unmediated

I think Julian Bleecker's netpublics: participation + change paradigm aptly reflects the transition China is experiencing with how the public participates in politics.

In China, it is estimated 52% of white collar workers have a blog, with already 30million blogs already registered and over 100 blog providers, and this # is expected to grow to 90million in 2008 (1/3 of america's population).

According to this paradigm, web 2.0 allows for mass networked participation and change. The question for China is will participation = change? And how sustainable is this method in light of China's new regime of censorship policies and alliances with Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo and how will it affect the netpublic feedback loops? Will surveillance of the overwhelming # of internet bloggers in China mirror how it currently handle's it's overflowing human population? The next year in China's blogosphere will be interesting to monitor, but one thing is for sure, there's never enough political fires to put out and voices to squash in the real world and digital world - it's all the same now.

Akihabara News had the chance of being invited to Sanyo's press conference where the first pocket HD camcorder was presented... and here were are, a few weeks later, with the device in our hands, to provide you with a quick review of the product. Before attacking this review that might not be that positive overall, here's a little overview of the kit.

The review with HDTV and Flash video over here!

If you’re into information visualization, the Licentiate thesis of Tobias Skog (Future Applications Lab, Göteborg) is very appealing. It’s called “Ambient Information Visualization” (1.7Mb pdf here) and it deals with various issues regarding informative art, everyday displays as well as their utility and evaluations.

This thesis investigates the concept of ambient information visualization. It has its background in the research fields of ubiquitous computing and information visualization (…) The term ambient information visualization distinguishes an area where these two research fields merge, and can be defined as the use of visual representations of digital data to enhance a physical location. These visualizations are typically displayed using flat-panel displays or projectors and ideally act both as information displays and decorative elements in the interiors where they are placed.

is describes a suite of design examples, where the first ones explicitly address the issue of creating a decorative surface by using the styles of famous artists as inspiration for the appearance of the visualizations, creating so-called informative art. Subsequent designs are developed under the superordinate term ambient information visualization and strive to find generic, inherent properties of peripheral information displays and how these properties come to affect design requirements. As a way of informing the design process, visualizations have continually been tested with users in different environments, including exhibition settings with large amounts of visitors as well as long-term studies of use in office settings with smaller user groups.
The knowledge gained from the design and study of these examples is analyzed and the results highlight issues that are of central importance when designing a visualization. These issues are divided into three categories that concern the information source, the mapping from data to visual structures and the use of the
visualization.

Some of the examples, my favorite is certainly the one using the Mondrian compositions as inspiration to show information about e-mail traffic:

I've been tracking the development of all the personalized start pages that have flowered up over the past year. Live.com, Google Personalized Homepage, Netvibes, PageFlakes, et al. These are services that don't just offer a place to store all your content and links - but house your widgets, gadgets and web services too. I'll be publishing an analysis of the feature sets of the leading services on ZDNet tonight, but I want to set the scene by discussing their growing popularity - which makes for an obvious comparison to portals in the late 90's.

TechCrunch calls them AJAX homepages, because they all use AJAX in the UI. For that reason there's something uniquely 'Web 2.0' about personalized start pages. But in other ways, they harken back to the dot com era when portals were all the rage (Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, etc). For example, the main aim of the game is still getting traffic.

Looking at the 2006 class of portals/personalized pages, there are two distinct groups:

1) The big guns: Microsoft (live.com), Google (Google Personalized Homepage) and Yahoo (My Yahoo, which is still mostly an old-style portal).

2) The little companies: Netvibes, Protopage, PageFlakes and a host of other contenders which I'll mention in my ZDNet post.

In terms of traffic, it's difficult to gauge how the big guns compare to one another. But amongst the little guys Netvibes has been getting all the buzz and early traffic, as this Alexa chart shows:

To put that into perspective though, it's small potatoes compared to live.com:

Update: A source at Microsoft tells me that the Live.com figure on Alexa may include mail.live.com, which gets a lot of traffic. If that's the case, take the following paragraph with a grain of salt...

I added the top web-based RSS Reader Bloglines into the chart to show just how significant Live.com - and Personalized start pages in general - are becoming. Bloglines smokes every other web-based RSS Reader and has been no slug in traffic growth lately, yet it was overtaken in traffic by Live.com after just 1-2 months. In fact Live.com currently has double the amount of traffic of Bloglines! I would imagine Google isn't too far behind Live.com either.

It goes to show how valuable this type of service could be, in terms of traffic and being a 'start page' for users. More grist for the Portals 2.0 mill, because portals too were all about getting 'eyeballs' and traffic.

Incidentally, I have a question for you: where is Yahoo in all this? My Yahoo is more like a dot com portal than a Personalized start page. Aside from the obvious observation that My Yahoo isn't made of AJAX, it's still basically a portal for mostly static content. Yahoo owns one of the leading widget makers, konfabulator (now known as Yahoo! Widgets), but it's not integrated with My Yahoo. Why haven't they joined the 'AJAX homepages' party yet?

UPDATE: I've now posted an Ajax homepages market review on ZDNet.

Sony Ericsson has signed a deal with Google that will mean owners of the Sony Ericsson mobile phones will be able to file to a personal blog on the move as soon as they turn on their new phone, reports Pocket-Lint. "The company today announced that it will be integrating Google's Blogger and Web Search features on all its future mobile phones. Owners of a blogger.com account will be able to file stories via their mobile phone on the move with the included software." Related: - Nokia bundles Lifeblog.

It looks like the folks at SirsiDynix are making the library blogger rounds these days. There are lots of us doing these institutes. Today, mine went up, as did Alane Wilson's, Greg Schwartz's (no, we don't share the same job), and Meredith Farkas's.

