is a good one:

Blog comments have perhaps more collective wisdom inside them than any other form of consumer generated content. However, as of today, there's essentially no way to mine them. Who's going to help us here? Will it be Google, Yahoo, Technorati or Ice Rocket? Or will some great new search engine come along and change the game. Tune in this time next year.

Steve is right, of course, but there is so much more to be done with comments than simply being able to search them.

We need a solution to comment spam, maybe captchas are it, but TypePad doesn't support them yet. Most of the other blogging platforms seem to offer them by now.

We also need a way to "subscribe" to a comment thread.  I post comments a lot on blogs.  I rarely go back to see what reaction they generate.  If, when I post a comment, I get the option to subscribe to the comment thread, via email or RSS, that would be great.

And as I have said before, we need a way to elevate the best comments right up onto the front page.  I realize that most of my posts generate comments that are way better than my posts.  I want a simple one click button that posts the comment right onto the bottom of the post.

Bottom line - blogs are conversations.  We need to start treating the comments like the important content that they are instead of an afterthought.

How does Organized Music get to victims? Lawyer Ray Beckerman, who's been working with Santangelo since the begining, explains:

A lawsuit is brought against a group of John Does with the corporate headquarters of the ISP as the location of the lawsuit. But, "All the RIAA knows about the people it is suing is that they are the people who paid for an internet access acount for a particular dynamic IP address," says Beckerman, going on:

"The 'John Does' may live - and usually do live - hundreds or thousands of miles away, and are not even aware that they have been sued. The case may drag on for months or even years, with the RIAA being the only party that has lawyers in court to talk to the judges and other judicial personnel.

"The RIAA - without notice to the defendants - makes a motion for an "ex parte" order permitting immediate discovery. ('Ex parte' means that one side has communicated to the Court without the knowledge of the other parties to the suit. It is very rarely permitted, since the American system of justice is premised upon an open system in which, whenever one side wants to communicate with the Court, it has to give prior notice to the other side, so that they too will have an opportunity to be heard.).

"The 'ex parte' order would give the RIAA permission to take 'immediate discovery' - before the defendants have been served or given notice - which authorizes the issuance of subpoenas to the ISP's asking for the names and addresses and other information about their subscribers, which is information that would otherwise be confidential.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

It appears that there are a handful of people out there, primarily engineers, who are taking the plunge and implanting RFID chips into their hands. Purpose? For automation of course. Having an RFID chip implanted can save time doing things such as logging onto computer work stations, unlocking electrically locked doors, ordering Pizza and buying porn. Mikey Sklar, one of the pioneers of this self-chipping procedure will be explaining the self-chipping process along with giving a talk about why he did this, different tagging options and any other self-chipping information at the next Dorkbot meet-up in NYC on Wednesday January 4th at 7 pm.

Project: Chipped [Electric Clothing]

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In Ten myths of multimodal interaction (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42 , No. 11, pp. 74 - 81, 1999), Sharon Oviatt describes common myths about multimodal interaction (i.e. interacting with a computer using more different input/outputs, like mouse/voice/keyboards or more recent technologies). The myths she is describing are quite relevant to lots of HCI research:

• Myth #1: If you build a multimodal system, users will interact multimodally.
• Myth#2: Speech and pointing is the dominant multimodal integration pattern.
• Myth #3: Multimodal input involves simultaneous signals.
• Myth #4: Speech is the primary input mode in any multimodal system that includes it.
• Myth #5: Multimodal language does not differ linguistically from unimodal language.
• Myth #6: Multimodal integration involves redundancy of content between modes.
• Myth #7: Individual error-prone recognition technologies combine multimodally to produce even greater unreliability.
• Myth #8: All users’ multimodal commands are integrated in a uniform way
• Myth #9: Different input modes are capable of transmitting comparable content.during periods of blank staring.
• Myth #10: Enhanced efficiency is the main advantage of multimodal systems

The article is full of interesting examples that explains how each of these myths can be deconsctructed.

Minister of Information Industry Wang Xudong announced that the registration will apply to both phone subscribers and to the estimated 200 million Chinese who use pre-paid phones and until Jan. 1 have not been required to fill out paperwork at the time of purchase.

The program is aimed largely at cracking down on the use of pre-paid phones for fraud or to launch text-message spam.

There have, however, been complaints that the registration is an inconvenience and an intrusion on privacy, the Xinhua news agency said. Some officials agree that it could be difficult to coax pre-paid customers into registering.

There is a lot of discussion going on in the "blogosphere" about the Structured Blogging.

The idea behind Strucutred Blogging is to make a set of standards for RSS and blog software. Here is an article describing this:

Structured blogging is an initiative to add structure to blog posts of similar content. For example, let’s say that I write a review of a piece of software on my Wordpress blog and someone else writes a review in their Movable Type blog. Not only are these two posts structured differently, with the blogging platforms writing different code, but each tool has customizable templates so that the blogger can write any code they want. So even though the content is nearly the same, the probability that the code in the end results looks anything similiar is very small.

Joe Reger has also injected the idea, based upon his "datablogging" concepts, that:

In light of the two general types of data that we can log...There's a whole set of value for bloggers centered not on the network effect... not on community... not on Web 2.0 mashups. Value centered on personal data mining.

Josh Bokardo calls this the "Del.icio.us Lesson". This seems to be a natural extension of Danah Boyd's ideas about "glocalization". This is also very much in line with the "WebAssistant Telecommunity" approach as well.

The basic idea being that data gathering and contextualization tools start focus on the individual personal level, and that meta-data can then be aggregated from all of these individuals.

This is very close to the aggregation ideas that Surowiecki talked about in his book The Wisdom of Crowds: Aggregating knowledge, data, information, etc., from diverse group of individuals, who are working mostly seperately.

"Datamining" ourselves "democratizies" tools that were previously cost prohibitive for most people. They can also make it easier for many more people to contribute more effectively to a general "knowldge commons". The idea of creating databases about different aspects of ourselves has actually been around for a while. Part of the core of Catherine Austin Fitts' Solari concepts is the creation of public community databases that make hidden information and knowldge about a locale explicit and transparent. This allows people to create indexes to track the health and status of all sorts of factors that directly affect them, and their communities.

However, there is of course the issue of privacy when revealing personal info. There is also the emerging issue of defaulting to forms "Cybernetic Decision-making" as a way to deal with information overload as we create more and more digitized streams of data about our world. Eventually, we'll have to find new ways to work together to manage all of this information.

"With the advent of the DOM, the more widespread usage of new generation browsers, and the adoption of xmlHttpRequest and other technologies which all together are called AJAX, the need for notifying user with what is going on with simple animations can become a necessity, such as using fading colors and resizing elements."

This is a simple step-by-step guide to creating a mobile application using the Flickr Authentication API. A full spec of the API can be found here. See also: web how-to, desktop how-to.

Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications in Ithaca, New York invites high school and college students across America to submit a 30-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone. The Ithaca College Cellflix Festival offers a prize of US$5,000. It may come off like a gimmick, but Dean Dianne Lynch has no doubts about the contest’s academic value: In today’s media marketplace — where cell phones can take pictures, play music and games and connect to Web sites — it’s all about thinking small and mobile. ‘’Historically, we’ve always had students thinking bigger and bigger. It’s gone from radio to television to the movie screen, to the era of blockbuster films. All of a sudden, things have reversed and everything is getting smaller,'’ said Lynch. The submission deadline is 2006 January 10. A winner will be chosen from among 10 finalists and announced online January 30.

This fall, MTV launched Head and Body, a comedy series of eight programs created exclusively for cell phone users. Last year, Zoie Films, an Atlanta-based producer of independent films and festivals, ran what it billed as the world’s first cell-phone film festival.

And in October, the Forum des Images in Paris held its first Pocket Film Festival, which included everything from 30-second shorts to mini-soap operas to full-length features [View the winner, DÉCROCHE by Stéphane Galienni].

‘’It’s exciting. We were discussing this last year in film club,'’ said Sasha Stefanova, an Ithaca College junior from Kazanlak, Bulgaria, who is majoring in photography and visual arts. As soon as she heard about Lynch’s contest, ‘’I went immediately to the dean’s office and said, `How can I enter?’ I love old films, and old-school techniques. The challenge here is how to get a meaningful idea into such an everyday tool.'’ Stefanova is still pondering her entry. She is traveling home to Bulgaria for the holidays and plans to shoot scenes during her travels. ‘’It will be about my generation’s mobility and the falling down of borders,'’ she said.

Sudhanshu Saria is a senior in filmmaking and likes the novel challenges presented by working with a cell phone and a 1- to 2-inch screen. ‘’There are definitely visual limitations. You have to be able to tell a quick story. You can’t really make it character-based,'’ said Saria, from Siliguri, India. ‘’With a super small screen, you can’t have wide shots or crowd scenes. The images have to be visually simple. You can sustain closeups better than on a huge screen but some images may need to be exaggerated to compensate for the small size of the screen,'’ Saria said. Saria’s initial reaction was that the contest ‘’could be gimmicky … But I hope people studying film will take it as my generation’s chance to provide a new language, a new way of thinking.'’

The rules of the contest are simple: There must be a story, a narrative and sound, and the film must be shot on a cell phone. The movies can be edited digitally on a computer or a cell phone that has editing functions. The technical quality of the movies will depend on the cell phones, some of which can film with greater resolution than others. To ensure fairness, all submissions will be judged in basic VGA (video graphic array) quality, Lynch said. The submissions will be reviewed by a panel of film students and faculty, who will select 10 finalists. Those entries — which can be viewed on the contest Web site — will be judged by a panel of faculty and professional filmmakers.

‘’The challenge is, can you capture an audience member’s attention in 30 seconds and hold it an environment where not only is the delivery system small, but the time frame is short?'’ Lynch said. ‘’Every single frame matters. There’s no excess. That’s an incredible discipline to develop.'’ [The New York Times: Associated Press Online]

Hams concerned with the interference capability of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology are giving the greenlight to the recent announcement of BPL deployment in Texas by TXU, a local utility. "If TXU is going to install a BPL system, the ARRL is glad that TXU has chosen Current's system--which avoids using spectrum allocated to the Amateur Radio Service--in preference to one that has proven to be problematic," the group reports. The Current technology avoids putting high-frequency energy medium-voltage lines by using low-band VHF (30-50 MHz) instead.

AllPeers "combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent" to add media sharing to the long list of available extensions

"Yet when wireless companies survey the consumer landscape, they see three areas where there's still plenty of room for growth: youths, Hispanics and customers with poor or no credit histories."

listens to the song and creates tags for it

the entire "We're Not VJ's" available as a PSP/iPod video download. Hurry, hurry, it's only online for two weeks.

Niall's reverse engineering of Google's feedds API is a fantastic scoop. A few quick responses:

• Developing the API first and the apps later puts Mobile developers on equal footing.


• The #1 feature that I want RIGHT NOW is to sync my NetNewsWire subscriptions with my Google Reader subscriptions. Google Reader has been the near-perfect complement to NetNewsWire for me - since I will eventually return to NNW I won't miss a post, but I can still keep reasonably up to date when I'm away from a Mac. NewsGator subscriptions for NetNewsWire readers were rumored, but still haven't been delivered.


• Love, love, love the conversion to valid Atom 1.0 feeds. That Unicode headache you had in your home grown feed reading/publish app? It's gone, or at least different. But hopefully it's gone.


• Love, love, love, LOVE the subscription list in Atom 1.0 Here's my google reader subscriptions list.


• I really hope there's no security problems with sharing google "_USER_ID"s between apps. If there is, it will effectively kill the ability of third-party apps to develop on top of the google feeds API.


• This brings up another point - some of what google knows about me I WANT shared. What Blogger blogs I write, what I upload to Google base, some (but not all) of my google search history, and so on. Will I get to control that? No other API does this. For instance, I can't not let you subscribe to my flickr feed, nor can I constrain what shows up in it.


• If they allowed me to selectively share and cross-reference my feeds with my search history, then we'd really be getting somewhere.


• Google is going to win the API "war" with a thousand little APIs, rather than one big one.

More later. I'm kind of surprised how excited I am about this.

While TV execs are worried about TV commercials and TV writers and actors are worried about product placement, it appears that one TV show in Japan is experimenting with something that appears to be halfway between a commercial and product placement. It fits in more specifically with the show, using the same actors from the show, but focuses on a product (such as a car) and has the actors discussing the product. To separate it out from the actual show, when it happens, a red "CM" appears in the upper righthand corner of the screen, designating that this is sort of a commercial. Apparently, the early experiments with this type of advertising has gone over well. Fewer people skip it and more people remember the content. As the execs involved admit, it's part of a growing recognition of a common theme around here: advertising is content too. If you want people to watch your ads, make the content worth watching -- and that's what these half-commercials/half-product placement bits try to do.

You may have noticed that we've almost entirely ignored the supposedly raging battle over the new DVD format. The New York Times is now recognizing what we suggested months ago. The whole battle over next generation DVDs is somewhat pointless because people seem to be moving well beyond disc-based storage. Of course, if the two sides actually came to an agreement and offered a single standard, it could generate some interest -- but it would need to happen soon. However, with two competing standards, high prices, and all sorts of other problems (such as overly aggressive copy protection), it seems that many consumers just aren't interested. The entertainment industry seemed to believe that the "here's our new format, now go replace your entire collection" business model would continue forever -- but it appears that more than a few people are fed up. Obviously, the concept of storage on discs isn't entirely dead, and won't go away for quite some time, but it does seem sort of quaint to think that disc-based storage is going to be a growth area any time soon.

Fujitsu is to construct a system utilizing its biometric palm vein authentication technology for Naka city's new public library, in Japan.

The contactless palm vein authentication technology will eliminate the use of library identification cards to check out books.

Users of the library will be able to choose between an ID card with an embedded IC chip, or the palm vein authentication system. To check out library materials or use its audio-visual section, users simply suspend their hand above the authentication device and their palm vein pattern is compared to their pre-registered pattern for verification.

Besides, RFID tags will be attached to the library's materials to make the lending process automated and faster.

Fujitsu intends to adapt its contactless palm vein authentication technology for use in the security, financial, heath care, government and public sector fields as it expands its business on a global basis.

Via de bug.

Related: Palm vein deposit account, Finger vein ID ATMs.

During the holiday season, I’ve been reading an advance copy of a great book called Thumb Culture

The book was edited by a friend, Stefan Bertschi, and is a trailblazing selection of pieces on the mobile phone as a social tool. It’s been providing new insight on the landscape within which Socialight exists. I think it’s either available now or will be soon. If I get around to it, I’m going to write up a more detailed review once I’m done reading it.

I had written a chapter for the book, titled “Socialight: Mobile Network, Meet Social Network” that didn’t get into the book since it’s now focused on ethnographic and social research case studies.

However, I still highly recommend the book to anyone to whom this sounds interesting. You can purchase it here.

And if you’d like to read the unpublished chapter, you can find it here.

The Apple Podcast Server in Mac OS X Server v10.4 is based on the popular Blojsom open-source weblog server project.

Check out the Podcast Creation Guide [ pdf ] located at the bottom right of the page which, among other things, explains how to record a podcast with QuickTime Pro, GarageBand or SoundTrack Pro.

Gijs Geikes has been hard at work since we last saw his latest bizarre Walkman Tape Player / Game Boy Sequencer. A new model sync with the Little Sound Dj cartridge: plug in a Game Boy, and other goodies (like a Walkman tape player and Stylophone keyboard), and you can create wild, screaming patterns like this. (A must-listen, experimental punk/hip-hop chiptune creation.)

Gijs has schematics up, so adventurous makers, you can make your own. Or you can just go buy one of those nifty Stylphones.

SEQ05 Pictures, Sounds, Schematics [Gieskes.nl Instruments]

Updated: That link exceeded its bandwidth restrictions, but you can hear the sounds via a new link! (Thanks, Gijs!) Related:
Gameboy Music with LSDJ: Workshops, Tips, Photos, MP3s.

dflare">

Abstract: One aspect of modernization is the use of science-based technology in rule enforcement. In the “engineered society” an ethos of rationalization is seen in the application of means to ends, whether this involves manufacturing, agriculture or efforts to control human behavior. Six social control strategies are discussed and illustrated: target removal, target devaluation, target insulation, offender incapacitation, offender exclusion and identification of offenses and offenders. In complex settings in a democratic society, relying primarily on technology to control human behavior has clear social and ethical limitations.

Ubimate

UbiMate is a mobile city guide which utilizes the collective power of the mobile user community to generate customized recommendations. It looks at what like-minded user have done in the past under similar context (e.g., location, weather) to predict what the current user may like to do. It currently has two location setups, New York and Zurich.

We are currently collecting ideas on the type of activities to recommend to our users. You can help us by recommending your favourite eateries/places/activities and rate what others have added. Start by entering into your location and register to begin recommending. Rate or edit your own activities by selecting the name from the activities page.

Many thanks for your help! Please feel free to pass it on! :)

Via Annie

I remember the Netflix naysayers. Who would wait for a video to appear in the mail? Well, think again. Not only is Netflix gaining online subscribers faster than Blockbuster's new heavily-promoted service, but Netflix as a company is worth over twice the market value of Blockbuster. While Netflix has no debt, Blockbuster owes $1 billion. And Blockbuster did it to themselves by waiting too long to offer online rentals, charging ungodly late fees and requiring customers to jump through hoops because Blockbuster stores couldn't talk to each other. No surprise here. (Full disclosure: I hate Blockbuster.)

For the first time in its history BBC News is opening its archives to the UK public for a trial period.

XML.com: Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful

PodCoward writes "VH is blogging that in Belgium a former talk-show host and now member of parliament for the biggest political party, Jurgen Verstrepen, received a fine of 12,500 Euro because he hadn't asked permission for his podcast." From the article: "The decision is apparently politically inspired and motivated by content, although formal reasons like non-compliance with Flanders' media regulation have been put forward in the motivation of the decision to fine. The issue has raised some serious concerns about free speech on the Internet in Flanders, about the definition of 'broadcasting,' and about territoriality."

