unmediated

Ever since I did a presentation at the meet the vloggers gathering in SoHo this summer, people have kept asking what software I use to do my vlogs. I’ve been using Wirecast from Vara Software. It’s rather pricey, but it allows for simple changes of precomposed shots with videos, titles, and 2 cameras. It saves the videos right to the desired QuickTime format, or even sets up a video stream. Wirecast is available for the Mac and Windows platforms.

Vara Software has released a lighter version called VideoCue for Mac platform. It is really great as it allows for simple drag and drop of videos, pictures and live camera into a storyboard cue. It also has direct support for adding it to your blog. There is a free trial download to get your feet wet and to see if it is something for you.

Watch this clip of blogger, online facilitator and collaboration expert Nancy White.

It is part of TheWeblogProject - the first open-source movie documentary about blogs and bloggers.

also see these other two great video clips:

clip one
clip two

Kamlas India has an insightful post on the power of technology in Indian Temples, many of which are IT enabled organizations run by Temple CEO's, compelete with websites, webcasts, e-donations and text messaging prayers.

Strange as it may sound, though, soon you may be spying on yourself. Why would anyone want to do that? Entrepreneur Seth Goldstein, whose startup Root Markets aims to create a financial market for consumer data, offers a compelling reason. "Everybody else is spying on me," he says, "so I want to spy on myself." But Goldstein wants a better copy of his online behavior than anyone else has, and he wants to have complete control over who gets to see it. Instead of spyware, he calls the software that will let him do this "myware."

Taipei began planning its network in 2003. Mayor Ma Ying-jeou made the Wi-Fi effort a centerpiece of his "Cybercity" campaign to give Taipei an edge over other Asian cities.

"This will increase the cutting-edge competitiveness of this city, and make the life of our citizens even more convenient," the mayor says.

As in Philadelphia and some other U.S. cities, Taipei opted to let the private sector build and run the network so it wouldn't cost the city money.

In August 2004, the government approved Q-ware Systems Inc., which beat out another local company in bidding. Construction started the following month. Q-ware, in turn, hired Nortel Networks Corp. of Brampton, Ontario to build, equip, and maintain the system.

Taipei has encountered obstacles. The Wi-Fi plan met resistance from state-owned Chunghwa Telecom Co., the island's biggest phone company, which urged the city government not to launch the project, people involved with the project say.

The "telephone companies are quite nervous," says Mr. Ma, the mayor, who expects the Wi-Fi network to help trim city spending as schools and municipal offices use it to communicate instead of pricier fixed-line and cellular-phone networks.

• Wireless Access Point 7220: (Wireless AP)
• Wireless Gateway 7250: The Wireless Gateway hides Wireless LAN-specific mobility and provides data security for the mesh transit links (between Wireless AP 7220s).
• Optivity Network Management System: Provides centralized facilities for monitoring and managing network operations

Cory Doctorow: Crazed Viennese net.artists Monochrom have a great new tee for sale (&Euro;18): I WAS A COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IN A PREVIOUS LIFE. Link

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drums beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60's soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a 'B' side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that 'information wants to be free'- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Under the scheme, youngsters will be given a blacklist of suspect websites to monitor and asked to report any illegal uploading activities that they discover through the customs web page

Dont be surprised if the US doesent start outsourcing its copyright infringement investigation resources to low wages in the east...

MemoryMiner is a brand new application that represents the first step towards a long term goal: the creation of the world's most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture.

macworld best of show award.. some pretty interesting stuff going on here.

We are a group of determined face recognition and text recognition researchers and engineers who believe it is time for a new type of photo search that uses technology to look inside and automatically tag photos. We hope this will revolutionize how people "see" the world.

everyday biometrics for the masses ;)

The new version of the most widely used open-source license takes a "highly aggressive" stance against the digital rights management software that's widely favored in the entertainment industry

Instead of letting the government waste tax money by getting user and search data from Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves or Google, users of Patriot Search make sure their queries end up in the right databases of the government and its various agencies.

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism invites U.S. nonprofit groups and education organizations to apply for funding to launch new community news ventures and to cooperate with J-Lab in spotlighting best practices and lessons learned.

So smart it hurts, library members can now put graffiti in the card catalog online. Please check this out and understand it.

Two related posts on algorithms and infrastructure:

To be sure, Google's road map of evolving search services is being guided by algorithmic strategies that are foreign to the creative likes of publishing, filmmaking, television production, marketing and advertising. But a willingness to embrace the new math and science of connecting with and selling to consumers and advertisers will make artistic media's leap onto the digital broadband fast track quicker and more profitable.

-Diane Mermigas

This is the same point that I made with a client company last week in Florida. It's not enough to be a content company anymore, because it isn't the content that makes money in the old media world -- it's the infrastructure that produces the bundle within which the content is delivered. And that infrastructure is basically irrelevant now.

-Terry Heaton

I don't want to zeldman all over this, but I've been under the impression that actual makers of films, music, articles, and stories are already on top of this shift towards unbundly creative works and basic economics of attention. The great misfortune of the content cartels is that they're still thinking in terms of "delivering" "content" to "consumers". It's a very mass-production way of looking at the world, and it's really poorly adapted to the internet.

Heaton is right that it will be necessary to understand the customs and tendencies of unbundled media to operate in that world, but he's wrong to use the word algorithm. An algorithm is bounded, defined, predictable and reproducible. Unbundled media is anything but - who could have foreseen the success of Crazy Frog (thanks Rael) or developed the pop-hit formula for Lazy Sunday? This stuff comes out of nowhere, and reaches furthest when detached from its source and reinterpreted.

an impressive reality video of 1609 different webcams positioned around the world. specially developed software called 'picksucker' saved an image of each camera every ten minutes (from 29-01-2004 until 30-01-2004 18:40 GTM), which are placed on a geographical world map & become animated according to time. created by pleix, a community of digital artists (graphic designers, 3d artists, musicians...).
although based on completely different input data, the end result is looks similar to google search activity map. [pleix.net (mov)|thnkx Yannick!]

LCD, LED, HDTV, plasma, they don’t have anything compared to the latest and greatest display technology that should begin appearing next year. The next big thing is called Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, or SED for short. Basically it combines the terrific contrast, responsiveness and sharpness of conventional CRT monitors with the power efficiency, size, and thickness of LCDs or Plasmas. Like any new display technology, it will probably cost an arm and a leg.

Right SED Fred [Red Ferret]

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The project explores how people – youth in particular – use self-representation in digital storytelling to shape and share their lives, and tries to understand these processes through theories of mediation and mediatization across media studies and the field of education.

A neat new machine that generates CC licenses for Second Life works will be available for the first time today at 4.30 pm PST (that's 12.30 am GMT on Thursday), just before Lawrence Lessig's talk gets underway.

Check it out on Democracy Island - if you hang out there a bit you'll be able to hear the talk piped from Pooley Auditorium.

Originally posted by Jen from Wonderland, ReBlogged by evan on Jan 18, 2006 at 08:55 AM

Alison Lewis has launched a brilliant website: SWITCH, an online DIY show where she and her friends focus on teaching young women about electronics through fashion and design.

In the first episode Alison and Diana Eng create a talking frame (using "ingredients such as nail polish and a dental floss container.)

Bonus: Alison was at CES, meeting and talking with people from Eleksen, Iqua, Chitter Chatter, etc. (video)

Proposes several themes for the study of the blogosphere: economic influence, the convergence of sender/receiver roles, class and cultural representation, the constitution of digital identity and the limitations imposed by a digital divide.

"We will discuss the latest trends on technology, online media and social software; entertainment, fashion and design as well as arts & sciences and brands & consumer marketing."

Online file and digital media storage. Free storage limits raised from 10 to 25 GB

At a high level the timeline might just show me activity summarised by tags. At a more detailed level, attached to the timeline will be actual photo thumbnails, blog entry titles, links, etc.

I Am Alpha is a site for developers and other curious folks to play around with the underlying technology behind a whole new crop of cool AIM products.

A Web site launched by Dutch real estate agents will allow house-hunters and the merely curious to view every inch of the Netherlands--up close--starting next week.

The 7th International Symposium on Online Journalism will be held on April 7 and 8, 2006 at the University of Texas at Austin. As usual, the sessions on the first day have a professional/industry emphasis, and those on the second day will be dedicated mainly to a more academic/research focus, with presentation of papers submitted to a blind review process. The deadline for submitting papers' abstracts is January 27. More information here.

Just a day after the unveiling of the new Adobe Production Studio, Adobe Systems Incorporated has today announced the expansion of their Adobe OpenHD alliance. This alliance was formed in April of 2005, and was a concerted effort by Adobe, Dell, HP, Intel, and Microsoft to provide certified and integrated end-to-end solutions for Windows-based HD editing platforms working with HDV, SD, and HD formats. Along with the release of the new Adobe Production Studio, which includes new versions of Adobe After Effects, Premiere, DVD Encore, Audition, the latest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe and its allies are looking to create a strong presence for themselves within the postproduction HD editing and production market.

StoryField is a new desktop database solution for oral history and documentary process, content, resource and idea management.

Developed in FileMaker Pro, StoryField works with Microsoft Office to provide seamless desktop integration and management of multiple users, multiple projects and multiple sources of data during the pre-production to production phases. Users can customize StoryField to create their own digital toolkit and resource library with the ability to track projects, add data and store related materials in various media formats--easily cross-referenced with user defined keyword tags.

Here's everything you need to know about enhanced podcasts: how to get them, how to make them, and some fun ideas for what you can do with them

21-22 january in paris is the avit france VJ conference...loads of great artists on the schedule and interesting conferences.

More easy to use wiki-like wikiness. hmnnn.

Sharemywifi.com connects people with WiFi to people without it! If you've got WiFi and are willing to share it - or you can can 'see' someone else's WiFi and would like to use it - Share My WiFi is for yo

Suitable for use as a textbook or for self-study by professionals, it concentrates on undergraduate-level fundamental concepts and techniques that will enable readers to proceed with building applications on their own.

Buffalo is going to release 150 to 500GB SATA II HDD's in Japan that offer a 3Gbps transfer rate. I think I'll upgrade to one of these once I'll really start doing some serious HD video business... the speed and size are just perfect! Everything might be in RAID 1 too.

In response to the rapid increase in the number of mobile phones being used as music players in Japan, NEC Electronics has developed a dedicated SLI chip for audio. This is a companion chip made specifically to enhance audio in cellphones. It has a CPU dedicated to music play, a digital signal processor and a connection for an application processor. It functions with SD cards and supports copyright protection (CPRM). The chip also minimizes battery drain, thus enabling continuous music play for 50 hours. Sampling started yesterday, and mass production is planned for April. Sample price is $13. Hopefully we'll see these in stateside handsets before the end of the decade.

Press Release

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There's a new restriction on content waiting in the wings--a "webcaster's right" that allows websites to control the dissemination of content they put up. With this new privilege, they'll be able to prevent retransmission even if the copyright on that content is owned by somebody else--even, in fact, if that content was in the public domain.

The workaround, in this case, was simply to expose the feed URLs, and through them, the individual lecture URLs, to public discourse: linking, tagging, blogging, playlisting.

"It was an ironically circular exercise. I started at itunes.stanford.edu, which is just a web placeholder for the JavaScript code that launches iTunes and points it at the special Stanford area of the iTunes Music Store. Then I subscribed to some of the Stanford feeds in iTunes. Capturing the URLs of those feeds was way harder than it should be, because iTunes displays them but won't let you copy them."

David Weinberger: "Wikipedia has been a continuous state of self-criticism that newspapers would do well to emulate. It has discussion pages for every article. It has handled inaccuracies not defensively but with the humble understanding that of course Wikipedia articles will have mistakes, so let's get on with the unending task of improving them. Wikipedia's ambitions are immodest, but Wikipedia is not."

Martijn de Waal talks with Chris about the emerging media ecosystem.

