unmediated

open the top of the can, speak, close, shake...oh yeah... the hackers are so damn brilliant...sampling and mixing taken to a whole new level...

EuclidVision should be able to reduce the current MPEG-4 attainable 700 MB file size for 2-hour long videos down to 50MB – finally making feature length movies as “swappable” as MP3s.

When advertisers try to engage participatory media, they're going to get anti-ads.

Diva is a project to build an easy to use, scalable, open-source video editing software for the Gnome desktop.

This 52-minute video is from a presentation I gave about for the Capital PC User Group on Powerbullet and Audacity.

Insanely cool

"Hitachi TRK-8200HR + Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 Color Tablet PC
currently running win98 (linux or dual-boot when complete) with MediaCar as the default mp3 interface with custom skin for the 480x640 portrait display
20g harddrive
pcmcia LAN, and WiFi
internal webcam
4 USB
custom desktop to keep original aesthetics"

50% conference, 50% unconference. Reboot 8 is coming...

The driving theme of reboot8 is renaissance. What (else) should we focus on?

• Ubiquitous Computing
• interesting people and interesting ideas
• thoughts about value based creation
• digital history bridging
• sociology
• people creating new open shared infrastructure
• thoughts on the super-empowered individual
• analog creatures in a digital world
• what are we building for our children? what will they build for us?
• Possibilities and barriers for use of social software in business
• More science and blogging (Hard blogging scientists - German)
• More on Social Innovation
• How to leverage web 2.0 to thwart attempts to restrict free speech?
• Less blog-centric, more internet... please?
• Seems like the Libraries are having lots of ideas in the user-participation area.
• How does TV and mainstream media view social software and user-participation - a threat or a possibility
• Potlatch^WP economy
• Identity management

This from News & Technology:

YourHub.com may be coming to a Web site near you.

More than a dozen newspapers, ranging from The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel to those operated by the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, have signed up to begin offering the Web-to-print grassroots journalism platform since the Denver Newspaper Agency began syndicating the concept earlier this year.

it adds:

Key features in the YourHub.com syndication launch kit include content publishing and hosting software as well as strategies for marketing, editorial and sales, Wills said.

Optional features, such as converting the Web content to print format, and online classified ad posting, are also available.

Documentary filmmakers are in a particularly difficult position in terms of intellectual property, as most documentarians focus on lives of real people -- and modern life, especially in the US, Europe and Japan, is inundated with logos, music, background video and myriad other trademark and copyright concerns. Bound by Law?, a discussion of the intersection of fair use, public domain, copyright and documentary film -- done in a comic book format -- illustrates both the complexities that documentarians face and the broader struggle over how we can record modern life in all of its forms for posterity. Created by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins at the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Bound by Law? is well-worth reading by anyone trying to understand how intellectual property rules affect our lives. Although it looks only at American regulations, many of the concepts it covers apply far more broadly.

The ongoing evolution of copyright laws in the industrialized world has served both to protect and to stymie creative artists. On the one hand, stronger and more explicit protection of copyright assures emerging artists that larger corporate entities can't simply take the artists' work; on the other hand, aggressive assertion of rights over material that is part of our common culture has a demonstrable negative impact on the creative abilities of artists. Although much of the debate online focuses on American laws, digital era copyright laws in Europe and Japan have evoked similar arguments, and the role of intellectual property laws in the relationship between industrialized and developing nations remains controversial. The solutions offered by groups like Creative Commons can go a long way to making the situation more reasonable, but they require positive action on the part of artists.

Long-time WorldChanging readers will also note that many of the issues that apply to documentary filmmakers would apply to some degree to people using "participatory panopticon"-style technologies, especially as the more rudimentary versions of these technologies come to be used as ways to document events as they happen. It's likely, in fact, that the biggest roadblocks to more widespread adoption of "lifeblogging," "sousveillance" and other participatory panopticon tools will arise not from privacy concerns, but from intellectual property problems. Some will come from twisty legal passages, all alike, that label showing the recordings to others as "public presentation." Some will come from restrictions on recording hardware meant to stop "piracy" of copyrighted material by shutting down whenever songs or videos with digital restriction "watermarks" are captured, even in the background.

As Bound by Law? demonstrates, this is not an easily-resolved situation -- but it's one that is increasingly important to us all.

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Tech Bloom – Collaborative and Emergent Technologies at 04:59 PM)

AnalyGIS and SRC, both of whom work on various tools for studying markets and communities, have teamed up to build a demographic study tool combining Google Maps (surprise) and 2000 US Census data. Click on a spot in the US, then select either basic census information (ethnic distribution, sex parity, and income averages) or housing information (owners vs. renters, housing value, age of units) within one, three and five miles of your target click. You can also enter an address directly.

They describe this as primarily a proof-of-concept exercise, so there's no telling when it will disappear. Still, for those of us who want a better way to access demographic information quickly and visually, this works pretty well. Since it's based on Google Map's public APIs and open access census data, it should also be relatively simple to rebuild should this one go away.

(Thanks, Joe Willemssen!)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 02:24 PM)

Friday is the deadline for the journalism contest for high school students, sponsored by Participant Productions. Judging the contest will be Dan Rather of CBS News and Ann Curry from The Today Show/Dateline NBC. Oh, yeah. The winner gets $1,000!

