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.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

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]

Comment on this post
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]

 
Comment on this post
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 or PAL analog composite video signal. The video encoder can either be integrated into a larger digital integrated circuit, or it can be a standalone device depending on how the partitioning is done.



From the main system processor (i.e., baseband chip), the standalone video encoder converts digital component video (in 8-bit parallel CCIR-601/656 or ANSI/SMPTE 125M format) into a standard analog baseband television composite video signal (NTSC or PAL standard) with a modulated color subcarrier. This is then fed into an integrated DAC and to the device’s output (Figure 5).

View full size

Figure 5 - NTSC / PAL video encoder



Video Reconstruction Filtering

Following digital video encoding, the signals are typically converted back into the analog domain by a digital to analog converter (DAC). This process is called reconstruction (Figure 6). High-band spectral artifacts are introduced during this process and can distort picture quality. Reconstruction filters remove these artifacts. The filter’s reconstruction performance is based on how well the high-band spectral artifacts are removed without distorting the valid signal within the passband. Video signals are affected by these artifacts through a variation of the amplitude of small detail elements in the picture, such as highlights or fine pattern details, as the elements move relative to the sampling clock. The result is similar to the problem of aliasing and causes a distortion of details as they move within the picture.



To implement filtering, it is recommended to use an integrated video filter/driver such as Fairchild Semiconductor’s FMS6151. With such devices, integrated active filters replace several discrete components. Generally, the filters that are used in video multimedia applications are low pass active filters. The main components in these filters are operational amplifiers, capacitors, resistors, and inductors. The FMS6151 is a 5th order Butterworth filter and tends to be a good choice for the filtering of consumer video due to its overall performance such as low phase error, high stability, low parts count, and effective filtering characteristics. Due to their increased reliability and guaranteed specifications, these integrated active filters generally have more consistent filtering characteristics than discrete active and passive filters (Figure 7).

Figure 6 –Ultra-portable video reconstruction filter/driver



Reconstruction filters and cable drivers are typically left external to the encoder due to the voltage swing requirements and the need for higher ESD protection levels.

Figure 7 - An output reconstruction (image rejection) filter removes the clock and sideband components that are present from the sampling and analog reconstruction process

Video Filter/Drivers

Beyond the reconstruction filter, a video driver is required to amplify the video signal and drive the 75 ohm coax cable. The amplifiers need to have 6dB of gain to accommodate doubly terminated loads. The FMS6151 integrated video filter/driver solution combines the reconstruction filter with a low impedance video driver. The device will operate in applications with a Vcc ranging from 2.5V to 5.5V. The 5th order filter provides better image quality compared to typical 2nd and 3rd order passive solutions.



This filter/driver is intended to be directly driven by a DC-coupled DAC output, but can also operate with an AC-coupled input. The input common mode range of the device is 1.2Vpp, ground referenced. The output can drive an AC or DC-coupled single 75 ohm coax cable (150 ohm) load. DC-coupling the output removes the need for expensive output coupling capacitors. If the output is AC-coupled, the SAG correction circuit can be used to reduce the value and the physical size of the AC output coupling capacitors and still produce acceptable field tilt.



SAG Correction

Traditionally, if a video application is AC coupled, it will require a very large output coupling capacitor (between 220F and 1000F). SAG correction provides excellent performance with a small output coupling capacitor, which eliminates the need for a large coupling capacitor. The typical output circuit (220F into a 150 ohm load) creates a single pole (-3dB) at 5Hz. Reducing this capacitor causes excessive phase shift, resulting in video field tilt which can prevent proper recovery of the synchronization signals.

The SAG correction circuit in the FMS6151 provides a small amount of peaking, which in turn provides phase response compensation that significantly reduces video field tilt. This compensation enables the designer to decrease the large 220F output coupling capacitor. A 22F capacitor is used for SAG correction and a 47F is used for the output coupling capacitor, both of which are much smaller and less expensive than the alternative circuit requirements (Figure 8).

View full size

Figure 8 – Video filter/driver with SAG correction

Enable/Shutdown

The FMS6151 has a shutdown feature that disables the output and reduces the quiescent current to less than 25nA, thus reducing power consumption and prolonging battery life. This feature is especially important in portable applications such as cellular phones, hand held gaming devices, and video cameras requiring video filtering and drive capability. Additional features include 12kV of ESD protection.



A Small Driver for The Big Screen

The implementation of the composite video TV out function on a portable device has many facets to take into consideration. The partitioning of devices, keeping power low, and the picture quality high present many design challenges. Video encoders are readily available to perform the task of conversion from digital to NTSC and PAL analog composite video.



The FMS6151 in a Micropak™ package is so small that it can be poured from a salt shaker, so it will have no problem fitting into a crowded handset and will provide quality video for TV viewing. The robust 12kV ESD protection provided in this device ensures the mobile device will be safe from harm. The 5th order low pass reconstruction filter smoothes the output video to prevent unwanted distortions. The device amplifies, drives, and matches the impedance of the 75-ohm coax cable. The board space is further reduced by offering a choice of output coupling modes, with the smallest configuration being direct DC coupling. Finally, this technology conserves battery power with a low current draw when the coax driver is enabled as well as less than 25nA of current when the device is disabled.