I'm excited for my first real chat about libraries being the center of community building. Here's the abstract:

"Based on parts of previous writings by Kathleen de la Pena McCook (A Librarian at Every Table), Cohen will discuss how social networks, public space theory, and online communities can be used by libraries in any setting (public, academic, and school) to build social capital and become an active part in community building. Learn how other libraries of all sizes and budgets have become active participants in their communities and how a process-based approach can incorporate the above theories into practical methods for community building"

A far cry from my previous talks on RSS, Blogs, etc. How refreshing.

Well so much for those turn-off-the-tv festivals of media snobbery. The New York Times reports that two University of Chicago economists find that TV is not bad for kids.

Most studies that find negative effects from television compare groups of children who watch television to those who do not, even though the economic situations of the two groups are in all likelihood very different, Mr. Gentzkow said. The new study, however, was based on what the authors call a “natural experiment” that resulted from the way television was introduced in the United States in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when some cities got TV service five years ahead of others.

where preschoolers were exposed to the new technology, and data from cities where they were not, was correlated with test scores from about 300,000 students nationwide in 1965, as collected in the Coleman Report, a survey done under the Civil Rights Act. The study also looked at test scores from pre- and post-TV age groups within cities.

The result showed “very little difference and if anything, a slight positive advantage” in test scores for children who grew up watching TV early on, compared to those who did not, said Mr. Shapiro.

Media are good.

Excellent white paper on artifacting in MPEG video.

"MPEG-2 is what we call a lossy codec. It discards image information believed to be of lesser visual importance. The more you want to compress, the further away you get from the look of the original image. Image quality and fidelity now depends on the chosen (or often imposed) level of compression. And since that is directly tied to the available bandwidth, we must ask ourselves when is the video simply too compressed?"

SlashLinks is a tool developed by Eyebeam R&D for automatically mirroring links from the popular social-bookmarking service del.icio.us to your personal or institutional website. Posting, tagging, and management still occur within the del.icio.us interface, but design and layout can now be fully customized on your mirrored site. The tool also adds blog-like year/month/day archives (similar to Kottke.org's remaindered links) to the typical del.icio.us or flickr style tag browsing.

Create a tag cloud for your site based on any RSS/Atom feed. Customize the look of your tag cloud, save/share cloud design.

a display of a musical score without any measures or clefs, in which information about the music's structure is conveyed with bars of color representing the notes. these bars scroll across the screen as the music plays. their position on the screen conveys the pitch & the timing in relation to each other. different colors denote different instruments or voices, thematic material, or tonality, lighting up at the exact moment it sounds. [musanim.com/ & musanim.com/(pdf)]

So how does a relatively little-known site like YouTube rack up 1.2 million views on a CBS News story in just a few days? It makes video obscenely easy to share. First, YouTube has a social networking engine, so you can see who's submitting clips and add them to your friends list. Then there's the handy "share this video" icon that pops up over the player at the end of each clip. And then the easy-to-copy code on very page so any blogger can drop the clip into their sites, player and all. Very smart.

Denise Barker is one of the few file-swappers sued by the RIAA who has taken her fight to court. Elektra v. Barker is an interesting case for several reasons, including the fact that the RIAA wants to argue that simply making files available (even if they're not actually downloaded) constitutes infringement. The EFF has just weighed in on the case by filing an amicus brief with the court. Rather than address all the issues raised by the case, the brief tries instead to make only a single point: sharing music files does not infringe the "distribution right" granted to copyright holders.

Under US law, copyright owners are the only ones authorized "to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending." The EFF argues (PDF) that such "copies or phonorecords" only include physical objects such as cassettes, CDs, or a user's hard drive.

(Continued at Ars Technica)

If your employer or corrupt, undemocratic, dictator-based government uses a filtering service such as Secure Computing's SmartFilter to block access to BoingBoing.net or other enlightened, democratic and liberlly oriented sites, you can try the following workarounds:

Use the TOR network. The more people who run Tor servers, the faster and more anonymous the network becomes.
Using an SSH tunnel, VPN, or anonymous overlay to an unfiltered network is widely considered to be the best way to protect yourself while accessing "prohibited" content. (Thanks, chris)
Use Google as a proxy to access forbidden sites. Link
A group called Peacefire created proxy software called Circumventor to bypass censorware. Install this software on your home computer and allow others to use your proxy to access the web, or use your proxy from work or school to access any web site. (Thanks, Sean!)
Breaking out of a Proxy Jail. Link (Thanks, Mutz!)
Try Daveproxy, and other services listed on the proxy list at samair.ru/proxy together with AntiFirewall (a small app that tests proxies). (Thanks, Joao Barata!)
Try Java Anonymous Proxy. JAP uses the TOR network, and installation is pretty easy for non-nerds. (Thanks, Jonas)
The Bitty browser, while not initially designed as an anonymizing tool, has helped some of our readers work around corporate internet filters. (Thanks, Scott Matthews!)
Some of our readers have found the Coral Content Distribution Network (CCDN) helpful for evading internet blocks. Just add ".nyud.net:8080" at the end of boingboing.net -- for example, instead of typing http://www.boingboing.net to your browser's address line, instead type http://www.boingboing.net.nyud.net:8080. (Thanks, Tian!)
Check out the regularly updated list of public proxy servers at publicproxyservers.com.
For BoingBoing readers in the UAE or Qatar, or other countries where BoingBoing is blocked, one anonymous reader tells us: "There is an internet via satellite called OPENSKY sold through www.broadsat.com which goes around these problems. Using VPN with normal dialup, the signal gets sent back from Europe, so, uncensored. Works really well and is cheap!"
Andy Armstrong says, "I've also set up a proxy for boingboing at boingboing.hexten.net."
Or...