: Toptrend 'streaming' TV claim challenged: Hong Kong-based Toptrend Interactive's claims that it can change the way TV is watched around the world has some doubters. The concept: broadband can be used to open a channel directly to the program provider; instead of time-consuming downloads, the company says customers can start watching live or VOD TV in a matter of seconds instead of downloading. "It's as big a leap as black-and-white to colour," says managing director Ian Dallas. But others say it's not as revolutionary. Then again, an Indian exec connected to the project also proclaims, "I think VOD is a bunch of rubbish, because I don't see consumers engaging in it. If you don't start from that basis point of understanding consumers are lazy and work backwards, you're not going to revolutionise the television industry."
-- Internet TV drives broadband uptake: This is one of those chicken-egg things. From my perspective, broadband proliferation is driving IPTV use.
-- Niche sport gets new life on IPTV: Interactive Television Networks (ITVN) and the National Lacrosse League are joining forces on Lacrosse TV -- "the first 24/7 broadcast network dedicated to lacrosse." The broadband net, which promises live games, archived games and other features, launches Jan. 1 with a $10 monthly fee. The deal includes dedicated team channels. ITVN bills it as the first of a series of sports channels. Press release.

Looking to get your hi-def, next-gen, hyphenated format on early this year? No worries, mate, looks like a nice new Blu-ray burner is on its way from Pioneer in January. The Pioneer BDR-101A is capable of burning Blu-ray 25GB discs at 72MBps. Totally fast. The drive will also be able to read and play back burned Blu-ray discs, so don't be suprised if you see a surge in legitimate file sharing that's completely legal pirating of movies and warez. No price or release date has been set.

Blu-Ray burner for January! [Akihabara]

The Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference in Ontario, Calif., a little while back posted podcasts of the sessions. Here is the podcast of the panel I participated in: How Citizens Media Is Changing the Face of Traditional Media (mp3). With me were moderator/podcaster John Furrier and podcaster/videoblogger Eric Rice. Lots of other sessions worth a listen, such as the keynotes by Leo Laporte and Jason Calacanis.

NY Times: The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels.

Even as the recording industry staggers through another year of declining sales over all, there are new signs that a democratization of music made possible by the Internet is shifting the industry's balance of power.

Exploiting online message boards, music blogs and social networks, independent music companies are making big advances at the expense of the four global music conglomerates, whose established business model of blockbuster hits promoted through radio airplay now looks increasingly outdated.

ut looks. It's about the new realities of the marketplace.

On the Rhapsody subscription music service, for example, the 100 most popular artists account for only about 24 percent of the music that consumers chose to play from its catalog last month, said Tim Quirk, Rhapsody's executive editor. In the brick-and-mortar world, he estimates, the 100 most popular acts might account for more than 48 percent of a mass retailer's sales.

bout a big behemoth beaming something at a mass audience," Mr. Quirk said. "It's about a mass of niche audiences picking and selecting what they want at any given time."

MagnaChip semiconductor recently announced its high-performance 3.2 megapixel CMOS image sensor for camera phones.

The MC532MA offers both superb low light performance in a small sized module. It operates at 12 frames per second at full resolution and up to 30 frames per second at SVGA resolution.

The MC532MA is expected to be mass produced in the first quarter of 2006, and according to a representative from MagnaChip the performance gap between camera phones and digital camera is expected to decrease. Via Esato.

20051227_MagnaChip.jpg

The Wall Street Journal has a story about the multitude of problems facing the multiplex, including flat screen tvs, bankruptcy, rude guests, $6 popcorn, pre-show ads, cell phones, etc. Theaters are so desperate to reverse the decline in attendace that they are turning to technology to fight back:

Some chains say they're considering clamping down more, increasing the number of times ushers "sweep" theaters to rein in loud audience members. A more radical tactic under consideration: jamming cellphones to thwart chatty audience members. The theater owners' trade group and its members are looking into a cellphone call-blocking service that is currently illegal under federal communications law.

Do you still go to the theater? What annoys you the most?

Thanks to Joe for sending this in.

The irony is that the same disruptions that are eating away at the business of broadcasting offer tremendous opportunities, if broadcasters could simply rise above defending their old turf and play a little offense in the new stadium.

how Linux can use a computer parallel port and a $10 integrated circuit to read 8 analog channels at 12 bit accuracy

Creative Commons licensed cameraphone picture chosen as one of the best of 2005

Open source Gnutella client for OS X with Creative Commons support

A lot of smart Intellectual Property types have started a blog about copyright — the title says it all: Copyrightwatch.ca: Debunking copyright myths, one post at a time. Myths or not, there’s lots of very thoughtful stuff there, writes Lawrence Lessig. It bills itself as Canada’s home for common sense and the straight goods on digital copyright law. This blog is supported by a team of academics, public interest advocates, and creators concerned that copyright serve the interests of ordinary Canadians. [Lessig Blog]

The ARRL is still trying to have the Manassas, Virginia broadband over powerline (BPL) operation shut down because it's still causing harmful interference to Amateur Radio, and does not comply with FCC Part 15 rules, notes the group's monthly newsletter. Meetings between the ARRL and operators "have not produced any solution to the interference problem but have, instead, created the illusion that the problem is being addressed," says an ARRL attorney.

Bookpedia is a book cataloging software for Mac OS X. To save you time and effort, it retrieves all book information from the Internet and lets you arrange your books in any which way you like.

Podcasting could represent the single largest increase in religious exposure since television, which gave rise to the televangelist.

MySync provides the Mac-to-Mac syncing capabilities of .mac, without .mac

If script.aculo.us had a cube effect this would rival Keynote. Presentacular adds script.aculo.us visual effects to slide shows created with S5. It has the same advantages than S5 for creating slide shows: printer-friendly version, simple and semantic markup and portable across the most modern browsers.

DropDV is a Mac OS X droplet which converts MPEG video into DV video streams. After conversion, your video can be edited with iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or any other DV video editing system. DropDV converts MPEG video files from Still Cameras, MPEG-based video cameras, Tivo and ReplayTV MPEG files, as well as any other MPEG file you may have from other sources. DropDV 2.0 has been totally rewritten from the ground up to give you the best possible conversion from MPEG video into DV format. DropDV 2.0 has a new look, faster processing, a slick Macintosh user experience and all of the great features of the original DropDV 1.0! Features: Multiprocessor enabled Rock solid audio/video synchronization A Simple, drag-and-drop interface Creates projects compatible with iMovie Uses high quality bicubic scaling for the best video image Full YUV pipeline (no conversions to RGB) Supports both NTSC and PAL output Doesn't lose the audio track Splits output DV files so they are less than 2Gb (optional) Will convert VCD, (unencrypted) DVD and any other MPEG file into DV format DropDV 2 also includes speedups, bug fixes, and many enhancements. No other MPEG to DV solution offers all of these features, including QuickTime Pro or even Final Cut Pro.

Videora automatically and intelligently finds and downloads video you want to watch.

SpiralSynth Modular is an object orientated music studio with an emphasis on live use.

TransPose is an audiovisual performance instrument whose interface encourages dramatic movement.

Wayne Carlson, professor of design, art and more at OSU, has put together an exhuastive (and exhuasting), 20-part critical history of computer graphics, complete with images and movies of rare early works.

Chris Anderson has posted an absurd piece called The Probabilistic Age in which he suggests that the reason people aren’t comfortable with Wikipedia and Google is that they are systems that operate according to the laws of probabilistic statistics, which exist on some higher plane that human minds cannot comprehend. Most of the comments on the post focus on Anderson’s incoherent claim that Wikipedia somehow operates “emergently.” (This is a claim that Jimmy Wales himself disputes, by the way.) But what really concerned me was this line:

[Google] makes connections that you or I might not, because they emerge naturally from math on a scale we can’t comprehend.

There is absolutely nothing “natural” about Google’s search results. Google’s (and Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s and everyone else’s) algorithms are designed by human scientists and engineers. These scientists and engineers make specific choices about which algorithms they will use, and which they will not. They decide how the various parts of these algorithms will be weighted. They decide how they will define fuzzy concepts like “spam” and “relevance.” Each of the decisions reflects the values and preferences of the decider, and these values are reflected in the search results we see. It isn’t “alien logic,” it is human logic, and to believe otherwise is to cede control to those who write the algorithms–something I’m frankly surprised Mr. Anderson is willing to do.

When I saw Sergey Brin speak at UC Berkeley this past fall, I was very concerned when he revealed that he himself has fallen victim to, or at least wishes to propagate, the belief that his algorithms are “natural,” saying that the link structure of the web reflected the intrinsic importance of the documents linked to. But documents have no intrinsic importance–they only have importance in the context of a particular query-maker at a particular time. Sergey’s algorithms don’t reveal some truth about what is important–they encode decisions about what should be considered important. Both Mr. Brin and Mr. Anderson need to come to grip with the fact that search engines are inherently political. If people are concerned about Google, or Yahoo, or Wikipedia, then pundits like Chris Anderson should be starting discussions about what we value and how our technologies do or don’t reflect those values, not turning off their brains and blathering on about statistics and the mind of God.

Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing?

A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.

Q: Huh?

A: Exactly. Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there's a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google's results. We want to trust what we read.

    When professionals--editors, academics, journalists--are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems where nobody's in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.

    But how can that be right when it feels so wrong?

    There's the rub. This tradeoff is just hard for people to wrap their heads around. There's a reason why we're still debating Darwin. And why Jim Suroweicki's book on Adam Smith's invisible hand is still surprising (and still needed to be written) more than 200 years after the great Scotsman's death. Both market economics and evolution are probabilistic systems, which are simply counterintuitive to our mammalian brains. The fact that a few smart humans figured this out and used that insight to build the foundations of our modern economy, from the stock market to Google, is just evidence that our mental software has evolved faster than our hardware.

    Probability-based systems are, to use Kevin Kelly's term, "out of control". His seminal book by that name looks at example after example, from democracy to bird-flocking, where order arises from what appears to be chaos, seemingly reversing entropy's arrow. The book is more than a dozen years old and decades from now we'll still find the insight surprising. But it's right.

    Is Wikipedia "authoritative"? Well, no. But what really is? Britannica is reviewed by a smaller group of reviewers with higher academic degrees on average. There are, to be sure, fewer (if any) total clunkers or fabrications than in Wikipedia. But it's not infallible either; indeed, it's a lot more flawed that we usually give it credit for.

    Britannica's biggest errors are of omission, not commission. It's shallow in some categories and out of date in many others. And then there are the millions of entries that it simply doesn't--and can't, given its editorial process--have. But Wikipedia can scale to include those and many more. Today Wikipedia offers 860,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500. Tomorrow the gap will be far larger.

    The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it in this smart post, Wikipedia "should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts."

    The same is true for blogs, no single one of which is authoritative. As I put it in this post, "blogs are a Long Tail, and it is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail--it is, by definition, variable and diverse." But collectively they are proving more than an equal to mainstream media. You just need to read more than one of them before making up your own mind.

    Likewise for Google, which seems both omniscient and inscrutable. It makes connections that you or I might not, because they emerge naturally from math on a scale we can't comprehend. Google is arguably the first company to be born with the alien intelligence of the Web's large-N statistics hard-wired into its DNA. That's why it's so successful, and so seemingly unstoppable.

    Paul Graham puts it beautifully:

"The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it.  That's why their success seems so effortless.  They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way.  They try to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does."

The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers. That grain Graham sees is the weave of statistical mechanics, the only logic that such really large systems understand. Perhaps someday we will, too.

[Update: Nicholas Carr, who seems to have inherited the Clifford Stoll chair of reliable techno-skepticism, has a clever and well-written response here.]

been meaning to post this for a couple of days now, for those who havent come across it yet - michael

Gijs Geikes has been hard at work since we last saw his latest bizarre Walkman Tape Player / Game Boy Sequencer. A new model sync with the Little Sound Dj cartridge: plug in a Game Boy, and other goodies (like a Walkman tape player and Stylophone keyboard), and you can create wild, screaming patterns like this. (A must-listen, experimental punk/hip-hop chiptune creation.)

Gijs has schematics up, so adventurous makers, you can make your own. Or you can just go buy one of those nifty Stylphones.

SEQ05 Pictures, Sounds, Schematics [Gieskes.nl Instruments]

Related:
Gameboy Music with LSDJ: Workshops, Tips, Photos, MP3s.

Ultramercial says they have a patent on a business model for VOD advertising. In an email, they said "it allows the viewer to make the choice: watch an ad that 'earns' them each segment of their program - OR - pay-per-view. The viewer chooses between an explicit exchange of value: their time for the content - OR - their money."

In the accompanying graphic, you can see how they expect a viewer of broadband TV shows to navigate to the show they want to watch.

Paul Grusche of Untramercial claims that the Ultramercial approach is "being considered by two major networks to bring their shows online."

Vlogger Calendar 2006
All proceeds go to charity.

You can now take your choice of how to virtually tour New York City (and although not as good as the real thing, the virtual city doesn’t go on strike):

• Virtual NYC: Navigate through the streets of New York using thousands of pictures and reading the city’s history. 16 tours currently available.
• NYC POV: Takes the Quicktime VR 360-degree approach to touring the Big Apple. [via]

You can also use the ‘nyc’ tag to check-out other NYC mashups at any time:

    http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/nyc

There are 17 NYC-related mashups currently listed.

Update: The New York Times has a new mashup Commuting Guide that can help people find transportation alternatives including car pool staging areas.

Many of the arguments on emerging music business models seem to be based on speculation and assertions. So I thought I'd sit down and do some actual math, based on two sales scenarios for a moderately successful indie album: physical CDs vs. iTunes downloads. It's scary.

Global cultural centers of gravity shift.
Today's Mouse will be tomorrow's mouse.

How much does your job rely on creativity?
How much of your creativity is based on your deep insights into local cultural norms?
How long will it take before the global cultural center of gravity shifts to marginalize your culture?
How long before the (global) relevance that you take for granted is gone?
How long before your job is no longer relevant?
What do you need to do to stay relevant?

Photo taken earlier this year wandering around Old Delhi.

questions survivors ask themselves daily -michael

So I'm finishing off a workshop proposal and going through my notes on remembering, forgetting, materiality and cultural value. I've gone back over Nietzsche's active forgetting, Ricoeur on memory, history and forgetting, and Auge on oblivion. Excellent stuff. I also glanced back over some of the essays in Appadurai's The Social Life of Things and Mary Douglas' The World of Goods, as well as Michael Thompson's Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, and his more recent article Time's Square: Deriving Cultural Theory from Rubbish Theory (which builds on the work of Douglas). Not entirely my cup of tea, but useful.

I also checked out Organization's Special Issue on the Rise of Objects in the Study of Organizations, which has some good work by John Law and Vicky Singleton on objects as regions, networks, fluids and fire ("objects as patterns of discontinuity between absence and presence") and an interesting account by Lucy Suchman on how how values of the "new" operate in technological design culture.

Bruno Latour has recently attempted to move from objects to things, and I like all sorts of, um, things, about his dingpolitik, but the Making Things Public exhibition catalog is a brutal read. It just goes on and on, and despite having essays grouped into sections, it's almost impossible to determine the ideas which one could apply in one's own work. So I've just got the library to order What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design by Peter-Paul Verbeek to see if it might be more useful.

But there's something about Thompson's work that is sticking with me. As Will Straw puts it in The Thingishness of Things:

"Michael Thompson noted that the central problem in the analysis of objects was the disjunction between economic decay and physical decay. Long after objects have ceased to hold any significant economic value, long after they have stopped being signifiers of social desire, they continue to exist as physical artifacts...Here, an analysis of cultural artifacts almost of necessity becomes an ecological analysis, in the broadest sense of the term. The accumulation of artifacts for which there is no longer any observable social desire invites us to deal with the question of how we deal with cultural waste..."

This becomes particularly interesting when I think about pervasive computing, and especially those spatial annotation projects that seek to capture collective memories. Persistence is a funny thing...

a collection of 1.774 commonly available circular & cylindrical lights, worth 67.920W of luminous output, which can be individually dimmed for showing animated patterns on a building's facade at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany. until February 2006, this integrated light & media installation will present new works by internationally renowned artists that have been created especially for this location & this medium. see also bix interactive facade & blinkenlights. [spots-berlin.de|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

A Shoulder Pad Insert Vibrotactile Display by Aaron Toney, Lucy Dunne, Bruce H. Thomas, Susan P. Ashdown describes a project that aims at integrate a vibrotatcitle display and support electronics into a standard clothing insert, the shoulder pad.

The shoulder pad in particular was chosen as a highly useful garment insert because of its common integration into
the standard business suit, one of the most culturally pervasive garments in western society.
(…)
The objective for this project was to develop a tactile display contained within a standard shoulder pad that could present a stimulus to the user. More specifically, the display needed to be capable of presenting several distinct stimuli in multiple locations at once, and it needed to maintain the the functions of a shoulder pad: shape, stability, and flexibility.

The pad is meant to display to mimic social conventions such as tapping on the shoulder area for alerts or guidance. One of the authors, Bruce Thomas, reports that:

“As one example, we are working on a set of pager motors integrated into a shoulder pad for a business suit,” Thomas said. One idea is to have silent vibration patterns — similar to custom ring tones — coded to incoming phone numbers. “This way, when you are in a meeting you have a better idea of who is trying to contact you and you are not always pulling your phone out to see who is calling,”

…

I like this concept very much: Leapfrogging and Worldchanging has a good definition of it::

“Leapfrogging” is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps. (…) Rather than following the already-developed nations in the same course of “progress,” leapfrogging means that developing regions can experiment with emerging tools, models and ideas for building their societies. Leapfrogging can happen accidentally (such as when the only systems around for adoption are better than legacy systems elsewhere), situationally (such as the adoption of decentralized communication for a sprawling, rural countryside), or intentionally (such as policies promoting the installation of WiFi and free computers in poor urban areas).