: YouTube has had a 100MB file upload limit all along but earlier this week, the viral video site set a new 10-minute limit aimed at reducing the amount of copyright violations. According to a staff blog entry, more than 99 percent of the uploaded videos are already under 10 minutes and most users only watch videos about or under 3 minutes long. But a YouTube analysis of the longer videos showed that "the overwhelming majority of them were full length, copyrighted videos from tv shows and movies." The new limit is meant to keep that from happening, although it wouldn't have prevented the most public recent examples of NBC's "Lazy Sunday" or the CBS News report on the autistic basketball player.
Maryrose writes that users should know from the blog or press coverage that YouTube is "constantly trying to balance the rights of copyright owners with the rights of our users." Instead of doing away with longer-form video altogether, YouTube has set up a premium program for professional videos and is working on a solution for those with legit user-gen content that runs longer than 10 minutes. "while still preventing copyrighted full length episodes from entering the system."
The move comes as YouTube continues to reach out to content companies and coincides with the annoucement of a high-profile arrangement with E! to cross-promote the network's new broadband channel "The Vine."
Curious -- for those of you making video deals, does this alleviate your concerns about YouTube? Please leave a note in the comments or drop me a line.

: Day two at Digital Hollywood was a sunny, beautiful day. Some buzz and fallout from the Facebook valuation issues. BW is doing a followup to the story two days ago, and people here are still scratching their heads. I heard Greylock is one of the funders in Facebook's new round.
The other thing I am hearing is YouTube is being hawked around vigorously now...it has also closed a big round from what I hear at an "insane" valuation. Kinda ties in with the post Staci has below...if they take money from the big guys,they have to work with them now.
Another things which is getting some play is that Qualcomm has been hiring content producers in NYC and LA to develop original content to push through its mobile TV service MediaFlo, which will launch with Verizon later this year (hopefully). Officially, the company says that the BW story quote was taken out of context, slightly, and they are merely working with all different parties on the production part. That's a head scratcher for now...need to see how it will play out when the service launches.
On a potential competitor MobiTV, some people asked me what will their ultimate game be? The mobile video aggregation company is moving from just being on 3G systems to mobile TV streaming (DVB-H, DMB etc). Some rumors are they will do an IPO soon...my bet is someone like Yahoo would come in when they get serious about mobile content and video.
More thoughts later...
The Digital Hollywood coverage is sponsored by PaymentOne

Axel Stockburger has a very interesting research topic entitled “THE RENDERED ARENA: MODALITIES OF SPACE IN VIDEO AND COMPUTER GAMES“. He’s working on this at the University of the Arts London, Research Scholarship London Institute with Dr. Angus Carlyle (LCC), Alan Sekers (LCC), Prof. Clive Richards (Coventry University).

one of the most evident properties of those games is their shared participation in a variety of spatial illusions. Although most researchers share the view that issues related to mediated space are among the most significant factors characterising the new medium, as of yet, no coherent conceptual exploration of space and spatial representation in video and computer games has been undertaken.

sis focuses on the novel spatial paradigms emerging from computer and video games. It aims to develop an original theoretical framework that takes the hybrid nature of the medium into account. The goal of this work is to extend the present range of methodologies directed towards the analysis of digital games. In order to reveal the roots of the spatial apparatus at work an overview of the most significant conceptions of space in western thought is given. Henri Lefebvre’s reading of space as a triad of perceived, conceived and lived space is adopted. This serves to account for the multifaceted nature of the subject, enables the integration of divergent spatial conceptions as part of a coherent framework, and highlights the importance of experiential notions of spatiality. Starting from Michel Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia, game-space is posited as the dynamic interplay between different spatial modalities. As constitutive elements of the dynamic spatial system mobilized by digital games the following modalities are advanced: the physical space of the player, the space emerging from the narrative, the rules, the audiovisual representation and the kinaesthetic link between player and game. These different modalities are examined in detail in the light of a selected range of exemplary games. Based on a discussion of film theory in this context an original model that serves to distinguish between different visual representational strategies is presented. A chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the crucial and often overlooked role of sound for the generation of spatial illusions. It is argued that sound has to be regarded as the privileged element that enables the active use of representational space in three dimensions. Finally the proposed model is mobilised to explore how the work of contemporary artists relates to the spatial paradigms set forth by digital games. The critical dimension of artistic work in this context is outlined. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the impact of the prevalent modes of spatial practice in computer and video games on wider areas of everyday life.

Why do I blog this? since space/place are the cornerstone of what I investigate in my research about pervasive games, I am interested by this approach.

apophenia: MySpace, HR 4437 and youth activism: “For good reason, many Americans are outraged by HR 4437, a House bill that will stiffen the penalties around illegal immigration. Over the weekend, protests began with over 500,000 people taking to the streets on Saturday. Online, teens wrote bulletin board posts on MySpace, encouraging their peers to speak out against the bill. On Monday, instigated through MySpace postings, thousands of teens across the country walked out of school and marched in protest. In Los Angeles alone, 36,000 students walked out and took to the streets. Throughout the country, thousands of teens walked out in protest.”

movie matrix stuff

The Movie Toolbox makes extensive use of transformation matrices to define graphical operations that are performed on movies when they are displayed. A transformation matrix defines how to map points from one coordinate space into another coordinate space. By modifying the contents of a transformation matrix, you can perform several standard graphical display operations, including translation, rotation, and scaling. The Movie Toolbox provides a set of functions that make it easy for you to manipulate translation matrices. Those functions are discussed in QuickTime Movie Internals Guide. The remainder of this section provides an introduction to matrix operations in a graphical environment.

"Orwell once remarked that one reason fascism never took off in Britain was because the sight of a goose-stepping soldier would prompt your average Englishman to giggle. Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it."

"So assorted media types, old and new, are here to try and work out how user-generated media can be tapped in to, connected with, understood, and 'leveraged'. I hate that word, it smacks of exploitation. But hey-ho, the commerical impact of new media is big business. Well, that's the mission for today. Let's see if anyone here can make head or tail of it in one day. The clock's ticking."

Robert Price - Lifeblog Posting Protocol Example
Alas, after doing a bit of exploring, I see why LifeBlog never worked with my blog(s). It doesn't do XML-RPC. Arrrg..
In any case, detailed on the site above, Robert Price has done the hard work and figured out just what it does and how it can be used. A bit painful but some progress..