If possible, ask your system administrator to whitelist BoingBoing.net. Sometimes network admins leave all the defaults on when they install enterprise filtering software. If they're using SmartFilter, for example, the admin can selectively allow the BoingBoing.net domain, while keeping the rest of the entries for the "blocked" category in which BoingBoing is listed. Bribing your sysadmin with cartons of Skittles and Red Bull may expedite this option.

Xeni Jardin:

Boing Boing to net-censors: Get bent!

We've decided not to rejig our editorial process to make it easier for a censorware company to block us for their customers. Instead, we're creating a clearinghouse of information on how to defeat censorware.

Last week, we reported that Boing Boing was blocked by entire countries including the United Arab Emirates, and by many library systems, schools, US government and military sites, and corporations.

Today, we've learned that Internet Qatar, the sole ISP in the State of Qatar, has also banned BoingBoing.

We've heard from librarians in Africa who want to watch the video of the American Register of Copyrights denouncing Congress, employees at the Australian Broadcasting Company, students, and workers around the world who can't gain access to our work.

At fault is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity -- even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands -- as a "nudity" site, which means that customers who block "nudity" can't get through.

Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a "nudity" site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692 -- that's 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618 -- 0.32 percent.

In fact, out of the 25,000+ Boing Boing posts classed as "nudity" by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.

Why is SmartFilter content to deliver a product with a 99.5 percent false-positive rate? Because it has promised its customers that it will stop their users from seeing nudity (fat chance -- it's a dead certainty that Smart Filter has failed to class innumerable sites containing nudity), and punishing 24,875 nudity-free posts to get at 125 that contain mild or "art" nudity is fine by them.

Secure Computing told us that their categorization system protects kindergartners from being exposed to porn. We argue that not only are products like SmartFilter incapable of blocking all potentially kid-inappropriate sites, but why treat entire countries, or entire corporate sites full of working adults, as kindergartners?

The question of keeping your child from viewing content you don't want them to see can be addressed more efficiently locally, with tech tools like the browser Bumpercar. As BoingBoing founder (and father of two) Mark Frauenfelder explains, "My daughter and I found a bunch of great kid-friendly sites and have added them to the 'white list.' As a parent, I have local control of the sites she visits instead of handing over control to a remote group of people that I don't trust to do my job of being a parent."

The fact is, there's no effective way to censor the Internet in broad strokes. Only dumb CIOs and totalitarian governments like the UAE believe that adding censorware to your network will prevent the naughty stuff from slopping in. Having a human being review a few pages on a site every couple months is a perfectly adequate classification system, in SmartFilter's lights -- which is convenient, since a genuinely thoroughgoing review would be ruinously expensive.

Secure Computing offered us a devil's bargain: if we'd change the URLs of images with "nudity" (which, they assured us, included photos of Michaelangelo's David) to something they could detect and block, they'd let the rest of the world see us again. That guy in the UAE who was worried he'd be imprisoned for trying to read BoingBoing would be OK again.

We considered their offer, and decided not to do it. What happens when the next censorware company comes along with another editorial process they want us to engage in to help them censor the site?

More importantly: why should we let a company that helps corrupt dictatorships oppress their citizen dictate morality to us?

So instead we've decided to help put Secure Computing out of business. We're doing this in three ways:

• First, we're publishing a guide to evading the SmartFilter censorware. There are hundreds of ways to defeat these censorware apps, and we're going to catalog as many of them as possible.
  Link to "BoingBoing's Guide To Evading Censorware."
• Next, we're compiling a list of SmartFilter's dumb classifications. Send us your misclassified SmartFilter sites so we can add them to the list.
• Finally, we're producing a guide to convincing your employer to ditch SmartFilter. It consists of parts one and two above: a list of bad SmartFilter classifications and a list of ways that SmartFilter can be shredded like wet kleenex. Why spend money on bad technology that doesn't work?

ngBoing team:
- Cory Doctorow
- Mark Frauenfelder
- Xeni Jardin
- David Pescovitz
- John Battelle

(Internet Qatar screengrab: thanks, Patrick McKinnion)

Previous BoingBoing posts:
* BoingBoing now censored in the UAE
* Argonne National Laboratory is blocking Boing Boing

The Project Pad Quicktime Tool lets you attach annotations to time segments of Quicktime video and audio streams. The tool can be used by instructors and / or student teams to critique student-produced video and audio or to provide a way for students to analyze scientific, historic, or artistic recordings.

Plugin for OS X that will let Spotlight index your del.icio.us bookmarks. The program syncs with your del.icio.us account every thirty minutes.

Comics that use the iPod's clickwheel function to advance from panel to panel.

ZoneTag can automatically tag your photos with the location they were taken at.

I finally installed XBox Media Center this weekend and I'm thoroughly geeked. It plays just about anything, and I wasn't expecting the picture quality to be so damn good. I realize I'm a little late to the game, but so be it.

I followed ProductWiki's guide to soft-modding and was able to get through it with minimal teeth gnashing. The main reason I hadn't modded before was the pain it is to figure out which mod chip you have to buy, install it, etc. so this soft mod guide was exactly what I needed.

So now that I've caught up with what the Makers were doing 4 years ago, does anyone have any recommendations for cool add-ons for XBMC?

Tags: xbox modding xboxmediacenter

_Live_Flash_Stream_via_FFMPEG
Drazen writes up the procedure he uses to do live streaming to an embedded SWF.

As reported on Slashdot, and briefly at Cinematech, Google Video has announced a pilot program to digitize and make publicly available the entire contents of the National Archives.

