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