"In the emerging media-ecology no-one has control. The mainstream media used to control everything. They can't anymore. … As mainstream media you have the power to get important ideas out quickly. That should not be the end, but the beginning."

English translation of Diego Galli's research on participatory journalism in Italy. Originally published in le edizioni del Mulino.

Superlowrez is an experiment in re-visiting a historically significant moment when pixel and bitmap were in their infancy. vertexList and Bit Editions have asked eight artists: Joe Amrhein, Brian Conley, Joe McKay, Kristin Lucas, Jillian Mcdonald, Akiko Sakaizumi, Jude Tallichet and Matt Freedman to generate content for custom build matrix of 12X14 pixels, resolution smaller than that of a cursor. Each animation contains 1984 frames, the memory limit of the chip used in production of the device.

Glitch is a highly-adjustable, semi-automated, realtime audio manipulation system which allows you to alter your music in a variety of different ways ranging from quite subtle to extremely bizarre.

nice little hack on how to watch google video from outside the US via proxy. very simple and elegant

Apple Computer's iTunes store, of course, offers a few TV downloads for purchase at $1.99 each. Those include a smattering of shows from NBC, USA Network and the Sci-Fi Channel.

The selections are likely to improve, just as the iTunes lineup has gradually expanded to include additions like the Grateful Dead.

But that won't help anyone who owns a video iPod today and wants to watch something beyond "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives." It especially won't help someone with a library of DVDs that would make perfect iPod fodder.

Ala milliondollarhomepage... the first commercial tagcloud. You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result.

O so very lightnet...a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed from Flickr (or anywhere for that matter) What would be super hot is if u could subscribe to video podcast feeds...

TENORI-ON (sound on your palm) is a novel personal digital instrument for playing sound and ambient light patterns. This instrument was developed by Japanese Artist, Toshio Iwai and Yamaha Corporation

Postvinyl (Space Age Tool for the DJ, 2005) is a project in progress developing space age tools for the DJ. Our current game level contains recordplayers, records, sleeves and posters to be viewed at the discretion of the virtual DJ.

StoryField is a new desktop database solution for oral history and documentary process, content, resource and idea management.

After hearing reports that American tech giants like Microsoft and Yahoo are abiding by Chinese law mandating Internet censorship, some irritated U.S. politicians are threatening to pass laws restricting such cooperation

The We Media Deal has two components to it: (1) the value of the service to you increases in lock-step as you contribute more data to it, and (2) the more transparent the value exchange, the more willing you are to share your data.

If you want to fast download Google Videos as .avi format (nor Google Video .gvl default), take a look at this web based parser

chomsky on intellectual property...dont miss

Sparkle is a module that developers can stick in their Cocoa applications (five-step install!) to get instant self-update functionality. By that, I mean that your app will be able to update itself, not just check for new versions: it'll read the update information from an appcast on your server, download, extract, install, restart, and even offer to show the users release notes before they decide if they want to update.

It's free, it's easy, and it'll make using a Mac better for everyone, so go for it!

øM is a Generative Music Player. The player self generates ambient music wich change each time you listen it.

This means that every time you'll listen to øM music, you'll get a unique listening experience. Generative music behaves like organic lifeforms. øM player is usefull to Meditation, Reki or Yoga practicioners as well as everybody interested in self generated ambient music.

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

oh so very lightnet... and so very random...what a great serendiptious idea..lets hope its not harnessed for spamming u with shit.

"As our slogan says: Give one file, get one free!

File-swap.com is meant to be fun. It acts as a big black box. You put in one file and you will receive a different file in exchange which someone swaped earlier. If many users swap cool files many other users recieve cool files."

The latest American technology helps the Chinese government and other repressive regimes clamp down.

"By taking advantage of market freedom and selling products to repressive regimes, however, these companies undermine another fundamental freedom: the ability of individuals to speak and think without fearing government retribution. Cisco, Secure Computing, and others put the U.S. in the untenable position of advocating for human rights abroad while allowing these companies to supply products that help China and other nations violate human rights."

"I don't know who to blame for this debacle, but the hard drive of the machine I got when joining the QT Engineering tea was called 'Fuck Phil Schiller'."

a 3D network browser that allows users to pan & rotate a large three-dimensional concept diagram. for the Austrian European Community presidency, 200 European key persons were questioned about their opinions on the strengths, weaknesses, chances & risks of the European Union. based on co-occurances of specific topics, 4 different network diagrams were created, representing a European 'thoughtscape' (gedankenraum). see also eurosong visualization & blog impact visualization for more euro-centered data representations. [aec.at]

(We're back, with thanks to Corante for giving us bigger and better hardware.)

Gavin Baker of FreeCulture.org sent me a note asking for people to sign up for their Pledge to boycott DRM campaign. This is really a "no brainer" for me. I cancelled my Sony-BMG membership years ago when they put out their first copy-locked audio disk and I haven't bought a new CD from a store in almost five years. (I do still buy direct from artists/DJs and haunt used-music stores.)
FreeCulture's modest 500 signature goal has been doubled so far and I wouldn't be surprised to see them get 5000 signatures.

A CDM Special Report, http://www.createdigitalmusic.com/intel/

In 2006, we're compiling our own list of audio and music software, plug-ins, and drivers that have been updated as Universal -- containing code that's optimized both for PowerPC Macs and the new Macs with Intel processors. With this list, Mac musicians can keep track of which software will run best on the new chips. We'll also link to compatibility coverage elsewhere and to additional reporting on the new machines and their performance.

You can help! Developers and readers should contact us at a special email address with any tips on software updates or other features:

intel (at) create digital music (dot) com

There are already a fair number of resources available (including new drivers from MOTU), just in case you've just purchased a new Intel iMac. Expect more complete information after we poll manufacturers at the NAMM trade show. Here's the current list:.

The latest movie by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh opens today on 215 art-house screens. It also airs on cable channel HDNet the same day, and the DVD will follow in four days. Will Bubble be remembered as the start of a new era, or a failed experiment?

You probably know Paul Miller as the DJ culture guru famous for creating structure from sequences. Also known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, he works in music, video, and text, he cuts-up and collages, he deconstructs and creates. And Paul appears in our 24×7 film experiment.

The clip in this post is from the beginning of the shoot where the conversation was about collaboration. As with the other clips we’re posting in the production blog, this clip is pretty typical of the shoot however it’s not amongst the footage that’s making it into the final cut.

Have a look at some of the projects Paul has in the works and pick up his book if you have time, it’s an interesting and enjoyable read, of course you have already checked out his music.

Paul Miller (8.6mb quicktime faststart .mov)

Show this video to friends on del.icio.us

Not only did a Texas judge refuse a district attorney's request to force a Houston TV station to turn over unaired video footage, but in so doing he lamented the erosion of constitutional protections for the news media, the Houston Chronicle reports.

"Ever since the Constitution was issued, it's been chipped away at," District Judge Mark Kent Ellis said at Tuesday's hearing on television station KPRC's motion to quash a grand jury subpoena for the video. "I'm sympathetic with the needs of a press to be free."

The platform’s speech recognition algorithms are designed to determine the context and intent from conversational speech, enabling consumers to speak in free-form language. Users can ask for directions to the nearest Italian restaurant, check on traffic for the daily commute, make hands-free phone calls, navigate through hundreds of channels on satellite radio, or search for songs and artists on their iPod intuitively and safely.

A website called Everyday Hogwash just launched. File it in your ideas list under "citizen journalism"-related. E-Media Tidbits reports.

The concept is simple: Hogwash collects "rants" from people about various annoyances and things they've had to endure from companies: "Hidden fees. Really tiny fine print. Overbooked airplanes. Hypnotic hold music." We've all had bad experiences with various companies, so, the website's concept goes, let's share them and "have some therapeutic yuks at the millions of little ways companies stick it to us."

To encourage submissions, the site is very contest-oriented, giving away cash to daily prize winners as selected by a panel of judges.

The concept seems a bit thin for a website -- it's more like a feature of a larger site. Indeed, the idea of using contests to solicit citizen submissions is a good one.

Chatsum is a Firefox extension that lets you chat and leave messages on any website for other Chatsum users to see and interact with.

The Chatsum sidebar houses a fully-fledged chatroom, specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes automagically. If you open a page in a new tab, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re viewing. There is the option to switch between a page level room and a site level room, and you can also see what rooms/pages are popular with other Chatsum users.

Safari and Explorer versions are in development and the developers, George Grinsted and Lee Parry, are planning some other interesting community features: including "non-chat" surprises, a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X 10.4, etc.

Check it out, sign up for the beta and help them "squash the bugs."

More background information: Chatsum Development Blog; George's and Lee's blogs.

Last episode of Laura Baigorri' essay for GAME as CRITIC as ART. 2.0. (see Part I, II, III and IV.)

In one of her PDF , Laura Baigorri recommended also the following games:
- Rethinking wargames that "uses the game of chess to find strategies that challenge existing power structures and their concomitant war machineries",
- UnderAsh and UnderSiege "is about the modern history of Palestine and it focuses on the lives of Palestinian family between 1999-2002 during the second Intifada. All levels are based on true stories."
- Crosser and La Migra simulate opposing points of view on the Rio Grande (more details),
- Stone Throwers, "in dedication to the Palestinians who have died in the nearly three months of clashes with the Israeli army."
- The Great Game, a daily record of Enduring Freedom as a 3d terrain map of the Afghanistan region,
- Tropical America: your journey begins as the sole survivor of a terrible massacre - you must find four pieces of evidence to bring justice to the memory of your small village.

Diffusion and investigation:

Water Cooler Games, Opensorcery, Molleindustria, Selectparks, Persuasive Games.

Shows: Breaking and Entering: Art and the Video Game and re:Play.

NPR wakes up to our looming cultural crash from bad copyright laws

more than 100 stations, including many UPN, WB and Fox affiliates, just started generating money from their Web sites for the first time in 2005

The Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism in partnership with the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation is accepting applications for this expenses-paid seminar that combines practical instruction in multimedia reporting with in-depth exploration of media convergence and other critical issues for online news operations.

Participants will get five full days of intense hands-on instruction on how to do multimedia stories for the Web...

(Continued at CyberJournalist.)

RESIDENTS of a trendy London neighbourhood are to become the first in Britain to receive “Asbo TV” — television beamed live to their homes from CCTV cameras on the surrounding streets.

The people behind IT Conversations are starting a podcast network!

Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media is a new academic journal which seems of interest with regards to my research/work/interests.

Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due January 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking work in the field of game studies.

d Culture’s scope will include the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives, including textual analysis, political economy, cultural studies, ethnography, critical race studies, gender studies, media studies, public policy, international relations, and communication studies. Other possible arenas include:

- Issues of gaming culture related to race, class, gender, and sexuality
- Issues of game development
- Textual and cultural analysis of games as artifacts
- Issues of political economy and public policy in both US and international arenas

It’s an interdisciplinary publication, welcoming submissions by those working in fields such as Communication, Anthropology, Computer Science, English, Sociology, Media Studies, Cinema/Television Studies, Education, Art History, and Visual Arts.

Technorati Tags: game, videogames

Here's a thought to ponder on paid-vs.-free content from the article "Shifting stars: Why Howard Stern, Ted Koppel and New York Times columnists are moving from free to fee media by Fortune reporter Marc Gunther:

"Ironic, isn't it? Only big stars have the clout to persuade people to pay to hear what they have to say. But by doing so, those stars get a little smaller."

Here's what I think will happen. Yes, those big stars will get knocked down a notch as their content moves from free access to paid. At the same time, new stars created online (...)

Entry continued...

Some Internet companies do not respect freedom of expression when operating in repressive countries, according to Reporters Without Borders. The organization has condemned "the ethical lapses displayed by certain Internet sector companies" when applying their policies in some countries. RWB mentioned the recent case of a blogger whose weblog was closed down by Microsoft under pressure from the Chinese authorities. Other cases condemned by RWB involve Yahoo!, Google, Secure Computing, Fortinet, and Cisco Systems.