Figure 9 – FMS6151 in Micropak™ package – so small that it can be poured from a salt shaker

About the author

Jeremy Tole is a Technical Marketing Manager for the Signal Path Analog Product Line of Fairchild Semiconductor, where he has been developing the broadcast and consumer video business since joining in 1998. His current responsibilities include systems definition of video and signal path products and the business development of consumer and ultra-portable markets for signal path analog products in the Americas and European regions. He holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, with a concentration in Applied Electrophysics and Computer Engineering from the University of Virginia. He is a member of the IEEE, SMPTE, and Trigon Engineering Society. He can be reached at Jeremy.tole@fairchildsemi.com

ray from vidvox is an animal..now wehave the FIRST full res 640x480 HD 6 layer realtime vj app. This is the earliest that vidvox has ever put a work out for beta...but this looks really promising, built on core image and cocoa native unniversal binary.. runs on old macs or intel macs...as ray says "its a pacifier while i finish vdmx.." Anyway, go grab it... early early ;)

Direct downlad link..1.3mb


from vidvox:

first of all: the following beta requires tiger, and a machine with a decent (coreimage-capable) graphics card. it's a universal binary, and it runs just fine on intel-based macs. if you try to use it on a machine that doesn't have a fast enough graphics card, clips just won't play back.

if playback is poor, it's probably because your graphics card isn't fast enough. we'll certainly work on improving performance on low-end machines as soon as we're able, but right now the priority is getting all the features working. for the time being, everything is based on coreimage, and the name of the game is fast graphics cards. i know that toby's rev-A imac g5 (nvidia something-something 5200, 64mb) certainly doesn't like this beta, but it seems to fare quite well on 2-year old alumabooks (we've got access to a 1.25 and a 1.5, and they crunch 640x480 clips like nothin'- off the internal drive, no less). macbook pros seem to be able to crunch HD off an external drive. as i'm writing this, dave is telling me that the g5 is crunching two 1280x720 HD files with fx driven by audio analysis. the general consensus so far seems to be that this is exponentially more powerful than the current version of gridpro- we'd love to hear how it runs on your machine, too.

this beta doesn't have a time-out, and doesn't expire. when it launches, it attempts to check to see if an update is available; you do *not* need the internet, this check is purely optional. if it sees that there's a new version available, it'll open a page in a web browser with a list of updates and a link to the new version. downloading the update is optional, but it makes everybody's lives easier if you're not experiencing/reporting bugs we've already fixed. updates will be frequent (no set schedule, but every couple days or so).

here's how it works:
you drag files into the media bin (below where it says "drop files below"). double-click on folders to explore their contents, click on files to trigger them. drag fx from the lists in the "Layer Compositor" window to any fx chain. have fun!

the bugs to watch out for:
- if your external display is above or below your main display, going fullscreen will make your main display go fullscreen. if the external display is to the left or the right of the main screen, everything works properly.
- the only thing that saves at the moment are behavior chains. saving fx chain presets and the contents of the media bin (which will include a whole brace of features that haven't been implemented yet) are coming [very] shortly. this isn't really a bug, but it's inconvenient enough to be worth mentioning.

mostly, this beta is missing features. this is definitely the earliest we've let something go public (this specific app has been in development for just over two weeks), so we ask that you bear with us while we get things up to speed.

i like keeping track of stories that my friends are submitting to digg.com. so i use squeet to alert me via email when a friend submitted a story to digg. digg.com does a great job of aggregating all my friends' digg submissions. i just use the rss fe

PLASMA PONG is a variation of PONG that utilizes real-time fluid dynamics to drive the game environment.

The future of the read-write web is multi-user. There is life after Ajax.

How to tune and optimize your PHP scripts so they run even faster.

Steve Outing: "Newspaper Web sites must make it easier for readers/users to share online content with them and each other. Only an "open garden" will flourish - and prove profitable."

The popularity of the websites that allow people to share short video snippets is leading to the rise of a clip culture, writes internet law professor Michael Geist.

While almost entirely technical in nature, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has proposed as set of broadband video advertising guidelines. Meanwhile, the battle still rages over the maximum acceptable length for a pre-roll video ad. I believe that :15 should be the self-imposed cap, but I'm seeing an increasing number of :30's appear on national news sites.

Dominique Delport with Streampower is just giving a really interesting presentation about a cross-platform interactive television programme on France5, Cult TV.

He said that 30 to 40% of the programme is video content generated by the viewers. Wow.

He just laid out his 8 Commandments of Cross Media production:

Commandment 1 Interact with the show. Give the power to the audience.

Maybe obvious to say today, but they really want to have the control. They can see whether it is real or false, Dominique said.

The agenda of the programme is driven by the viewers. Viewers vote on topics all week long. They set the agenda for the next week.

And he says that public TV was not particularly focused on its viewers. (EBU is a pan-European group of public broadcasters, which the BBC is a part of)

Commandment 2 Increase users’ stickiness. Extend life length of the show. Some audience watching show on TV and on the web.

And be aware of how the audience wants to communicate. Originally, they thought SMS would be the way the audience would communicate, but their younger audience was using e-mail and video blogging (using webcams) more.

Commandment 3 Give users access exclusive access not seen on television. Half hour is spent with guests after show, and web users are given specific musical bonus.

Commandment 4 iIncrease user loyalty. Work so that your viewers recommend the show. They have many contests and challenges organised on the website

Commandment 5 Continue the show on the web.

Commandment 6 Enhance the watching experience so that it follows the viewer whenever and wherever they are. The programme features video chat with guests.