Does anyone have a pointer to XML-RPC J2ME code for me?

Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang continues to spew excrement, echoing his shoulder-shrugging of earlier this month, which essentially amounts to saying: So sorry we assisted in human rights violations, but there's nothing we can do if we're going to bring the Internet to the Chinese people. One recent quote:

"You have to balance the risk of not participating," he said. "And people don't realize that being in the market every day there, and being on the ground, we are seeing changes, on the whole, for the positive."

Tell that to the family of Shi Tao who is in jail for 10 years.  Jerry Yang should meet with them and tell them to their faces just how sorry he is, but that Shi is being sacrificed for a noble cause. I'm sure they'll understand...

Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you're in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can't do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this?  Either they weren't thinking through the consequences or they don't care.

Based on my conversations with people in the Chinese dot-com world, I get the impression that initially, they weren't thinking through the full implications of their business plans. But given that they are now doing nothing to help the families of the dissidents who are in jail thanks to Yahoo!'s cooperation with the Chinese police, and they are doing nothing to prevent more such convictions with Yahoo!'s assistance in the future (or the assistance of it's Chinese partner Alibaba under the Yahoo! brand), one must conclude they also don't actually care very much. If Yahoo's disingenuousness annoys you as much as it annoys me, Amnesty International has a letter writing campaign with all the addresses you need to let Jerry Yang and his colleagues know what you think. They have several recommendations for action which I have updated and modified below.

If Yahoo! wants to convince their users worldwide that the company actually cares about user rights, and that Yahoo! deserves user trust, Yahoo! should:

•    Use its influence to secure the release of Shi Tao, Li Zhi, and any other people who simply exercised their universally recognized right to political dissent and whose arrest and sentencing was aided by Yahoo!
•    Stop any actions that could undermine human rights in any country in which you operate
•    Take immediate steps to ensure that all its units – the parent corporation and subsidiaries – uphold human rights responsibilities for companies, as outlined by the UN Norms for Business
•    Develop an explicit human rights policy, ensuring that it complies with the UN Norms for Business.

Note: There is no mention here about disengagement with China. Jerry Yang, and other Yahoo! executives, please stop claiming that your critics are advocating disengagement. Most of us aren't. Stop treating the public and your (increasingly former) users like morons.  It's really bad for business. You've certainly lost my trust.

UPDATE: Note I have added Yahoo!'s ticker symbol to my title. Thanks to Kathryn Cramer for pointing out that if you include a company's ticker symbol on your blog posts, they'll show up in Google Finance. Very cool.

 

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced an evolution path to over 100Mbps by adopting WiMedia Alliance's version of ultra-wideband (UWB). WiMedia's UWB, also called "wireless USB", is supported by Intel, Microsoft, Sony and Nokia among others.

The UltraWideBand spec split into two incompatible camps,  WiMedia's UWB is not compatible with the UWB Forum standard, promoted by Motorola and Freescale, also called "cable-free" USB.

The Bluetooth SIG will work together with WiMedia to optimize the use of UWB in Bluetooth and to obtain needed worldwide regulatory clearances - something they expect to achieve early in 2007.

The final spec and prototype chipsets are expected to be available around Q3 of 2007. Bluetooth+UWB devices should hit the market early in 2008.

Simple devices such as mono headsets for use with phones will likely remain with the current 2.4GHz Bluetooth technology in order to keep costs down. Initial UWB chipsets are likely to add an extra US$10 to US$15 in cost to devices, though they should quickly fall in line with current Bluetooth chipsets that cost a third as much.

The UWB portion of future Bluetooth devices will run on frequencies above 6GHz, unlike the traditional 2.4GHz band used by Bluetooth and WiFi devices today. Future devices will negotiate with each other to determine whether traditional 2.4GHz Bluetooth or the new UWB connections should be used for a given task based on bandwidth needs. The Bluetooth SIG is hopeful that the UWB system will be as energy efficient as current Bluetooth devices when used within a similar 10m range.

Related DailyWireless articles include; UWB Overview, UWB in the Chips, MultiBand UWB Chip Gets FCC Approval, Wireless USB 1.0, UWB Range Doubles, UWB Organizations Merging?, Alereon Gets UWB Recognition, UWB RF-ID, Wireless USB Comes Home, and Microsoft Joins UWB Battle.

MuniWireless and WiFiNetNews point out that consumer-oriented Common Cause has compiled a list of "astroturf" telecommunications organizations entitled Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.

Astroturf campaigns generally claim to represent huge numbers of citizens, but in reality their public support is minimal or nonexistent.

Common Cause has profiles on the following organizations:

• Consumers for Cable Choice

• FreedomWorks

• Progress and Freedom Foundation

• American Legislative Exchange Council

• New Millennium Research Council

• Frontiers of Freedom

• Keep It Local NJ

• Internet Innovation Alliance

• MyWireless.org
  
  

Not only is the newly introduced Barton Broadband Bill (discussed yesterday) now stripped of network neutrality provisions it contained last fall, critics say it limits the FCC's authority to act, should problems arise. Internet Giants such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and others have rallied, says the Washington Post and are begging lawmakers to act. "We are extremely concerned that legislation before your committee would fail to protect the Internet from discrimination and would deny consumers unfettered access," says a letter from the companies to lawmakers.

The bill is also being criticized by Rep. Edward Markey, who says the bill "would allow phone companies to ignore low-income communities and at some point allow cable incumbents to withdraw service from less-affluent areas," reports Multi-Channel News. Consumer advocates are likewise unimpressed, reports Internet News. The steep divisions could mean no new broadband laws are passed this year.

Ruby library for parsing all sorts of syndication feeds, with preference given to ActiveRecord for caching

DanMelinger posted a photo:

Why is the BBC getting involved in blogging? It's a question that was raised in a session I was running the other day. Followed by the comment: 'Blogging is for amateurs, and provides an easy way for them to put their opinions, however flaky, online.'