To avoid new cases in the future, RWB recently issued six concrete proposals such as avoiding censorship in search engines, protecting personal information, and (...)

Entry continued...

A Global Resource for Using Cell Phones in Social Activism

Mobile phones have emerged as a civic and campaign organizing tool across traditional socio-economic and cultural boundaries. Cell phone campaigns have swung elections through innovative get-out-the-vote activities, have been used to ensure impartial elections through monitoring, have resulted in massive collective action to free political prisoners or stop illegal logging, and are being used in public health strategies.

MobileActive convened in Toronto in 2005 to bring together, for the first time ever, activists from around the world to explore the use of mobile phones in civic action campaigns. This wiki and MobileActive site is an aggregation of the learnings from this convergence, stories from participants and their projects, and resources for activists interested in using mobiles in their campaigns. (For write-ups about MobileActive 05 go to our press page).

The goal of MobileActive is to grow the network of mobile activists, to share knowledge and skills, and to provide a peer network, training and resources to those interested in exploring mobile phones in their civic engagagement, mobilization, and civic action campaigns.

We aim to better understand the strengths and limits of the medium, explore available technologies for campaigners, and share lessons learned, campaign examples, and tech tools to increase activists’ ability to organize our constituencies.

If you used mobiles in your campaign, please share your story! If you need or have resources, let us know! And if you want to join this growing network of activists from around the globe send us a note: info[at]mobileactive.org.

International Competition for Cyberarts

The Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for Cyberarts is being conducted for the 19th time in 2006. In addition to the classic categories-Interactive Art, Net Vision, Computer Animation / Visual Effects and Digital Musics-Digital Communities and [the next idea] Art and Technology Grant competition that debuted last year will be reprised.

Online Submission Deadline: March 17, 2006; Total Prize Money: 117,500 Euro; 6 Golden Nicas; 12 Awards of Distinction; Up to 12 Honorary Mentions in each category.

INTERACTIVE ART: The "Interactive Art" category is dedicated to interactive works in all forms and formats, from installations to performances. Here, particular consideration is given to the realization of a powerful artistic concept through the especially appropriate use of technologies, the innovativeness of the interaction design, and the work's inherent potential to expand the human radius of action.

COMPUTER ANIMATION/VISUAL EFFECTS

The "Computer Animation / Visual Effects" category has been part of the Prix Ars Electronica since its very inception. It recognizes excellence in independent work in the arts and sciences as well as in high-end commercial productions in the film, advertising and entertainment industries. In this category, artistic originality counts just as much as masterful technical achievement.

DIGITAL MUSICS

Contemporary digital sound productions from the broad spectrum of "electronica" come in for consideration in the "Digital Musics" category, as do works combining sound and media, computer compositions ranging from electro-acoustic to experimental music, or sound installations. This category's programmatic agenda is to expand horizons beyond the confines of individual genres and artistic currents.

NET VISION

The "Net Vision" category singles out for recognition artistic projects in the Internet that display brilliance in how they have been engineered, designed and-especially-conceived, works that are outstanding with respect to innovation, interface design and the originality of their content. The way in which a work of net-based art deals with the online medium is essential in this category.

DIGITAL COMMUNITIES

This category focuses attention on the wide-ranging social impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in the fields of social software, mobile communications and wireless networks. "Digital Communities" spotlights bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, bridging the geographical as well as gender-based digital divide, or creating outstanding social software and enhancing accessibility of technological-social infrastructure. This category showcases the political potential of digital and networked systems and is thus designed as a forum for the consideration of a broad spectrum of projects, programs, initiatives and phenomena in which social innovation is taking place, as it were, in real time. A Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction and up to 12 Honorary Mentions will be awarded in the Digital Communities category in 2006.

[the next idea] Art and Technology Grant

The aim of this grant focusing on the mutually enriching interplay of art and technology is to nurture concepts for the future that young thinkers are coming up with today. This category’s target group includes interested persons throughout the world between the ages of 19 and 27, who have developed a not-yet-realized concept in the fields of media art, media design or media technology. The winner will receive a 7,500-euro grant and an invitation to spend a semester as scientific assistant and artist-in-residence at the Ars Electronica Futurelab.

Iris Mayr
Prix Ars Electronica | Project Manager

Ars Electronica Center Linz
Hauptstraße 2
A-4040 Linz
Code: Prix

Tel. ++43.732.7272-74
Fax ++43.732.7272-676
info[at]prixars.aec.at

The networks and some cable channels are quietly signing up for new services that basically deliver “ratings” for their ads. Nielsen Media now offers minute-by-minute measurements to determine the effectiveness of ads. Based on thousands of daily Internet surveys, IAG Research is able to determine which ads are watched most attentively. This summer, MediaCheck hopes to have its measurement boxes in 35,000 homes in 4 to 7 cities to see how viewers respond to ads for both live and recorded programs. As IAG CEO Alan Gould says, "The new currency is measuring engagement." Seems like television is on its way to becoming as accountable as the Internet.

A Hollywood studio — MGM — won a lawsuit against an Internet file-sharing company — Grokster. Bill Murray, former executive of the Motion Picture Association of America talks with lawyer Denise Howell about MGM versus Grokster in The Bag and Baggage Podcast, #16. [Bag and Baggage]

Another day on the newswires: ZDNet is exploring wireless backhaul capacity upgrades in order to watch Gwen Stefani videos on your cellphone. Tech-blogger Om Malik is excited over a company offering online Calendars. The intellectual mecca known as the E! channel is launching a broadband channel.

Not to be a killjoy, but is regurgitated television and on-line calendars really the best we can do with our 1-30Mbps broadband connections? Shouldn't there be something more? Games utilizing two-way video? Virtual church? Virtual tours? Better virtual sex? Something that vaguely resembles innovation? Assuming capacity, caps and deployment are not an issue: what kind of content would you like to see emerge over the next five years?

There's been plenty of talk about the two big announcements at MWSF 2006, so I won't bother to go into them. Yes, I want a sexy new MacBook Pro (though not the first few off the assembly line, thank you very much) but my technolust doesn't add much to the conversation.

But what about the other announcements? Let's see if we can't find a common theme.

iPhoto will now be able to publish and subscribe to image RSS feeds of photo albums, deemed "Photocasting." Photocast feeds will work with regular RSS readers, but iPhoto will be able to handle 1-click subscriptions and will treat Photocast feeds as special folders. It's kind of like a distributed Flickr, using RSS.

iWeb, the new iLife tool for web sites, has built-in blogging and podcasting tools. While hosted blogging tools have gotten to the point where even executives can blog, there's still a market for client-based blogging tools. So with iWeb, people will be able to produce RSS feeds, complete with media enclosures from other iLife applications.

iMovie has been updated to make web ready video easy, specifically for podcasting video to iPods. GarageBand has added a metric assload of podcasting features. Podcasting, by the way, is something that happens over RSS.

Looking at the new things in iLife, I can't find that common theme that I was looking for. So let's talk about RSS instead.

Apple has been doing well with consuming RSS for the past year or so. It started off with Safari 2, which treats feeds like bookmarks and relies on bookmark folders to see all new items.

It's not the best feed reader for OS X, but it's likely the most ubiquitous and I use it alongside NetNewsWire for feeds that update more frequently than I care to read them (like reddit and del.icio.us/popular). Apple also threw in a pretty cool RSS screensaver to boot (seriously, check out the video if you haven't seen it).

Then, iTunes started being able to subscribe to podcasts. They even added an entire section of the iTunes Music Store devoted to podcasts! I'm reminded what a smart move that was everytime I hear an NPR show telling people to look for their podcast in the iTMS.

As an aside, OS X Server also has publishing tools. It comes with a blogging server and even provide instructions for using it as a podcast server in academic settings. However, most of the people in the market for iLife don't have access to OS X Server.

Apple has a lot to gain from more people publishing feeds. For one thing, more podcasts mean fuller iPod hard drives, which means upgrades to bigger iPods. Also, video podcasts mean upgrades to video iPods. This definitely fits with the business needs of an iPod-centered Apple. It also gives them some leverage to set the agenda for RSS. Toolmakers now include Apple's RSS extension for podcasting; I bet Flickr supports Photocasting within a week.

Now, we just have to wait and see how it all actually plays out. Photocasting sounds neat, but Apple's RSS extension wasn't met with the warmest reception. And iTunes' 1-click podcast subscription? Lucas Gonze advises the engineers behind that technology: "You can't put this stuff on your resumes, folks. It will lose you potential jobs to be known as the person who made these decisions."

Those examples show it's within the realm of possibility that Apple could screw up the very thing that RSS makes possible: interoperability. One thing I haven't touched on is how every mention of publishing RSS seems to involve .Mac, which I hope is just a marketing push. I would hate to see all these advances fail to change the world because it only works with a bundled hosting service (as opposed to failing to change the world because they're only available on a minority OS).

Apple has always carried certain perceptions. They're known for being distinct from Windows systems by their good design, high prices, and catering to people who both produce and consume. While none of those are always true, it is common wisdom and the last one is borne out by iLife 06.

It's funny though, a video has been circulating showing a Mac desktop demonstrating features Bill Gates announced for the upcoming Vista. I guess when Microsoft announced RSS would be a core technology for Vista they were announcing one more feature for Apple to deploy first.

Apple got the RSS religion a while ago.The difference here is that Apple is making the tools to create feeds, not just consume them. This is about being a producer, not a consumer. This is part of the democratization of media, giving tools to people to publish online. Not just text, but media. By lowering the barrier to entry, they're making it easier for anyone (well, any Mac user) to start publishing. They're taking some of the tools of the geek elite and distributing them to the masses.

Tags: apple podcasting videoblogging ilife rss photocasting ilife06 osx mac

One wonders what we might carry with us "digitally" a decade or two from now, with memory and storage capacity getting larger and much more affordable every day. Imation got us thinking about this by showing several interesting concepts for carrying digital files at the CES – the 256 Mb Flash Wristband and the 4Gb Micro Hard Drive. They're interesting concepts, particularly the wristband, but just think that a decade from now the bang-per-buck factor will have improved by several orders of magnitude.

Your Room as Browser

Ambient Intelligence, with its network of cooperating devices, offers the promise of providing us with exciting new experiences in the home...An Ambient Intelligence system can interpret a description in Physical Markup Language (PML)--developed by Philips to describe experiences within an Ambient Intelligence environment. Devices in a network can jointly use their individual capabilities to render that experience at a given location.

In effect, your whole room becomes a 'browser' that brings the experience to life. For example, PML-enabled lights add to the experience by getting brighter or dimmer, or changing colour. A PML-enabled hi-fi provides an appropriate soundscape. Almost any device can be PML-enabled: the possibilities are only limited by the imaginations of their manufacturers. Suppose a room is rendering an experience described as 'warm and sunny': the lights, the TV, the central heating, the electronically controlled blinds and (a little further into the future) even the ceiling, walls and floor coverings could all contribute to creating it. [via nicolas at pasta and vinegar]

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

A wonderful 22 minute video from the BBC looking at how user-generated content and mobile phone footage on stories like the London bombings has changed the way broadcasters report the news. The BBC has been looking back at how user generated content has become part of everyday news throughout 2005. Input from news editors from around the world, including Dan Gilmore. [via Cyberjournalist.net]

Windows MediaPlayer version

RealPlayer version

: Since this is something close to my heart (I've talked about the rise of the journalist-entreprenuer before), this is something I am happy to spread the word about (I won't be able to make it since I've committed to be in London for the OPA conference):
OJR 2006 is a free one-day conference for independent online journalists on March 3, 2006 at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. This conference is for writers and editors who want to share their passion for online media and learn from colleagues how to improve the quality, visibility and profitability of their work. Participants will gather in discussion sessions to share their recent work and to talk about how journalists can make their websites more engaging, informative and financially successful.
More information and the registration form are available at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/conference/

As Fabien points out, the MapQuest FindMe (integrated with AIM) is a clever service that allow users to use manual sharing of one’s position. Which is one of the guidelines that would emerge from our CatchBob! experiments.