Commandment 7 Promote the programme with P2P, social networks. Viral, word of mouth marketing.

Market the show with the hosts of fan forums. Invite key members of online social forums on the programme. Target underground activity and get the maximum number of people involved. It will get the show even more known and spoken about. target underground activity. get maximum number of people involved

Commandment 8 Increase revenues. This was the very last objective of public tv but many public broadcasters are moving to dual-source revenue streams with their public support being supplemented with advertising and cross-promotional revenue.

But he noted some of the challenges of creating this programme, one that brings together web cam contributors from around the world.

They have a production teamo of 40 people for one programme. A poverty of riches for most organisations.

And Dominique said that the clash of interactive and TV cultures provided challenges. And he said:

TV needs are not the same as interactive and web needs. And TV always comes first. The web always comes second.

I wonder if this will always be the case?

TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

Simon Waldman: What we need is a swift, easy and unpunitive licensing structure to allow content creators to distribute content; and for aggregators to aggregate.

How big a gamble are phone carriers taking with television? It depends who you ask. American carriers have lost more than 5 million telephone customers to cable rivals Time Warner, Comcast and Cox during the last year as cable firms move into the VoIP marketplace, says America's Network.

Yesterday's announcment by Microsoft and DT to bring IP-TV to Germany's telephone users, highlights the seriousness of phone carriers to offer television.

Deutsche Telekom's IPTV will go live in ten major German cities - including Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich - later this year. DT plans to bring it to 50 German cities by the end of next year.

Microsoft says 13 broadband service providers will use its IPTV Edition software. They include Telecom Italia, T-Online France, British Telecommunications, Swisscom and Verizon. BellSouth, Bell Canada and Reliance Infocomm are still testing the software, reports C/Net.

Siemens executives said in December the global market for IPTV could hit $1 billion by 2009, with China expected to account for a quarter of the spending.

BT Vision is launching IPTV service this year in the UK. The service gives viewers access to on-demand films, music, and TV shows by combining access to digital-terrestrial channels through the aerial with VoD provided by broadband. The Philips set-top box uses Microsoft software. Trials are due to begin shortly.

IPTV is big in the far East, reports Converged Digest. In Hong Kong, PCCW's NOW Broadband TV has more than 500,000 IPTV subscribers (pdf). Over 13 million DSL subscribers in Japan will soon get IPTV services through Softbank/YahooBB and NTT. Korea, with the world's highest broadband penetration, plans to launch IPTV via Korea Telecom and Hanaro Telecom.

Japan's NTT and Korea's KT plan to offer 30 million and 10 million (respectively) FTTH subs by decade's end. UT Starcom signed a contract last month with China Telecom to begin IPTV services in two Chinese cities, Fuzhou and Quanzhou.

In the US, Verizon's FiOS is utilizing a "hybrid system" for video that uses 860-Mhz cable tv technology to deliver broadband video to the home. Verizon, which bought MCI in January, plans to spend an estimated $22 billion on its Fios rollout.

AT&T, on the other hand, is using Microsoft's IP-TV settop box and twisted pair with VDSL modulation to deliver 10-20 Mbps. AT&T/SBC liked the lower cost (using a consumer's current twisted pair) and by the ability to offer highly interactive features compared to cable.

Project Lightspeed, which began in San Antonio this January, initially is offering 200 channels, but promises as many as 1,000 when it expands the service to other markets by June.

By the end of 2007, ATT/SBC expects to reach 17 million households with FTTN and nearly 1 million with FTTP. In 2005, SBC said it expected that its total capital expenditures will be at the high end of its 2004 guidance range of $5 billion to $5.5 billion. AT&T, with BellSouth, will have 70 million landline subscribers.

Research firm Parks Associates (above) estimates 70 million users around the world will embrace IPTV by 2010, up from 5 million last year. The IPTV market is expected to grow as much as 25% annually. Infonetics Research says there will be 13 million IPTV users in North America by 2009.

The new on-demand IPTV paradigm has profound consequences for the old media ecosystem – traditional TV channels, previously key for ‘branding’, are in danger of losing their influence, says Converged Digest. The $60 billion spent on U.S. television advertising, annually could get re-directed, opines Bob Garfield (MP-3).

Americas Network has a good overview. Telephony Magazine has complete coverage of TelecomNext while IPTV News and Google News have the latest poop on IP.

Related DailyWireless stories include; IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IPTV Networking, Telco's Left Behind in IPTV Armageddon?, Cuban: Broadcasting Not Dead, Wireless IP-TV Box, IP-TV End Game, Cisco Buying Scientific Atlanta, SBC Picks IP-TV Settops, GoogleNet?, The Free Triple Play, VDSL-2 Ratified, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IP-TV Settops, Legislators: Don't Mess With SBC, DirecTV + WiMax?, Muni Wireless Laws, and Duopoly Laws.

Irish researchers are using collaborative learning techniques to develop a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Such networks are currently being tested in the center of Dublin before being deployed in other large cities.

Links: Primidi, ZDNet

by Ajit Jaokar

(Richard's Note: Ajit is the second of my guest bloggers on Read/WriteWeb and he will be writing on Mobile Web 2.0 and digital convergence. Ajit runs a book publishing company called futuretext, which specializes in these topics. He also chairs Oxford university's next generation mobile applications panel and is a member of the Web 2.0 Workgroup.)