-known example of leapfrogging is the adoption of mobile phones in the developing world. It’s easier and faster to put in cellular towers in rural and remote areas than to put in land lines, and as a result, cellular use is exploding.

Find open educational resources. The OCW Finder currently shows results from: MIT OCW Utah State University OCW Johns Hopkins School of Public Health OCW Tufts University OCW Foothill De-Anza SOFIA Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

Dion Henchcliff has a great list of Web 2.0 Software over on his blog. Drop on over there and add to his list. -michael

Social Bookmarking/Search/Invitation:

Simpy
Goovite
Furl
Spurl
Rollyo
Squidoo
StumbleUpon
RawSugar
Kopikol
SurfTail

Content Filtering

Techtiki
ScoopGo
Filangy

To Do Lists

GooTodo

Online Calendars

HipCal
AirSet
zEvents
EventSniper

Web Site/Blog Analytics:

Measure Map
Google Analytics

Peer Production Content (News/Music/Listings)

Shoutwire
Millions of Games
Rojo
Last.fm
Pandora
WikiCompany
Glypho
Yazai
BlockRocker
Wists
SpinSpy
NowPublic
Odeo
WebJay
180 Degree News
Quimble
Riffs
ButterFly
Bandnews

Mash-Ups

Ning
FlickrMap
LivePlasma
CoverPop
Qube
Kayak
toEat

Aggregators

Google Reader
SuprGlu
PBwiki
Attensa
fluctu8
NewsMob
Blummy
Fluxiom

Start Pages

Google Ig

Team Planning, Organization, Coordination, & Project Management

Basecamp
Planzo
Backpack
Zimbra
ProjectPlace

E-Mail and Communication

Meebo
GMail
myemail
Tempinbox
Citadel

Online Storage

Avvenu
SendSpace
eSnips

Image Storage, Search, & Sharing

Fotolia
iStockPhoto
Riya

Mapping

Google Maps
Yahoo! Maps
MSN Maps
Wayfaring

Word Processing & Note Taking

JotSpot Live
Webnote

Web 2.0 Parts

TinyMCE
RSS2PDF

Grassroots Web 2.0

Knowmore.org

Online Business Software

2ndSite
NetWorthIQ
ThinkFree
CampaignMonitor

Web 2.0 Social Communities

MySpace
Orkut
LinkedIn

Web 2.0 Command Line

YubNub

Web 2.0 Humor

Web 2.0 Validator

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application with an open security architecture and NAT-to-NAT traversal capabilities.

Talk Digger is a web application developed by Frédérick Giasson that helps users to find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.

simple aggregator combining search engine results.. very efficient -michael

"We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive"

good ol albert...thinking away as usual

playground is a simple 3d collaborative brick builder where users can simultaneuosly build their architectural masterpieces or destroy theirs or others. the playground is small, bricks are limited, the potential of conflict is big.

With MonitorThis you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time" Cool way to easily track mentions of something across many different search sites.

make it opml and simple...

This article from Michael Geist points to a wide range of examples involving packet preferencing, content blocking, traffic shaping, and public musings about premium charges for faster content downloads. ISPs are now reducing access to peer-to-peer applic

MyBlogLog is all about tracking where your readers come from and where they go; in the simplest, most non-intrusive way possible

a neat little javascript for inline views on linking activity

The intense legal jockeying to determine who will own new scientific knowledge, paradoxically, is preventing scientists from having the freedom to collaborate and generate that knowledge in the first place!

Simply enter the URL of your feed, choose which directories you want your feed submitted to, and click the submit button.

Lady finds digital camera, doesn't know who it belongs to so her husband uploads the photos to Flickr in hopes someone knows one of the subjects of the photos. Take a look at let them know if you recognize anyon

This release is "a huge improvement over 0.1 in capability, performance, and polish." Dojo is one of the most clean and well-designed JavaScript libraries around so check it out!

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don't go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces. Dojo lets you prototype interactive widgets quickly, animate transitions, and build Ajax requests with the most powerful and easiest to use abstractions available. These capabilities are built on top of a lightweight packaging system, so you never have to figure out which order to request script files in again. Dojo's package system and optional build tools help you develop quickly and optimize transparently.

Xeni Jardin: Snip from a post today by Daniel Solove, a professor at George Washington University Law School:

Suppose the mainstream media, fed up with the buzz bloggers keep getting and with bloggers criticizing their stories, decided to exact revenge. They initiate a vigorous copyright enforcement strategy, launching a barrage of lawsuits against bloggers as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has done to music file sharers. What would happen?

The blogosphere would be in for some tough times I bet. Bloggers frequently copy large chunks of mainstream media articles and some of us copy pictures we find on the Web. Bloggers don't have a team of photographers and artists, so they snag images from the Internet. As for mainstream media articles, bloggers often quote very liberally because the mainstream media is notorious for creating dead URLs -- articles often just disappear after a week or two. In other instances, articles get archived and can only be retrieved for a fee. The result is that a post discussing a mainstream media article with just a link or a small quote can become hard to understand when the article being referred to becomes unavailable. That's why bloggers often copy significant portions of articles -- so their posts can still be understood when the URLs to the articles go dead.

(...)[The] blogosphere has developed a set of copyright norms in an area where there is very little enforcement. These norms about the use of copyrighted material are probably at odds with existing copyright law. The mainstream media and other websites have not been going after bloggers for copyright violations all that much. Although the music and movie industries have been on the copyright offensive, beyond them, the enforcement of copyright on the Internet has been rather laid back. But this article from the WSJ strikes a bit of fear in my bones (...)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?a=nwGexv">

Neil Gaiman pointed to this entry in Diane Duane's blog. In it, Duane proposes an experiment in direct creator-audience business. Basically, she has the outline for a third novel in a series where the first two didn't sell all that well. Given the lackluster sales her regular big-market publisher won't take a chance on the third. But there's still a dedicated fan base that wants to see the story concluded, as well as completists, collectors, and those who might want the cachet of owning a novel written "on spec" by a big name author.

A niche audience to be sure, but isn't the 'net about connecting up niche groups and letting them do things they couldn't do as isolated individuals? Duane estimates that the per-person cost of such a book would be USD 20-25 in paperback form. That's a hefty premium over even today's inflated paperback prices (typically $5-8) but not out of the reach of people who are collectors or who are used to paying for specialty items.

What Duane is asking is for feedback on this idea - the email address is in her blog - and for people to publicize the notice. I'm not personally a Duane fan, but I am a fan of experiments in new business models. So I'm publicizing and urging you to do the same. Blog this, put it in places where people who care about publish-on-demand and similar topics will see it.

"The creation and playback of DivX® video has never been easier for Mac users. The new DivX Converter™ and DivX codec put you in control of your media. Convert nearly any digital video to DivX. Easily burn or transfer your DivX files to watch them on any DivX certified player. Take your DivX videos wherever your path may lead."
This is great news for Mac users! DivX is a great player, I use it all the time on my PC. w00t! The Converter...

The United States ranked sixth among the world's leading jailers of journalists in 2005, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a report issued yesterday. China, Cuba, Eritrea and Ethiopia were the worst offenders, the report said, together accounting for two-thirds of the 125 editors, writers and photojournalists imprisoned around the world.

The U.S. is holding four Iraqi journalists in detention in Iraq and one Sudanese national, an assistant cameraman for Al-Jazeera, in Guantanamo.

For the seventh consecutive year, China was the world's leading jailer of journalists, with 32 imprisoned, the report said. Fifteen of the cases in China involved Internet journalists. Cuba was second, with 24 journalists behind bars.

After a bit of a hiatus, we’re back! You knew we couldn’t leave you hanging for long, right? We come bearing good news, too! What could be better than that? We here at We Are The Media are happy to announce the winners in the 2005 Remix Month Contest. We know, we know. You’ve been salivating in anticipation of the possibility that you could be the remixer who wins our very awesome, very vloggy prizes! The response was tremendous. The competition was fierce. In the end, you’re all winners in our book. Don’t ever forget that (tear). Now, without further ado and grandstanding, allow us to introduce this year’s winners:

In the category of Best Overall Remix and winner of the Grand Prize - Phillip of Swordfight gets the prize with his remix simply titled WATM Remixoff2005. Straight, to the point, and totally rockin’! Way to go Phillip!

In the Category of “I Have to Win Something if I Stack the Deck” - Susan of Kitykity walks away knowing that people are both watching and loving her stuff! She’s done something like 100 videos in 3 months and they are filled with heart and technical snazzyness. If that doesn’t deserve an award, we don’t know what does. Congrats Susan!

In the highly sought after “Best Use of Steve Garfield, Josh Leo and Ian Mills Drunk” Category - Our own Jennifer Rundle takes home the award for illustrating just how dangerous alcohol can be with her remix titled Don’t Let This Happen to You…especially when coupled with video recording yourself! Kudos, Jen!

And last, but certainly not least,Chris Mulhern wins the award for “Best Use of Achived Footage” with his entry called San Francisco.

In order to claim your prizes you must drop us a note with your address

Ive been following Crostopher Allen's blog, "Life With Alacrity", recently quite avidly (no pun intended, eli), and he has a new article up on ratings systems that i highly recommend checking out. As the Lightnet expands, it will be more and more important that we delve into accurate statistics and ratings methods to dethrone the arguments of the DRMafia... and Chris outlines the pitfalls and potholes in most methodologies inherent in selection systems, which are primarily centered on voting and deliberation, opinion systems, which represent how voting could occur, and finally comparison systems, which rank or rate different people or things in a simple, comparative manner. Dont miss it.

-michael

free plug in to post photos and tag them to your blog from iphoto

Safarilicious parses your Safari bookmarks and allows to export them to your del.icio.us account

While testing our participants' eye movements across several news homepage designs, Eyetrack III researchers noticed a common pattern: The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.

Two weeks or so ago I posed a question to the newly minted SKYPE USA GM, Henry Gomez, about the issues of adult content and licensed content going over the Skype pipe when Video was announced.

One of my questions centered around the ability for Skype to be a multicast streaming pipe. Now Gomez, who is very bright, seemed to not see this as an issue that mattered to Skype, but he was just on the job.

But, you see, I've been in the streaming media world longer than I've been in the VoIP world (circa 1997) so the issues and the potential of using Skype as a pipe don't fall far from the tree.

So when I saw this post via Stuart at Skype Journal I said "oh, my God."

Basically when you add in encryption that Skype already has it becomes impossible to know what's going through the pipe. That means someone in London could in effect Skypecast English Premiere League Football to an ex-pat in the USA. Vice versa someone here in the USA could Skypecast NBA basketball, which has rights deals in other parts of the world, virtually anywhere.

For Hollywood this is akin to Kazaa or LimeWire in many ways. But much worse. First Skype makes things easy. Like a Mac almost. So with TV shows seen at least one year behind in foreign markets the Skypecasting market could blow holes in that approach very quickly. Given the growth of broadband around the world Skype could become the illegal distribution pipe with a technology like the one described by Stuart, or someone else's. Now with Video and codecs geared for it already resident in Skype, the issue is no longer if, but when.

Burn Station is a mobile self-service for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge. It is completely legal, released under an open licence, and non-commercial.

SplitCamera is a freeware virtual video clone and video capture driver for connecting several applications to a single video capture source. AWESOME... connect it to SKYPE

Sundance is doing a session on videoblogging/podcasting. hosted by Jason Calacanis. i really hope someone in this group goes. Im just waiting for the Jason Calacanis of videolbogs to pop up. a daily videoblog for every topic you can think of. Jay ____________________ PODCASTING, VLOGGING, & THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Sunday, January 22, 11 a.m.
Digital Forum - Shorts Theater
Sundance Film Center, Main Street Mall

The combustible mix of audio blogs and mp3 players known as ³podcasting² has been termed by some as ³the first great media breakthrough of the 21st century.² Combining the democratic ideals of inexpensive digital production, virtual community, content-on-demand, and freedom of expression; podcasting has emerged as an overnight success promising an endlessly varied universe of audio content to anyone who wants it at any time. But behind these ideals, podcasting also opens up a new market with unlimited possibilities with respect to audience penetration, frequency, consumer advertising, and target marketing. Is this a win-win situation for media companies and content developers alike, and where might it take us? Moderated by Jason Calacanis, internet entrepreneur and CEO of Weblogs, Inc.

This seems relevant to our backchannel practice...

Reinventing trust, collaboration and compliance in social systems. A workshop for novel insights and solutions for social systems design

April 22, 2006
Paper Submission Deadline - 16. Jan 06

Hosted at CHI 2006
April 22-27 2006
Montreal, Canada

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/reinvent06

-------------------------------------
Aim of the Workshop
-------------------------------------
Designing social systems that support trust, collaboration, and compliance has emerged as a core concern in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-mediated communication (CMC). Research to date has focused on policing mechanisms, stable identities, reputation systems, and rich media channels, among
other approaches. However, these approaches are often costly, negate the benefits of anonymity, or rely on the truthfulness of participants.

This workshop aims to provide a forum for novel alternative approaches that have, in our view, been overlooked or under-utilized to date. Further, we want to address how the analysis of existing social systems and user-centered design methods can help in the design of social systems that support trust and collaboration.

Bernardo A. Huberman , author of “The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information” has published a new paper that explores "long tail" concepts in "P2P" systems:

Abstract: We describe an efficient incentive mechanism for P2P systems that gen- erates a wide diversity of content offerings while responding adaptively to customer demand. Files are served and paid for through a parimutuel market similar to that commonly used for betting in horse races. An analysis of the performance of such a system shows that there exists an equilibrium with a long tail in the distribution of content offerings, which guarantees the real time provision of any content regardless of its popu- larity.

The paper goes on to exaplain how the problem of creating an "adaptable and e±cient system capable
of delivering any file, regardless of its popularity" can be solved. The system works by creating an(quoting from the paper):

...effcient incentive mechanism for P2P systems that generates a wide diversity of content offerings while responding adaptively to customer demand. Files are served and paid for through a parimutuel mar- ket similar to that commonly used for betting in horse races. An analysis of the performance of such a system shows that there exists an equilibrium with a long tail in the distribution of content offerings, which guarantees the real time provision of any content regardless of its popularity. In our case, the bandwidth fraction of a given file offered by a server plays the role of the odds, the band- width consumed corresponds to bettors, the files to horses, and the requests are analogous to races.

The European Parliament passed a measure requiring data providers to hold onto users' communication information for a period between six months and two years. While this is intended to aid anti-terrorism policing, it also worries critics for privacy and market competitiveness reasons.

One wrinkle: Wired notes that

only 20 percent of e-mail would be covered since many service providers were based outside the bloc.

(via /.)

Nature reports "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,a Nature investigation finds".The article says,"in the study,entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review.Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias;they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia.A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out,and were then examined by Nature's news team.Only eight serious errors,such as misinterpretations of important concepts,were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed,four from each encyclopaedia.But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements:162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica,respectively."

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

Faced with the employers' systematic breaches of both international standards and national labour laws, a trade union in the Phillipines is targeting young workers and using text messages as a campaign tool to counter employer hostility.

Men and women do many things in different ways, even reading news on the Internet. When reading news online, men follow a zigzag pattern while women tend to cross the page vertically (see illustrations). This is one of the findings of an eyetracking study (results in Spanish) that was conducted recently to learn reading habits on digital Spanish newspaper websites. The study also focused on the impact of advertising. Banners on top of the name of the newspaper and big vertical "skyscraper" ads are the most seen ads.

Interesting ... and not really surprising ... but useful. As reported by Online Media Daily, a new study shows that ads in RSS feeds work best (in terms of click-throughs) when the ads are individual items, rather than as ad text tacked on to an item.

Advertising on RSS feeds is still pretty new, so the industry is feeling its way. Early experiments by news publishers often added a line of ad text to selected news items, which is visible in the user's RSS reader. Others tried the concept of inserting occasional items (...)

Entry continued...

Wired, Body and Soul

In Getting Your Body (And Soul) Wired, Newsweek Magazine reports about Finger Whisper, a wristwatch-phone that transfers voice signals via your body:

"In his gadget-filled office at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Prof. Kohji Mitsubayashi tells a visitor to touch a transmitter with one hand and a receiver with another. Voila! A jaunty TV jingle blares from a pair of attached speakers. Surprised, the visitor releases both gadgets, and the music stops. The simplicity and strangeness of becoming a human circuit—with electrical signals coursing through one’s body from fingertip to fingertip—is so fascinating that visitors usually repeat the act. “Fun, isn’t it?” says Mitsubayashi, grinning.

Not just fun. Japan is abuzz over the potential of such body-based technology as the ultimate wireless networking tool. A string of Japanese companies are experimenting with systems that use the human body to conduct electricity—some manipulating weak currents that pass through the skin itself (as body-fat scales do), others taking advantage of electrical fields on the surface of the body. Associated products are on the way. The question is whether this represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about wires." [blogged on wristfashion.com]

That's how Viacom President and CEO Tom Freston explains all the possibilities to "sell pieces of what we do to a lot of places." While wireless and online video are profitable enterprises for MTV Networks, Freston said the next stop is video gaming, social networking and digital music ("Urge" was announced earlier this week.) "It has the potential to become a very high margin business because, in many cases, you are using the content you already have on television, and you also have television to drive traffic," he says. "As great as Yahoo! and AOL are, they can't present the integrated multimedia experience."

Yahoo is delving into more original video content, this time with a reality show called "Wow House." The show will follow two families as they renovate and upgrade their home electronics, and it will have plenty of opportunities for product integration. "Wow House" will debut on Yahoo's upcoming technology section -- due to launch in the first quarter of next year -- and headed up by former CNET editor-in-chief Patrick Houston. Yahoo's starting to live up to the designation of "the fifth network." (Free reg. req.)