To whet your appetite, Google Video has already uploaded quite a few videos at the NARA Google Video site. Here are a few direct links:

*Marines Raise Flag Over Iwo Jima 1945
*Allied patrols in action on Anzio beach
*Reclamation and the Arid West
*The Eagle Has Landed 1969
*Boulder Dam 1937
*White Sands 1938

A valiant effort, and one that will no doubt be greatly appreciated the world over. But it raises the question; why couldn't the National Archives deliver such a solution on their own? Why must Google step forward? I am assuming, of course, that they did indeed step forward and were not approached first by the Archives.
Not to mention...geez, if this "Google" machine ever becomes concious, we are headed straight towards a Matrix-inspired armageddon...

Now there's a place you can go to find out the top 100 most-frequently-used makes and models of digital cameras used to take pictures uploaded to photo sharing website Flickr. There's also a column that names the top camera manufacturers represented in Flickr uploads.

Here's an exquisite example of data mining, where recent uploads are sampled using some pretty tricky technology. Taking a look at the list right now, it looks like Canon dominates, with seven out of the top 10 cameras used, with the top three manufacturers lining up as Canon, Sony and then Nikon. Take a look at the list here.

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Anatomy of a fake Video iPod meme (via MacRumors).



Smaller mirrored video at YouTube.

Tom Coates' good wrap-up of Web 2.0 philosophies to date.

A brand new blogging engine with a 'keep it simple' philosophy. Designed from the ground-up to be fully buzzword compliant (AJAX, RSS, Web 2.0 - it's all there), logahead lets you effortlessly do what blogs were invented for

FictionFixer™ tracks and analyzes more than 250 characteristics of current bestselling novels. The software combines this data with a consensus of expert advice and opinion to define a model representing what the public expects from such books.

Anvil is a free video annotation tool, used at research institutes world-wide (see the Anvil User Web). It offers frame-accurate, hierarchical multi-layered annotation driven by user-defined annotation schemes. The intuitive annotation board shows color-coded elements on multiple tracks in time-alignment. Special features are cross-level links, non-temporal objects and a project tool for managing multiple annotations. Originally developed for Gesture Research, Anvil has also proved suitable for research in Human-Computer Interaction, Linguistics, Ethology, Anthropology, Psychotherapy, Embodied Agents, Computer Animation and many other fields.

At the start of each round, Ariel issues a Scene Mission that details what should happen in the upcoming scene, and outlines specific objectives. For example: "Create a scene in which Shane and Carmen discuss moving in together. Carmen gets upset when she senses Shane's apprehension."

At the end of each round, the top-rated scene becomes part of the fanisode script. The winning writer receives a special prize and gets a profile on the site (15 minutes of fame!). Other players are awarded bonus prizes. Then, a new round begins and we repeat the process week after week until March 31st when we'll have the completed script.

The Neighborhood Story Project works with high school students and their families to write about their lives and neighborhoods. Students learn to write creative non-fiction and vignettes, conduct in-depth interviews of family members and neighbors, and take photographs. Community writing projects allow us to be the authors of our own stories, and infuse our community with real and important literature.

(Also check out the Lower East Side Biography Project -kc.)

After the print media's integrating citizen contributions in their papers and online editions, TV is now doing the same, requesting citizen videos shot with digital cameras or cameraphones for their news programs. News.com reports.

"USA Networks, Fox and NBC are programming shows featuring the most popular video shorts circulating on the Net in the coming months. And ABC News Digital plans to enhance its television news program by drawing on video captured by viewers using mobile phones.

ABC News also introduced an online service devoted to collecting viewers' video that's been captured by multimedia-equipped mobile phones. ABC collects and edits video from the online service, which is called "Seen & Heard in America," so that it can incorporate it regularly into shows like "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America."

[via isnoop]

Check out Make Zine's article about a "Linux powered, wireless sniffing web radio boom box":

"For the past few months, I've been working on a web radio boombox. I've hollowed out a perfectly good radio and made room for a tiny motherboard and power supply that are set up to run Damn Small Linux off of a USB flash drive. There is a wireless card inside, and the box is configured to sniff out wireless networks and automatically start streaming web radio on any friendly Wi-fi network."

"http://www.flickr.com/photos/isnoop/sets/1486698/">Flickr photos

: As I mentioned earlier, I am at the Public Broadcasting New Media Conference, and Alisa Miller, the new CEO of Public Radio International, is giving a keynote this morning. She is talking about community and how the private sector calls it social networking, and the need for public media to respond to it. She is saying that all the private efforts care about is how to make a sale, get more money out of users, as opposed to the public service media.
I would say it all sounds a bit too defensive...let's see if the tone changes over the day.

One of the world's most successful citizen journalism sites, Korea’s OhmyNews, has gotten an $11-million investment from Softbank.

The site -- which has built a team of almost 40,000 citizen reporters -- will use the investment to launch a Japanese news site, the first “stepping stone” of the soon-to-be-formed OhmyNews International. It also plans to develop its video journalism arm and improve its English-language edition.

Filed under: Culture, Business

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Clues Woven Into Cloth

If you find yourself wearing clothes from a new company called Edoc Laundry, beware: Strangers may walk up to you on the street to examine the intricacies of your shirt's patterns. That's because Edoc Laundry's first line, expected to launch March 1, literally weaves an episodic, multimedia game into the fabric of the garments. The Seattle-based company is believed to be the first to attempt such a fashion feat.

The idea is an extension of so-called alternate-reality games, or ARGs, in which people try to solve puzzles that are propagated online but require players to team up to find clues in the real world. Usually, the games are promotional vehicles for other products, including video games and movies. Examples of ARGs include 2004's "I Love Bees," which was a lead-in to Bungie Studios' "Halo 2" for Xbox, and 2005's "Last Call Poker," which promoted Activision's "Gun."