In the next five years the number of global web surfers will quadruple from 500 million to 2 billion people. One billion of those people will come onto the Web using cheap pocket and wrist devices running multimedia content.

In parallel, as web 2.0 starts to become mainstream, browser technology is becoming pervasive. In the PC/Internet world, the browser is fast becoming the universal client. However, there is a crucial difference between the PC world and the browser world.

In the PC world: for desktop apps we need one type of program to run a specific type of application (MS Word to view word documents, Excel to view spreadsheets and so on). In contrast, we can use the browser to view any type of application - i.e. one client for many applications. This makes application development more optimal and less susceptible to the vagaries of software running on the client, in this case the PC.

So with higher spec mobile devices and greater bandwidth, let us consider the question: can or should ALL mobile applications be implemented using browser technology?

After all, the browser works well on the PC as a universal client - why not on the mobile device? A corollary to this question is: are there fundamental differences with browsing on a mobile device vs. browsing on the web?

To understand the differences between browsing on the web and on a mobile device, we have to consider factors such as:

a) Intermittent connections - unlike on the web, the wireless network connection is relatively unstable and is affected by factors such as coverage (e.g. you lose your connection in a tunnel);
b) Bandwidth limitations - for example even when 3G coverage is available, the actual bandwidth is far less;
c) The need for data storage on the client - if the device has no (or little) local storage, all data has to be downloaded every time. This is not optimal given intermittent and expensive bandwidth;
d) Finally, and most importantly, a local application provides a richer user experience - especially for applications such as games.

There are other factors such as limited user input capabilities, screen sizes and so on.

Some of the above factors are getting better, for example coverage blackspots are decreasing. But the overall user experience remains one of the most important factors.

So, to answer our question - no, we cannot develop all mobile applications using the browser only. However, as we shall show in subsequent posts, these limitations are being overcome through Ajax and mobile web 2.0.

Ajit Jaokar's blog about mobile web 2.0 is Open Gardens.

Photo: lis186

Whoa. Slingbox, the hardware that lets you stream what's on your TV to whatever PC you're on, is heading for your cellphone and PDA. SlingPlayer Mobile will stream your stuff only to certain PDAs running WindowsMobile, and will soon work with WindowsMobile Smartphones. The Slingbox is already playing havoc with old notions of local sports blackouts, and this will further erode old borders.

ZDNet points to an interesting map compiled by CIO, which shows the entire North American backbone, with 134,855 routers colored coded by which telecom company owns them (large pdf copy).

"In order to build this map Ches fired off 300,000 messages to various points on the Internet and mapped how they got there, recording the address of every router his packets passed. He also had to figure out a way to isolate routers in North America. The map is not perfect – he probably missed a few points and maybe double counted a couple more – but for all intents and purposes this is what the North American Internet looks like."

FCC chief and free-market fan Kevin Martin, mirroring telco fears of net-neutrality laws, says his agency already has the authority to act if incumbents try to block or degrade service. As with a number of recent editorials, Martin and this Networking Pipeline story seem to blur the line between the network neutrality debate, and the right of incumbents to charge more for faster service... .

"We've already demonstrated we'll take action if necessary," Martin said. However, Martin also added that he supports network operators' desires to offer different levels of broadband service at different speeds, and at different pricing -- a so-called "tiered" Internet service structure that opponents say could give a market advantage to deep-pocket companies who can afford to pay service providers for preferential treatment.

While Martin said that consumers who don't pay for higher levels of Internet service shouldn't expect to get higher levels of performance, he did say in a following press conference that "the commission needs to make sure" that there are fair-trade ways to ensure that consumers "get what they are purchasing." When asked how consumers could measure service performance levels, Martin said that public Web sites already exist that let users measure their connection speeds."

For the record, nobody anywhere has suggested ISPs shouldn't be allowed to charge customers more, for faster service. The debate is over incumbents pulling a new revenue stream out of thin air by charging content providers (often competitors) a new QoS tariff that will likely be passed on to consumers.

Stickam allows you to easily place streaming video, slide show, music, and live video chat on your blog and/or web site. With Stickam, you can instantly play your videos online using just your web browser. There is no software to download, you just copy and paste the Stickam™ Code into your web site or blog where you want it.

Samsung announced their 32GB Flash memory HDD for notebooks yesterday. The big advantages of this technology are the speed and the shock resistance, so no way of killing a HDD because of vibrations. Noise will be drastically reduced too, and less heat will be generated, so soon we'll be able to say goodbye to those genital BBQ's!


Samsung Launches NAND Flash-based Solid State Disk
for Mobile PCs

Taipei, Taiwan – March 21, 2006: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced at the Mobile Solution Forum that it has begun offering a 32-Gigabyte (GB) NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD) -- marking the first time that NAND flash has moved into mobile computing applications.
The 32GB Flash-SSD, which serves the same purpose as a hard disk drive, is a sophisticated data storage medium for notebooks and other mobile computers. It uses instantly-accessible, non-moving NAND flash memory instead of the rotating discs found in hard drives; therefore can upload and download data quickly and quietly with minimal power consumption.
The Flash-SSD weighs only half as much as a comparably-sized hard drive, but reads data three times faster and writes data 1.5 times faster. The SSD uses just five percent of the electricity needed to power a hard disc drive and is noiseless. Its design is free of any motor or other mechanical parts.
The commercialization of Samsung’s 32GB Flash-SSD is a historic milestone for storage devices as it marks the initial entry of NAND flash memory in the mass mobile PC market.
Samsung sees the overall global SSD market surging from US$540 million in 2006 to US$4.5 billion by 2010.