It's interesting that the comment came on the day that the Baghdad Burning blog was nominated for an award a measure of how some blogs can be credible and offer a new perspective, not often portrayed by 'big media'.
But it's not just individuals getting into blogging. Big business is there too ­ with GM, IBM, Microsoft etc. using the Internet to connect with consumers. Connecting in a way that allows consumers to enter into a dialogue.

The BBC too has just started to expand it's blogging operations. The first was political editor Nick Robinson, Paul Mason of Newsnight and the World Have Your Say programme from the World Service have recently joined him.

When the BBC already operates chat forums, message boards and community sites, and lets people add comments to some news stories ­ - so what's the point of adding blogs to the mix?

It's early days and hard to tell how blogs at the beeb may develop, but some of the ideas delegates suggested were inspiring. Blogs needn't be just personality based, but could also be built around events, or the genre of programme. They'd be more interactive ordinary web pages, provide more insight to the production process and journalistic process and more depth to programming.

It's similar to the way that big business is using blogs to get closer to consumers, big media can use blogs to engage with the audience in a more one-to-one way.

Matt

I've gotten some feedback on my content objects post, and I'm realizing that I should expand and clarify a bunch of things.

In a world of content objects, there are no copies. There are no mp3 downloads. Special Edition DVDs are obsolete. We think we want to own this content because we've only known audio and video content in a world of masters and dupes.

The content sits online in one place and one place only. There are no intermediaries. You interface with that content by calling it up from the source server which transcodes a stream best suited for your access device.

In the master+dupe world, there are 1 million instances (read:paper copies) of The New York Times in circulation each day. In the content object world (read:online), there is only one NYTimes.com that gets 22 million unique visitors to one instance. Just think of what the world would be like if we could only view web pages through downloading pdfs. Now ask yourself why is it okay that we do this with our music?

The difference between video captured to media during the production process and your final content object is the meaning conveyed through the final edit. A content object is curated. A content object can also be inserted as a whole or in part into a playlist, making it part of a greater content object.

Content objects are neither blogjects nor spimes though they share many of their underlying ideas of and rely on a confluence of emerging network and processor technologies in order to work. Content objects are probably the close cousin of blogjects and Project Xanadu. But I need a little more time to figure out the lineage.

I used to complain that our content shouldn't be married to our objects. Now I realize that our content shouldn't be bound to their particular instances.

(Original post here. -kc.)

Jackie Huba is warning brand marketers to scan YouTube for consumer generated 'commercials' about their products. If you're focusing only on the blogosphere, don't. Focus on the universe, not just one galaxy/center of gravity.

Technorati Tags: youtube, cgm, COGs, video, advertising

I have a robot bunny. He arrived today. He has wifi connectivity, and an API. There are Ning apps, and a Perl module.

Naturally, it’s love.

Originally from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent, ReBlogged by Yury Gitman on Mar 28, 2006 at 07:09 PM

Financial Times writes (via Yahoo News):

Mobile phone users are unlikely to pay extra to access the growing range of video and audio content available on their phones, according to a global KPMG survey. This trend could push operators into rethinking their business models.
...
"Mobile service providers will need to stop thinking of converged services purely as a revenue booster," said Sean Collins, global chair of KPMG's communications practice.

ider them as a churn reduction tool, allowing them to present a much more stable, loyal subscriber base which should be attractive to advertisers and digital commerce partners."

CyTV is a streaming solution for elgato's EyeTV family of TV tuners. It allows you to watch TV and recorded programs over a local network (wired or wireless) or the internet. You can pause and resume live TV on the client ("timeshift"), and you can also change channels remotely.

a publication & web-based exhibition exhibition currently touring in the UK, consisting of commissioned work by 20 artists, presenting an extensive survey of imaginative methods of data visualisation, through different media. interesting works include: "physical bar charts" that allows users to respond to the question ‘what did you do last week?’ by taking one of the five brightly colored button badges whose slogan best sums up how they spent their time. "life:lotto" is a study into whether the winning lottery numbers can be found in ciphers hidden in coffee dregs & other miniscule daily occurrences.
see also places & spaces exhibition & scrollbar composition.
[daytodaydata.com & daniellearnaud.com]

a keynote address on 'Openness as an Ethos', exploring the benefits of distributed intelligence and collaborative problem-solving and new approaches to defining value and efficiency in the internet age.

Researchers at the University of Padua in Italy have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together.

The scientists squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size. They used proteins found in the brain to glue neurons onto the chip. The proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.

The proteins allowed the neuro-chip's electronic components and its living cells to communicate with each other. Electrical signals from neurons were recorded using the chip's transistors, while the chip's capacitors were used to stimulate the neurons.

It could still be decades before the technology is advanced enough to treat neurological disorders or create living computers, but in the nearer term, the chips could provide an advanced method of screening drugs for the pharmaceutical industry.

"Pharmaceutical companies could use the chip to test the effect of drugs on neurons, to quickly discover promising avenues of research," explained Stefano Vassanelli.

The researchers are now working on ways to avoid damaging the neurons during stimulation. The team is also exploring the possibility of using a neuron's genetic instructions to control the neuro-chip.

Thanks Beverly!

Via LiveScience, IST. Image.

"The real problem for Microsoft is it has invested about as much money as the Gross Domestic Product of more than a few African nations in an operating system that became out-of-date about a year before it was due to ship. The simple fact is we don't need another desktop operating system. We need an Everywhere OS."

An interesting article over at Light Reading about AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest's thoughts about p2p, and whether or not such traffic is a serious problem for their networks. Qwest CTO Pieter Poll even goes so far as to openly wonder if there's even a problem.