Edoc Laundry's line integrates an ARG into its shirts, hats and accessories. The story involves the mysterious death of the manager of a fictional band called Poor Richard. Players find clues such as words and symbols embedded in the clothes. They then head to a Web site where they can unlock complex elements of the overriding story of Poor Richard and its music..." Continue reading Wearable game weaves clues into cloth by Daniel Terdiman, CNET News.com. [via Jim Downing on Smart Mobs]

Art, Technology and Popular Culture

The STRP Festival will take place between the 24th and 26th of March 2006 in the former industrial area, Strijp S, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. STRP is a festival at the intersection of art, technology and popular culture in the full context of all art disciplines. A festival where the public is treated to a broad palette of works through in-depth presentations and large spectacles, which provide an image of how visual art, design, stage arts, film, architecture and popular culture develop themselves through the means or appliance of both new and existing technology.

ROBOTICS: Amorphic RobotWorks (USA) - Inflatable Bodies, Robotlab (GER) - Juke_bots, Bill Vorn (CAN) - Hysterical Machines, Pascal Glissmann, Martina Höfflin (GER) - Electronic Life Forms (ELF), Garnet Hertz (CAN) - Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot #3, Gijs van Bon - Arabesk #23, Time's up/HRL (AUT), Bar Bot - Dr. Christoph Bartneck (GER) - eMuu, Robbert Smit, Graham Smith, HKU - Telemoby, Björn Schülke (GER) - Nervous, Markus Lerner, Andre Stubbe (GER) - Outerspace, Michiel van Overbeek - Nazarenos, Lara Greene (UK) - You Move Me, Fred Abels & Mirjam Langemeijer - Dirk.

INTERACTIVE ART: Marnix de Nijs - RMR (runmotherfuckerrun), C6 (UK) - Want Need, //////////fur//// art entertainment interfaces (GER) - PainStation, Marnix de Nijs & Edwin van der Heide - Spatial Sounds, Mateusz Herczka - 44\13, Debbie does art - Cockroachlounge, Walter Langelaar - SUB-OBJECT_2.1, Raymond Deirkauf, Beyond Expression - Ray's, Aldje van Meer en Radboud Mens - Realsound, Kim Boekhout van Solinge - Ruissimulatie, David Kousemaker - TouchMe, Prohaska, Sägmüller, Demblin (AUT) - Unplugger v1.1/Plug In to Black Out, Prohaska (AUT) - KRFTWRK, Crew (BE) - Degenerator 2.0, Paul Klotz - 3D-Quoter.

MUSIC: Dj's--Jeff Mills (DVJ-set, USA) - Derrick May (USA) - Daniel Wang (USA) - DJ Krust (UK) - Addictive TV (DVJ Set, UK) - Dick El Demasiado - Lady Aida - Steffi - Martyn (DJ Pan) - Robob - Rick Angel - Ari Daily - Caz One Live: Karl Bartos (Ex-Kraftwerk, GER) - Mouse on Mars (GER) - DMX Krew (UK) - Atom Heart (GER / CHI) - Octave One (USA) - Joris Voorn - Secret Cinema - Zeena Parkins & Ikue Mori (USA) - Beautyon (UK) - Daniel Wang (USA) - Kettel - Geigercounting - Dijf Sanders (BE) - Dexter - Like a Tim - Vert (GER/UK) - Drillem - Taeji Sawai (JPN) - Ella Bandita - Yutaka Makino (JPN) - RA-X and the Raiders of the Lost Cause - David Grubbs (USA) - Solid Decay - Hrvatski.

VISUALS: Live Cinema--Peter Greenaway (UK): Tulse Luper VJ performance - Skoltz Kolgen (CAN) - Telcosystems - Addictive TV (UK): The Eye of the Pilot - Boris en Brecht Debackere (BE): Rotor - Optical Machines - SXNDRX: Videoboxing; Video-art/art videoclips--Cinefeel: Music Videos - Addictive TV (UK): Mixmasters - Optronica (UK): Visual Music on the Screen - WORM: Live Cinema DVD 1 - NOTV: Visual Music 2 - Floris Kaayk: The Order Electrus; Vj's--VJ Oxygen others. Live visuals & presentations by Holland-Interactive. Special outdoor light installation by Har Hollands.

Films: Fritz Lang (GER) - Metropolis, Fred M. Wilcox (USA) - Forbidden Planet, Mamoru Oshii (JPN) - Ghost in the Shell 2, Het uur van de wolf - Op zoek naar een vergeten toepassing, Lesic, Lindgreen & Pancras, When I sold my soul to the machine, Len Lye (NZL) - Birth of a Robot, Lillian Schwartz (USA) - Pixilliation, Robert Seidel(GER) -Grau, Phillipp Hirsch (GER) - Inside, Alexander Rutterford (UK) - Gantz Graf, Alexander Rutterford (UK) - 3Space, Johnny Hardstaff (UK) - Future of Gaming, George Melies (FRA) - Le Voyage dans la Lune

OTHER: Theatre: Pipslab: The washing powder conspiracy, produced by Paradiso-Melkweg Productiehuis - Crew (BE): _U - Eboman: SampleMadnesS

Workshop: Ralf Schreiber, Tina Tonagel and Christian Faubel (GER) 'Chirping and Crawling' Robotworkshop

Lectures: Karl Bartos (Ex Kraftwerk, GER) - Bas Haring - Dirk van Weelde - Dr. Christoph Bartneck (GER) - Kees Tazelaar - Koert van Mensvoort Peter Verhelst (BE) - Hans Beekmans - Waag Society

STRP Foundation
P.O. Box 272 / 5600 AG Eindhoven / The Netherlands
Tel: +31 40 2367228 / Fax: +31 40 2377676

Via the Commons Music blog, I see this in-depth article about the fact that hardly any graphics cards you buy today will be compatible with the forthcoming HDCP copy-protection standard:

HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This content protection system is mandatory for high-definition playback of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. If you want to watch movies at 1980×1080, your system will need to support HDCP. If you don’t have HDCP support, you’ll only get a quarter of the resolution.