At Media Shift, Mark Glaser has the rundown on the current state of personalized news sites. What started with Fishwrap at MIT in 1994 then became My Yahoo in the late '90s, and now is giving way to Web 2.0 sites such as Netvibes and Gixo.

Robert Scoble is taking some heat for not commenting quickly enough on Microsoft's decision to delay of Windows Vista by a few weeks. I am interested less in the delay and more in the community's desire to hear from the people inside an organization that they share a kinship with when there's big news. If this sounds familiar, it happened to me.

Increasingly when big corporate news breaks the community doesn't want to just hear just from the CEO. They want to get the perspective of someone they trust even more, the corporate blogger. This puts pressure on these individuals to comment on every major news announcement that impacts the community - and to do it quickly. The problem is, the bigger the organization, the further away they might be from the epicenter of the news.

All of this leads to a larger issue. Who is a corporate spokesperson? Is it any employee who blogs, the CEO, who? My theory is that every company that has bloggers has multiple "spokespeople." Some, like the CEO, address shareholders, key customers and more. Others, unit managers, bloggers, evangelists, address one or more communities. Where this gets messy is the media. Both Scoble and Jim Allchin, the exec who manages the Windows Vista project, are viewed by the press as credible spokespeople. The problem herein is that one, Allchin, had more knowledge of this situation than the other, Scoble.

Another sub-point here is timing. When should an employee blogger who does not have first-hand knowledge of a situation blog on the subject? To what degree do they need to become a roving corporate reporter? And last, but not least, should they remain objective perhaps to the chagrin or simply waive the corporate flag? All good questions that I don't have answers to yet as I am figuring them out in my own organization.

Technorati Tags: windows+vista, robert+scoble, scoble, microsoft

Yahoo Tuesday launched a PC phone service used in conjunction with its Yahoo! Messenger service. Those signing up can receive unlimited domestic calls for $2.99 a month or $29.90 a year. You can also purchase prepaid voice credit in $10 and $25 increments.

To use the new services you'll need to download the new client (available at http://messenger.yahoo.com). Calls have to be initiated from a PC, but can be made to traditional landline phones and cellphones. Yahoo customers can also receive calls from regular phones, explains USA Today.

Yahoo will charge 2 cents a minute for domestic calls, on top of the monthly $2.99 fee. Per-minute charges to 180 other countries will vary. It won't charge to receive calls.

Yahoo is undercutting Internet telephone leader Skype by about $1 monthly for such PC-to-phone service.

Yahoo Voice and Skype both offer PC-to-PC calls for free, as do instant-messaging services including America Online's AIM, Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Google Talk.

You need a headset with microphone to make calls or a PC with a built-in microphone and speakers.

MSN is now testing a PC-to-phone service. AOL says it will have PC-to-phone calling available later this year.

Yahoo Vice President Brad Garlinghouse says what sets Yahoo's service apart from competitors' is "aggressive pricing," and the fact that the calling services are entwined in Messenger and the Yahoo network.

Unlike Skype, which is pure calling, Yahoo offers e-mail, instant message, news headlines and many other features.

"Phone service for $2.99 monthly won't make people run out and replace their traditional phones. But, "we see a continual chipping away at the traditional model," says Maribel Lopez, an analyst with Forrester Research. "And this really hurts the future phone business."

An entire generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it - and it plays these games in different ways. Will Wright explains how (video) games are unleashing the human imagination in Wired.

... It's a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, read-the-manual-first approach of their parents.

ed education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

Society, however, notices only the negative. Most people on the far side of the generational divide - elders - look at games and see a list of ills (they're violent, addictive, childish, worthless). Some of these labels may be deserved. But the positive aspects of gaming - creativity, community, self-esteem, problem-solving - are somehow less visible to nongamers.

"#51 -Attention and Sex" is an insightful little essay by Scott Berkun that I wanted to share about how dividing our attention over so many different things does us a disservice. I can't deny how relevant his point is to the field of interactive media and our program. There are so many things that call for our attention within this program and within the medium that we risk losing the "depth of experience" in our attempts to consume it all. I'm not saying that the interactive medium inherently causes us to divide our attention, nor am I saying that we cannot have a meaningful experience through the interactive medium. But there is a great temptation to try and take in all in at once everything that is wild and new and get lost in the process. This essay helped remind me what I was looking for in the first place.

WordPress Multiuser
From the site:
WordPress MU is multi-user version of the famous WordPress blogging application. It is ideal for people wanting to offer a hosted version of WordPress.

This is what I should get up and running for MobVCasting.

: The Denver Public Library has become the first library (or so it says) in the country to offer movie downloads, through a partnership with OverDrive, a digital distribution company that caters to libraries.
Library patrons can download copies of Frederico Fellini's 8½, surf film The Endless Summer and Imax movie The Living Sea, among other educational, indie and public domain releases. Users can download the films for a set rental period and can view it on their Windows-based PC, notebook or portable media player. Movies are copy protected with Microsoft Windows Media Rights Manager, which restricts file sharing.
Besides others, OverDrive is in negotiations with A&E Home Video for rights to distribute hundreds of their programs.
The cumbersome part is you have to download OverDrive's "Media Console" on top of Windows Media Player to view and manage these movies.