September: 'Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone' debuts on Yahoo

Epic has released a bunch of new screenshots for its upcoming game Unreal Tournament 2007, which will be the fourth in the series. Naturally, the graphics are astounding and the example above doesn’t look too far off the high end CGI example we posted yesterday. We could just leave you to drool all over your keyboard at the next next-generation of graphics, but that’d be too easy. Instead we’re going to recount a couple of the comments left at the previous CGI graphics article.

As Anon points out, “at the rate the price of games are going, the amount of time taken to model this will have to pay the artists 10 fold”. We touched on this earlier, where we looked at Nintendo’s patent for displacement mapping graphics. The problem of increasing programming and artist time is one that a vast section of the industry is going to have to address. As budgets and graphical expectations (from the greedy gaming public) rise out of control, publishers and developers are going to have to make a choice: graphics or gameplay.

Jake believes that “Half-Life 2, and all those other games, in fact every single “photorealistic” game look cartoony. No matter how many polygons they get in, Alyx still looks cartoony.” What Jake’s saying here is that photorealistic graphics will never move past the “Uncanny Valley”. This is a principle of robotics that addresses the emotional response we have to human-like robots. As the realism of the machine (or game) approaches a certain point “then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out” and we’ll start to feel uneasy (around the robot) or detatched emotionally (from the game character).

It’s clear that there are lot of problems involved within the field of super realistic graphics, two of which we’ve looked at here. Other factors include the quality of gaming hardware, slower progress in the field of animation and most importantly: the need to focus on gameplay. After all, don’t we play games to have fun?

[Via digg]

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Originally posted by Conrad Quilty-Harper from Joystiq, ReBlogged by EAI on Dec 14, 2005 at 10:46 AM

Glue together" pieces of the content that belong to you (not just random feeds) and import your tags. Currently, supporting del.icio.us bookmarks, your blog(s), and your Flickr photos (with video on the way).

Broadband Reports says it best:

FCC Chief: Net Neutrali-wha?

There is no need for the FCC to adopt rules protecting consumers' ability to use whatever IP services they see fit, FCC chief Kevin Martin said today.

"I'm hesitant to adopt rules that would prevent anti-competitive behavior where there hasn't been significant evidence of a problem," says Martin, just one day after the Boston Globe reported AT&T and BellSouth wanted to de-prioritize the traffic of websites, VoIP providers, and any other content carriers and competitors who didn't pay them. Also recall AT&T CEO Whitacre's recent comments.

Tech Dirt adds;

Today was apparently FCC chairman Kevin Martin's birthday -- and he celebrated it by having a bunch of big telco execs sing him "Happy Birthday" (you wonder, did they get the rights first?). Then, to return the favor, he gave them all a few birthday presents. First, he said that taxing VoIP systems was a good idea...

FCC chairman Martin sometimes seems more like a clumsy political appointee than an astute policy wonk. Martin's staff might serve the country more objectively if they put away those San Antonio brochures.

Beyond TV: TVSpy.com Next Generation TV
So, I went to the Future of Television conference a couple of weeks ago and was somewhat suprised. Last year, I poked my head in to see what was being discussed and it was a big snooze. After checking out the website, I figured it was worth my time this year so I went.

Wow.. I was surprised. You wouldn't know it but there are people in TV who really "get it"... Larry Kramer from CBS most notably get's it.

Here is what I had to say on the day of:
I am writing from Future of Television Conference at NYU's Stern School of Business today. I am here for several reasons, first of all I would like to know what the networks and traditional media concerns think of the scrappy interactive folks. Second, I am here doing recon. Specifically, I would like to know how long video bloggers and other decentralized media creators have before traditional media begins to offer enough of what they are doing to satiate "consumers". (Perhaps that is not exactly my fear but close enough for now.)

First of all, I have to say that Larry Kramer gets it. He really does. He is open to experimentation. At CBS he has launched many interactive initiatives from a broadband news channel to podcasts of daytime soaps to fantasy sports sites to deep entertainment content add-ons to viewer/user photo posting to writer and producer blogs to actual audience participation through SMS. Phew..

CBS isn't the only media company doing this type of experimentation. The other networks, cable and broadcast are doing the same or similar. Notable is ABC News Now, ESPN, Playboy and the like.

The question is, whether or not this is enough. Will this engage and empower viewers enough to keep them despite the ever growing number of alternative content channels. The networks certainly know how to deliver programming to a passive audience. They are just beginning to support a more engaged and digitally connected viewer.

A later speaker in the day, IBM's Saul Berman described the audience by categorizing them in 3 camps. "Massive passives", the folks that CBS has always served, lean back, over 35, want to be entertained but don't feel compelled to buy the latest gadget or create their own media.

The next camp, arguably the focus of most of these efforts he described as "Gadgetiers". He describes this group as heavily involved in content, they are fans, will seek out other individuals who are interested in the same content they are. They will purchase the latest devices, use time shifting (TiVo) and will space shift (TiVo To Go). They are also the heavy buyers, the early adopters, in short, the people that the advertizers (and therefore the networks) covet.

It remains to be seen whether what the networks are starting to do will appeal to this group in the long run. In the short term, it is clear, if you put it out there they will come. How long they stay is another matter.

The last camp, the "Kool kids", the ones really getting all of the attention, are the hardest to understand. He suggests that this is the group that rejects DRM and "walled gardens", in short, the group that wants media on their own terms. This is the group that uses P2P software and is heavily social. They have dream devices that aren't out in the market as of yet.

I know that the kks (short for "Kool kids") are what have network executives up at night. They are the hackers and inventors who are really driving the internet. TV and media in general will fit into their game or be disregarded.

Ok.. So the big question at the end of the day? Will the cable and TV networks run scared and do everything possible to protect their business models or will they embrace the new like they must. My feeling after this conference is that they have learned something from the music industry and will try to embrace but there will still be a major shakeup and Yahoo! and Google just might become the "new" networks. Good or bad.

cineSync enables multiple people across the world to efficiently review visual media, from static images to movies. What you see is what others see: experience synchronised movie playback across everyone's screen with frame-accurate precision. Annotate movies and images by simply drawing on the screen with your mouse, like a real-time shared whiteboard (with full support for pressure-sensitive Wacom tablets).

Blip.tv is hosting news videos from “Alive in Baghdad” — long form interviews and detailed coverage not available from the mainstream media.

Alive in Baghdad will encourage Westerners to ask questions about the similarity of life between working Americans and working Iraqis, to wonder about the strength of resolve it takes to continue supporting your family against all odds under occupation. We will encounter those who do not join the resistance despite the lack of any viable employment and survival in a manner that remains neutral to the occupation, as well as those who feel the resistance or the occupation are the only options.

The Alive in Baghdad videos capture personal interviews with regular Iraqi citizens living day to day through the war as well as with activists and volunteers trying to work for peace and equality in Iraq. [Television Archiving]

Blip.tv is a video blogging, podcasting and sharing service. If you don’t have a blog, we’ll give you one. If you have a blog already, we’ll make it a video blog.

Sprint and MSpot today announced the premier of MSpot Movies, the first mobile entertainment service to stream full-length feature films to mobile phones.

The movie service will come in two forms, a lower-bandwidth, lower-frame-rate service for Vision customers on Sprint's CDMA 1X vision service and a high-frame-rate, better-quality stream for 3G customers on Sprint's new Power Vision EVDO network.

The most recent movie of the 10 currently available is "Short Circuit," a family film from 1986. Most of them are in the classics genre, including films like "One-Eyed Jacks," a Marlon Brando-directed western from 1961, and "Angel and the Badman," a John Wayne film from 1947. Music concerts are also available. MSpot Movies cost $6.95 per month.

Sprint TV also allows customers to watch live TV on the go over Sprint Power Vision and Sprint PCS Vision Phones. MobiTV Powers Sprint TV. Customers who subscribe to Sprint TV can choose from 34 channels of live and exclusive on-demand programming, including NFL Network, as well as news, sports, weather, movie trailers and entertainment channels.

How much will it cost to download and view an entire movie on your cell phone? Sprint seems evasive (perhaps understandably). The voice, EV-DO, and movie service options add up to a substantial sum.

Instead of trying to stuff video onto a cellular channel like MobiTV, GoTV and Verizon's VCast, new mobile video services use standalone wireless networks. MediaFLO operates at 700 Mhz (channel 55), and Crown's DVB-H operates at 1.6 Ghz. They can broadcast (multicast) to millions, simultaneously. That frees up the cellular channels for voice and data and enables better video and faster datacasting.

Of course there are other options outside the walled prison;

• AOL Video enable you to search for and play back thousands of free video clips.

• Yahoo Video Search is free.

• Google's Video search will search through archives of recent closed caption television broadcasts.

• Blinkx.tv uses voice recognition software to transcribe content of audio and video segments allowing users to access clips from NYTimes.com, About.com and other content partners.

• MSN Video search and CNN Video Search also allow you to search online videos for free.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Verizon Goes with FLO, Sprint: Go with the FLO?, T/W, Cingular: On Demand, DVB-H Headend Software, Intel On DVB-H, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, Video Search, Multi-Media Interoperability, BBC's Mobile Video, CBS/Comcast Broadband, Portable Photostories, Interactive TV News, The Feed Room, ABC News Now Looks to Future, Publishers Buy Online Content, The Free Triple Play, IP-TV Settops, Mobile TV Expands, The 700 Mhz Club, 700 Mhz Worth $28B, The 700 Mhz FCC Auction, Global Mobile Television, TiVo on a Stick, Clear Channel Podcasting, Multicasting the Olympics, WiMax Handsets, Laptop Television, Sirius Portable Radio, U.S. Broadband Policy?, XM Buys 2.3GHz, Sprint Gets Sirius, MPEG-4: Satellite, Cable & Wireless, Satellite TV on Cell Phone?, Sprint Bundles EchoStar, Satellite WiFi, DirecWay Modem Shares Access, Satphones Get Giant Antennas, U.S. Cellsats and FCC Approves Big Mobile Sat.

Seeking a Youthful Audience, Little Cable Channel (Current TV) Presents Features Filmed by Neophytes.

(Also see the NYT Article on Videoblogs: TV Stardom on $20 a Day)

Compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service.

By adding a small bit of code to your comics pages, you make it possible for yourself and your readers to transcribe each comic, quickly and accurately building your own personalized comic search engine!

Fans should be able to get their hands on clips of just about any hoops moment they want, and even create their own personalized video reels.

Linkubator is an online tool that will create interactive Quicktime movies for you. Based on a movie you provide, Linkubator can add a ‘bug’ to the movie (a small image with a link to your blog entry). In the future it will be possible to create one or more text blocks (with or without links) that appear and disappear as your movie plays.

(Nice work, Andreas! -kc.)

"A moving piece of ambient public art, Unsilent Night can be compared to a holiday caroling party, except that participants don't sing. Instead, each carries a boombox playing a separate cassette, CD, or MP3 that becomes part of the piece. In effect, Kline and his co- performers become single elements in a huge, mobile sound system."

On December 13 (6-9 p.m.), Artists Space and Pointed Leaf Press cordially invite you to the launch of Artbrain.org #3 curated by co-founders Warren Neidich and Nathalie Angles, and to the signing of the Earthling catalogue by Warren Neidich.

Created in 2000, Artbrain.org was conceived as an internet site to post works of visual art, film, writing, architecture, that interfaced with ideas generally considered the territory of Neuroscience. Quoted by Christiane Paul on the Artforum hotlist (Oct 2001), Artbrain.org does not simply illustrate scientific facts but attempts to produce a new paradigm in which cultural changes are paramount in new becomings of brain/mind/body.

New issue Artbrain.org # 3 presents the exhibition Conceptual Art as a Neurobiological Praxis, and the proceedings of two conferences: Movies, Buildings and Brains ( UCLA School of Art, Los Angeles, 2003) and The Phantom Limb: The Aesthetic, Cultural and Philosophic Implications (Goldsmiths College, London, 2005).

Artists and contributors to artbrain.org #3 are: Douglas Gordon, Jonathan Horowitz, Jack Pierson, SamDurant, Ricci Albenda, Beom Kim, Andrea Robbins, Thomas Ruff, Spencer Finch, Uta Barth, Rainer Ganahl, T. Kelly Mason, Mathew Ritchie, Grennan and Sperandio, Ann Lislegard, Eric Duyckaerts, Charline Von Heyl,Liam Gillick, Carl Fudge, Jason Rhoades, Historical Information Display, Tania Lopez Winkler and Markos Lutyens, Nicholas Wade, David McGonigle, Peter Brugger, Chris Frith, William Hirstein, Arnold Modell, Charles T. Wolfe, Vivian Sobchack, Nicola Diamond, John Welchman, Ralph Greenspan, Jonathan Green, Colin Gardner, Peter Zellner, Conerly Casey, Mark Cohen, MA Greenstein, Christiane Paul, Warren Neidich.

Warren Neidich is an artist and currently fellow at the Center for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths College. His work has been shown most recently at ICA, London, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Ludwig Museum, Cologne. Nathalie Angles is presently the Director of the International Residency Program at Location One, New York.

Fermata explores the potential of a purely auditory calendar application for the visually impaired.

Through user research and testing with members of the blind community in Manhattan, Spencer Kiser, Michael Jefferson and David Yates have designed a series of surround sound representations of common calendar information that lets users score the composition of their daily lives.

The prototype can run on mobile devices. Users navigate their calendars with a combination of simple voice commands, gestures and the universal keypad (up, down, left and right arrows plus an enter key). Calendar information is represented through a spatialized soundscape that uses a variety of audio icons (sounds that represent kinds of calendar items), human speech that is a navigable 3D model of a user’s calendar. Users are able to navigate to different "views" of their calendar from a month to a week to a day to an individual calendar item.

Listening to the demo makes it clearer: to her left a blind person could hear her appointments on Monday and an evening training session in the middle on Wednesday but she did not hear anything on her far right signaling that her weekend is free. Then through a combination of voice and keypad arrow clicks, books a Lincoln Center concert and dinner with her friend Amy. When she completes the entry, the event is played back in its iconic sound of applause and a clinking glass. The next time she plays back the week she will hear those off to her right in the spatial placement reserved for Saturday.

Part of the itp Winter Show, on December 18 and 19.

Peter Suber’s Open Access News is fast becoming one of my favorite sources of information. The focus tends to be on print and scholarly journals, but it covers the whole spectrum of open access issues, and draws from an amazingly diverse set of sources. I suspect the amazing variety of new approaches to open access print can inspire new models video and television.

Technorati Tags: copyright

Wired News: There are more than 500 public domain movies available on torrents for downloading to the iPod.

Once someone writes us a check, we'll put them up on Ourmedia for free download.

From the NYTimes story about the recent violence against social protesters in Dongzhou, China:

Mobile telephone technology has made it easier for people in rural China to organize, communicating news to one another by short messages, and increasingly allowing them to stay in touch with members of non-governmental organizations in big cities who are eager to advise them or provide legal help.

A new type of text message called StealthtText launched by Staellium UK Ltd self-destructs in 40 seconds, according to The Daily Record, simply by keying in a code.

Whether you’re a celebrity who’s up to no good or a business executive dealing in sensitive information, the last thing you want is for urgent text messages you’ve sent to fall into the wrong hands. StealthText allows you to send a text message safely in the knowledge that it will delete itself from the recipient’s mobile phone as soon as the person has read it – ultimately, allowing the sender control of their own information.

The iTunes Signature Maker scans your iTunes library and mashes up bits of your favorite songs to create a unique audio representation of your identity. This is a great idea–I’d much rather have cool aural signature than a visual one. The MySpace kids will be all over this.

my audio avatar “video signature” of all the porn news I watch?

Shanghai "is looking at plans to build a traffic information center that would send up-to-the-minute reports on road congestion to a computer screen installed in cars or a portable device cyclists and pedestrians could use",the Shanghai Daily reports."The center will integrate information from the current three road condition monitoring departments — traffic police, the urban transport bureau and the urban project management bureau — and install more information collecting devices such as monitors along or beneath roads.Once applied, the Intelligent Transportation System will help drivers find the best routes to avoid congested roads, or suggest they use the subway or buses depending on traffic conditions,said Yang Dongyuan,vice president of Tongji University".

Traffic system would send info to computer

Originally posted by Jim_Downing from Smart Mobs, ReBlogged by emma on Dec 11, 2005 at 08:31 AM

I'm a little worried about this.

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, ReBlogged by emma on Dec 11, 2005 at 04:03 PM

(!! ;) -kc.)

a simple list-like visualization that allows a user to find search terms related to their chosen topic. after entering a keyword, a user is presented with a visual chart that contains 2 axes: 1 axis presents terms that contain the original keyword, & the other axis presents related terms. unfortunately, little or no information is available on how this keyword map is constructed. [kwmap.net]

an interactive data visualization displaying the timeline of several textual conversations simultaneously, enabling the discovery of utterance lengths & specific reoccuring keywords. the application reads up to 10 different xml files that are stored by the MSN chat service, & generates a graphical display that allows to make comparisons between conversations with different people. [nataliarojas.com]

Both houses of Congress have passed digital television (DTV) bills as part of budget legislation.

Below is a comparison of the bills from the Benton Foundaton. Representatives from both chambers are now going to conference to iron out the differences in these bills.

The bills aim to end analog TV broadcasts in 2009, auction off returned analog TV spectrum in the same year and earmark those revenues for deficit reduction and other purposes.

For more detail about both bills, see Digital Television Transition Legislation House and Senate Bills Go to Conference (DOC).

Attachment: DTV Transition Legislation Comparison.doc (49.5 KB)

For all the latest news check out Lee Wood's HDTV Magazine which has provided the definitive Daily DTV News Resource for years. Lee Wood is a highly regarded chief engineer at Portland's KOIN-TV.