As part of the Windows-Vista Ready Monitor article, I was going to publish a list of all of the graphics cards that currently support HDCP. I mean, I remember GPUs dating as far back as the Radeon 8500 that had boasted of HDCP support.

Turns out, we were all deceived.

Although ATI has had “HDCP support” in their GPUs since the Radeon 8500, and NVIDIA has had “HDCP support” in their GPUs since the GeForce FX5700, it turns out that things are more complicated — just because the GPU itself supports HDCP doesn’t mean that the graphics card can output a DVI/HDCP compliant stream. There needs to be additional support at the board level, which includes licensing the HDCP decoding keys from the Digital Content Protection, LLC (a spin-off corporation within the walls of Intel).

When I read about these kinds of enterprises, the more I’m struck by how brittle they are. Each and every component in the HDCP content stream—the optical drive, the operating system, the graphics card, and the monitor, and numerous small components, must be specifically reviewed and approved by the HDCP consortium to make sure that they follow the rules. The millions of drives, computers, graphics cards, and monitors that were designed prior to the release of the HDCP spec (i.e. virtually all the video hardware in use today—even hardware that’s physically capable of playing high-resolution video) will have to be thrown out if consumers want to view Blue-Ray or HD-DVD content. This is a tremendous cost in time, money, and consumer inconvenience.

(Continued at The Technology Liberation Front.)

According to Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong (SCEH), Sony will begin providing download services on March 21 for its PlayStation Portable (PSP) in Taiwan.

Content will include animated cartoons and music, with Sony affiliated ISP Sony Network Taiwan (So-net) supplying the service. Users will be charged a monthly fee to access the service, but all content will be free to download.

EVERPLAY contains a set of standards for the consumer imaging and electronics industry, aimed to provide products that are designed to satisfy consumers desire to protect their image assets for generations and provide interoperability across a variety of devices.

EVERPLAY shall record EXIF meta data, such as date and time, inputted by the camera. It also allows recording of additional scene data from PCs, consumer electronics devices, digital still cameras and Photo Kiosks, if desired.

Via del.icio.us/yatta

"If you want any of them to survive, get involved now - whether through money or ideas, because otherwise I predict 2006 will be the year the nonprofit media movement dies. The definition of independent is debated regularly, but could soon just mean one thing: alone."

"A really good connector is someone who can connect you to people, places, ideas that you'd not have come across otherwise. Like a journalist, a really, good connector shouldn't be precious about their information sources."

The Article, Emergence as a Construct (dead link) which appeared in Volume 1 of Emergence Magazine provides a detailed, although rather complex look at the subject. Better yet, a web-based project over at MIT allows you to explore emergence via the wonderful world of cellular automaton. (Remember Stephen Wolfram's ode to the cellular automaton, A New Kind of Science?) You can also use this piece of software to create interactive art pieces that use emergence to "provide the opportunity to explore the role of artificial life and human presence in the creation of an art form which includes the interactive experience."

Turn a tvrss search into a podcast with Feedburner

Danah Boyd gave a talk recently:

When MySpace was initially introduced, skeptics thought that it would be just another fad because previous sites like Friendster had risen and crashed. Unlike the 20-somethings who invaded Friendster, the teens have more reason to participate in profile creation and public commentary. Furthermore, MySpace's messaging is better suited for youths' asynchronous messaging needs. They can send messages directly from friends' profiles and check whether or not their friends have logged in and received their email. Unlike adults, youth are not invested in email; their primary peer-to-peer communication occurs synchronously over IM. Their use of MySpace is complementing that practice.

MySpace at least once a day or whenever computer access is possible. Teens that have a computer at home keep MySpace opened while they are doing homework or talking on instant messenger. In schools where it is not banned or blocked, teens check MySpace during passing period, lunch, study hall and before/after school. This is particularly important for teens who don't have computer access at home. For most teens, it is simply a part of everyday life - they are there because their friends are there and they are there to hang out with those friends. Of course, its ubiquitousness does not mean that everyone thinks that it is cool. Many teens complain that the site is lame, noting that they have better things to do. Yet, even those teens have an account which they check regularly because it's the only way to keep up with the Jones's.

Iran endorses its own blogging revolutionHossein Derakhshan | Toronto-based blogging activist | Feb 22Guardian Unlimited / Internet -  Hossein Saffar-Harandi, the most fundamentalist minister of culture and Islamic guidance Iran has ever had, has not only publicly endorsed blogs, but also announced plans for including them, as well as websites, within the purview of a new government office that used to oversee only the press, writes Hossein Derakshan. Given Iran's strict new policies against cultural products that promote "western" ideas such as feminism, liberalism, nihilism and humanism, the recent endorsement of blogs seems contradictory. The flourishing of blogs, estimated at more than 700,000 worldwide, has created a new space for self-expression on political and social matters. full of links

Originally from The Agonist, ReBlogged by huong on Feb 22, 2006 at 11:06 PM

Okay, imagine the simplest possible multitrack audio tool. Drag and drop audio files from an integrated browser, and add envelopes. Now imagine this tool free and open-source:

Gungirl Sequencer

At version 0.3, so your mileage may vary, but could be a fun tool to have around -- or the beginning of your very own audio tool, if you've got the programming chops. Who's the gun-toting grrrl who created this little gem? Um . . . Richard Spindler. So I'm guessing he didn't name it after himself. Via AudioMastermind blog, which has been on a roll lately.

Richard also has a simple open-source movie editor project going that looks quite capable. (Also under development; Linux source only.)

Only Gungirl can give you a ghetto rendition of the Ableton Live knobs, however. Enjoy!.