Self-disclosing one’s location seems to emerge as a good trend now, both in the real world of services and the academic world of research as in those papers:

• Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P.: ‘Location is not enough!’: an Empirical Study of Location-Awareness in Mobile Collaboration. Proceedings of the third IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, November 28-30, 2005, Tokushima, Japan, pp. 21-28, IEEE Press: Los Alamitos, California.
• Benford, S., Seagar, W., Flintham, M., Anastasi, R., Rowland, D., Humble, J., Stanton, D., Bowers, J., Tandavanitj, N., Adams, M., Farr, J. R., Oldroyd, A., and Sutton, J. (2004). The error of our ways: The experience of self-reported position in a location-based game. In Proceedings of the the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. (UbiComp 2004), pages 70–87, Nottingham.

Both paper advocate for self-disclosure of location. They rely on different approach to come up with this recommendation. Benford’s paper has a qualitative approach and is more focused on users’ thoughts. Whereas ours is more mixed-methods (quantitative methods dominant though), it proposed the same idea because of the underwhelming effects of automatic location-awareness on how people collaborate. Another paper for a conference about ‘designing for collaboration’ will deal with this issue.

I am still digging this issue of location-awareness on collaboration, working on both asynchronous location awareness and the importance of letting people express their own strategy.

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SPONSORED BY: Age of Empires III - Real-Time Strategy Game Control a European power on a quest to colonize and conquer the New World. AOE3 introduces new gameplay elements, as well as new civilizations, units, and technologies. http://www.ageofempires3.com/

"Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs. Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM (Profile, Products, Articles) Deutschland, has his own view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime. "Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke said in an interview this week. "There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more.""

There are varying opinions on this, but I thought most experts agreed that CDs and DVDs would last in the 20+ year range before degradation, depending on the type and quality of the dye used. This guy, who's credentials sound impressive, is saying two years for cheap CDs and only five years for quality CDs? That's disastrous! I've always been a big believer in lots of big hard drives with the data mirrored all over the place, and this only confirms that opinion. It's sad to think of all the data and memories burned to CD/DVD that might not be accessible even five years from now. Anyone had trouble with optical discs they burned more than a couple of years ago?

Calling All Independent Filmmakers in the San Francisco Bay Area — The Bay Area Video Coalition, Independent Television Service and the Center for Social Media are hosting an event on Friday February 24, 2006 on the topic of the fair use exception to American copyright law, and What Fair Use Really Means For Independent Filmmakers. Promising to expose the “secret side” of copyright, the event includes a showing of UNTOLD STORIES, a short video produced at American University’s Center for Social Media about the problem of rights clearance for documentary filmmakers, and a discussion with filmmakers, programmers, and legal experts about such topics as —

• What’s fair in quoting or appropriating something without paying for it?

• What are the implications of Fair Use on freedom of expression and distribution?

• How can I reduce production and legal costs and follow the law?

• How do I deal with the exploitation of my material?

• What is the best way to navigate the law safely?

Panelists will include:Patricia Aufderheide, Director, Center for Social Media, American University; Fred Von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Jack Walsh, independent filmmaker and Co-Director, National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture; Donald Young, Director of Broadcast Programming, Center for Asian American Media; Claire Aguilar, Director of Programming, Independent Television Service. The event is free; no registration required.

out (if you haven’t already) the Center for Social Media’s Documentary Filmmaker’s Statement of Best Practice in Fair Use. [Creative Commons: weblog]

DVB-T is a standard for broadcasting digital television over the air and is found in many countries outside of North America. This hack involves using a video card to generate the DVB-T signal. This project was inspired by Tempest for Eliza, which we covered recently. To pull this off you have to add some custom settings for an additional screen in your X server configuration. When you start up the server and switch to the new screen it will generate the proper signal. The signal strength is pretty weak though and the card has to be wired directly to the DVB-T set-top box. The box will display two different channels, each with a test image. The signal isn’t actually generated directly, but is a product of the VGA card’s DAC’s harmonics.

[thanks james]

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BY CYNDI GREENING, PHOENIX, USA (CINEMA MINIMA) — I was so excited
to see a digital forum entitled HD for Indies. I thought, WOW, Mike Curtis is coming to Sundance. This will be AWESOME!! Alas, it was just a title that was the same as his site … it wasn’t Mike. So, those of you who frequent Mike’s site, don’t get confused by the listing! Herewith then, the Digital Forums of interest.

• Production Technology Now (Fri, 20 Jan, 11am) HD, production technology, formats, frame rates, editing applications and blowups. Simplifying the process. Moira Gunn, host of NPRs TECH NATION moderates.

• Cinema On The Move (Sat, 21 Jan, 11am)) New Mobile Technologies and the Next Wave of Filmmaking. A discussion about the alternate sources for cinematic product distribution including PSPs, cellular phones, games, laptops, PDAs. Walt Mossberg, Technology Columnist for the WALL STREET JOURNAL moderates.

• Podcasting, Vlogging and The Freedom of Speech (Sun, 22 Jan, 11am) The global forum for expression was revolutionized by internet blogging, podcasting and videoblogging. Marketing, advertising and distribution. Jason Calacanis of WEBLOGS, INC moderates. Now, the REAL question … why am I not on this panel????

• Creative Editing (Mon, 23 Jan, 11am) The Language of Moving Images. Crafting images and audio into a coherent story, well-paced, with dramatic rhythm and unique style. Jennifer Hilner, Entertainment Editor of WIRED magazine moderates.

• Faces in the Crowd (Tues, 24 Jan, 11am) Finding Your Audience in the Thousand Channel Universe. Exciting forum that details how filmmaker’s can find their target audience and “get eyes on their film.” Journalist and Author John Anderson moderates.

• Case Study: QUINCEANERA (Weds, 25 Jan, 11am) The miracle of independent filmmaking discussed and moderated by pioneering filmmaker Todd Haynes (FAR FROM HEAVEN). Worth catching to hear Haynes’ point of view.

• Case Study: PUCCINI FOR BEGINNERS (Thurs, 26 Jan, 11am) Effie Brown (REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES) moderates discussion of InDigEnt film.

• Stay-at-Home-Movies (Fri, 27 Jan, 11am) The Home Theatre Experience and the Future of Exhibition. Where have all the audiences gone? As more and more viewers shun the communal filmgoing experience, the unique challenges for distributors, filmmakers and technology experts are moderated by William Alpert of BARRON’S magazine.

Mashup Camp is officially on. Anyone interested in mashups, APIs and the web as platform should go visit MashupCamp.com to sign-up for what promises to be a great event next month. David Berlind is putting together this “un-conference about the un-computer” along with co-organizer Doug Gold. As David announced a couple of weeks ago:

My goal for Mashup Camp is to do the opposite of what all these other Web 2.0-esque conferences are doing. It won’t be invitation only. The pilot event will be modest in size guaranteeing intimacy and low or perhaps even no cost to attend (perfect for some of the people doing the real innovation on a low budget). And, it will involve a mix of open networking time, leader-facilitated discussions that address some of the most important issues and concerns that the API providers and the mashup artists actually need to work out, and fun (for example, a hottest mashup contest with an even hotter prize).

Attendees already signed-up include some of the major API providers (Amazon, Yahoo, Eventful, Salesforce), press (BusinessWeek), bloggers (TechCrunch), and lots of creative and interesting mashup developers. Got a cool mashup? Win prizes in the Best Mashup competition.

What kind of sessions to expect? Business models and where’s the money, best practices for mashups and for APIs, mashup standards and microformats, mobile mashups, venture capital for mashups, usability, and legal issues. You see something missing, then feel free to go over the Proposed Sessions Wiki and add another.

The cost? Free. Invitations required? No. But, space is limited to the first 250 who sign-up…

Slate has an story about the decline and fall of the largest video rental chain in the world, Hollywood's New Zombie -- the last days of Blockbuster.

As far the studios are concerned, other than collecting the money that Blockbuster owes them for past movies, the video chain has little relevance to their future. Viacom perspicuously divorced itself from Blockbuster by spinning it off to its shareholders, and, as one Viacom executive told me, "Blockbuster will certainly not survive and it will not be missed." It is another zombie in Hollywood.

While I think it's a bit early to be checking for a pulse, it's interesting to note that it wasn't that long ago when Blockbuster was putting the "mom and pop" video stores out of business. I wonder what decisions they'll make this year in their efforts to survive in this incredibly competitive and ever-changing entertainment environment.

via Ryan from Orbitcast.

Gnash plays SWF up to version 7 as standalone player (which works) and also has a plug-in for Firefox (which is still under heavy development).

Dennis Haarsager has a thoughtful paper up on the future of public broadcasting, shaped in part by his experiences with the Open Media Network, a DRM-based distribution scheme that a number of PBS stations are using.

News Corp. raised the hackles of some MySpace users last month when the site blocked links to video-hosting site YouTube. It eventually capitulated, saying there had been "a simple misunderstanding". Now, however, some are reporting that MySpace is blocking Revver, another video service. Another "misunderstanding"? Maybe, though it could have more to do with the strategy for the site News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch announced yesterday -- a strategy in which video downloads play a central role, along with instant messaging and internet calling. Sound familiar? Those are pretty much the same differentiators Murdoch said he wanted to add back in October as part of his "be different by offering the same stuff everybody else has" plan. Murdoch adds that the portal business is in danger of becoming outdated, that young people don't need a site to tell them where to go -- when, by adding the videos and voice calling and beefing up the site's instant-messaging service, it sounds like like a portal is exactly what he wants MySpace to be. MySpace can add all the cool new features it wants, but if it eschews the community and user-created content that made it so popular in favor of a broadcast-style business, its young user base will simply flock somewhere else. Update: After some people noticed -- just like with YouTube -- MySpace has reversed its blocking of Revver.

Nieman Reports, a quarterly print journal from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, devotes its cover, 31 pages, and 13 articles in its Winter 2005 edition to the topic of citizen journalism. My copy showed up in the mail yesterday, and I can tell you that it's filled with some great stuff. I hope every news executive who doesn't already subscribe orders a copy.

Alas, you'll have to read it in print. Nieman doesn't post content from the publication online for weeks after the print release. (Here's the subscription page.)

The focus of the issue is (...)

Entry continued...

Everyone is talking abotu thsi kids Review site called Incredibooks. Thanks Peter for making sure I blogged about it.

It’s a great example of what can be done with the StructuredBlogging tools we shipped.

The term “the Flickr of Video” has been bantered around for over six months now - and it’s great to see such a large number of sites purporting to be just that. Michael Arrington has a nice overview article on it.

I don’t know if JD Lasica has been claiming that ourmedia is that, but without tags - I don’t see how they can claim that.

Anyway - there’s one dark horse which I know is coming round the bend. Won’t disclose it - just yet. But it’ll be hot.

Tomi Ahonen writes:

Mobile TV is only four years old, as two innovations were launched simultaneously in 2001. In Finland SMS-to-TV chat went live, while MTV launched Videoclash - the programme where viewers could decide what videos to see next, and vote via mobile phones. Since then in 2002, 2003, 2004 and even 2005 when I met with thinkers in this TV-Mobile space, most were always only thinking of putting football highlights, news clips etc onto mobile phones. Boring boring boring.

seen first signs of real innovations - you have to see MTV's Head and Shoulders to really "get it" - what we can do and what can really sell - on mobile TV. When Robbie Williams promoted his new CD, he had his concert simulcast to 3G phones. At the MTV Europe Awards the mobile MTV channel went back stage and shot exclusive footage that was only seen on mobile phones. At Big Brother houses around Europe it is now commonplace to have exclusive cameras - and latest innovation from Finland this Autumn, exclusive microphones - that viewers of the show can get more through their 3G phones.