Online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese to play the early rounds for them. These "gold farmers" work every day, in 12-hour shifts, playing computer games to harvest gold coins and other virtual goods that can be transformed into real cash.

Players around the world can trade the virtual currency to other players, who can use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Internet is now filled with classified advertisements from small companies auctioning for real money their powerful avatars.

By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers. They have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections.

"We prefer to hire young migrant workers rather than college students. The pay is not good for students, but it is quite attractive to the young migrants from the countryside," said Wei Xiaoliang who focuses his business on wholesaling Warcraft gold to overseas brokers.

Via International Herald Tribune.

Related: Virtual club to rock game culture. A different take in Cri.english.

the protopage web service lets you collect text, photos, and links on public or private pages. very useful. totally free. if you link to your video or audio files in the internet archive (which provides free web hosting), you can have a very attractive fr

The king of spoken-audio online, Audible, is entering the podcast enabling market with Wordcast, a creation, distribution, and monetization engine.

Kin, by cshool + canade, is a system that allows people to give a prayer over the Internet.

[PC, webcam, microphone, and kin. In the main building of Ryokusen Temple.]

At Ryokusen Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, a network computer that controls Kin, a bowl-shaped sacred artifact (kind of like an upside-down bell that can be hit by a stick) is installed in the main building. One can connect to this computer from "anywhere" and hit the kin using a GUI slider.

[GUI for tele-praying.]

Praying over the Internet without physically attending a prayer would likey be considered impudent, etc. today. But there could be a good, respectable uses of this technology as well. What if one cannot walk /travel, or lives very far away from a temple.. These are some of the things that were discussed at the Digital Stadium show when this work was featured.

By the way, systems like this impose a unique challenge in GUI design. They could have used a button widget for hitting the kin. But the designers decided to make the user's task deliberately "inefficient" so that users can have something more to do to better appreciate the moment.

via Digital Stadium.

Burn Station is a mobile self-service for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge. It is completely legal, released under an open licence, and non-commercial.

The kit behaves as a digital content self-service station. It is a local database for mp3 and text that makes automatic the process of selection and burning of files. With the motto "taking the Internet to the streets" platoniq tries to make visible the ways in which the Web is produced showing its very modes of independent diffusion and distribution based on open licenses.

By platoniq, activists of the copyleft movement.

The work has been nominated for the Transmediale 2006 award.
Via networked_performance.

a free-content encyclopedia of camera information

For rich web application developers, the TrimQuery engine from TrimPath is a lightweight GPL open-source component that lets you have the power of SQL queries while running in a web browser.

Freenet is currently undergoing a major re-write incorporating a number of fundamental changes. Version 0.7 of Freenet aims to (in addition to supporting traditional "opennet" operation, whereby users can quickly and easily get onto the network by downloading seednodes files from a central source), create a scalable darknet, where users only connect directly to other users they know and (at least marginally) trust. The purpose of this change is to protect users who may be placed at risk simply by using the software, irrespective of what they are using it for. In the new model, only people you choose to connect to will know that you are running the software. Previous darknets, such as WASTE, have been limited to relatively small disconnected networks. The core innovation in Freenet 0.7 will be to allow a globally scalable darknet, capable of supporting millions of users. This is made possible by the fact that human relationships tend to form small-world networks, a property that can be exploited to find short paths between any two people. The work is based on a talk given at DEFCON 13 by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg (slides available here). Other modifications include switching from TCP to UDP, which allows UDP hole punching along with faster transmission of messages between peers in the network. Anonymous message broadcast ("publish/subscribe"), and other new basic functions, have been postponed to 0.8 in order to get 0.7 out as soon as possible; Freenet 0.7 will support insertion and retrieval of information, as 0.5 does, but it should do it faster, and more securely. It will not include "premix routing" (a difficult technique to provide an extremely high level of anonymity to requesters and posters which we will introduce in 0.8 or 0.9), but we will endeavour to ensure that 0.7 is more secure than 0.5 in every respect. Thanks to the new transport layer, and darknet support, we expect that Freenet 0.7 will be usable in countries with national firewalls (China blocked the current version some time ago - both the web site and the protocol). Currently, we have insert and retrieval of arbitrarily large files ("redundant splitfiles") working, and a text mode interface. We should have an alpha which has initial FCP and Fproxy support by the end of January. Darknet routing is working, but not yet opennet, and there are issues to address with load balancing, but our new model (based on Ethernet and TCP/IP) is currently being debugged and should work as it is based on tried and tested solutions. If you want to help, join #freenet-alphatest on irc.freenode.net, or contact Toad (Matthew Toseland). Using donations through this website, the project has been able to employ one developer full-time, Matthew Toseland. Matthew has since become the backbone of the Freenet development effort. The project is always in need of additional funds to assure Matthew's continued employment, so if you can contribute to our efforts, please visit our donations page.

In the spring of 2003, as the nation slouched towards the mother of all strategic blunders in Iraq, I was working as a producer for Fuse, a new rival to MTV. The mood in the country was ugly. Clear Channel, the conglomerate which owns 1,700 radio stations, had issued a banned song list which included John Lennon’s Imagine.

Dixie Chicks CDs were being burned in large patriotic pyres. One of the only mainstream bands to put it on the line was the eclectic metal band System of a Down, whose hit song Boom rang out:

Boom, boom, boom, boom, Every time you drop the bomb, You kill the God your child has born. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

The band produced an unapologetic antiwar music video for Boom with Michael Moore, who at the time was finishing up Fahrenheit 9/11. Shot at the massive antiwar protests held around the world in February 2003, the video inter-cut protesters decrying the looming invasion with scenes of death and destruction. It was a well-produced, stirringly populist video for a popular song. But MTV and Fuse refused to play it. A Fuse executive told me that the network declined to play the video because the U.S. Army was a major sponsor of the channel – the people in ad sales didn’t want to piss off the generals.

Despite everything I know about how this screwed up country works, I was stunned. It was eerie to see how one middle manager in ad sales could so casually squelch such important dissent at such a critical time in our nation’s history. The scariest part is the military didn’t have to lift a finger.

The video eventually got on the air, but only after the war had started. The experience didn’t stop the band from continuing to speak out. As Serj Tankian, System’s lead singer, recently told me in an interview for Air America Radio, “Nothing’s made us think about muzzling ourselves. We say and do whatever is in our hearts.”

Today, System is hotter than ever. In 2004, they recorded two albums Mezmerize and Hypnotize. Mezmerize was released in the United States and Europe in May and quickly exploded to the top of the charts, the group’s second consecutive number one debut.

The second part of the two-CD set, Hypnotize, was released last month. Reviews have been mixed. Rolling Stone wrote “There is no getting around it: System of a Down nearly made the no-contest hard-rock album of 2005. Instead, they have released a double album, Mezmerize/Hypnotize, in six-month chunks—two separate records that each fall shy of pulverizing perfection and appear to be conceptually bound by little more than speed, fuzz and nonstop bile.” Nevertheless, the album hit number one last week on the Billboard charts.

Hypnotize continues the band’s assault on the Bush administration and consumer culture. In Attack, Tankian sings: “For today we will take the body parts… put ‘em up on the wall and bring the dark thereafter.” The song concludes, “We’re the prophetic generation of bottled water, bottled water/ Causing populations to die, to die, to die.”

As the war rages in Iraq and the administration’s approval ratings drop to close to 30%, dissent is no longer a dirty word. But war isn’t the band’s only political stand. In fact, there’s an issue that cut cuts even closer to home. All members of System of a Down are of Armenian descent and have been pushing for years for the U.S. Congress to issue a statement condemning the Turkish slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.

The soft-spoken Tankian told me, “Whoever is living in the diaspora outside of Armenia their only reason for living is having a survivor grandfather, as is my case, as is the case with the other guys in the band. We all grew up hearing the stories. So this is important for their memories for them. Right before I left LA, I promised my grandfather, who is 97, that I’d get ahold of Dennis Hastert and talk to him about it.”

Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is the speaker of the House and chair of the influential International Relations Committee. In September, the committee overwhelmingly approved legislation recognizing the Armenian Genocide, despite objections from both Turkey and the Bush Administration. Even though the genocide came at the hands of the now defunct Ottoman Empire, successive Turkish governments have steadfastly denied the killings were anything other than the legitimate squashing of an ethnic rebellion in a time of war.

Despite his previous public support for the measure in 2000, Rep. Hastert has twice prevented the Armenian Genocide legislation from coming to a full vote in the House. Most assume the speaker is simply following the lead of the White House, which doesn’t want to make already strained U.S.-Turkey relations any worse.

But there’s other, more insidious, theories. Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, has alleged that Rep. Hastert may have received tens of thousands of dollars of secret payments from Turkish officials in exchange for political favors and information. Edmonds told Vanity Fair magazine that she gave confidential testimony about the payments to congressional staffers, the Inspector General and members of the 9/11 Commission. Edmonds says that she heard of the payments while listening to FBI wiretaps of Turkish officials who were under surveillance by the FBI.

Rep. Hastert had denied the charges.

Tankian is undaunted in keeping his promise to his grandfather. While in Chicago for a tour date, he led a protest with the band and several hundred supporters in front of Hastert’s district offices (watch video of the protest here). When I asked Tankian why he thought it was proving so difficult to get a seemingly straight-forward recognition of a historical fact passed through Congress, he replied, “We have the same enemies of a lot of good and just causes. We have the military industrial complex, the Bush administration and a lot of corporate interests who have aligned themselves to a key NATO ally that they sell a lot of weapons and products to. They don’t want it to come out – these are the apologists for Turkey’s Armenian genocide.”

For more about System of a Down see www.systemofadown.com and www.soadfans.com. For more info about Tankian’s political activities, see Axis of Justice, the non-profit organization he started with Audioslave’s Tom Morello.

Clip and save just the stuff you want from any web page (images, text, links).

Collective Knowledge... Narratives... Architectures of Participation

"ABSTRACT: This essay is an exploration of the history and methodologies of collective narrative projects, and their relationship to collective knowledge projects and methodologies. By examining different forms of conscious, contributory, and unwitting participation, the essay attempts to develop a richer understanding of successful large-scale collaborative projects. The essay then examines largescale architectures of participation in Wikipedia and Flickr to extrapolate from those observations potential methodologies for the creation of collective narratives.

Keywords: Collective, social, systems, literary, collaboration, hypertext, constructive, constraints, writing, process, architecture, participation, narrative, literature." From All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation by Scott Rettberg, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Arts and Humanities, Literature Program. Presented at DAC 2005. [via elo]

The Internet Identity Workshop presents an Informational Morning for Developers Hosted by Doc Searls, Mary Hodder and Kaliya Hamlin. Monday, December 12, 2005 9-12 noon, with lunch from 12-1 Canton Dim Sum @ 655 Folsom St in San Francisco. Cost $20 for lunch (PLEASE RSVP HERE as the Canton Restaurant has been kind enough to give us the space if we all have lunch there, but we need an accurate count by Sunday at noon). If you are a developer working on a application that has folks login - this is a morning for you. Doc Searls will begin the day giving an overview of the identity landscape. He and others will answer the question: * Why do identity systems matter when building new systems and tools? We are bringing together a spectrum of folks who have been working on developing identity systems and tools. Identity Developers will share their work, basics and best practices to date to get started exploring integrating identity into these applications. These include YADIS, LID, Open ID, i-names/XRI, SXIP, among others. Developers of applications who have included identity into their services and tools will share briefly how they've done it. Application developers will hear from and meet with identity developers to ask questions. Event Info Detailed Agenda and RSVP here.

The University of South California Annenberg School Center for the Digital future has published a report that finds the most explosive growth in online time was among low income Web surfers,and "for the first time a broadband connection is the most popular way for US users to access the Web".(48 percent compared to the 45 percent of users)."In 2005,Internet use among those with incomes of less than $30,000 rose to 61 percent,after hovering around 50 percent for four years".

'Always on' Internet changing American life

Periodically these Video Game as Art shows come around, though there hasn’t been one for awhile. But the time has come again…

Breaking and Entering: Art and the Video Game
10 December - 28 January 2006
Pace Wildenstein
545 W.22nd Street, NYC

Another cool project developed at the Georgia Tech Mobile Technologies Group: Telegotchi

Telegotchi is an electronic pet based game for your mobile device. However, unlike tradition e-pet games, the emotional state of your pet is linked to the physiological state of other players. There are two types of players in this game, “Pets'’ and “Adopters'’. Pets wear a small, wireless sensor that measure physical/physiological responses and have a corresponding e-pet persona. Adopters are the caregivers for the e-pets. An e-pet personality is based on the stress and activity levels of the corresponding pet player. Adopters can interact with their e-pet in one of two ways: (1) SMS with the pet player directly; (2) interact with e-pet within your mobile device (allowing the pet player to influence the e-pet persona, but not be directly involved in the adopters game). Adopters should play with their e-pet when it is bored, tell the e-pet jokes when it is sad, and take the e-pet for walks when it is feeling lazy. At the end of the day, Adopters can rate how they like their e-pet, and have the option to exchange them for a new e-pet. Likewise, interactive pets can rate their owner and have the option to stay with them or run away. Thus, players can compete to be the most loved pet and/or adopter.

: i2, a NYC-based consulting firm, has come out with this white-paper/analysis of technological changes in Hollywood and the movie industry, on the lines of the Fast Company cover story I linked to yesterday.
The summary provides the overiew of this long story: "Hollywood believes large-scale broadband video distribution would only destroy proven value, fail to provide alternative value, and alter a business model that is still far from being in decline. With near-total control of the most valuable program libraries and the business models governing their distribution, a shift towards broadband media will come largely on Hollywood's terms and at an incremental pace."
A good read...

: Electronic Arts is buying the only pure-play public mobile content company in U.S., Jamdat, for $680 million...more to come...and we'll have exnteded covergae on our sister site MocoNews.net...
-- EA will pay $27 per share in cash in exchange for each share.
-- EA and JAMDAT together plan to publish over 50 games for mobile phones in the first twelve months following the completion of the acquisition
-- Upon closing, JAMDAT CEO Mitch Lasky will lead EA's mobile games business worldwide. The mobile businesses will be combined into one team.
For everything Jamdat, read our company dedicated section, here...
Also, there's an investor conference call at 2:30 PM PST, which will be webcast at http://investor.ea.com

Just came across this interesting site -- Bloggingheads.tv -- featuring a broadcast news style conversation between political blogger Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright. It's a little too stiff and reminiscent of CNN interviews for my tastes, but it also offers a lot of promise as a media form. Sort of like adding video to a podcast.

College Media Advisors has just launched a new blog site, Reinventing College Media. Ralph Braseth, director of student media at Ole Miss and a fellowship recipient to The Media Center’s recent We Media conference, is one of the project leaders. Ralph says about the initiative:

"College media should take a lead role in helping create the media future. This site will serve as a forum for new ideas, but it is our goal to move from mere ideas to proposing and implementing significant change for the student media of the future. Here we will share our experiments, our successes and failures. This site will highlight best practices among our colleagues and serve as a resource for any adviser of any media looking for a jumping off point."

I know Ralph to be a truly committed educator, passionate about his students as well as about the role journalism plays in our democracy. With his involvement, there can be no doubt about the sincere intentions of this CMA project, and I applaud the effort to begin a serious conversation about the issues facing college media and to collect possible solutions. But the forum’s ultimate success will hinge on who participates… and herein lies its weakness.

CMA’s membership comprises those with the most direct impact on the media producers of the future. It is uniquely positioned (in a much stronger position, in fact, than mainstream media) to scrutinize and understand how younger media audiences are evolving, to work closely with tomorrow’s media leaders to identify the behaviors and expectations of their generation. On the Reinventing College Media site, in addition to asking for participation from colleagues and other "grown-ups" that represent media’s shaky status quo, I hope CMA will invite – even beg – journalism and communications students, college media staffs and everyone else on campus experimenting with personal media, to jump in as well. Only with such a mix – of the established and the new, of the old lions and the young turks – will worldviews be redefined and the musty remnants of a media no longer relevant in a digital world be swept away. And only then will the future of college media, and media in general, become clearer.

Maps different Brazilian cities by urban interventions that aim to interfere at the current Brazilian mediascape, reappropriating technology to reveal places, people and their tales.

Dialogic mass media refers to a number of digital media technologies established over the past ten years, in which the receiver is also a sender and therefore able to engange in a dialogue.

"SMS Sent Global 1Q04: 135 billion" works out to over 20 text messages for every one of the 6.5 billion people on the planet

"There should be a book titled "How News Is Made," a book that could be for journalism what "The Jungle" was to the meatpacking industry. My version would offer no conspiracy theory, but I'd point out the preponderance of sloppiness and lazy thinking coupled with a herd mentality, most especially in business journalism. I found a great example to illustrate what I've been thinking about, tipped off by an article written by Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal."

Thanks to section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which became law in 1996, Wikipedia is most likely safe from legal liability for libel, regardless of how long an inaccurate article stays on the site, according to legal experts interviewed by CNET News.com. That's because it is a service provider as opposed to a publisher such as Salon.com or CNN.com.

James Pearce for Moco News refers to a piece in the World Wide Words newsletter on a new ’scientific’ terms relating to the mobile industry: Mociology.

“Mociology (mobile + sociology) is the study of the innovative ways people use their mobile phones or wireless systems in daily life. Examples given including buying concert tickets by phone or having medical information about your diabetic condition sent to you the same way…Mocio-economics is described as “the underlying economics that drives the fast emergence of mobile entertainment revenues and economics”.

Earlier in November, we picked up on a an article from the Guardian entitled We are all Mociologists, describing how Joe Trippi (author of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything" ) likes to open his lectures with a question. "How many mociologists are there in the audience?