"Poll says he's looked at Qwest's peering points for some idea of how much P2P traffic is on its networks. And, while he admits that it's not an exact measurement of the P2P traffic load, he says the fears of network congestion are a little overblown. "I found that the traffic is well under what some in that industry say is happening. I mean, you hear claims of significant double-digit penetration of peer-to-peer traffic, and it was not near there," Poll says."

Verizon meanwhile says they're dealing with p2p on a "congestion management basis", and being "reactive rather than proactive."

Websites that share advertising revenue from video uploads could become an end, not just a means for bands and other artists

It has just been announced today that Sony will be lowering the price of their new HDV 1080i HDR-HC3 camcorder to $1500. The original price for this camcorder was slated to be around $1700. The decision to lower the price is likely an attempt by Sony to attract more consumers to the HD format for video. The camcorder will begin shipping in April of 2006 and will be available both online and in authorized dealers nationwide.

"We hope this price move will encourage more people to embrace high-quality 1080i HD recording of their own personal memories," said Linda Vuolo, director of camcorder products at Sony Electronics.

"Each year the Alliance for Community Media hosts an International Conference and Trade Show – four days of training sessions, workshops, trade show, and hospitality events. Attendees will receive up-to-date information and hands-on experience on subjects including engineering, production and technology, legislative and legal, management and administration, professional and volunteer development, community building, media literacy, and more."

In our continuing quest to keep you up to date on the online video front, a promising new site called Revver is adding a twist to the YouTube model: it shares revenue with users. Video creators get 50 percent of the ad revenue associated with the clips they upload. And users who drive traffic to any Revver clips get 20 percent of ad revenue. "You can even use the Revver affiliate program to start a video blog... and you'll be getting paid," suggests the site. "It's a bold approach," writes Rick Aristotle Munarriz in the Motley Fool. "Within a year, Revver will either be huge or it will be history." I think it's a great idea. It's just a matter of whether Revver can pull off the execution. (Via PaidContent)

Video Blogging by Jay Dedman, Joshua Kinsburg and Joshua Paul $24.99
0-470-03788-1 Publication date July 2006 [I don’t understand, was
the book cancelled and then re-instated?]

Secrets of Video Blogging Diana Weynand, Ryanne Hodson, Michael Verdi,
Shirley Craig $24.99 ISBN 0-321-42917-6 Publication date April 2006

Hands-on Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting Damien Stolarz and
Lionel Felix $34.95 ISBN 0-240-80831-2

Videoblogging for Dummies by S.C. Bryant $24.99 ISBN 0-471-97177-4
Publication date June of 2006.

The UK/France-based Insight has just released a field guide to participatory video (PV). The guide lays out instructions through text, illustration and photography to assist amateur videographers in setting up PV projects regardless of their location.

Insight's work focuses on empowering individuals and communities to give voice to their experience by learning about the tools and processes required to direct, film, and produce videos. Much of their work involves applying video techniques to Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) practices, which encompass a broad range of local, collaborative methods for assessment and planning in communities both rural and urban.

This of course runs quite parallel to the work of Witness and other efforts to expose injustice through local, participatory video. While Insight's work goes more in-depth on the entire video-making process, their globally-applicable handbook may prove informative even for capturing more on-the-fly footage through developments such as Witness's mobile phone project, which enables citizens to document human rights violations through cameraphone recordings, as well as environmental data documentation, as Jamais mentioned with the idea of Earth Witness.

The use of mobile technology, cameras and wireless networks for citizen-driven progress is a recurring theme at Worldchanging. But having the tools without understanding the techniques doesn't get us all the way there. With "Insights into Participatory Video," citizens have a chance to extract the full potential of technological tools that are increasingly accessible in remote areas of the world.

(Posted by Sarah Rich in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 12:02 PM)

Combined with audio generated with athenaCL, babelcast-zoetrope is an experimental, algorithmic, computer-generated vodcast. Video sequences are constructed from images harvested within the duration of the babelcast period, and are mixed with dynamic panning, cropping, and cutting.

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

Techdirt: Why Aren't The Telcos Paying Google For Making Their Network Valuable?
It is true, cable franchises pay the networks for the privilege of carrying them. This is on a per-subscriber basis and allows the television networks to double dip in a sense, get per-subscriber fees as well as ad revenue.

The argument that Google makes the broadband networks valuable is true although there are a plethora of such services, no lack of content which is why the cable co.'s started to pay the networks in the first place.

There is NO WAY the telcos would fall for this (Verizon/CBS stupidity aside) on broadband lines unless they truly still envision the internet as 1,000,000 channels of TV.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that Google should pay either. We (the consumers here) are already paying. Unless Google wants to be on the providers home page or portal there is no reason for them to pay.

I hope they do light up all of that fiber they have been buying and route around the telecos and allow me a WiFi Mesh or WiMax connection.

TurnHere.com ~ The video insiders guide to neighborhoods across the world
My good friend Paul is featured pointing out all of the new buildings going up in the area. Nice..!

The site concept is interesting. I am glad to see that niche video content sites are popping up (as opposed to YouTube and Google Video).

I have a couple of problems with how it is built such as there isn't a search box (I want to see all of the Brooklyn films but could find no way to do it). There is no way to leave comments or otherwise say that I like any particular video. Also, this might be a personal bias but I think there is too much Flash used. It is fine to present the videos in Flash but why the rest of the site? Last, I wish they would give me an RSS feed with MPEG-4 videos so I can watch on my new Mini hooked up to my TV.

Overall though, I love it.. Good content!

The most successful web videos are short, funny and irreverent. They're also often too off-color (or off-copyright) for TV. Still, TV networks are picking up more talent from the web pool. Next to go from 320x240 to 16:9 - programming from Channel101.com and eBaumsworld.com. (Is moving from web to TV a step up?)