Long ago, I tried to argue that we shouldn’t call big media “mainstream media” because that would be conceding that blogs aren’t mainstream. I got nowhere but then I’m not Kos, who says — after getting past a traffic ego fit and an obligatory ideological slap:

That’s why I call old-school media the “traditional media”. It’s political neutral, it has no negative connotations. It doesn’t put old media on a pedestal, as though it was more “legitimate” than new interactive media. It doesn’t imply that we are tiny niches while they speak to the mainstream and the masses.

o proudly take our place in the mainstream. But to do that, we first need to stop implying that we’re not with that stupid “MSM” monicker.

Agreed. [via Kurtz]

Tim Finin of UMBC points to a paper on XPOD as a prototype portable music player that can sense a user's context -- what she is doing, her level of activity, mood, etc. -- and that to refine its playlist. The device monitors several external variables from a streaming version of the BodyMedia SenseWear to model the user's context and predict the most appropriate music genre via a neural network.

[thank you Tim !!]

Gear Live has a great short video of the Series 3 prototype in action at CES. It features TiVoPony showing off features (TiVoPony is the TiVo employee that hangs out on the TiVo Community board). The front LED display is incredibly sharp and looks handy. The way the multiple tuners works looks pretty smooth. Pony also covers how hard drive upgrades will be simple plug-n-play type upgrades. The new remote control is also covered, which features a way to tell top from bottom, even in the dark (they have ribs on the back, on one side).

I can't wait to buy one of these boxes and ditch my crappy cable-provider DVR, and if anyone at TiVo is reading this, I will name my next child after you if I can get a unit for early review when they're closer to being done.

Tim Bray has a thorough essay on the pros and cons (mostly cons) of inventing new XML dialects.

Tim starts by saying…

Designing XML Languages is hard. It’s boring, political, time-consuming, unglamorous, irritating work. It always takes longer than you think it will, and when you’re finished, there’s always this feeling that you could have done more or should have done less or got some detail essentially wrong.

…. which pretty well sums up the challenges with creating new document formats for the Web. Of course, we try to eliminate some of these drawbacks when doing microformats- mostly be focusing on existing behaviors on the web and aiming for the 80% use case (rather than trying to satisfy every edge case), or in Tim’s words, “do[ing] less.”

As Tim went on to describe the challenges and pitfalls of creating arbitrary XML dialects, I was already preparing a “Just use microformats!” response in my head. But, alas, Tim beat me to the punch.

Along with DocBook, ODF, UBL and Atom, he recommends “XHTML+Microformats” as a way to reuse an existing XML dialect, and thereby bypass some of the birth pains of creating a new format. Tim says:

If you’re delivering information to humans over the Web, even if you don’t think of it as “Web Pages”, it’s almost certainly insane not to use XHTML. Yes, XHTML is semantically weak and doesn’t really grok hierarchy and has a bunch of other problems.

Thanks, Tim, for the endorsement of Microformats here.

Of course, the fact that the language is semantically weak, doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me, since we can build on top of the semantics it does have (instead of reinventing things like lists, links and paragraphs). And for hierarchies of things, you can always use XOXO.

Creating new XML languages is a hard task and not likely to be rewarding. We don’t need more arbitrary formats, each with their own namespace and slightly different semantics.

a semantic data visualization that shows the relationships within complex concept network structures. in this example, the diagram represents the connotations (e.g 'has a border to', 'is part of', 'is spoken in') between countries, languages, continents & oceans based on CIA factbook data. the center node can be clicked for detailed information, while adjacent nodes can be selected to put them in the center. another variant of this visual browser is capable of visualizing social networks in outfoxed, a firefox extension for social browsing. [der-mo.net (cia factbook) & getoutfoxed.com (social network)]

Code, Science and Content; Making Collaborative Creativity Sustainable

First Monday's tenth anniversary conference, 15-17 May 2006 at the University of Illinois at Chicago: Recent years have seen a strong interest among academics, policy makers, activists, business and other practitioners on open collaboration and access as a driver of creativity. In some areas, such as free software / open source, sustainable business models have emerged that are holding their own against more traditional, proprietary software industries. In the sciences, the notions of open science and open data demonstrate the strong tradition of openness in the academic community that, despite its past successes, is increasingly under threat. And open access journals and other open content provide inspiring examples of collaborative creativity and participatory access, such as Wikipedia, while still in search of models to ensure sustainability.

There are clear links between these areas of openness: open content often looks explicitly towards open source software for business models, and open science provides through its history a glimpse of the potential of openness, how it can work, as well as a warning of the threats it may face. Finally, open collaboration is closely linked to access to knowledge issues, enabling active participation rather than passive consumption especially in developing countries.

Despite these clear links, there has been surprisingly little thoughtful analysis of this convergence, or of the real value of the common aspect of open collaboration. In particular, while open source software - due to its strong impact on business and on bridging the digital divide - has drawn much attention, it may provide false hopes for the sustainability of openness in other areas of content that need careful examination. The conference - FM10 Openness: Code, science and content: Making collaborative creativity sustainable - provides a platform for such analysis and discussion, resulting in concrete proposals for sustainable models for open collaboration in creative domains.

The conference will draw on the experience of First Monday as the foremost online, peer-reviewed academic journal covering these issues since May 1996. Not only has First Monday published numerous papers by leading scholars on the topics of open collaboration, open access, and open content in its various forms, it is itself an example of open collaboration in practice: for nearly a decade, the journal has been published on a purely voluntary basis, with no subscription fees, advertising, sponsorship or other revenues. The success of First Monday is demonstrated by thousands of readers around the world, downloading hundreds of thousands of papers each month. This conference celebrates First Monday's tenth anniversary. The first issue of First Monday appeared on the first Monday of May 1996 at the International World Wide Web Conference in Paris. Altogether, 658 papers have been published in 115 issues, written by 783 different authors from around the world.

The conference is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (http://www.macfound.org/), the Open Society Institute (http://www.soros.org/), and the University of Illinois at Chicago

It looks like the false start is over, and the Google Video Store is up for business. According to my calculations, they have lost $1.99 so far, as the episode of "The Twilight Zone" I would have paid to watch is not Mac-compatible. My BLINK reaction? Weak interface, with even weaker title selections. I'm not underestimating Google for a second - I'm just counting this as strike two in their first at-bat. Confusing launch date, confusing nav & compatibility... I believe they will do better. And, as a Mac user, I demand it.

Here’s a nice bit of social commentary on the effect of mobile phones on people's lives, both the positive and the negative. A few paragraphs:

"You access what you want, when you want it and how you want it," said Ralph Vituccio, director of Media Development in Communications Design and an instructor in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

"In my age group, you don’t see people who are accustomed to that kind of viewing," said the 55-year-old instructor. "They’d rather sit down in a passive way and do it."

Younger people want two things, choice and control, and they don't care about anything else, he said.

While the concern is expressed that "Technology becomes a form of life. We mold ourselves to fit the technology as opposed to the technology fitting particular needs we have", I think the way younger people use the phones indicates this won’t be a problem. After all, they want "choice and control", and they have it. Many are in fact using mobile phones to control other areas of their life — such as getting friends to meet them on the corner rather than having to meet the parents. It’s just a question of familiarity...

"The root cause of the media industry’s problems is economic – the price of coordination has dropped discontinuously, enabling the rise of these new models. New sources of advantage in the media industry must leverage cheap coordination – not fight it."

How America's broadband policy and telcom monopolies are putting the economic future of the country at risk. Highly recommended read, even if you're familiar with municipal wifi.

RecentChangesCamp is a conference in Portland, OR about "building communities worth having," both online and offline.

"We're not going to block our customers from accessing any content from their broadband or DSL connection," says AT&T CFO Rick Lindner at a Citigroup conference (see Webcast, via IP Democracy). "However, the reality is that business models are changing and I think there are opportunities - to enter into commercial arrangements that are beneficial to both companies and beneficial to customers as well." How? AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre ignited controversy in October when he suggested Google should pay a premium to get decent network performance from AT&T's pipes.

Sony has presented it's newest DV cam, the DCR-HC96, with 3CCD sensor and a 3.31MP resolution (3.05 for the photos and 2.05 for the videos), and it also has a function to record videos in 4ch surround. The device measures 72x120x91 and weighs 490g.

It seems kind of like an odd concept.  Why would anyone need to spy on themselves?

Well I can think of a bunch of reasons when it comes to digital media.

But first, a little historical context.

We've all had that terrible experience with spyware that has been installed on our machines without our knowledge or permission. That spyware often tracked our behavior and used that information to deliver popup ads or some other form of annoyance.  Fortunately, through technology, government attention, and changing market norms, the spyware threat seems to be fading a bit.

Maybe the logical successor to spyware is "myware" as my friend Seth Goldstein likes to call it.

Myware is software that runs on our computers and other digital devices and tracks our behavior, in many ways like the spyware we all hate.  But there's an important difference.  Myware is put on our devices by us.  We spy on ourselves.  Again, why would we do this?

Well, for one because we honestly can't keep track of everything we do.  And because what we do and how we consume digital media is important.  Important to us and to others who might learn about new stuff by watching our behavior.

Some examples.

Last.fm is a music service that I've written about in the past.  You download and install some "myware" that last.fm provides and it tracks the music you listen to in iTunes, Winamp, Yahoo!,and a number of other music services. Your music listening history is shown on the web to you, in case you are interested in seeing what you've been listening to, and everyone else.  In addition, last.fm has a music player that creates a streaming audio/internet radio channel just for you based on what you've been listening to.  And, most importantly, last.fm creates a social network for you by linking you to people who share your music tastes.  It's a great service and I use it all the time to find new music.

Attention Trust is a non-profit that is trying to promote user control over their clickstream information.  If you use Firefox, you can download the Attention Trust Firefox Extension and it will capture all of your clickstream information and report it to any Attention Trust compliant services.  I do that and send my data to a Root Vault. I am not exactly sure what will happen if you click on the link to Root Vault.  But when I do it, I see a summary of my web clickstream.  It is interesting to me to know that I spend 14% of my Internet clicks on this blog, by far more than anywhere else.  Next is Amazon.com with 6%.  Rhapsody and Delicious come in next around 2%.  That's interesting to me.  I would like to be able to share that information with everyone else in the hope that it may be useful in some way to others. My friend Seth Goldstein is involved in both Attention Trust and Root and has done as much thinking about this as anyone I know.

These are two good ones, but there are many more.  While this isn't technically an example of myware, Josh and I have been spending a lot of time on Xbox and Xbox Live.  Xbox tracks your game play and records your level of skill and then shows that to everyone else on Xbox Live so you can get paired into a quality match.  Another excellent example of spying on yourself at work.

The point I am making here is that spying on yourself is a trend that I see developing on the Internet and in digital media in general.  I think it will bring tremendous value to users over time as they and others benefit from the data that is created in this way.  As long as the user is in control of their myware data, and they must be for any of this to work, then I see no reason why this won't be a great thing for everyone.

If someone is going to spy on you, it's probably best if its you.

"It's with great pleasure that I announce the addition of Lucas Gonze and Webjay to the Yahoo! Music family."

(Woohoo! Congrats Lucas! -kc.)

LG presents a new 2.4" VGA screen for PDA's and more specifically a VGA SPR(Sub Pixel Rendering) LCD.

- 1440 line high resolution VGA by 960 line horizontal resolution
- Long running time for mobile devices by low power consumption design
- High level of brightness
- Lead VGA mobile display market with high cost competitiveness

According to Nielsen Media Research , Americans watched an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes of television every day during the fall of 2004. This fall they spent watching 4 minutes longer. What's incredible is that fact that TV viewing is still increasing at a time when there are so many new distractions like video games, DVDs, the Internet, etc.