****
Hyperpolis 3.0: Really Useful Media
Call for Papers/Proposals

We know too much about media communications technologies as instruments of social control.
We don’t know enough about media technologies as instruments of civil society and cultural development.

We know too much about media discourses as, on the one hand, "popular culture": alienated and commodified cultural forms; and on the other, "cultural theory": paranoid cosmologies of hyper-rhetoric, and the ubiquitous inevitability of evil…
We don’t know enough about digital media as something other than a means to an end, as "instrumental culture", where culture itself —mainstream, alternative, underground, or otherwise is degraded to the status of tools (some hard, some soft, all ware).

Hyperpolis: Really Useful Media will provide a forum for the discussion and presentation of some positive contributions to the field, in light of these chronic imbalances.

1 Media practices whose product is an improvement in the integrity and vitality of the culture and society in which they are embedded.
2 Media practices whose processes are in and of themselves desirable.

Deadline:
June 15th, 2006
Conference and Celebration:
October 20th, 2006
Hosts:
Integrated Digital Media Institute
and Othmer Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies
Polytechnic University, Brooklyn
Info:
idmi.poly.edu
Contact:
Carl Skelton, Director, IDMI
Polytechnic University, Brooklyn
RH 701, Six MetroTech Center
Brooklyn NY 11201 USA
cskelton@poly.edu

NBC and CBS are two of the companies that we know have sent nastygrams to YouTube over copyrighted video, and I'm sure there are many more. YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley says in some cases, the same company is both uploading video and ordering YouTube to take it down. "There's been a few examples of marketing departments uploading content directly to the site, while on the other side of the company their attorney is demanding we remove this content," Hurley said. Classic. Meanwhile, YouTube is pursuing parnerships with traditional media companies, and it's only a matter of time (in my opinion) until they're acquired. Did you know YouTube has twice the traffic of Yahoo! Video and more than three times that of Google Video and AOL Video? Wow!

Earlier: So how does YouTube drive so much traffic?

emosive is a service for mobile devices which allows capturing, storing and sharing of fleeting emotional experiences. Based on the Cognitive Priming theory, as we become more immersed in digital media through our mobile devices, our personal media inventories constantly act as memory aids, "priming" us to better recollect associative, personal (episodic) memories when facing an external stimulus. Being mobile and in a dynamic environment, these recollections are moving, both emotionally and quickly away from us. emosive bundles text, sound and image animation to allow capturing these fleeting emotional experiences, then sharing and reliving them with cared others. emosive proposes a new format of instant messages, dubbed IFM – Instant Feeling Messages.

Have a look at the demo, it's a Flash application developed using FlickrFling and live data.

User scenario
While walking in the park and listening to a verse from his and his girlfriend Tina’s favorite tune – Madonna’s Little Star (“Never forget how to dream, Butterfly”), Jake sees a butterfly on a flower. Primed by the romantic musical immersion, Jake notices the colors of the butterfly and immediately loads a memory of Tina’s same-colored summer dress. Jake quickly clicks the emosive shortcut key sequence on his device. He snaps a photo of the butterfly and tags the image as "Butterfly". As Jack walks around the city, he captures other fleeting moments, making sure they are tagged to correspond with lyric words. He even adds some tagged images from his Flickr account. He then "wraps" everything as an IFM, previews it and sends it to Tina. When Tina accepts the IFM, it will stream to her phone and synchronize the tune and the images, based on the tagged lyric words. The stored IFM can also be viewed effectively as an emosive experience from any web-enabled browser.

The emosive (formerly e:sense) project was developed by the design team of the Designs Which Create Design workshop, held at the University Institute of Architecture of Venice (IUAV) 2006.
Via prototype.

: The broadband/video technology/vendor space is getting consolidated and I know of at least three more which are on the block. Anyway, VideoEgg, itself a startup which just received funding recently, is buying out online video publisher and distributor Popcast.
VideoEgg's service is a small browser plug-in that makes it easy for end-users to capture, edit, encode, and post digital video online. Meanwhile, until now, users of Popcast's Flash-based "Open Access Internet TV" could broadcast video channels to Popcast, but it seems like Popcast as a destination site will go away (and for good reason...too many me-too sites and competition out there like YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, Veoh and others). Under the terms of the agreement, Popcast's 1.0 technologies will be made available under the GPL and Popcast.com will become the administration domain for the code base.
Related:
-- Online Video Publishing Service VideoEgg Gets Venture Funding
-- Brightcove Acquires MetaStories

According to a new study from InfoTrends, the worldwide digital camera market continues to demonstrate a strong year-over-year unit growth rate.

When organizations all around the political spectrum can agree a law is broken, you'd think that would lead to quick passage of the bill to fix it. Unless that law is the DMCA's anticircumvention.

The Libertarian Cato Institute has released a terrific report (PDF link) documenting ways the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hinders innovation.

Why won't iTunes play on Rio MP3 players? Why are viewers forced to sit through previews on some DVDs when they could have fast-forwarded through them on video? Why is it impossible to cut and paste text on Adobe eBook? In a just released study for the Cato Institute, Tim Lee, a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, answers these questions and more.

The new legislation’s most profound effects will be on the evolution of digital media technologies. We have grown accustomed to, and benefit from, a high-tech world that is freewheeling, open-ended, and fiercely competitive. Silicon Valley is a place where upstarts like Apple, Netscape, and Google have gone from two-man operations to billion-dollar trendsetters seemingly overnight. The DMCA threatens to undermine that competitive spirit by giving industry incumbents a powerful legal weapon against new entrants.