Two new bills aim to allow US wireless broadband operators unlicensed use of so-called "white spaces" in the analog television spectrum within months, report CNET and Ars Technica. Stations don't transmit in this spectrum, and it can be found in even the most dense urban locations. The National Association of Broadcasters has fought an FCC push on this front since 2004, concerned with interference potential. The bills:

The American Broadband for Communities Act, sponsored by Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) urges the FCC to open "any unused broadcast television spectrum in the band between 72 and 698 megaHertz, inclusive, other than spectrum in the band between 608 and 614 megaHertz, inclusive."

The Wireless Innovation Act, sponsored by Senators George Allen (R-VA) and John Kerry (D-MA), pushes the FCC to create rules enabling unlicensed use of the spectrum between 54Mhz and 698Mhz by year's end.

The customer is not always... well, rarely, right in Japan, and manufacturers don't really care about them. The second hand marker flourishes over here, and most people take good care of their equipment, so used goods are usually in a very good condition and are sold easily to be replaced by new goods. It's easy to strike a good deal when buying these second hand goods. But that's exactly the big problem for manufacturers, because this grey market is not generating them any profit, and they would like to get rid of this phenomenon. The first ones to talk to the government about this were the car manufacturers, and they convinced the government to enforce a rule that used cars have to go to the technical inspection after 3 years, and this is a costly matter since a check costs between 1500 and 3500 EUR. Once you're in the system, you have to get your car checked every 2 years, and once your car is 10 years old, you need to go there every year. This is a reson why the Japanese change cars quite fast, usually before the car is 3 years old. Important aspect is that you have no control whatsoever on the cost of possible repairs, because after the technical check, the car is driven to the garage and they do the repairs that the technical check asked them to do, you just get the bill with your car. A very nice rip-off... and this system is being envied by a lot of other domains, like the electronics domain at this moment. So from April 1st 2006, ALL electronic products sold in Japan before 2001 will be prohibited from the 2nd hand market! This means that for example a PC like the Vaio U1 (PCG-U1) will be soon not vailable on the Japanese market anymore, since it was sold in April 2002... and you still have about a month to get a Vaio C1! It also seems that a 5 yeas old product (made after 2001) will Face the same problem in the futur.

Needless to say that like any law, it can and will be circumvented, but this is a disaster for the small shops in Akihabara. The excuse of the Japanese government are security reasons on anything electronical.

Digg this Story !

Google's collection of thumbnail images culled from the adult website violates Perfect 10's copyright, a judge says in a ruling that could have wider implications.

First M, now Metropolis, one of Fritz Lang's other masterpieces, is available for download on Internet Archive.

As Bibi says, other formats are available at the Public Domain Movies. Related: Metropolis poster fetches record.

Ben Hammersley on not using Moveable Type: "I've spent all week converting wireframes - pixel perfect, gorgeous wireframes from three *very* good designers - into cross-browser compatible works of markup art, and I'm tired. I just want my words and pictures to look nice. Life's too short to customise one's templates for the eighth time."

The Coral Content Distribution Network
Not a CDN for streaming, rather a distributed caching system. Developed at NYU and Open Source. Pretty interesting..

abstract plane - products - uplink

Vara Software : Wirecast

Not sure about either of them as I haven't tested on a PC but looks good..

//// Welcome to eyespot ////
Just came upon this interesting new platform for online video editing. Flash based and targeted to non-video folk. I like the MMS submission process for mobile users and blog publishing though I wish it created a feed for use in things like FireANT. Guess that is a bit hard when everything is Flash video based.

From the site:
Shoot, Mix, and Share your Video.
Use the eyespot Mixer to combine your videos, photos and music. Share your video and mixes with the world for Free.

Established media has to grapple with the novel fact that its next generation of consumers is also competition.

Project Pad is a project to build a web-based system for media annotation and collaboration for teaching and learning and scholarly applications.

You can show what you are watching, and what you've watched and what you like to watch in the sidebar of your blog (or your personal web page.) Share your TV persona with your own community.

Story-sharing using instant messengers, VOIP, and image sharing applications.

Documentary filmmakers have created, through their professional associations, a clear, easy to understand statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use.

A text messaging reminder service has been launched by Lincolnshire’s library service to let borrowers know that their items are ready for collection. "When you reserve a library book, talking book, CD, DVD or video you can now choose to be notified by text message , a service which is free of charge. [via eGov monitor]

Part I: reblogging some stuff

Josh Kinberg on unmediated: NBC sends YouTube Take-Down Notice for SNL Lazy Sunday

Of course, some people think that YouTube should be congratulated for their copyright infringing practices. Here's what Xeni Jardin says about it on BoingBoing:

Boing Boing: NBC nastygrams YouTube over "Lazy Sunday"

This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere

Sorry, Xeni, that's completely wrong. In the same blog entry where YouTube responds to the take-down notice they also say:

YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month

So how exactly are they different from a TV network? How are they exempt from the laws and standard practices of the industry?

Part II: explaining it

Josh Kinberg is the main writer above. Josh is a co-founder of the videoblogging subculture and co-creator of FireAnt, a videoblog aggregator. Josh is arguing against YouTube from a lightnet perspective. He's an activist for internet video which is native to the internet, meaning the partipatory kind.

Xeni Jardin is the blogger he's responding to. Xeni is a contributor to BoingBoing, an important blog whose digital politics are from the P2P period. These political ideas center on defending unauthorized distribution.

Both Josh and Xeni are part of the bleeding edge, and not long ago it would have been very surprising to see such a stark difference in their views. What this exchange shows is that lightnet is a new fault line in digital politics. Is the work at hand about samizdat, as Xeni thinks, or about participatory media, as Josh thinks?

I have personally been blown off with gusto on this issue by members of the samizdat wing who felt that lightnet is either collaboration in the Vichy mold or just plain pussy. These ideas are new, counterintuitive and have near-zero visibility outside of the participatory media movement.