: The official announcement on the distribution deal [PaidContent] reported earlier today just came out. BBC News will provide about 40 on-demand reports a day for broadband and wireless distribution in North America; ABC News Digital Media Group will distribute. ABC News and the BBC have had a relationship since 1994.
Related: @ CES 2006: Exclusive: ABC News Cuts Deal To Distribute BBC News In North America; No Deal With Google -- Yet

Piracy is almost synonymous with the music industry and now it is creeping into the flourishing mobile ringtone segment, reports India's Sify.com.

"Until now, the telecom industry has been legitimately paying for the music offered in the form of ringtones and caller tunes. But in recent months, piracy has crept into this business as well.

There is copyright violation with shops selling high-end phones with bundled content. Some of this content is illegal as neither permission is taken nor royalty paid.

Mobile operators, however, said that piracy is not happening at their end.

"There can be no way that any illegal downloads are happening from our servers as we keep an account for billing purposes. But there could be leaks at other levels in the chain," said a Delhi-based operator. "

More in Moco News with related links.

(Why does it irk me when people refer to ringtones as "content"? -kc.)

"What [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that." Whitacre and AT&T argue that they need flexibility to exact a toll from Web services that hog bandwidth.

“During the hurricanes, Google didn’t pay to have the DSL restored,” said BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher. “We’re paying all that money.”

Says Malik... "If you charge people about $75 a month for DSL and phone service, it is your job to fix the line".

"Broadband access is no longer just a fun thing. It has become an essential utility no matter where you live," says Brian Dabson, associate director of the Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The Associated Press checks in on the state of broadband in rural America, and looks at several of the proposed deployment solutions, including using the USF to fund rural deployment.

There's some interesting discussion over at Dave Farber's IP mailing list over some new restrictions being foisted on Qwest DSL customers (you can see the new agreement here in pdf format). Among the new restrictions are common provisions, such as preventing users from running servers, or using the line to fuel bandwidth for a Wi-Fi hotspot. The agreement also says the user will be liable for $5.00 for each spam message sent from his or her machine, even if the spam is a result of worm infection.

The most contentious change is the fact that Qwest imposes these restrictions on the customer, even if they're getting actual DSL service from a third-party CLEC, and Qwest is simply providing local voice. Also see this discussion in [the BBR] Qwest forum.

MediaBASE is a software application for creating, sharing and exchanging media objects and compositions within a delimited social context. It places rich media authorship -- ordinarily confined to discrete, resource-intensive media projects -- in the hands of casual users, who are able to manipulate and exchange media compositions with the speed and informality of text-centric technologies such as weblogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, discussion forums and e-mail. Because it is built around an associatively-indexed database, MediaBASE allows these media "conversations" or "dialogues" to transcend their original contexts and take on relevance for subsequent users of the system. MediaBASE can be used: to augment existing discourse communities, such as a school, course, museum, local forum or design collective; to provide a common forum for linked classes and remote user groups; to create networks around a given topic or body of material, such as an online art collection or digital archive.

Jean K. Min, director of OhmyNews International, has a commentary in India Infoline: Journalism as a conversation.

What happens on OhmyNews is an intensely interactive online conversation. Citizen reporters have to persuade OhmyNews’ front-line copy editors to have their stories accepted in the first place. As much as 30 percent of daily submissions are rejected for various reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors, or its lack of news value. After stories are accepted and edited, then placed in a more prominent space, usually within minutes they draw scores of readers’ feedback. When the story is controversial, as in the case of Goh’s, the number of readers’ comments can shoot up to hundreds and even thousands.

This feedback from readers, coupled with editorial advice by OhmyNews’ copy editors, gives citizen reporters invaluable lessons in writing. A quick online search through the OhmyNews database yields 500 to 600 stories for some of our diligent citizen reporters and the difference of quality between their first and more recent writing is remarkable. Nearly 70 OhmyNews citizen reporters now have contracts to write books. If you believe, as I do, that an adequate level of writing skills is an important ability for citizens to have in a civil democracy, then OhmyNews’ citizen reporters can proudly be named the most capable practitioners of “the Emersonian vision of an expressive society.”

The New York Times – and many other prominent news organizations – appear to consider the Web as simply another format in which to sell their news content. They sold the news once in the paper medium, now they will sell it again to an online audience and increase the return on their investment. For OhmyNews, the Web is seen neither as a channel for information flow nor as a pipeline for news delivery. It is a playground for our readers, a cyberspace for Netizens. ...

Only as an afterthought did it dawn on us that the audience is the real content on the Web. Like any nimble disk jockey in a cool nightclub in town would do, we gave them a place to hang out and mingle in with the brightest minds in Korean cyberspace. One survey by a major Korean portal revealed nearly 40 percent of users’ daily mouse clicks on it were for user-generated content, such as readers’ comments and blog posts. A similar result was also found for OhmyNews. OhmyNews readers generate on average somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of daily traffic on the Web site through their participation in various online forums (other than their reading of the news). This is surely a wealth of eyeballs that any shrewd advertiser would salivate for. The “audience as the content” model makes a lot of sense for our business as well. ...

John Markoff in the NY Times: Coming Soon to TV Land: The Internet.

What would a world with television coming through the Internet be like?

Instead of tuning into programs preset and determined by the broadcast network or cable or satellite TV provider, viewers would be able to search the Internet and choose from hundreds of thousands of programs sent to them from high-speed connections.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show here this week, a future dominated by Internet Protocol TV, or IPTV, seemed possible, maybe even inevitable. ...

At the onset of the dot-com era, large online service companies like AOL, Compuserve and MSN tried to lock customers into electronic walled gardens of digital information.

But it quickly became apparent that no single company could compete with the vast variety of information and entertainment sources provided on the Web.

The same phenomenon may well overtake traditional TV providers. Potentially, IPTV could replace the 100- or 500-channel world of the cable and satellite companies with millions of hybrid combinations that increasingly blend video, text from the Web, and even video-game-style interactivity. ...

The growth in the number of mobile-phone subscribers is nothing short of spectacular. In 1990 there were just over 11m of them worldwide. Today almost 1.5 billion consumers own mobile phones of various shapes and sizes. [via The Economist via Smart Mobs]

Broadcasting & Cable has a good article by Ben Grossman that notes some hard facts about online video, e.g.

NBC U, for example, says that it will only generate about $10 million from iTunes sales in 2006—or the rough equivalent of ad revenues for one typical Thursday night on NBC. And Apple says it has sold more than 3 million video downloads, so only about $6 million in revenues have come in altogether, with the majority of that number reportedly generated by music videos and not TV shows.

Grossman goes on to note that networks are trying to respond to the realities by changing their internal operations. In particular, the shift from dealing with a few customers to millions will present a tremendous challenge.

“We are now investing in new media and beginning to affect the DNA structure of our organization,” says Huntsberry. “How do I license content to hundreds of on-demand customers around the globe who want to do business with me? I can walk away from them and only deal with the top 10 big ones, or change my processes whereby I can do business with the bulk of them, collect my money faster and be able to go into business with more people.”

As an individual who has attempted to purchase footage from various networks, I can say the networks don’t have this figured out. Leaving it to Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google to figure out may make sense in the short run, but longer term, this will be one of the biggest changes the networks make in the next ten years, not excepting the move to HDTV. (And if you’re a network exec working on this problem, drop me a line).

Technorati Tags: iTunes Video, video

This is the software that's powering the AT&T U-verse IPTV service that has just been rolled out in San Antonio. And Microsoft is working with Major League Baseball to create an IPTV environment for hard core fans. Pics...

(Go check out the rest of Cory Bergman's pics and commentary at Lost Remote)

(Via Emergic)

Alex Bosworth writes about the ecosystem of Digg, which is emerging as the latest generation of reader-edited nerdnews sites:

DIgg.com has shot up from non-existence this year to be a net publishing powerhouse, challenging the longstanding giant Slashdot for the crown of nerd news. The way Digg.com did it doesn't seem too complicated, they allow the democracy of users to pick the stories instead of a short list of editors.

Peering into the Digg.com social framework a bit further as part of research I'm doing for more social features in SWiK, I found that the system really is very simple, but that there is an interesting ecosystem at play behind the scenes of just the front page.

There are five groups of people who make digg.com what it is.

There are the readers: an educated guess would be that probably ten to twenty percent of those ever click 'digg', they are mostly just there for the end product of the digg machine: an array of interesting news and links often presented before the other news sources.

There are the diggers: some percentage of the readers, probably ten to twenty percent. They bother to vote for the stories on digg.com, which changes the numbers next to the stories and enables stories to get to another queue - the diggnation podcast.

Then there are the hardcore diggers - people who sit in the queue of submitted stories and watch for breaking news that should make its way up to the front page, or report stories as being spam or irrelevant.

An even smaller subset of users are the submitters: people who post fresh stories. It's difficult to post a fresh story to digg at this point, it's a competition for who can submit it first.

Finally there are the news publishers themselves, often bloggers who want to get readership for their content.

What's really interesting about these groups is that each of them is required for the system to function, they all came together relatively quickly, and each of them have different and complementary rewards for what they do.

Cyberjournalist posts about , a site -- now in beta -- called Newsvine. I've been hearing rumors about. It applies reputational algorithms and social filtering to newsreading:

The site is a slick combination of some of the trendiest news-related tools online now, incorporating news aggregation, social networking, citizen journalism, blogging, user ratings and online discussions. Think of it as one-part Slashdot, one-part del.icio.us and one-part Google News, with a few other neat features thrown in.

around four general actions: reading, discussing, writing and seeding the news.

The site posts thousands of Associated Press articles that users can read.

Among the things readers can do with stories or links: vote for it, to raise it up the Newsvine (i.e. give it better promotion on the home page); participate in a live chat with other users about the story; leave comments; report inappropriate content.

Users can write their own articles, and get to keep most of the ad revenue from those pages. You'll collect 90% of the earnings from your own domain (yourname.newsvine.com). The other 10% goes to the person who referred you to start writing on Newsvine.

Ever wonder what your desk surface looks like up close? No. No one has. Not even [Sprite_tm], but upon disassembling his optical mouse and discovering its 18x18 CCD he decided to put it to use (well, a different use). The optical chip outputs serial information to the USB chip in the mouse. [Sprite_tm] wired the optical chip to a parallel port and wrote a simple program to interpret the data. Not really useful, but it does generate some interesting pictures. Program provided, natch.

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© 2006 Weblogs, Inc.

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The Unseen Video is a weather controlled music video for Mike Milosh's - You Make Me Feel.

The video is affected by the weather and local time of the viewer's localisation. Every little change in their environment ensures that they will never see the same video twice. The look of the video might slightly change within an hour, but will have a whole new character in a few months. More screenshots .

By Daniel Scheibel and Ferdinand Weinrother.

Thanks Jan!

Weather-related installations: the Cloudharp, weather report.

Imedia has a an interesting article on the use of tags and other forms of folksonomies for advertising. This will happen - it simply makes too much sense not to.

For more on folksonomies see these past posts on Future Now.

Originally posted by Steve King from IFTF's Future Now, ReBlogged by djacobs on Jan 8, 2006 at 02:54 PM

Soon, vegetable vendors in India Could be selling CDMA phones in the Rural part of India. The initiative would involve training of the owners of vegetable and grain mandis to demonstrate and sell the product, and to provide after sales services.

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by djacobs on Jan 8, 2006 at 02:54 PM

Dion Hinchcliffe: Unfortunately, one thing I learned in my research is that both the usage and creation of much of our social software still seems to be mostly experienced-based.

Andrew Kantor has researched the rights photographers have to take shots under certain circumstances. Specifically, he's looking at private property such as a mall. He has written about this in USA Today and also posted a PDF guide. The findings are surprising and have significant ramifications for mobloggers (mobile bloggers w/camera phones), PR professionals and marketers. (Via Lifehacker)

Technorati Tags: Photos

PodGuide.TV has found two short form branded entertainment shorts available in iPod format. Sprite is offering a series of comedy videos entitled Marcus hates his job, while Bud Light brings us Ted Ferguson, Daredevil. Add RSS feeds and they're advercasts.