Free one-click conversion of video files to the specific MPEG format required to copy video onto your TiVo. No messing around with demuxers or codecs required. They also have one that converts to iPod Video format.

The days of selling software through the traditional commercial model are numbered, as open source is becoming the paradigm of choice, said Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation

The Eyebeam OpenLab is now accepting interns for a number of project areas. Positions are unpaid but receive full named credit for all work completed. All interns will work closely with one or more of the OpenLab's staff or fellows on new or ongoing projects. Interns must be skilled in their project area but more importantly they are eager to learn and take direction from their coworkers in the lab.

We are seeking interns in the following areas:

• Web Development
• 3D Graphics
• 3D Printing/Digital Fabrication
• Graffiti Research Lab
  • Web Development
  • Engineering Technician
• Senior Fellow Cory Arcangel Intern

For more information about the positions and how to apply, please go to http://research.eyebeam.org/internships

"Real" Pong! - "Pongmechanik is an absolutely physical game. The game is realized electromechanically, and essentially consists of four elements: A relay computer, the mechanical movement with collision detection, the display and the acoustic components." [via] - Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by Yury Gitman on Mar 27, 2006 at 04:38 PM

The Borough of Lewisham in London has launched a new program to help clean up the neighborhood with the help of the public and MMS. Everyone is allowed to download an Java application to their cell phones and then proceed to take pictures of graffiti, abandoned cars, garbage, etc. The application then uploads the photo a council who will go to the pictured spot and clean up the mess. The standard MMS fees apply for the public, but just think of how pretty the environment could be without all that nasty tagging.

MMS to Combat London Graffiti [MobHappy]

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Related: Nokia N93 in the Wild
Related: Toshiba v604T with TV Tuner

Strange things afoot at Cablevision. They're apparently working on a DVR without a hard drive—the content is stored remotely on Cablevision servers and then pulled down when needed. Customers "record" by pressing a button, ensuring that the cable company's server's don't get bogged down by simply recording everything that goes over the customer's tuner.

The new service, called RS-DVR, will launch in Long Island, NY and then possibly spread to other areas. There is no major hardware upgrade needed, although existing cable boxes will need a small firmware upgrade.

While I'm all for off-loading the storage burden to folks who might have some money for a few terabytes of storage per user, I'm wondering about privacy and fair use implications.

Cablevision to test network DVR [News.com.com.com]

 
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Related: Dual Tuner Series 2 TiVo?
Related: Tuning Fork
Related: Easy Streaming to the Xbox 360

If you would like to convert your audio from one format to another, Max can read and write audio files in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats. For many popular formats the artist and album metadata is transferred seamlessly between the old and new

Two articles, one from the BBC and one from TechDigest on 3G mobile phone social trends in UK, ranging from personal security to checking your make-up.

First what is a 3G from the BBC:

3G is the next generation of mobile phone technology, offering a wide range of high speed mobile services, including video calling and messaging, e-mail, games, photo messaging and information services.

Here are few of the trends as outlined in TechDigest:

Mobumentaries --using your phones to create a mini-movie documenting your lives.

The Andrew Marr effect --Men's tendency to adopt an alternative persona and give a running commentary in the style of a news report when recording on their phone.

Visual Vanity -- Women turning their video phones on themselves for anything from applying makeup to trying on a new outfit for a more realistic view of how they look than in a mirror.

Night safe

Citizen journalism -- using 3's service that allows people to upload their own ‘at-the-scene’ reports or celebrity spottings, and get paid for it.

I spent an hour at Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park up there and got a look at the new Version E SunSpots. These are amazing little microcontrollers with lots of gusto — they pack tons of functionality, making them effective for prototyping real stuff, but their remarkably legible — not a huge learning curve. They park themselves firmly into the DIY world, but without the requirement that you be an alpha programmer or hardware hacker. One of the goals was to have a package that would be immediately friendly and accessible. (Dang..wish I had taken a picture of what Angel Lin, a design intern from Art Center, and Rob created in collboration for the out-of-the-box experience. It's this great, completely legible iconography.)




Here's a video of the very cool "Hello World" application — a runner of LEDs that you can "spill" from device to device.



I've got more about these units, plus other sightings on the short, two day tour about Silicon Valley.

This Korea Times article reports 'popular online role-playing games such as Lineage,need gamers to hunt down weak monsters repeatedly to increase their character’s ability levels and obtain items.To avoid such monotonous work,gamers use cheating tools such as software programs called “Macro,”and a USB type automouse".The article explains,"such passive cheating tools are usually categorized into two types,software macros and hardware types called auto-mouse.The software type is usually called "macro.’’It is usually cheaper and easy to use,but is vulnerable to the countermeasures,as game companies can easily upgrade their systems to prevent use of macro programs.In comparison,the hardware type is more complicated,more expensive and more stable.They often look like portable USB storage with a flash memory chip and electronic circuits inside.It can grab video signals transmitted between the PC and the monitor,and analyze the signals to make a judgment.For example,when a player gets beaten by a monster and loses his health, the game shows that he is in a critical condition by showing a bar gauge on the monitor.When the reading goes down by a certain point,the auto-mouse notices it,and moves the character out of the danger zone.Then it makes the character regain his strength by drinking a magic potion or using a magic spell,before sending it to another battle.It is practically impossible for outsiders to tell whether a human or a computer program is playing a game character.Also,it is not against Korean law to use a macro of an auto-mouse,as they do no damage to the game’s main server".Further,"it is difficult for game companies to punish the cheaters or even detect them.Most companies say they prohibit using cheating programs and they close down game accounts of cheaters who are detected.But such things happen rarely,gamers say".