"Mociology refers to how mobile and wireless technology has changed the way we do things: downloading music on to a mobile phone, for example, or getting the football scores texted through on a Saturday afternoon."

Originally from textually.org, ReBlogged by emma on Dec 8, 2005 at 07:42 AM

Very thorough bibliography of works on social memory.

The Pulitzer Prizes will start accepting online material along with print material in all 14 of its journalism categories starting with the 2006 competition.

Online submissions will be limited to stories and images in all categories except for Public Service. In the Public Service category, which has allowed an online element since 1999, all online material, from databases to interactive graphics, will continue to be permitted.

In two categories -- Breaking News Reporting and Breaking News Photography -- an entry consisting entirely of material published online will be permitted.

The new rules were adopted after a study that began a year ago.

In the past two years, two winning entries had major online components. Although those online components technically didn't count for the prize, they may have helped persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board of the need to include online material in all categories.

: Finally, Fast Company does a cover story which is worth something: a series of stories on how technology is changing the business of Hollywood and entertainment, and some of the new players emerging out of it. (Some of these stories are not online yet, but the major ones are)
The first one, linked above, says that consumers are in control now, and puts all the changes in historical perspective. "They'll create extraordinary opportunities for innovative new players--and for the establishment powers, if they can survive the transition. 'There's no question we are searching,' says Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group. 'We are searching for the new platform or the new channel that will drive the profits in the future, but there are so many unknowns . . . What we do know is that the entire model is up for grabs.'" That's as big a statement as you can get from the movie studio honchos...
Also in the issue, a profile of the new wave of executives who're on the cusp of the media-tech revolution...the top 10 include some of the names familiar to our regular readers: Lloyd Braun, Yahoo; Anne Sweeney, Disney-ABC TV; Blair Westlake, Microsoft; Morgan Freeman, ClickStar; Brian Roberts, Comcast; and Kevin Tsujihara, Warner Bros., among others.
Also read:
-- Peer-to-peer: The Problem is the Solution: How P2P will help the movie industry...
-- Editor's Letter: Hooray for Hollywood

ptpete writes in:

You can now subscribe to rocketboom on your tivo. It will be downloaded daily.

Here's the link to the announcement on TivoCommunity.

You can subscribe via the web or directly from your Tivo.

I think it's great to get some regular original internet content on the TV via Tivo.

Yeah, definitely cool to see TiVo doing this. It'll be great to see where they take this support for videoblogging. It feels a little bit early for this -- there's not a ton of great video blogs/vlogs/vodcasts out there, but this would certainly give people some incentive to create more.

(!!! ;) -kc.)

CBSNews.com's blog The Public Eye posted video of Tuesday's lineup meeting with executive producer Jim Murphy, anchor Bob Schieffer and the rest of the editorial team as they discussed which stories were likely to make the broadcast that night. Interestingly, the video was posted over an hour before the broadcast. How's that for transparency?

"China's government said it stepped up monitoring of short message services (SMS) sent between the nation's 383 million mobile-phone users to prevent fraudsters,pornographers and other "unhealthy elements" from exploiting the technology",Asia Media reports."Police found 107,000 illegal short messages and shut down 9,700 cellphone accounts since the start of last month,Wu Heping,vice minister of the Ministry of Public Security,said at a briefing in Beijing yesterday that was broadcast on the Internet."

CHINA:Beijing boosts surveillance of SMS

After a number of weeks of a secret beta, Seth Godin's new aggregation project has quietly gone live. Check it out here

Wi-Fi Networking News explores the latest ultra-wideband (UWB) chipsets, which will be capable of 660Mbps, albeit over very short distances. Though this Dallas News article dubs it "turbo-charged Wi-Fi", it's anything but. As Wikipedia will tell you it's really a radio communications technique, which can even be implemented to increase the speed of traditional coaxial networks.

Apparently half of all HDTV owners don't actually use the HD capabilities of their set, and nearly a quarter think they're watching high definition video when they actually haven't set it up correctly. The survey comes from set-top box maker Scientific Atlanta, which notes that HDTV sets will be in approximately 16 million homes across the country by the end of the year. BBR editors want a 50" Plasma if Santa is listening.

NEC has just announced a battery that measures 0.3mm in thickness, it's also flexible and can be recharged in 30 seconds. This is a product that can change A LOT of things and that will give the designers and engineers a lot more liberty. Let's take the following example: this type of battery can be easily integrated into the bracelet of a watch instead of the housing of the watch itself, rendering new designs possible.

English readers : UPDATE : dedicated section opened France is about to get the worst copyright law in Europe.

HowTo Tuesday - December 6, 2005

Be Fearless – One thing that separates my geeky friends from the non-technical is a fearlessness when it comes to new things. They’re never afraid they’re going to destroy their computer when they’re learning about hardware. New software is exciting! Something new to learn! Geeky programmers love new programming languages- only the soon-to-be obsoleted humorless programmers steadfastly refuse to give up COBOL or RPG or VB6. Geeks love new challenges and attack them with intellectual ferocity.

Love Technology – This one pretty much defines our culture. One can certainly love technology and not be a geek, but it’s very difficult to be a geek and not love technology. I don’t just mean computers either. I think all true, hard-core geeks get a rise out of just about anything that plugs in or uses batteries. There’s something poetic about harnessing the electron to trim my beard instead of using scissors. There’s joy to be found in an inanimate AA battery – it brings wondrous things to life! Technology is humanity’s triumph over nature and evolution. Without technology there would be no internet, books, gadgets or geeks.

Always Read – Part of being an alpha-geek is knowing at least a little bit about almost everything. You should be able to carry on some sort of conversation with anyone no matter what they do for a living or what their hobbies are. Geeks can not get their fill of books, magazines or websites. True geeks make a point of not limiting their reading habits to one type of fiction or non-fiction, but instead read almost anything put in front of them. Technical books, science fiction and fantasy are preferred, but history, alternate history, philosophy and the occult are fair geek game as well. A technically oriented person who doesn’t read is just a nerd wannabe.

Never Quit Learning – Geeks want to fill their brains with more and more information. Keep going until it fills up! A geek knows full well that the world is changing too fast today to keep up without dedicating a large part of each week with learning a new way of doing something or a new way of thinking. The nice thing about being out of school isn’t that class is over, it’s that you get to control the entire curriculum!

Set Personal Life Over Work – Alpha-Geeks are consumed with their geekiness. Work is incidental to the pursuit of more knowledge, of more gadgets, of more processing power. Work is what we do so we can continue being geeks. Being a geek isn’t free. Corporate slavery, though, is not conducive to geekhood. Find a comfortable balance. One of your goals should be to be indispensable enough to your employer to live a simple 40 hour work week. Another secret to being a successful geek is to place a high priority to your own personal happiness. Just simply being geeky is part of it, but if you have a family, fulfilling your responsibility of raising good geeks will go a long way towards making you happy, and thus more geeky.

Be Never Bored – Alpha-geeks are never bored. No matter how little is happening, there’s plenty of things to entertain a geek. People watching, imagining a billion years of the geological history of where you are, wondering about the future, planning that next project, deciding on the next gadget, dreaming up the next blog posting, or just being amazed to be alive – there’s always something to do or to think about. Boredom is just giving up.

Always Be Prepared – It’s one of the geek mottos too. Old school geeks had pocket protectors because they knew they had to be prepared for inspiration. Nowadays we have cellular phones, digital cameras, PDAs, laptop computers, moleskines and more which serve as our tools for capturing moments of inspiration. A good geek will also carry a handy key-chain multitool or swiss army card. You never know when inspiration strikes or something needs fixing or a beer needs opening.

Play Well with Others – One thing about the internet that is so attractive to geeks is how we can all interact with each other. Open source software shows that with many of us sharing our talents with each other, we can create free applications which rival software costing hundreds of dollars. Geeks love to share their knowledge and know-how with each other. They know that doing so creates a positive feedback loop which encourages more help and more knowledge.

Be Open Minded – Alpha-geeks are open to the possibility that they don’t know everything. That really would be boring. The surest way to quit learning is to fool yourself that you know everything – even about just one topic. Having an open mind allows a kind of unclouded thinking which can be very useful in solving some really difficult problems. Whether it’s debugging multi-threaded code or having to maintain some really horrible spaghetti code, unconventional thinking is a fantastic trait.

Embrace Change – The world around us is changing at a pace quicker than ever before in the history of humanity. Some people become afraid – peak oil, disruptive technologies, having to move outside of your comfort zone, new careers… Geeks embrace change – the more change, the more disruption, the more opportunities there are to learn, to profit and to share. This rapid growth in technology is not going to slow down – there’s no time to take a breather. Those of us who ride the wave are going to reap the greatest benefits. Everyone else will follow in our wake.

actually, these should be the 10 commandments for members of a free society....

Real Networks today announced the availability of a web-based version of its Rhapsody music service. Finally, there is a listen-on-demand authorized music service with deep major label catalog that Mac and Linux users can use. I expect Napster 2.0 and Yahoo! will feel competitive pressure to migrate to a cross-platform, browser-based solution, as well. What strikes me about this announcement is the implicit rejection of DRM that it represents. After all, while Real touts Rhapsody as primarily a "streaming" music service, everyone knows that it is trivial to turn a "stream" into a "download" by using widely available software tools. Audio Hijack, for example, records Rhapsody streams without any problem on my OS X machine. And everyone knows that Linux users will have new "stream-ripping" applications aimed at Rhapsody before you can say "DVD Jon." So it seems clear that Rhapsody has managed to talk its major label licensors into allowing them to concentrate on attracting customers, rather than shackling them in a misguided attempt to restrict the music that is already available on P2P networks for free. That's a good sign. We've been saying for years now that the music industry needs to pay more attention to fattening the carrot, and less to brandishing the stick. There have been other signs that the end for music DRM may be near. First, the Sony-BMG debacle has certainly made the labels reassess the value of DRM on CDs. Moreover, Apple allows its customers to bypass the FairPlay DRM by allowing iTunes Music Store customers to burn their purchases to unprotected CDs, which can then be ripped or duplicated without restriction. And all the major authorized music services appear to have spurned Microsoft's "Secure Audio Path" technology, which would have made the DRM shackles on Windows Media files that much tighter fitting. At the same time, legitimate customers are piling up the complaints on DRM schemes that make it difficult to move music to iPods and create new failure modes for paying subscribers, all while doing nothing to prevent file sharing on P2P networks. So here's to the eventual demise of DRM on digital music. Once the DRM is gone, we can see what a real, robust, competitive digital music marketplace looks like.

Paste the link from Google and get the REAL link now: Announcement fM Google Video Downloader ver2.0 Final is now avaiable ! The features listed below are introduced in version 2.0 since the previous major release.

"Simultaneous release is already here.... It's called piracy."

Soderbergh on the simultaneous distribution of 'Bubble' to theaters, DVD, and cable.

This workshop intends to bring together researchers and developers from industry and academy to discuss the technological advances and challenges in providing IPTV services over WWW.

Awesome

The Wi-Fi Alliance now certifies features for Wi-Fi networks that will extend battery life for mobile devices. This extension of the Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) program, called Power Save, helps pave the way for rapid proliferation of Wi-Fi technology into phone handsets where battery life is critical.

WMM Power Save gives device manufacturers and developers a robust framework to improve Wi-Fi power efficiency, via improved signaling capabilities and the opportunity to fine-tune power consumption. The certification for both access points and client devices uses mechanisms from the recently ratified IEEE 802.11e standard, and is an enhancement of legacy 802.11 power save.

"As many as 55 million subscribers for Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones are expected in the consumer market alone," said Monica Paolini of Senza Fili Consulting.

The following devices are the first to be Wi-Fi CERTIFIED(TM) for WMM Power Save, and currently populate the program test bed:

• Atheros AR5002AP-2X Access Point
• Broadcom AirForce(TM) BCM94704AGR Dual-Band 802.11a/g Access Point
• Broadcom AirForce(TM) BCM94309CB Dual-Band 802.11a/g PC Card
• Cisco AIR-AP1231G-A-K9 with AIR-RM21A-A-K9
• Conexant 802.11a/g PRISM WorldRadio
• Marvell Semiconductor 802.11a/b/g WLAN router
• Ralink 802.11a/g Mini PCI
• Winbond Mini PCI 802.11a/b/g WLAN Client

 

I got a few emails asking whether things were part of lightnet or not, and that didn't make sense to me. Anybody should be able to evaluate that question for themselves.

Here is a strawman definition: timed media which is all three of interoperable, interactive, and interconnected is in the lightnet. If it's not all three, it's darknet.

So what do interoperable, interactive, and interconnected mean?

Interoperable

Anybody can make a web page which pretty much any browser can render.

Presently, the pool of proprietary audio/video content is split among many different proprietary formats, the one convention (MP3) is forbidden to free software, and vendors often invent new URI schemes.

Interactive

Anybody can repurpose pretty much any web page, for example to bookmark it, tag it, comment on it, do research on it, email the URL to a friend, or aggregate it.

You can't repurpose DRM content without permission from the vendor, which only a few people can get. You can only repurpose stuff on filesharing networks to a limited degree, because you will likely infringe a copyright in doing so.

Interconnected

Links, links, links. More links. Hypertextual crunchity gooey goodness. Pointers from and to every conceivable region of space; space defined as stuff with pointers. Take off your clothes and link like a monkey! And don't just link to yourself -- that makes you intraconnected, not interconnected.

A 30 minute podcast is opaque and linkless, except maybe kinda sorta the parts where URLs are spoken. Ditto for videoblogs -- they are linkless except for the parts where URLs are displayed onscreen. If you must make a thing which is opaque and linkless at least give it a URL. When you mint a URL don't complain when third parties reuse it in in their own hypertext.

1. One test of an idea is whether it has explanatory power, and a thing which the 3-legged lightnet definition explains very nicely is the rise of mongrel media browsers like FireAnt (a videoblog aggregator), I/ON (a media browser), Songbird (a media browser based on Firefox), Juicer (a podcatcher), BlogMatrix Sparks (a podcatcher with integrated podcast-creation features), and YME (a media browser based on Internet Explorer). All of these merge the concept of a browser with the concept of an MP3 player.

   1. Interactive: in comparison to a traditional MP3 player like Winamp they allow interactivity via web tools like comment forms and bookmarks.
   2. Interoperable: in comparison to media players from the big four -- Real, WMP, iTunes, Quicktime, and Flash -- they don't favor the software maker's proprietary data formats; in comparison to traditional browsers they guarantee some minimal level of functionality, like the ability to play an MP3.
   3. Interconnected: they all support hypertext formats like HTML, RSS and XSPF. FireAnt, for example, takes pains to be sure that there is a link to any comment form published by a media creator.

   It is a lot of trouble to write software. The makers of these products are not doing it on a whim. The reason it is worth the trouble is that they see a need for software which supports all three legs of lightnet.

2. If you could have all this in the browser, why would you ever leave it for an MP3 player? And if you could have all this in one browser but not another, why would you use the incapacitated browser?

   The other test of an idea is whether it makes disprovable predictions, and the 3-legged definition does indeed provide one: within the lightnet, browsers and media players will stop being separate categories.

Habitat Jam finished up yesterday - a facilitated online forum by UN-HABITAT, IBM, the Government of Canada, and others that aimed to bring together thousands of participants for productive discussions around six urban themes. It succeeded only partially in its ambitious goals, but that's the nature of experiments. But from its problems, we may be able to tease out some lessons and principles for future large-scale distributed meetings.

This is a hard problem. Forums like Slashdot can handle millions of users, yet lack a sense of focus and a real-time component. The more immersive technology behind Habitat Jam (which has been used for awhile by IBM) shows promise, but is clearly missing important elements: effective searches of previous posts; summaries of the "discussion to date" to avoid repetition on basic issues; a user-rating system for posts as they are read to identify the more interesting ones (aka, "collaborative filtering").

Then there are the even tougher questions: How can a sense of "discussion" be kept in a large threaded forum? Would it be better to have multiple smaller groups discussing the same themes, and sending their best ideas to a common second-level forum? How can inclusiveness and diversity be balanced with selectivity and high performance?

How would you talk with 100 000 people?

(Posted by Hassan Masum in Your Turn at 02:24 AM)

The i-garment project aims to develop smart garments for for the Portuguese Civil Protection. The suits will be equipped with sensors to monitor position, vital signals (temperature and heart beat) of the firefighters. The information will be sent via a wireless link to Civil Protection Officers in the HQ, processed and returned to the field officers equipped with PDAs and/or TabletPCs.

Tightly integrated with the fire-fighting garment, sensors, telecommunication, localisation, alert and processing hardware collect the status and position of the fire-fighter and transmit it wirelessly and in real time to a data collecting computer installed in local Operational Field Vehicles (OFV).

Besides, the system will allow the data to be transmitted from the local OFV to the main servers via satellite transmission, making the data available from virtually anywhere there might be a fire situation, without the need for further communication infrastructure.

Thanks Antao.

The problem is not in finding the number of links but in using the number of links joined to the seriousness of the assertion to create automatic notifications to interested parties.

The Internet allows us to see how news is made, as though we were walking through a factory tour, and we can compare the very similar results of a mass production system.

Ice, the Internet Communications Engine, is middleware for the practical programmer. A high-performance Internet communications platform, Ice includes a wealth of layered services and plug-ins.

Writing in the current issue of Digital Journalist, Terry Heaton discusses and diagrams how unbunded TV programming should work....

A Case Western Reserve University research team from physics and statistics has recently created innovative statistical techniques that improve the chances of detecting a signal in large data sets. The new techniques can not only search for the "needle in the haystack" in particle physics, but also have applications in discovering a new galaxy, monitoring transactions for fraud and security risk, identifying the carrier of a virulent disease among millions of people or detecting cancerous tissues in a mammogram.