Sound copyright policy has obvious attractions for advocates of small-government and deregulation. Copyright has become more regulatory, and more market-crippling, as it expands, and the DMCA is a case in point. As Lee describes, the DMCA has been (ab)used to prevent competitive development of audio and video players, cable boxes, and even, for a time, printer cartridges. Instead of a free-market rush toward the best technology to meet public demand, we get a trickle of major-label "approved" devices that must be bug-compatible: region-coded DVD players and can't-record cable boxes.

I don't agree with Cato on everything, but this report is spot-on. Let's hope it inspires more in Congress to join Reps. Boucher, Doolittle, and Barton in support of the DMCRA.

Here is a glimpse of how iMP (the BBC's Integrated Media Player) might work using enhancements present in Windows Vista, Microsoft's new operating system due out at the end of the year.

Finally China will make use of its homegrown CPU chip (Central Processing Unit), Godsen II, to build Dragon Dreams, affordable computers at 1,000yuan ($125).

After testing Godsen I and Godsen II for severals years, the Godsen II chip is equivalent to Pentium III and will be China's first 64-bit high-performance processor. Godsen II also supports Linux (yea!) and Windows X operating systems. Tax-control and server machines made by domestic companies have already started using the Godsen II chip since last year.
People may wonder why China would create another processor when there is already is Pentium III and Intel. This goes back to patents issues and is reminiscent of the reactions in early March when China highly encouraged the use of homegrown codec AVS instead of using MPEG-4 and H.264. Therefore not only is this China's first 64-bit unit, but Godsen II is China's first wholly owned intellectual property rights for a CPU chip, therefore their Dragon Dream PCS will not be held to US patent royalties. Get it? Ahhhh yes anti-US imperialism working its ways! That is why the development of Godsen II was funded heavily by various sectors, from government agencies, universities to private companies.
Now UN's Kofi Annan at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) can contact China to roll those $100 computers out. Others have already noted how this affordable computer can now be used by the poor. Back in May 2005 the Director of Godsen II, Li Guojie, said that this will "enable 800 million Chinese peasants to afford PCs." So let's start working on rural education and development to make this quote come true. With recent funding directions announced at the China Development Forum 2006 and by the Premier, Wen Jiaoba, at the National People's Congress, it seems like we are at least heading in the right direction. The question is if Chinese peasants can afford these new PC's, what kind of information will they have access to online? In a top-down surveillanced world, these affordable PC's could be pre-built with monitoring devices that will track peasant's usage and control what websites can be accessed. Scary! The future of political activism may look like peasants learning how to hack into these Dragon Dream PC's to get around firewalls.
UPDATE: Dragon PC is already on trial and may be produced on a small scale by June.

Technorati Tags: china, chip, computer, CPU, dragon dream, Godsen II, intellectural property, IP, patent, processor

Mark Cuban’s recent post, Digital Rights Management - The coming collateral damage is a great explanation of the problems that DRM will pose for individuals. There is another dimension to this, which is that libraries, archives, museums and other institutions concerned with cultural preservation will experience this problem on a massive scale. It doesn’t help that the DMCA legally prohibits kinds of preservation copies that Mark describes.

Keepvid translates videos back out of “protective” wrappers used by certain online video services into standard video files that can be saved locally. Given the number of sites that take works they don’t own and then try to fence them in with some bogus bit of digital barbed wire, it’s refreshing to see at least one company making wire cutters.

I have been waiting for one of these for years. A network PTZ camera that does true standards based streaming. Most of the others from Linksys, DLink and so on seem like they fit the bill but their flavor of "MPEG-4" is only codec deep (if even that) and requires playback to be handled with their proprietary ActiveX or Java players.

Not so with the Axis 214 which not only serves true MPEG-4 content but it is playable with QuickTime and any other player that can handle a standard RTSP MPEG-4 stream. This also means that the streams can be reflected by QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server to allow for a much larger audience than the camera itself can handle.

Unfortunately, getting it to work with the QuickTime Streaming Server but in the end it was well worth it.

In the interest of saving the rest of the world some time I am posting an email message from Kyle Robertson from Apple's Streaming Server User's Listserv that was immensely helpful.

Mobile WiMAX chip specialist picoChip will start sampling its third generation picoArray processors by mid year. The multi-core processors, dubbed PC202, PC203 and PC205, integrate around 200 individual processors on to each die and deliver over 100GIPs and 25GMACs.

The processors are fully backward compatible with picoChip’s 101 and 102 family of processors that are already designed into products from companies such as Intel, Airspan, Nortel, Fujitsu and Ericsson.

Two of the devices, the PC202 and PC205 integrate an ARM 926EJ-S 280MHz core for control and MAC functionality, the result of a partnership revealed last September. picoChip and Wintegra earlier announced a development platform for mobile WiMAX that integrates picoChip's PC102 picoArray DSP running its IEEE 802.16e PHY with the Wintegra WinMax access processor programmed with 16e MAC software for transport and backhaul.

According to Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at picoChip, the multi-core processors are “the most competitively prices parts of its type, and are amongst the first to get near the $1/GMAC metric when ordered in volume”.

Reference designs are being readied for both 16d and 16e version WiMAX and W-CDMA cellular systems, including versions for HSDPA that will be software upgradeable to HSUPA.