Technorati Tags: Advercasting, Advertising, iPod

"The news from this announcement is in what wasn't announced as much as what was. Sony has scaled back their MiniDV line significantly, dropping all vertical, matchbook-style camcorders and simplifying the line as a whole. "

(Although the CES feeds from Engadget and Gizmodo have been fantastic, I've held off on reblogging a lot of the CES coverage save the stuff that seems disruptive or more than "neat." -kc.)

Via CamcorderInfo - default

In his paper The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur The Boundaries of Work and Play (Games and Culture, Vol. 1, pg. 68-71 (2006) ), Nick Yee explains how “video games are inherently work platforms that train us to become better game workers“. The underyling assumption in this paper is that work being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations. The author hence studies online games and sees them as a way to “reveal larger social trends in the blurring boundaries between work and play“.

In order to assess these statements, he taks relevant examples such Star Wars Galaxies players who “operate a pharmaceutical manufacturing business for fun“. He also underlines this interesting point: “The central irony of MMORPGs is that they are advertised as worlds to escape to after coming home from work, but they too make us work and burn us out“. And now, the bunch of studies about virtual goods which have a real value can lead us to think that game play can constitute a real work… His last word is strikingly pertinent: “he blurring of work and play begs the question - what does “fun” really mean? “.

Yes guys, playing is hard and it’s not a matter of toying with simple things as people reluctant to consider video games as a serious activity think.

If there’s an essay on machinima you’ve been burning to write, now’s your opportunity. Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche are editing The Machinima Reader, the first collection of essays to critically review the phenomenon of machinima from a variety of prespectives. 500 word abstracts should be sent as RTF files to Michael Nitsche (michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu) and Henry Lowood (lowood@stanford.edu) by April 3, 2006. If your abstract is accepted, final essays should be 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006. Here’s the full CFP:

CfP: The Machinima Reader

Edited by Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche

Machinima is on the verge of stepping beyond its chaotic mix of artistic, ludic and technical conceptions into established traditions and vocabularies of contemporary media. As machinima invents itself, the flexibility of its form poses an interesting challenge to academics as well as artists and critics. We want to offer an inaugural reader for the further development and critical discussion of Machinima, one that charts its growth from several angles and also provides a foundation for critical studies in the future.

The rapid development of Machinima is closely connected to the culture of computer and video games. In a repetition of early cinema’s history, many of Machinima’s milestones are formulated as mixtures of artistic expression and technical achievements. In our organization of The Machinima Reader, we will recognize that the creators of Machinima have been at times just as concerned with demonstrating mastery of technology and gameplay as in artistic expression or narrative performance. At the same time we acknowledge an artistic maturing process that has led to more professional production methods and results of higher quality. Consequently, we are looking for essays that address a range of topics. These include (but are not limited to):

• Culture: History of Machinima - definitions, technology, and context; performance practices; evolving and new presentation platforms, theory
• Technology: Promise and impact of real-time engines for animation; future developments in hard- and software; technical relationship and dependencies among games, technology and machinima
• Communities and Contexts: Machinima as community-based practice and performance; legal issues; use in classroom; relationship to other media; machinima as guerilla film making; Machinima and modding; players as performers; machinima in MMOs
• Art: Aesthetics and poetics of Machinima; Machinima and new media; from game to Machinima - what translates what does not?

Please submit a 500 word abstract via email as RTF document to michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu and lowood@stanford.edu by 3 April 2006. We expect that final essays will not exceed 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006.

The Wall Street Journal reports Google is going to roll out a pay-per-download video model this week. The WSJ says the announcement will come Friday. First to join up will be CBS and NBA video, with more providers likely to follow. Google Video has been around since last year, and it has been widely speculated it would eventually enable a charge-per-download payment system. And, of course, the big question is how all this will compete with Apple's iTMS video download shop. UPDATE from Cory: I'll be attending the keynote address from Google co-founder Larry Page here at CES tomorrow.

The Future of Content?

"The first few days of February I'll be at Lift, a content on the near future of technology, people and communication. Nicolas Nova and others have organized this conference, together with a workshop on Blogjects — a not particularly clever neologism I came up with for objects that blog. This topic ties into the idea of proximity-based interaction and usage scenarios for mobile contexts, the main theme of the NetMagnet research project I'm working on through the Netpublics seminar. An informed speculation I have is that the future of content creation and dissemination won't just come from people. It will also come from the social world of objects — things that have histories and experiences. A different kind of witness upon the world, and a witness to events that are of interest to the other blogging species — people.

Micro local content is one area in which this may be of practical concern. Just this afternoon I had a nice long meeting with Elizabeth Osder at Yahoo Media in Santa Monica. We discussed many things, including how to reward local communities for disseminating news about local sports events. I mean..really local sports events — the little league team scores, for instance. Now, this fits into a larger conversation about the news content ecology, but just taking this particular problem in hand in the context of the Blogject: why don't scoreboards blog? Sure, it's not a question deserving any measure of brilliance for the asking, but it suggests a (super simple) example of the Blogject.

Why are blogging objects interesting? The idea bubbled up as I was reading Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things". The [w:Spime] — the "thing" in the world that knows itself and is able to tell things around it about itself. RFID is the Paleostine era for Spimes. Blogjects are Spimes that are fluent and legible, so that anyone can read them. Blogjects are meant for humans to read, in human code, not encrypted Arphid data. Blogjects are the prototype framework to experiment, DIY style, with what Spimes can become.

The current, upgraded brain of the Aibo blogs, for instance.

The motivation here is not just to create objects that blog, as we now understand blogging. But to use the framework of the complete blog social formation as one in which objects participate — first-class — in the entire multipath culture circulation network. That means syndication, layering meaning on content, trackback, etc.

There are several Blogject prototype projects on the front burner. One is a Sakura riff called flavonoid, turned around into a U.S. idiolect, focusing on the present day craze with Pedometers. Another is a way to turn device logs into material that's legible to humans. I've already gone on and on about FlightAware, but there are other idioms — for instance, Motion Based, a community-based mobile social software framework that slurps up device track logs and translates them into fitness goals and regimens." [blogged by Julian Bleecker on netPublics]

Over at Editor's Weblog, published by the World Editors Forum, Bertrand Pecquerie ponders citizen journalism again, and comes up with a succinct taxonomy of citizen journalists:

1. "The citizen journalist who owns a digital camera or a camera phone and sends shootings to a news organization during a major event (tsunami, London bombing ) or a local car accident."
2. "The citizen journalist who wants to cover its local or virtual community and produce targeted content.
3. "The citizen journalist who is a militant and campaigns for political reasons. How Eason Jordan was fired from CNN by infuriated bloggers in January (...)
   
   Entry continued...

I've been trying to think about how populations can have some influence over technology -- how to even start understanding how to think about having influence over technology -- for some time. This paper, Devon, Richard. Towards a Social Ethics of Technology: A Research Prospect, Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2004, which I found via Anne Galloway's blog is very rich food for thought. Design plays a central role in this approach -- it is, after all, the earliest point at which intervention is possible and effective -- as Galloway points out.

Taking a social ethics approach means recognizing not only that the ends and means of technology are appropriate subjects for the ethics of technology, but also that differences in value systems that emerge in almost all decision-making about technology are to be expected. The means of handling differences, such as conflict resolution processes, models of technology management, and aspects of the larger political system, must be studied. This is not to suggest that engaging in political behavior on behalf of this cause or that is what ethics is all about. That remains a decision to be made at the personal level. Rather, the ethics of technology is to be viewed as a practical science. This means engaging in the study of, and the improvement of, the ways in which we collectively practice decision making in technology. Such an endeavor can enrich and guide the conduct of individuals, but it is very different than focusing on the behavior of individuals in a largely predetermined world in which their options are often severely constrained...

Adobe announced on January 3 the availability of Flash Lite 2 — a significant upgrade to Flash Lite 1, the mobile devices software that moved on to Adobe’s shelf with the acquisition last year of Macromedia. In the past year, the number of mobile devices running Flash Lite 1 has tripled from 12 to 45 million. The press release for the upgraded product describes it as enabling high-impact experiences for consumer devices.

By leveraging the Flash ecosystem -- which includes the Flash authoring tool, rendering engine, and an established community of more than two million designers and developers -- Flash Lite 2 and Flash Player SDK 7 can reduce deployment costs and deliver content and interfaces three to five times faster than competing solutions.

The new features of Flash Lite are discussed in the article here by Jonathan Duran, Macromedia/Adobe’s Developer Support Manager for Mobile and Devices.

"My belief is the following: that before a system collapses, it will exhibit the worst of its features. Thus, just as we are witnessing the marketisation, monetization, and commodification of everything, there is the birth of a counter-reaction, the emergence of the seed of the new. Network society itself, is not an answer to market totalitarianism, in fact, it exacerbates many of the current problems. Peer to peer, when harnessed within the for-profit system, seems to lead to an exacerbation of the work culture, as can be witnessed by many who work in the new IT sectors. It has been described by Pekka Himanen as the Fridayisation of Sunday, i.e. the values of the work week are being applied to private and intimate life."

P2PNet has set up a Patricia Santangelo defense contribution fund via PayPal donation

Tired of being called criminals, a group of Swedish filesharers have started a new political party, The Piracy Party

Dan Gillmor will run the Center for Citizen Media in California. Here is the introduction:

This is the website for the Center for Citizen Media, a new initiative aimed at helping to enable and encourage grassroots media, especially citizen journalism, at every level.

The nonprofit Center is jointly affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School.

Gillmor was a panelist at our last two conferences:

The Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism and this year's Restoring the Trust conference in San Antonio.

The solution to this problem is simple: subscribe to HBO through iTunes. iTunes MUST have some subscription mechanism built into it already.

"The way I figure it, getting HBO piped into my house costs me an extra $13 each month on my cable bill (or $156 per year, for those of you who haven't hit F12 and done the math on Apple's Calculator widget yet). Figuring the usual $2-per-episode fee, a 12-episode season of The Wire would cost me $24. Even if I spend another $24 for 12 episodes of The Sopranos, that's still a $108 savings after I call my cable operator and inform them that I will no longer require HBO’s services. "

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will be having its annual D.I.C.E. Summit (http://www.dicesummit.org/) this February 6-10 at the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Henderson, Nevada. Key speakers this year include Richard Gariott, David Jaffe, Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, and Reginald Fils-Aime.

The Academy is looking for 4-6 students in the field of Interactive Entertainment to help with the event (travel expenses will be paid for). If you're interested, e-mail your resume to Geri Gordon Miller at geri@interactive.org.

See you at D.I.C.E.!

Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on.

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

"Having been involved in creating mobile services for a few years now, I believe AJAX will replace both J2ME and XHTML as the platform of choice for developing mobile applications. In this article, I will outline my reasoning."

Groklaw realizes that DRM is about anti-competitive business, not piracy, thanks to Coldplay and a detour through Mozart.

Bounty County is a listing of coding bounties offered by free and open-source software projects. Bounty County is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation.

DOT-TUNES was conceived by a group of professional musicians who use iTunes for storing their own copyright music and recordings and who wanted to be able to easily demonstrate their work to clients and to share 'works in progress' and other original compositions with others.

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. Today it's five.

2005 was arguably the year citizens really started to do it for themselves. Raising mobiles aloft, they did not just talk and text, they snapped, shared and reported the world around them.

A survey in December by Podtrac, a company that aims to connect podcasters and advertisers, showed that 78 percent of those who have ever listened to a podcast are male, CNET reports.

Divided into 22 categories, the guide introduces each category with a summary of the type of services generally offered by the companies listed within and where they fit into the bigger picture.

Filed under: Culture, PC, First Person Shooters, Online

the more established Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) finals as part of their GameØRZ week.