Director Aryan Kaganof has shot a feature film using only camera-equipped mobile phones. "SMS Sugar Man" was filmed using eight phones over 11 days with three main characters at a cost of $164,000.

This is a form of coordination arbitrage: these students are arbitraging the fact that coordination, in Hollywood, is relatively overpriced. That is, studio execs, stars, agents, etc cost a great deal - but are returning less and less relative to new form

summary: it's all gear and bandwidth baby.

Here's how to make "light graffiti" out of disposable digital cameras - once the camera is modded it will display images/words automatically and run for about 2 days.

James Boyle in the FT argues that we are (slowly) moving towards a 'cultural environmentalism' that tries to protect the public domain in the way that the environmental movement tries to protect the natural ecology.

The head of the US Copyright Office says that a controversial treaty that would bring harm to webcasters -- especially podcasters -- has been rejected by the rest of the world, leaving only the US to champion it

"A Chinese audio/video codec is on the verge of becoming a national standard--a domestic rival to MPEG-4/H.264 and WMV-9 that backers say will save China-based manufacturers and consumers at least tens of millions of dollars in fees and royalties during t

eVokeTV.com is focused on multi-tasking tv watchers - the growing population of users that have broadband internet connectivity while watching TV.

A mobile aggregator for existing Web 2.0 API's. In the future it will also act as a hub between mobile devices and services, allowing users to post to things like del.icio.us, upcoming and flickr

SSG was made to run on Mac OS X Tiger with the tools provided therein." It's a PHP-based web image gallery that can exploit Spotlight indexing provided by OS X Tiger!

An attempt to make computers smarter by making it easy and fun for people all over the world to work together to give computers the millions of pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute 'common-sense', all those aspects of the world that we all underst

Search engine for the code samples made available for download by programming book publishers.

Newcastle City Council and AV Festival are supporting the 2020 project, bringing together artists from a vast array of backgrounds, all with the common goal of exploring the potential of live audiovisual performance in an artistic context.

James Boyle in the FT argues that we are (slowly) moving towards a 'cultural environmentalism' that tries to protect the public domain in the way that the environmental movement tries to protect the natural ecology.

"I'm beginning to realize that the Arphid has become a peculiar fetish object around the Internet of Things discourse. I mean, why Arphid? It's not even directly networked? It's a glorified anti-theft device? How did this happen?"

Electronic Standard Book Number (ESBN) is the unique identifier of electronic content and media. ESBNs are simple and quick to generate and serve as branded identifier or copyright for individuals or companies developing electronic content and media.

Chips that really get under your skin

"Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) presented a chip that is implanted in a user's forearm to function as an audio signal transmission wire that links to an iPod. Many of the presentations featured devices that conserved power, though this chip goes a step further, harnessing the human body's natural conductive properties to create personal-area networks. It is not practical to wire together the numerous devices that people carry with them, and Bluetooth connections fall prey to interference, leading scientists to explore the application of the human body as a networking cable. The Korean scientists augmented an iPod nano with their wideband signaling chip. When a user kept his finger pressed to the device, it transmitted data at 2 Mbps, at a consumption rate lower than 10 microwatts. Researchers from the University of Utah also presented a chip that scans brainwave activity by wirelessly streaming data through monitors in the hopes of creating prosthetics that quadriplegics could operate with their brain waves, though both projects are still in the preliminary research stages. () These chips are not something that will be included in one of Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs' Macworld keynotes anytime soon." ACM Technology News. See Chips that really get under your skin by Tom Krazit, CNET News.com (see Microsoft patents body power by Matt Loney, CNET News.com) [blogged by nicolas on pasta and vinegar]

Cory Doctorow: The head of the US Copyright Office says that a controversial treaty that would bring harm to webcasters -- especially podcasters -- has been rejected by the rest of the world, leaving only the US to champion it. This is the opposite of the US negotiator's position, which is a lot like the old Internet saw, "The lurkers support me in email" -- that is, that lots of countries have privately supported the restrictions on webcasters, but haven't found the right time to express that support at the United Nations.

At stake is the "webcasting provision" of the "Broadcasters' Treaty" underway at WIPO, the UN agency that handles copyrights, patents and the like. The Webcasting provision would make it illegal to retransmit Creative Commons licensed works (as well as public domain works, uncopyrightable works like those made by the US government, etc) without permission of the person who hosts them. In other words, it will no longer be enough to know that the author of the work wants you to share it -- you'll also need permission from the company that hosts and distributes the files.

The treaty wil eliminate fair use for all Internet audio/video casts, by creating a different set of rules for what's fair and what isn't when it comes to casters than when it comes to copyright holders. You'll have to negotiate two separate, contradictory "fair use" systems whenever it comes time to making a podcast.

At the UN, the US consistently argues that this is a popular idea. They've been put up to advancing it by an org called DIMA that's a front for Microsoft and Yahoo, who like the idea of being Internet audio/video gatekeepers.

I've delivered a letter to the UN signed by 20 tech companies that oppose the inclusion of webcasting in the Broadcast Treaty. The copies of the letter were stolen from the literature table and put in the trashcans in the toilets. Repeatedly.

I questioned Mary-Beth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, about the Webcasting treaty during the Q&A after her panel at a conference at UNC last November. To everyone's surprise, she admitted that the US's position that this is a fundamentally popular idea was a lie:

[7:20]...I think the most controversial piece is the scope of the right that's being created. The position that the US took is well, if you're going to give that type of a right to a broadcaster -- theft of a signal -- then you should look at all people who are similarily situated, including webcasters. Now, that has been totally rejected by the rest of the world."

MP4 Link, AVI Link, MPG Link

Credit: The University of North Carolina and UNC-TV for the video capture and TJ Ward for digizing it.