"In fact, clicking through Backfence's pages feels like frontier land-– remote, often lonely, zoned for people but not home to any. The next launch is supposed to be Arlington, VA. Without more settlers, Backfence may wind up creating more ghost towns."

Research firm Maravedis has a new study out on the licensed 2.5 GHz Broadband Radio Service (BRS) and the licensed 2.3 GHz Wireless Communications Service (WCS) band. They calculate the number of licenses and coverage in the 2.3 and 2.5 GHz bands.

Those frequencies are critical for the future of mobile WiMax in the United States. Without them it's not going anywhere.

Under the FCC terms of the Sprint Nextel merger, Sprint agreed to offer at least 15 million Americans broadband wireless access within four years, and an additional 15 million potential subscribers within six years using their 2.5 GHz frequencies.

In 2004, the FCC changed the MDS/ITFS frequency plan. Commercial Broadband (BRS) and Educational (EBS) broadband services are now allocated differently. The television oriented EBS service was moved in the middle of the band to reduce interference with the weaker 2-way data services.

As of November 2005, over 1,700 BRS Licenses and 2,500 EBS Licenses (formerly ITFS) were listed on the FCC's ULS License Search web site. The FCC's Tower Search has additional information. Maravedis estimated the broadband wireless licensees (below), from the FCC's ULS License Search web site.

Protected Service Areas (PSA) is an exclusive license service granted to either a BRS or EBS licensee. Each PSA is comprised of a 35 Mile Radius surrounding the licensed transmitter site.

Basic Trading Areas (BTA) is geographic region defined by a group of counties that surround a city as formulated by Rand McNally. There are 493 BTAs in the U.S.

Owners of incumbent MDS (now called BRS) and ITFS (Instructional Fixed Television Service) (now called EBS), hope mobile WiMax, likely to be available in a year or two, will take off. EBS television licensees must have a minimum of 20 hours per 6 MHz channel per week of educational use of EBS spectrum.

The 2.3 GHz WCS band, currently has a total of 282 x 5.0 MHz licenses, according to Maravedis. Many of the 2.3 GHz WCS licenses, granted in 1997, will be due to expire in 2007. The FCC gave considerable flexibility to satellite radio's 2.3 GHz DARS (Digital Audio Radio Service) to put their satellite "gap fillers" where they need them (and even where they don't).

Some fear the 2.3 GHz band will be one big mess resulting in interference between broadband wireless providers and satellite radio repeaters -- just like the FCC screwed up with Nextel. Or maybe the problem will just disappear if XM satellite radio buys out the 2.3 GHz broadband wireless band for their own purposes.

The FCC also moved to open up the 3.5 GHz band, particularly for rural populations. But the 3.6GHz spectrum will be shared, unlike the 2.5GHz and 2.3GHz bands.

Other frequency options include the 5.8 GHz band with 100 Mhz of unlicensed bandwidth - but the restricted range and unlicensed nature makes mobility impractical. The 700 Mhz band is expected to have good range and might be an option in 3-4 years, but the 6-12 Mhz bandwidth will limit capacity of any licensed 700 Mhz network.

The FCC can appear to be insular with industry lobbyists guiding FCC policy. Why, for example, isn't there more information on the proposed buyout of the 2.3 GHz band by XM radio? Inquiring minds want to know.

Related DailyWireless stories include; FCC: 97lb Weakling, XM Buys 2.3GHz, The FCC Opens the 3650MHz band, Battle at 3 Dot 5, 3.5 GHz: Licensed or Un? Fixed Vrs Mobile WiMax, Navini Activates 2.3GHz in USA, President Wants 90MHz, Mobile WiMax Chips, Heartland Says The World Is Round, McCaw Profile & WCS, The 700 Mhz Club, Samsung Demos WiBro, WiBro Three-Way, Arraycomm + Intel Beam WiMax, Sprint + Motorola Test WiMax, Navini's Mobile WiMax, 4G War in Sydney, WiMax 16d+ Dilemma, WiMax: Will It Stay or Will It Go?, WiMax World Wrap.

It seems HDTV (high-definition TV) could shake up Hollywod. The unforgiving clarity of high-definition television has induced paranoia among celebrities obsessed with their appearance, reports The Telegraph via TV Predictions via digg.com.

The technology, soon to become available in Britain, produces images so sharp that even subtle imperfections, usually hidden by make-up or flattering lighting, are brutally exposed.

s have begun savaging stars normally considered attractive who appear haggard or saggy in the new medium, which boasts resolution six times that of normal television.

... Philip Swann, whose website TV Predictions covers television technology, said: "With high-definition television facial imperfections and ageing signs are dramatically visible." He said many celebrities were "scared to death" by the technology.

... Swann thinks that the technology could affect casting decisions and the longevity of careers. He believes that it could wrong-foot the "Hollywood glamour machine" which turns ordinary-looking people into stars, thanks to glossy magazine shoots and air-brushed videos.

Crossposted comment on an article by Jonathan Gray over at the online television journal 'Flow'.

Hi Flow people and thank you Jonathan for an insightful piece.

Some of Jonathan’s points cross over with some of my research interests. I am interested in what happens in fan or enthusiast communities in the period between ‘fan-events’. My original thinking was focused on film, but now I have shift gears to focus on car enthusiasts. I thought about the rituals of expectations and anticipation that fan/enthusiasts participate in. Both expectation and anticipation involve relations of futurity. The two terms I used were defined as follows: Anticipation is a modulation of an affective tension with a future event, and thus relates to a (temporally present) affective intensity. Expectation is a calculus of futurity, an extrapolation of narrativised past events into the future.

“Spoiling is all about knowing.”

Well, at the minimum, I would insist on a caveat. The knowledge in itself does not necessarily mean a thing. I could have knowledge of Johnathan’s favourite TV show and it wouldn’t necessarily matter to me. The knowledge has to matter and has to relate to an ‘interest’ (in the Silvan Tompkins sense of the ‘interest-excitement’ affect). I would know that the knowledge probably means something to someone else, but only because I am familiar with the social conventions of ‘spoiling’.

I would rather suggest that, firstly, ‘spoiling’ is an action that disrupts the normative distribution of the screening-event (for want of a better term!) and produces an illicit convergence in the affective tension experienced by fans. It is a particular qualitative intervention that displaces ‘author-produced’ (ie PR company produced) expectations and anticipations. Production companies and the like are very well aware of this capacity of fan communities to intervene in the passage and circulation of the screening-events. Examples include The Lord of the Rings where information was ‘leaked’ to fans and various limited-participation ‘beta’ testing of computer games.

The ‘spoiler’ also has a secondary function, which I would argue is actually its primary function, in the sense of a spoiler being a piece of affectively charged knowledge. That is, spoiling is about belonging. Here I am drawing on the work of Brian Massumi (_Parables of the Virtual_ “Political Economy of Belonging” chapter). The screening-event is not just a screening, but a fan-event, too. Fan-events do not nominally involve only fans, but anyone who has an ‘interest’ (again in the Tompkins sense of ‘affect’). There is a ‘becoming-together’ of fans that occurs over the season of a TV series (or between sequels in a film series, or between cruises or racing events for car enthusiasts).

It does not surprise me that in the case of Old Scooter Dude was expelled for his ‘false’ spoilers (were they not, then, ‘spoilers’ in a real sense?!), he wasn’t merely expelled from the boards, but from participation in the togetherness of belonging. His ‘false’ spoilers produced a convergence of a corrupt set of expectations and a traitorous feeling of anticipation. Ironically, however, his actions may have actually served as another singularity in the fan community and produced a stronger becoming-together of other fans who all felt (in different ways) resentful and cheated.

From DigitalMediaWire newsletter:

Oslo - The first trial of interactive mobile TV programming was launched this week in Norway, a collaboration between broadcaster NRK and wireless firm LM Ericsson. The six week trial of the IM-TV service will enable viewers of the Norwegian music video show "Svisj" to interact in real time by voting for upcoming videos, and messaging the show's hosts and other viewers while still watching the program. The cost to interact is about half that of standard text messages. "Our solution makes it possible for viewers to interact with a show that they are watching on their mobile device in a whole new way, creating a much richer TV experience with the help of the mobile channel," said Ericsson Mobility World vice president Kurt Sillen.
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/051202/0102895.html
http://tinyurl.com/9ck57 (Associated Press)
http://www.nrk.no/img/541868.jpg

Not featured in the online version but front (page) and center of Sunday's WEEK IN REVIEW:
The Gamer as Artiste, Yes, the new video games are dazzling and cinematic. But can they rise to the level of art?

"As games gain attention as an art form, it remains to be determined just what sort of art they can or should be. Are they like movies, projecting the vision of an auteur like Mr. Spielberg or Peter Jackson, who recently collaborated in "Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie"? Or are they more like the song "Frankie and Johnny," which is performed in different ways by many people, and in which the art lies in the sum of performances?"

Or, maybe something else entirely?

INCLUDING: Lawrence Lessig Hillman Curtis Dan Tynan Andrew Gumbel J.D. Lasica Kevin Bankston Jim Buckmaster Hofmann & Knous Dan Gillmor and many many others. great resource

NEXT STEPS ON PROPOSED .COM SETTLEMENT On 21 October 2005, ICANN announced proposed settlement terms between ICANN and VeriSign, including a proposed new .COM agreement. Since then, ICANN has been conducting extensive public consultations on the proposed

via slashdot: K-boy writes "Pushing my own scoop, but I think it's a valuable piece of Net history, I have come into possession of the vital letter sent by Condoleezza Rice to the EU over Internet governance. And posted it on the Web.

Welcome to the Fedora Directory Server. The Fedora Directory Server is a robust, scalable open-source server designed to manage large directories of users and resources. It is based on an open-systems server protocol called the Lightweight Directory Acces

Browse your iPod's TV Shows the way you are supposed to.

These bookmarklets let you see how a web page is coded without digging through the source, debug problems in web pages quickly, and experiment with CSS or JS without editing the actual page.

Below is a big list of free blog hosts, where you can set up a subdomain or subdirectory with your username. Pick a subdomain with a keyword and start posting your links, simple as that and free.

fALk found this guy - Fernando Llanos - running around with his self made video guerilla gear that is fully wearable including beamer with power supply and all. He projects burning airplanes an airport building...etc.

here's a direct link to his project site and another link to his hand illustrated pdf of the concept

girls ambient room uses sound, music, animation & light projections to visualize information at the periphery of human perception by subtly & artfully displaying personal communication data. the room was specially designed for Taiwan teenage girls, reflecting their aesthetic, their taste, & their values.
data is gathered from different chat services, email & comment entries to their personal online journals. when the user (the Taiwan teenager) is in her room & receives a message on MSN chat, she hears audio signals that are in tune with one another, & sees bubble-like visual animations are created on the wall. email traffic is represented by lines on the screen which start to animate & vibrate. the more email the more vigerous the animations.
[quietplse.com & quietplse.com|thnkx Andrea!]

(This is my most recent column in the Financial Times.)

The open internet is under attack as never before, and the attackers are the usual suspects: governments and incumbent communications giants. Unhappily, this applies in America, too.

By “open” I mean an internet where customers use the available bandwidth as they see fit, not as oligopolies decree. Of course, what customers want is not especially relevant to the bureaucrats and executives who are working hard to regain control.

It is not surprising to see repressive governments, especially the ones that control national telecommunications operations, squeeze the life out of this vital new medium. Not just political control is at stake; so, in many cases, is an enormous amount of revenue.

But it is disheartening to watch the US turn in this direction. The nation that spawned the internet is renouncing some core values in the process.

Xeni Jardin: Exerpt from an essay by George Dyson on Edge.org:

Digital coding is the universal language allowing free translation between abstract information and physical books. Once upon a time, if you wanted the information, you had to physically possess (or borrow) the book. If you wanted to purchase a new copy of the book, the title had to be "in print."

This is no longer true. Scan the text once, digitally, and the information becomes permanently available, anywhere, no matter what happens to physical copies of the book. Search for an out-of-print title and you will now find bookshops (and libraries) who have copies available; soon enough the options will include bookshops offering to print a copy, just for you. Google Library and Google Print have been renamed Google Book Search — not because Google is shying away from building the Universal Library (with links to the Universal Bookstore) but because search comes first. To paraphrase Tolkien: "One ring to find them, one ring to bind them, one ring to rule them all."

Why does this strike such a nerve? Because so many of us (not only authors) love books. In their combination of mortal, physical embodiment with immortal, disembodied knowledge, books are the mirror of ourselves. Books are not mere physical objects. They have a life of their own. Wholesale scanning, we fear, will strip our books of their souls. Works that were sewn together by hand, one chapter at a time, should not be unbound page by page and distributed click by click. Talk about "snippets" makes authors flinch.

direct link to the whole article whole article

Posted by exiledsurfer at 05:26 AM | Comments (0)

Cory Doctorow: If you're in San Francisco on December 8, you can attend a court case where the constitutionality of America's creeping war on anonymity will be challenged.

My friend John Gilmore, co-founder of EFF and inventor of many key Sun Microsystems technologies, is suing the US federal government over the constitutionality of a secret law that requires Americans to show ID before boarding airplanes, a back-door to mandating Soviet-style internal passports for travel.

The TSA and airlines claim that the ID requirement for travel is a law, but the law isn't published anywhere. If it were published, it would be subject to Constitutional challenge; previous Supreme Court cases during the anti-Segregation fight established that the Feds have no right to condition citizens' ability to travel across state lines.

Now the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing John's case, and the hearing is open to the public. I wish I could be there -- this is history being made, and John deserves all our support for having the guts to put his money and liberty on the line to fight for the Constitution.

Friends and supporters of John are welcome to attend this historic hearing, but are asked to please dress appropriately for court. John would like nothing more than to have the public gallery filled to the brim with fellow Americans who care as much as he does about the US Constitution.

What: Oral Arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzalez
When: December 8th 2005 at 9am
Where: 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Third Floor, Courtroom 3
95 Seventh Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

nks, Bill!)

another water based 3d display technology. nice high res shots and films

Although networks are still in their infancy, experts think they're already creating new forms of social behavior that blur the distinctions between online and real-world interactions.

France has given the go-ahead to a long-planned Gallic rival to CNN, the international rolling news channel. La chaine francaise d'information internationale (CFII) is expected to start broadcasting in the second half of 2006.

Today we're launching a new version of Odeo with several big changes. The most notable is that everyone can now record audio with the browser-based Odeo Studio - or via the phone. Either way, your voice gets posted as an MP3 on an Odeo page, and from ther

everyone on the internet shall be famous for 15 megabytes. damn...someone stole my ichat autoreply and made an url out of it!

....share cc licensced music and songs here

XaoS is a fast portable real-time interactive fractal zoomer. It displays the Mandelbrot set (among other escape time fractals) and allows you to zoom smoothly into the fractal. Various coloring modes are provided for both the points inside and outside th

Yet there's another difficulty lurking in this story that many are just becoming aware of within the Free Culture Movement. You might be able — technically — to remix all this creativity. But can you remix it legally? Will the licenses that "free" content permit that free content to be remixed?
The astonishing (and for us lawyers, embarrassing) answer is no. Even if all the creative work you want to remix is licensed under a copyleft license, because those licenses are different licenses, you can't take creative work from one, and remix it in another. Wikipedia, for example, is licensed under the FDL. It requires derivatives be licensed under the FDL only. And the same is true of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license that governs Opsound content, as well as much of the creativity within Flickr. All of these licenses were written without regard to the fundamental value of every significant advance in the digital age — interoperability.

ah... the pandoras box has been open sourced. -es

Yahoo! just enabled every blog and news service in the world to update 200 million American mobile consumers instantly. Every feed, from any source online is now a potential mobile alert service, instantly notifying readers, customers and users of any update.

Russel does some of his patented hand waving here for something truly amazing.

Use Nuvvo to: post prep. and follow-up for your live sessions, create a multimedia hub for your classroom teach stand-alone courses online The choice is yours and the possibilities are endless.

PHONifier is an application to make your mobile web life easier. More and more mobile phones have internet access, yet there are very few webdevelopers that really seem to care about the mobile surfer. PHONifier takes care of this by optimizing webpages f

In the 1980s the CIA produced a small illustrated booklet in both spanish and english designed to destabilise the nicaraguan government and economic system.

You know that feeling of joy you get after you have posted a meme, and one of your contacts sends you a link to something he wrote expounding on it IN DEPTH, and u think "wow, great...a new thread finds the eye of the needle" ?

And then you look at the date of his post. And its oh so 24 hours ago.

Joining the trackers at unmediated for me has meant a closer dialog with a group of great minds...great activists; top among them of course is your host here, the big cheese mr kenyatta. I awoke this morning to find a link in my mailbox from kc to one of his posts on the Lightnet/Darknet (oh so 48 hours ago!), which i am taking the liberty to repost here in its entirety.

Follow this meme. Spread it like sticky peanut butter, chew and digest it. It's a core argument for the days ahead.

From kenyatta's braintag:

Lucas Gonze has a good meme going, defining the explicit and implicit content on the web as examples of lightnet and darknet respectively. Lightnet is content that propagates openly and without much friction. Darknet content is traded clandestinely, implying a sense of mistrust.

As developers and technologists, I think we should do all that we can to promote the Lightnet. But as an activist and organizer, I need to remind myself that the vast majority of the planet still needs both a lightnet and a darknet.

As I said before, I'm all for the Lightnet. When Lucas stood up at the OMDS to share his personal manifesto against underground economies, I was the first mouth open to support his idea. For a room full of developers whose job it is to make the world machine readable, obscurity should be the enemy. Just think of the many useful and interesting things that can be built once our media, information, objects, and the relationships between it all are made explicit. But this explicitness can also be used against people, and for that reason I will still advocate for the use of darknets for certain non-bourgeois contexts.