Mouse Plays When Gamer’s Away

"It's a bad time to start a company" (Caterina Fake)

I've just arrived in Vancouver for the IA Summit, where I will be on a Sunday panel with Gene Smith, Dan Brown, and Michal Arrington (I will be the one running back and forth along the net, picking up wayward tennis balls). The topic of our conversation is Web 2.0, and what it means for information architects. This comes somewhat hot-on-the-heels of Peter Merholz calling out Web 2.0 poster-company 37Signals for their "shallow views and rhetoric", in response to a swipe at information architecture from the Getting Real PDF file, and I have been informed that a lot of information architects are worried about what Web 2.0 means for their employability. What skills will transfer, does user-created content mean no one needs to be told how to choose section titles, etc.

Caterina Fake's post detailing the reasons why it's a shitty time to start a new venture (everyone else is doing it, talent pool is finite) is a ray of hope for me, because one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 for me personally has been "Low Hanging Fruit". There are a million companies with similar-sounding names and logos all running a mile-a-minute trying to solve easy problems: calendars, word processing, drag and drop, time-and-milestone trackers. Web frameworks Rails, Django, and TurboGears are optimized for these tasks, and process dogma Getting Real assumes that anything which takes more than a week to dream up, prototype, and release may very well not be worth doing.

If all the coders and designers are exhausting themselves implementing known solutions to solved problems, who's paying attention to the big questions? This feels like the natural home for the IA Summit crowd: people comfortable imposing order on chaos and tackling big tasks. I say this more from a position of reverence than experience, because I'm definitely missing the experience of long-term, many-faceted projects at the moment. There's so much fast-turnaround, race-to-market work in the world right now it's making my head spin, and not in a good way.

It's an auspicious time to Go Big.

"Yes the geeks are writing the protocol today, but which geeks? The Chinese government geeks? The Redmond option whore geeks? Russian mafia geeks? American dwarf linux geeks? Sony DRM geeks? Favela internet cafe geeks? If its an internet of things than only one can really win. If multiplication prevails we have not an internet, but internets of things. And the difference between the two is quite literally of Tower of Babel proportions. Are these things in this together or do they take sides in the networks around us?"

Javascript being pulled from the server

Grants for internet-based art works! Deadline: April 1, 2006!

Artists are invited to submit proposals for new works of Internet-based art. There is no required theme. The works can manifest offline, as long as the Internet is a primary vehicle in the creation of the work, and the final work is accessible online, whether through a web browser, software, or some other use of internet technologies.

When evaluating proposals, the jury will consider artistic merit, technical feasibility, and online accessibility. Although we will provide some technical assistance with final integration into the Rhizome web site, artists are expected to develop projects independently and without significant technical assistance from Rhizome.

Yahoo! News has launched a beta version of a new local news site. You can browse most areas around the US via a map or drop-down menu. The site takes a different approach than in the past -- rather than partnering with local providers and running their full text on Yahoo! News, the site is now pulling in RSS feeds from multiple providers, creating a snapshot of all of the local coverage from an area at once.

You can see the New York coverage here, for example.

The4thScreen.com :: global mobile media festival
This festival looks very interesting. They are pushing people to think about the phone in a different way, not just as a television that is carried in your pocket as it seems the providers are pushing for:
'The Fourth Screen' Global Mobile Media Festival will focus on the mobile phone as an emerging social, cultural and technological phenomenon.
We invite artists, technologists, and other creative thinkers to submit creations, inventions and concepts in two categories:
1/ moving images: videos made with mobile phone, movies, animation and games intended for mobile delivery
2/ wise technologies: software art, software and hardware that proposes new uses for mobile multimedia communication, applications that have positive cultural, social and economic impact in diverse cultures

Startup to Wed Mobile Games, Live TV Shows - Yahoo! News
Very interesting:
AirPlay Network Inc. said it will introduce a lineup of cell phone games tied to live television broadcasts. While watching TV, subscribers could use their cell phones to compete against others in "real time" by predicting plays in sports, choosing winners on reality TV shows or picking answers on game shows.

anyfilms.net
I would copy and past some of the text here if the text wasn't in Flash (therefore not allowing me to copy). (With all browsers supporting precise layout and text control, why render these elements in Flash? The other elements I can understand, mostly.)

In any case, this is interesting but I don't get the grid..

Gen Kanai weblog: "HBO busted me for using bittorrent"
HBO is going after users for downloading content using BitTorrent. Here are some stories, letters and so on..

HBO could simply start doing things like simultaneous release (or at least shorten the time), offer it through iTunes and the like and maybe, perhaps just embrace the BitTorrent phenomena and offer access to a good high quality seed for 1 or 2 dollars. Would be cheaper than the lawyers..

Emmy Advanced Media - Television Business News: Cuban Likes Obesity
Shelly Palmer tells us about Mark Cuban calling out Disney's Preston Padden in obvious over exaggeration..

From the post:
There aren’t many of us who could call bulls__t on Preston Padden–at least not in front of a room full of press and politicos. However, Mark Cuban, CEO of HDNet and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, did it twice in 10 minutes at the Consumer Electronics Association’s 2006 Entertainment Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. Preston Padden, executive vice president-government relations, The Walt Disney Company, was trying to tell the audience that there had been over six million illegal downloads of Disney’s animated hit movie, “The Incredibles.” Mark wasn’t buying it. “I call bulls__t!” he said, with no small degree of effervescence in his voice. “Maybe if you said ‘Star Wars,’ but ‘The Incredibles’? No way!!!”

"For developers wanting to create multi-player games, we provide a multi-player ActionScript API and hosted infrastructure at no cost."

Following on from the recent decision in a Dutch Court, Creative Commons licenses have also been implicated in a decision in Spain. The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music.

Unfortunately, as we explain on our site, because most collecting societies, especially in Europe (but not in the US), take an assignment of rights from the artist, artists who are members of these collecting societies are not free to CC-license their works. And so far, collecting societies have been reluctant to explore how they could enable those of their members, who are interested in CC-licensing, to do so.