[Via Gamecloud]

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SPONSORED BY: Age of Empires III - Real-Time Strategy Game Control a European power on a quest to colonize and conquer the New World. AOE3 introduces new gameplay elements, as well as new civilizations, units, and technologies. http://www.ageofempires3.com/

Originally posted by Christopher Grant from Joystiq, ReBlogged by djacobs on Jan 5, 2006 at 02:10 PM

At this multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary symposium we shall attempt to investigate and analyse these new effects and the changed role of the image in society.

"COCOA was formed as a committee with participants from many different authors groups, publishers, and experts in copyright law and publishing rights. The views of the members range from "conservative" to "liberal" with respect to copyrights — thus, this consensus reached, which satisfies all members, represents a view that should be acceptable to most people no matter where they stand on the copyright spectrum."

Microsoft’s MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs, and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN’s censorship system last summer.  On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. (You can see the Google cache of his blog up until Dec.22nd here.)

Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government.

Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. (See a recent profile of him here, and an interview with Anti here.) His old blog at the U.S.-hosted Blog-city is believed to have caused the Chinese authorities to block all Blog-city blogs. In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China.  (For all the gory details on the current press crackdown click here, here, here, and here.) Roland Soong at ESWN has preserved the original Chinese-language posts of Anti’s Call for a Beijing News Walk Out and his Call to Cancel Beijing News Subscriptions.

(Continued at RConversation)

Pure Data networked jam sessions

PD (acronym of Pure Data) has recently emerged amongst the many software devoted to real time sampling and audio/video streaming, mostly thanks to its flexibility during live performances. It's a real time coding environment suitable for video, audio and graphic editing. Roman Haefeli has developed an environment made for facilitating electronic musicians' jam sessions on a network basing on PD. It's a client-server system, so it works on any network (internet included), and its name, NetPD, derives from this feature. But this is not intended as a platform for creating sounds, but as an environment where every client (i.e. every computer connected to a NetPD server) can share its music patches. The most interesting part is that the same patches can be played through NetPD, and this implemented feature triggers the jam sessions, welcoming all the different contributions. A further peculiarity is that you can't share sound files (even if they are embedded in a patch). On one hand this makes samples sharing impossible, but on the other hand it handles the real innovative significance of the generative music. [Vito Campanelli, neural]

Every year, the biggest trade show in Vegas gets bigger. This year, the Consumer Electronics Show will cover 28 football fields with 2,500 exhibitors. (Rule number one: bring comfortable shoes.) And CES is about as big as it gets when it comes to the future of media. Keynotes from all the top brass at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And a focus on video like never before. Our reporting from Las Vegas begins on Wednesday, so stay tuned...

the title says it all. i want one. NOW.

The iSee 360 revolutionizes iPod by turning any iPod*, iPod mini or iPod nano into a full-fledged video recorder/player. Simply slide your iPod into the dock on the back of the iSee 360 and see more. Better.

There's a lot of interesting points in this article, once you get past the "gee-whiz mobile TV" bit at the beginning…

"So-called interactive TV is already in service for standard broadcasts, but industry officials say only a small number of viewers have connected their TV sets to the network…

On the other hand, the physical and psychological hurdles to connecting with the Net are very low for handset users, they said, thus, they are more likely to react."

It’s not so much a "if we build it they will come" attitude, but a "they already have come, let’s see if we can sell them a hot-dog and an over-sized Coke".

The article goes on to say that the mobile TV industry is trying to work out how to lure viewers of mobile TV broadcasting to the "wealth of digital content" already available for the mobile network…for example DoCoMo is hoping mobile TV will lure it’s older customers to its i-mode network.

This is in direct contrast to other places where the idea is to charge people to watch TV on their mobiles. While it’s a good way to get people to use the service, it means the companies cannot predict whether mobile TV will generate enough additional revenue to cover the cost of building handsets with TV tuners…

"The carriers would not give specific figures, but they said adding TV tuners will increase cell phone costs significantly and that the bulk of it would likely be borne by the companies instead of the customer…Since they won’t make money if people just watch TV, the key to success will be getting viewers to make purchases."

While the ratings for the US version of The Office suck, it's doing gangbusters on iTunes. Maybe now the networks will start giving people what they want.

"The NBC sitcom The Office, which has failed to live up to expectations in the ratings, has turned out to be a smash hit on the Internet. Daily Variety reported today (Tuesday) that the show regularly accounts for half the slots on Apple's list of top 20 TV shows for sale at its iTunes Store. It also is responsible for NBC selling more copies of its shows (at $1.99 a pop) than any other network, wiping out the early advantage of ABC, which became the first network to sell shows online. Meanwhile, the Starz pay-TV channel has announced that it is launching a new Internet movie site called Vongo that will allow consumers to download full-length movies, concerts and TV shows onto handheld devices employing Microsoft software. (They cannot be downloaded to iPods, something that Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff described as a "significant problem" in an interview with the San Jose Mercury.) Users will also be able to "stream" movies from the Starz Channel on their personal computers via the Real Networks site. It is expected that the Vongo service will cost $9.99 per month."

A new consumer technology poll shows that over half of all cable TV subscribers now receive TV via digital, putting those households who still receive TV via analog in the minority. The study also revealed that a quarter of all American homes now have a DVR, much higher than previous studies have indicated.

Sanyo will debut the world's first commercially available smallest, lightest, high-definition compact digital camera. Hell of a title, but that is what it takes to become a world's first. Here is a spec rundown: 5.1 megapixel resolution, 2.2-inch OLED display, HD recording at 720p, 16:9 widescreen format, 10x optical zoom, and weighs only 8.3 ounces. This will be seen at CES this week and expect it to be available to the public in March for $800 bones, pretty good price compared to some HD video cameras that run upwards to $4,000.

Sanyo Xacti HD1 to debut at CES 2006 [Ubergizmo]

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The Fullerton, CA public school system is aggressive in its push to educate children in the ways of silicon. The school district is aiming to give laptops to select elementary and middle school kids, and they are developing a curriculum centered around students having access to their laptops. So why are some parents putting up a fuss? The plan requires parents to pony up almost US$1,500 for the privilege, and if you can't afford it, you don't get to participate in the program. Participating parents would pay about $500 each year for three years, and their children would receive an Apple iBook G4 laptop and entrance into the special program.

(Continued at Ars Technica.)

The XP10 is a plug & play turntable for MP3 mixers...like a panasonic cdj.

This website has a GIANT collection of over 2000 electronic schematics for everything from guitar amplifiers and effects to entire computers (like the Apple LISA and Nintendo Gameboy)

BBC News is opening its archives to the public for a trial period. You can download nearly 80 news reports covering iconic events of the past 50 years including the fall of the Berlin Wall, crowds ejecting soldiers from Beijing's Tiananmen Square and behind-the-scenes footage of the England team prior to their victory over West Germany in 1966. You can download the clips, watch them, and "use them to create something unique."

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According to the Associated Press, Internet video will be the dominant player at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which begins Wednesday. With IPTV and place-shifting technology coming on strong, with Google, Yahoo & Microsoft playing major roles, the report claims "nearly 40 percent of TV network executives surveyed recently by IBM Corp.'s business consulting service said they feared major competition from Internet portals in the next five to seven years."

Samsung Techwin, part of the Samsung Empire, has unveiled their #11PMP, the first digital camera with PMP functions. This 6MP camera has 45Mb of internal memory and can read a variety of video files and MP3 files. The design is quite cool we think and the device is super-slim (18.5mm). To be followed up very closely as Samsung wants to become one of the top 4 digital camera manufacturers before the end of this year!

By Cutkillavince

an interactive visual interface that shows the 'top 100 moments' of the web from 1995 to 2005 to celebrate the first 10 years of the Internet. inspired by the original 10x10 concept, a real-time data visualization of popular, international news pictures & headlines. [yahoo.com]

a field of 400 physical pixels that function both as a sensor field & a large outdoor screen. each single pixel functions outdoors in the sunshine (using solar power & radio communication) & can sense the presence of people. specific time interaction scenarios, games & functions are still being developed, to open up this unique architecture to its full creative use. in fact, the developers are still looking for people willing to collaborate or discuss any ideas & propositions.
see also distributed projection structure & balloons scatterplot & terrainium for other large-scale, physical visualizations. [aether.hu & aether.hu (simulation)|via we-make-money-not-art]

According to a report by Online Computer Library Center - Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources - the criterion selected by most information consumers to evaluate electronic resources is that the information is worthwhile. Free is a close second. Speed has less impact, and the respondents do not trust purchased information more than free information.

Katherine Albrecht put together a fearless photo exposé on the use of RFID tracking chips at Wal-Mart, and on various products like printers and TVs. She goes on to show how customers are electronically frisked on their way out of the store. All of this is "for your protection" of course.

Seeing these sticker-RFIDs does make me take another look at the Dorkbot dude who implanted an RFID chip in his hand and wonder, why on earth didn't he simply use a sticker?

Photos of Item-Level RFID Tagging Wal-Mart Super Center, Dallas, Texas October 15, 2005 [Spychips (via Digg)]

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SPLITCAM video clone capture driver software
From the site:
SplitCamera is a freeware virtual video clone and video capture driver for connecting several applications to a single video capture source. Usually, if you have a web-camera connected to your computer, you cannot use it in more than one application at the same time, and there is no standard Windows options that makes it possible. SplitCam driver allows you to easily multiply your web-camera video in any conferensing software like ICQ, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, or whatever... and to broadcast it to many users at a time. With SplitCam you can connect up to 64 clients to a single video source. In a few words: SplitCam does just what its name says: it splits the video stream coming from the video source and tunnels it to numerous other client applications.

Thanks Spencer

A European technology and civil liberties group presented some antisurveillance projects this week. Quintessenz appeared at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress, showing anti-CCTV techniques including descrambling recordings, altering facial data, and physically blinding devices with lasers.

(via /.)

(Via we-make-money-not-art ----> networked performance)

Interactions within a personal network of devices, Thomas Stovicek's thesis, looks at solutions for practical dilemmas of managing smartmobbed info and devices.

Idea/problem/context

In the future, our electronic devices will be networked together and all our digital 'content' readily available when we need it. So we will have ever more data to sift through. This project looks at new ways to access, view and filter this growing store of information.

What is it

Exploring the Content Network , a set of screen-based software and hardware interactions between devices. Devices are physically manipulated, and keywords are used to make more intuitive natural way to access the content.

How it works

The coordinating system, Content Network, connects a group of devices and gives them access to each others' content. One of its elements, Navigation Through Related Tags, lets people find their content based on keywords instead of folders. Combining Devices to Navigate Content, uses very short-range wireless between the devices to detect how they are interacting and trigger data transfer and shared actions: placing one person's mobile phone over another's, for instance, bring up, on both screens, a combined calendar highlighting available times for a proposed meeting.

Value/potential

Related tags offered a new way to sort and organize your content by keyword. Physical interactions helps by using intuitive actions to interconnect the devices of a group of people, to show only data relevant to, and organized for, the task in hand. These concepts, which apply to both work and social groupings, demonstrate new potentials in navigating your content without the fear of information overload normally associated with it.

The Chicago Daily News is paying citizen journalists $100 for stories or photos that are the most viewed on the site in the month posted.

The site is an interesting online-only newspaper that combines traditional-style journalism with citizen journalism. It's edited by Geoff Dougherty a 14-year journalist who's worked as an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald.

More on the new Chicago Daily News here.

The government cookie story is getting stupider by the day. The AP — having naively believed they had some investigative scoop when they discovered that the NSA site, like most every site on earth, sets cookies — now finds that the White House has “bugs”: gifs that let stats software count visitors (like the garish, multicolored thing on the very bottom right of this page). All it does is measure traffic. It is an issue only with the tin-hat society. This is a nonstory born of ignorance and paranoia and now hype.

Jimmy Wales says Wikipedia may accept advertising. I think it’s a good idea. Some will have a kneejerk response against filthy lucre. But I say the right question is: What could those resources buy? The full Times of London interview with Jimbo here.