December 05, 2005
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.
-
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.
- Interactive: in comparison to a traditional MP3 player like
Winamp they allow interactivity via web tools like comment forms and
bookmarks.
- 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.
- 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.
-
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.
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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About unmediated
unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
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