Consequently, it seemed a little odd when in the Fall of 2005, the main Spanish collecting society — Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (“SGAE”) — sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, the owner of Metropol, a disco bar located in in Badajoz alleging that he had failed to pay SGAE’s license fee of 4.816,74 € for the period from November 2002 to August 2005 for the public performance of music managed by the collecting society.

On February 17th, 2006, the Lower Court number six of Badajoz, a city in Extremadura, Spain, rejected the collecting society’s claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society. The music performed in the bar was licensed under CC licenses that allows that public display since the authors have already granted those rights. Specifically, the judge said:

“The author possesses some moral and economic rights on his creation. And the owner of these rights, he can manage them as he considers appropriate, being able to yield the free use, or hand it over partially. "Creative Commons" licenses are different classes of authorizations that the holder of his work gives for a more or less free or no cost use of it. They exist as … different classes of licenses of this type … they allow third parties to be able to use music freely and without cost with greater or minor extension; and in some of these licenses, specific uses require the payment of royalties. The defendant proves that he makes use of music that is handled by their authors through these Creative Commons licenses.“

The full text of the decision (in Spanish) is available here.

This case sets a new precedent because previously, every time that the SGAE claimed a license fee from a bar, a restaurant or a shop for public performance of music, the courts have ruled in their favor on the basis that the collecting society represents practically all the authors. This case shows that there is more music that can be enjoyed and played publicly than that which is managed by the collecting societies.

As CC Spain project lead Ignasi Labastida said: “This decision demonstrates that authors can choose how to manage their rights for their own benefit and anyone can benefit from that choice, too. I expect that collecting societies will understand that something has to change to face this new reality,”

Let's hope that Creative Commons-licensing and collecting societies will be able to work together in future. If you are an artist who is a member of a collecting society and interested in CC-licensing some of your work, let your society know how you feel so we can get to the future faster!

Filter RSS with Feed Rinse - Filter RSS with Feed Rinse: Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren't interested in. It's like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions.

Open source game graphics engine, with Python scripting

Brian and David are offering for download all the multitracks on two of the songs. Through signing up to the user license, and in line with Creative Commons licenses, you are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like.

WiFiNetNews worries that Google's "free" WiFi service will be used by law enforcement agencies to track users.

Glenn Fleishman points to an article in The Nation by Jeff Chester:

Unless municipal leaders object, citizens and visitors will be subjected to intensive data-mining of their web searches, e-mail messages and other online activities are tracked, profiled and targeted.

The inevitable consequences are an erosion of online privacy, potential new threats of surveillance by law enforcement agencies and private parties, and the growing commercialization of culture.

San Francisco was advised by a trio of privacy advocates to develop policies that would respect personal privacy. In letters to the city, the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the adoption of a "gold standard" for data privacy, insuring that its Wi-Fi system would "accommodate the individual's right to communicate anonymously and pseudonymously."

The groups also suggested that the city require any Wi-Fi company to allow users to "opt in".

Fleishman summarizes:

If free Wi-Fi becomes a citizen’s right—at a slow speeds or for limited hours each day—it seems inappropriate to hand over control of users’ privacy to a private enterprise.

I have been a proponent of "free" networks for more than 5 years (see my University Park Wireless Proposal). I also believe in advertising-subsidized "free" networks.

But it should be an option. The public should be able to turn advertising off.

Which reminds me; a decision on a contractor for Portland's WiFi cloud is (over)due:

Unwire Portland narrowed the field from a total of 6 proposals. In Portland's Request For Proposal, equal access to competing wireless ISPs would be required. The operator can be both a wholesaler and a retailer of internet access to end users (if they so choose).

The convergence of technology in cell phones and other ultra-portable devices such as media players has rapidly increased the use of video in applications requiring extremely small size and low power. One new emerging feature is the ability to drive a video signal from a cell phone to view that image on a conventional television set (Figure 1). Sending video signals to different applications is useful in many ways since it can be used for video conferencing, photo viewing, movie streaming, video phone, Internet gaming and other applications that have not yet been dreamed of.

Figure 1 – Video signals can be sent from cell phones to TVs

In order to enable ultra-portable video technology, semiconductor manufacturers are developing devices such as video encoders and integrated video filter/drivers to drive the 75 ohm cable directly. The encoder, which is implemented after the main controller chip, includes the NTSC or PAL formatting and it has a combination of integrated video DACs, depending on whether only composite video is used or if S-video is added. The filter/driver is added after the DAC to reconstruct the signal and remove the high-frequency artifacts, which results in a higher quality image. In addition, it provides 75 ohm cable drivers to directly drive cables into television sets.

Composite Video Output

The TV out function of a mobile device outputs composite video, the most common video signal in use today, and which is readily available on any television set. On a high level, a portable device such as a cell phone or a portable media player needs a means to convert the digital video signal to analog and format this into an NTSC or PAL composite video. This allows the signal to be viewed on an external television. Additionally, the analog signal needs to be amplified and impedance-matched to the characteristic 75ohm cable. This implementation is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Video encoder and video filter/driver in a portable device



Composite video is expected to remain as a legacy signal and will be available for the near future as a means to display analog video. The anatomy of the video signal includes all of the information required to recover video at the receiving end, including horizontal and vertical synchronization, and luminance and chrominance signals (Figure 3).

Figure 3 – Composite video signal displaying color bars.



Since the standard composite video connector is fairly large for portable devices, there is a modified connector called a mini A/V connector that is more appropriate for portable video and has the added space-saving benefit of transporting the left and right audio signals on the same cable. Typically, the mini A/V is on one end of the connector and the larger RCA composite video and Left/Right audio jacks are on the other end (Figure 4).





Figure 4 – Mini A/V to RCA cable



Video Encoder

In order to create a composite video signal, a process called encoding needs to be implemented. This entails taking a formatted digital signal and converting it into a formatted NTSC o