A few years ago, I met a couple of media educators down in Cape Town, South Africa. During Apartheid, they were gun runners for Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. The ANC went through a massive stockpiling of weapons during the 1980s. They set up a tourist operation based out of London where white sympathizers would take rich, unknowing Afrikaners and white Europeans into neighboring Namibia for week-long safaris. While the tourists slept at night, the guide would go off and buy guns to be smuggled back into South Africa under the floorboards of the tour bus. (No one would ever search or question a bus full of rich white folks.) Upon their arrival in Cape Town, the guns were transferred to a van and left in a parking lot for an MK member to drive off and hide in the black Townships. If ever the time came for civil war, the ANC would be ready. Some say that when the white National Party eventually made its way to the negotiating table, it was this massive militarization that helped force their hand.

I tell this story because I can't help but wonder what could (not) have happened to them in a 99% above ground, explicit economy. Although they were fighting for a more Lightnet world, they needed Darknet work to support it. I think about the work of Witness.org, a group that uses video to document human rights abuses around the world. It's total Lightnet content, but it requires a Darknet in order to protect its participants. Sometimes an idea that seems bourgeois in our context can be liberating when mapped to another.

I don't think we can ever end discrimination but I do believe that we can make it harder to practice. As long as oppressive totalitarian regimes exist, institutional discrimination and ethnic oppression will be a fact of life. In these contexts, underground economies and the obfuscating darknets that form around them will continue to be an important organizing tool for the disenfranchised.

Please pass this on! We're trying to encourage the emergence of a community of videobloggers in Montreal.

Videoblogging is starting to take off. It's a powerful new way to find an audience and distribute your content. It's also entirely free: as long as you have a camera, the rest of the tools, from the editing to the publishing distributing to the storing of your content can be found for free.

We're putting the call out to artists, independent film-makers, activists, and geeks to start having monthly get-togethers to share information, content, ideas, and beer. Our first meetup is at La Cabane, 3872, rue Saint-Laurent, December 7th at 7PM.

Don't be shy if you're not a computer expert. People will be happy to answer questions and explain how the technology works.

Vlogball is a videoblogging game that you can enjoy by watching the films on the right, or you can join in and play! To play, download some of these films, shoot your own footage, re-edit combining your footage with excerpts from movies made by other play

(Themed videoblogging can be fun for the whole ad hoc network of needs and desires! See previous post. -kc.)

Rafat reports that Cablevision has defected from the MSO ranks and is supporting a la carte pricing. Phone companies AT&T and likely Verizon would likely join. See yesterday’s post for what happens next.

: Tonight on NPR, I was interviewed about blog networks, in a story pegged to the Pajamas party. Asked about whether, like radio and TV before us, the internet and blogs are naturally forming into networks, I blurted this out:

“The internet kills networks.”

Yes, it kills permanent, closed networks and encourages ad hoc networks created by need and desire over synergy and deals.

Introducing prototype.js

Prototype is a JavaScript framework by Sam Stephenson designed to help make developing dynamic web apps a whole lot easier. In basic terms, it’s a JavaScript file which you link into your page that then enables you to do cool stuff.

There's loads of capability built in, a portion of which covers our beloved Ajax. The whole thing is freely distributable under an MIT-style license, so it's good to go. What a nice man that Mr Stephenson is - friends, let us raise a hearty cup of mulled wine to his good name. Cheers! sluurrrrp.

FixedOrbit detailed data [lets you] drill down into the core of a network and see all the IP's they control and their fragmentation, who they have peering agreements with, and more!

You've heard of the Darknet. Now try on its antithesis: Lightnet. An intiguing new meme from Lucas Gonze, with contributions by Mike Linksvayer and Peter van Dijck. I like it.

Michael Robertson’s new Oboe service is both confontational (to the industry) and thoughtfully designed (for the user). Robertson, of course, was the founder of the original MP3.com, and it might not be too cruel to say that he was driven out of that bu

Io is a relatively new language on the dynamic programming block. It compares favorably with Python and Ruby in terms of performance. Io is also small and easily embeddable, as would be evidenced by the iol4 operating system. Io is small prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

I saw a post today on wmmna about a project Reactive Cubes. I had recently been researching such projects for myself, those that use projections through water as a novel display device. Avolve by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau (1994) was a landmark installation project. If you haven't seen it before, read here. Although they use water, it is a shallow tank which doesn't give the optical illusion of depth to this degree.

I got talking to Orlando Mathias and Mickey Stretton (from AllofUs) about this and they showed me an experiment called LightTank that they had made some years back, using a tank of water and projector.

These experiments are unreleased, but they were so great I persuaded them to let me publish them online. By projecting simple white geometric shapes on to the side of the tank, the light is carried through the volume of the water, creating the illusion of depth. Small dust particles in the water help capture the light. So this is a Pixelsumo exclusive :) I can see all kinds of great uses for such an optical illusion, espcially creating interactive audio visual works.

Video (1.3mb WMV).

It's a great little program getting more and more exposure; M-Audio has even added it to their podcast bundle. But it has a few rough edges, and has gone a long time without an upgrade -- until now.

Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into.

RawSugar is a social search engine powered by user contributions. Find the answers you need by incrementally selecting member-designated tags to refine your search.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Firefox 1.5 and the amazing people who have made the first year a raging success. Last year at Spread Firefox we launched community marketing into the mainstream with written testimonials.

QuickSynergy is a graphical interface (GUI) for easily configuring Synergy2, an application that allows the user to share his mouse and keyboard between two or more computers. Without the need for any external hardware, Synergy2 uses the TCP-IP protocol t

If the Internet has proven anything, it is that decentralized, equal access is an extremely powerful engine of creativity and innovation. The open, end-to-end architecture requires that the best products and services compete on their merits, and not on th

Collective choice systems have been around for a long time. Since at least the birth of democracy in ancient Greece people have made joint decisions about important issues, and since at least the knightly tournaments of the late Middle Age people have com

If the “VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department” bill proposal passes in the Parliament, free software and distributing the source code to your software will become illegal in France.

Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament. It appears that publishing Free Software giving access to culture is about to become a counterfeiting criminal offence. Will SACEM sue France Télécom R&D research labs for having published Maay and Solipsis (P2P pieces of software used to exchange data)[2]? Up to this point, the rather technical debate surrounding the issues addressed by DADVSI bill (copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society) makes one ask: Just how much control do the Big Players in the field of culture want to seize? It now looks like years of quibbling have put an end to compromises. What should have been the last meeting of CSPLA[2] Sirinelli Commission turned into an arranged battle dealing with the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department" bill. EUCD.INFO[4] cofounder Christophe Espern, representing Creative Commons France, had to argue for 13 hours to defend the right of Free Software to exist, but he lost the argument. The preliminary conclusions seem to regret that the bill "cannot be proposed by CSPLA in before the deadline." Maybe the new meeting scheduled today, November 25th, 2005, at 6:30pm, in the offices of the French Department of Culture, aims to impose the text ? [*] "Havoc is breaking loose," says Christophe Espern. "How can people possibly both pretend to defend culture and then want to ban the only software giving universal access to it? Actually, the contradiction may be only superficial: I think what they are truly after is the control of the public... culture is just a excuse." Absurd as it may seem, the DADVSI bill will bring an indifferent public a surprise gift [5] for Christmas nothing less than complete Orwellian control of digital culture.

Liberte....Egalite.... REALITE. The french youth have revolted, because their situation is so untenable... when will the comfortable intellectual elites do the same? When will "TheMovie" have a scene where hackers are setting fire to the SACD and SACEM? (see next post) -es

A movie cobbled together on a new video game called The Movie is circulating on the Web. The Washington Post has an article today describing how “The film, called The French Democracy, is inspired by real-life events that led up to the riots” that recently enflamed France. The movie could be made quickly because video characters were substituted for real people.
The Post article observes:

Though "The French Democracy" is a rough bit of work that might not win over many film critics, some folks are hailing it as a milestone for being the first politically motivated film in this newish and mostly obscure medium, called "machinima" by its fans. Hugh Hancock, who runs a Web site called, Machinima.com rated the piece as "a fantastic step forward."
Hancock said he thinks machinima will become an increasingly mainstream form of entertainment as computer graphics get increasingly sophisticated.

lionhead.com/"> Lionhead Studio’s designer of the game used to make the movie, Peter] Molyneux, on the other hand, thinks that people prefer to see real people starring in their film entertainment. To that end, his company is developing a contest in which players of his game will have a chance to get their material turned into a film project with real actors-- a Project Green Light for the computer game world.

where there is dissent, there is a way. direct link to the film - es

Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering. Network operators can identify the digital "packets" of content moving through their wires from sites and services and can block some or put others at the head of the stream.

the intrnetz become evermore "just another distribution channel"

The Bill of Rights: The First Ten Amendments to the constitution of the United States printed on sturdy, pocket-sized, pieces of metal. The next time you travel by air, take the Bill of Rights - Security Edition along with you.

its a tragic idea whose time has sadly arrived

You are a pod or vodcaster? heard of domain squatting? Imagine having your 1000 users redirected to another site. It merely involves finding a target Podcast and creating a unique URL for it on a Web site that the hijacker can control. The hijacker then points his URL to the RSS feed of the target Podcast. Next, the hijacker does whatever it takes to ensure that, as new Podcast engines come to market, the page each engine creates for the target Podcast points to the hijacker's URL instead of to the Podcast creator's official URL.

expect this to become more prevalent as vod and porncasts flood the market

Cory Doctorow: Neuros have shipped an amazing-sounding device that takes the video you've already paid for -- DVDs, TV shows, and so on -- and repackages it to play on your PSP, laptop, phone or any other device that can handle MPEG4 video and Memory Sticks or Compact Flash. It's small enough to use as a portable VCR, slipping it into your pocket and taking it on holiday or to meetings.

It's seems ridiculous that you can record a TV show to play back on your TV, but you have to buy it again if you want to watch it on your iPod, phone or PSP. Why do you need to buy a DVD and an iPod version? Why can't you "home-tape" your media to something more convenient, the way you could with your old LPs?

Thank (or curse) the entertainment companies: they have threatened to sue any company that makes a better digital VCR (they put one manufacturer, ReplayTV, out of business, by sucking up all their dough with legal fees). They've even proposed legislation to close the "analog hole" that makes this recording without permission possible. That's right, Hollywood's media-savvy technophobes really think that they'll be able to convince Congress to help them with something called the "A-Hole problem." Hey, if the shoe fits.

But Neuros's pocket-sized "Recorder 2" defects from the tacit agreement to withhold better technology from the market. Just in time for Christmas, Neuros is taking a stand, letting you home-record your stuff and watch it the way you want, the way the law allows. They've even written a stirring editorial explaining their commitment to their customers' freedom, with such choice quotes as "But who will stand up for you today if you are to continue to have the right to enjoy your legally obtained media content wherever and whenever you want?" and "these proposed laws are about Big Media using piracy as an excuse to take away your right to control your own legally obtained content and thereby open up new revenue streams by forcing you to pay multiple times for the same content." * Record effortlessly from any video source (TV Cable box, Satellite Receiver Box, PVRs or DVRs Like TiVoTM, DVD players, VCR, Camcorders).

* Simple setup that works without a PC and operates like a VCR.

* MPEG-4 video format allows you to view content directly on your PSP(TM) or any other device that accepts standard Memory Stick or Compact Flash (CF) memory cards (not included).

* The MPEG-4 format is also compatible with most other portable media devices.

* A great way to digitize your home movies for archiving, emailing, or playback on portables and laptops.

* Can play back from Recorder 2 through TV's and home theatres. Pocket-sized device is small enough to use as a portable VCR.

a million of these things. I'm buying one right now. Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

Here's an English-language interview with Gary Wang, founder of Toodou, a new user-generated, interactive, multimedia content website in China that sounds remarkably like Ourmedia.org. They have 120,000 registered users and tons of podcasts.

The Interactive Institute has unveiled new STATIC! prototypes that explore how everyday products might be designed to better express – and stimulate reflection on – energy use.

Power-Aware Cord displays the energy consumption of the appliances that are connected to it. The blue light in the cord displays the intensity relative to the watts. In a primary stage, the cord can be used as an experimental tool to examine household products and in the long run it turns into an ambient display of everyday energy consumption. The cord has been patentent and they are now looking to take it into production. PDF.

The Element is made out of glass, metal and enough lightbulbs to reach the same efficiency as an electric radiator, and the current energy-level is constantly seen. When the room is warm the light is dimmed and vice versa. Since 95% of the energy from lightbulbs is transformed into heat, the radiator uses all the energy it produces for the light and the warmth.

Other new devices. List of prototypes.
Via RED.

Related Future Currents, a website full of ideas for putting householders in control of the energy they use, produce or even sell. (thanks Helen)

The conference seems a little bigger this year - about 600 people are here.

This morning, Jane Johnson offered an update on MIC, a project to create a union catalog of moving image archive holdings. Over the last year, MIC has nearly double the number of archives it has listed, and added the ability to search for video that is online.

One of the big challenges for MIC is dealing with the diversity of different approaches to cataloging. MIC now has a new utility that makes it possible for an archive to map its catalog data to the schema used by MIC. Rather than forcing conformance with a particular schema, MIC accepts metadata more are less as is; archivists can contribute what they have.

This afternoon, the LC’s Mike Mashon gave an engaging overview of its collection policy. The LC currently takes in about 30,000 items a year, mostly as a result of copyright, though 70 percent plus of the materials deposited for copyright purposes are not added to the national collection.

A disturbing point was that some of the donor agreements for public domain materials require users to get permission to make copies from the original donor.

Interesting to me were the hints about how to get copyright deposits into the collection. Providing good catalog data and some evidence of real post production work helps. So does format: Mashon noted that he has yet to turn down a nitrate collection, and that DVDs have sometimes been accepted for the collection when VHS hasn’t.

Technorati Tags: AMIA, Austin

With all the talk of digital copyrighting and paid content these days, this story is an interesting wrinkle. The Grateful Dead, who long allowed fans to tape live concerts and distribute bootlegs, have asked the operators of Live Music Archive to make their concert recordings available only for streaming online, but not downloadable. Way back in the old Napster days, the Dead were among the bands who didn't have a problem with free p2p sharing of their mp3 files. The Dead are now selling downloads on their site, which can be copied and transferred without restriction.

(Read the update at Wired. -kc.)

The anime industry is doing everything the rest of show biz isn't: embracing technology, coddling fans—and making a killing.

(See previous :( -kc.)

AMV.Org gets its first cease and desist letter.

We've compiled the top four non-linear editors according to ease of use, price, motion effects and learning curve.

Tokyo FM's "Honda Sweet Mission" show presents Japanese "office ladies" working around the world, podcasting their experiences. Insanely cool interface.

Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more.

Automator workflow, I love that it doesn't add a bunch of songs to my library

Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME) announced the successful demonstration of IP-based video-on-demand application at the Wireless Broadband Forum in Cambridge, UK. The solution combined FME’s AXEL-F, ETHOS and WiMAX devices to deliver a high-resolution video-stream from a server across optical and wireless networks to an end user.

The demonstration network was developed to comply fully with the protocols that will form the backbone of the next generation of wireless broadband roll-out, such as Ethernet over SDH/SONET (ETHOS) (MB87M2181) and WiMAX (MB87M3400).

Fujitsu says the demo proves it has the capability to offer a cost-effective, highly-integrated solution that will provide a fast route to market for Telcos.

Using an optical Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), with a WiMAX connection over the last mile to the customer would be more cost/effective than the fiber to the home.

Of course the phone companies, using twisted pair or fiber, can deliver faster connections (vital for multiple tv households).

SBC, using twisted pair and VDSL-2, is expected to deliver 20Mbps. That's fast enough to deliver two HDTV streams (using IP-TV over twisted pair), along with voice and data, says SBC. Verizon's FiOS brings fiber directly to the home. Verizon offers internet speeds up to 30 Mbps (at $199/month), and hundreds of cable channels.

The poster child for IP-TV is Hong Kong's PCCW which just passed 500,000 IPTV subscribers. No Microsoft boxes.

Related DailyWireless stories include; SBC Picks IP-TV Settops, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, VDSL-2 Ratified, IP-TV Settops, Legislators: Don't Mess With SBC, DirecTV + WiMax?, Muni Wireless Laws, Duopoly Laws, Mobile TV Expands, Verizon Does Cellular TV, Video Search, Big Media Mobilizes, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, Samsung's Video over DSL, 700 Mhz Worth $28B, The 700 MHz Club, The Man Who Invented Television, The Smartest Guy in the Room, and Unlicensed Spectrum: The Sum of All Fears.

After a young sales manager at Indian Oil Corporation was killed by the fuel mafia in Uttar Pradesh, a number of bloggers demanded speedy justice and compensation to Manjunath's family. "Signatures piled up online, condolence messages poured in from all over the world, and serious discussions about petrol pump allotments and incentive structures ensued," DNA Evolutions reports. "Media houses responded, carrying prominent edits, and ran campaigns. When readers influence editorial decisions and prioritisation, it shows the power of participatory journalism."

its made it to huffington: A MUST READ: the Rome "broadcasters right" has never been applied to the Internet, where it is expected to have a much different impact. this is an excellent roundup of all the heavy hitters conspiring to take the "inter" out of internets.

Find new music, trade your playlists and track your listening habits.

Ajax based feed reader that provides headlines from major news organizations as well as other tech and blog feeds.

The Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center have released a document detailing the guidelines and the process that will be used for revising the GNU GPL, and have launched a new website related to the V3 process

So here is our resolution. You want to change the rules as you go along, so will we. We don’t care anymore. We’ve lost all respect for this organization.

Book includes: How-to, history and culture, legal issues, craft advice, future technology, plus interviews with: Benton-C Bainbridge • Craig Baldwin • Mark Coniglio • Bill Cottman • Ivan Dryer • Kathleen Forde • Stefan Gosiewski • Yusei Hori

shit. i'm speechless....steps away from iporn.com.