The entry point PC202 is targeted at access points and client side CPE systems, but Baines stressed, “we will not go down to the handsets side of the business. And we have no wish to go head to head with potential customers such as Intel in for instance the lap-tops business.”

The PC203, with 248 processors, is firmly positioned for basestations and support for algorithms such as MIMO and beamforming. This is meant to be used with external control or network processors. The PC205, which also integrates 248 processors and is suitable for high signal processing needs of, for instance, software defined radios.

Airspan Demonstrated Its Low-Cost, "Pay-as-You-Grow" WiMAX Base Station at CeBIT 2006, and plans to begin shipments of its 3.5 GHz system in April 2006. Their MicroMAX-SOC, is based on the high-performance SQN2010 WiMAX Certified base station design of Sequans. Later in the second quarter, Airspan will introduce support for the 5.8 GHz TDD and 3.3-3.4 GHz TDD bands, followed by a range of other 3.X GHz and 5.X GHz products in second half of 2006.

Airspan's other car, their MacroMAX basestation, uses picoChip components to handle the added funtionality of beamforming and scaleable COFDM found in Mobile WiMAX.

The picoArray chip is said to improve price / performance by combining the price and programmability of a traditional DSP with the performance of a FPGA / ASIC.

Related DailyWireless articles include; PicoChip: Livin' Large, picoChip & ArrayComm, PicoChip Upgrades, Intel WiMax Basestation, Airspan Submits, Airspan/Sequans Declare WiMax Interoperability and Mobile WiMax: It's Done.

C/Net reports that Microsoft plans to buy Vexcel, a maker of remote sensing software and instruments, to help expand the software maker's digital mapping efforts.

Microsoft said the pending deal will help it with its efforts "to deliver a dynamic immersive digital representation of the real world that provides the best local search and mapping experience."

Vexcel, a privately held company, specializes in synthetic aperture radar processing, remote-sensing ground stations, photogrammetry, aerial mapping and geographic information systems and services.

Vexcel's GIS software is often used to plot bombing missions and cruise missile attacks. The 3D representations help avoid radar and natural hazards. Vexcel also bought a company which makes a hyperspectral camera, the UltraCam (right).

Microsoft's Virtual Earth offers a combination of aerial imagery, maps and yellow-pages data. It is designed to let users search for and share information about specific U.S. locations, but it doesn't do the spectacular flybys of.

Google Earth utilizes Keyhole's commercial software in the Google Earth application and database. Google has also mapped The Moon and Mars.

The Boulder Daily Camera, a newspaper in the company's Colorado hometown, first reported news of the acquisition on Friday. Microsoft did not offer any financial details of the transaction.

Microsoft will have to get approval first. It may not be a walk in the park. The United States National Geospacial Intelligence Agency and other agencies are sure to raise concerns. Of course, it may have been the NGA who was responsible for the "accidental" bombing of tv stations and embassies in Iraq. 

DailyWireless has more on Cities as Game Grids, Tsunami Mapping, 3D Cities and Doing the Time Warp.

Microsoft software will be at the heart of broadband TV services from Bell Canada, AT&T (and by extension now BellSouth), British Telecom, Reliance Infocomm, Swisscom, Telecom Italia, and Verizon. There were some early reports of trouble with Microsoft's IPTV platform, criticism Ed Graczyk, director of marketing for Microsoft TV, blamed on faulty hardware & media "misinformation" (Wired News, May '05).

Om Malik scoops that Microsoft today is likely to announce they've now signed up Deutsche Telekom as well. The move doesn't bode well for Siemens, who had hopes of competing with Microsoft on the U.S. and European IPTV fronts. As Light Reading suggested recently, Siemens can still hope the MS/Alcatel solution stinks, leading disgruntled providers back in their direction.

a free webcast presented by Prof Ben Shneiderman, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland & inventor of the treemap metaphor.
title: "The Thrill of Discovery - Accelerating Information Exploration".
date: wednesday, march 29, 2006.
time: 11:00am - eastern standard time / 6:00pm - europe daylight time / 8:00am - pacific standard time.
[spotfire.com]

a simultaneous concert & film performance that uses data as its material & theme, highlighting the ways in which data shapes our understanding of the world. video images of landscapes are progressively abstracted into a language of data. facts, figures & diagrams are used in a graphic montage. the data is derived from the natural world, from global systems such as economics & from research mathematics.
[ryojiikeda.com|via dataisnature.com]

I’ve written several times recently about the technical details of network discrimination, because understanding these details is useful in the network neutrality debate. Today I want to talk about the role of encryption.

Scenarios for network discrimination typically involve an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who looks at users’ traffic and imposes delays or other performance penalties on certain types of traffic. To do this, the ISP must be able to tell the targeted data packets apart from ordinary packets. For example, if the ISP wants to penalize VoIP (Internet telephony) traffic, it must be able to distinguish VoIP packets from ordinary packets.

One way for users to fight back is to encrypt their packets, on the theory that encrypted packets will all look like gibberish to the ISP, so the ISP won’t be able to tell one type of packet from another.

To do this, the user would probably use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The idea is that whenever the user’s computer wanted to send a packet, it would encrypt that packet and then send the encrypted packet to a “gateway” computer that was outside the ISP’s network. The gateway computer would then decrypt the packet and send it on to its intended destination. Incoming packets would follow the same path in reverse – they would be sent to the gateway, where they would be encrypted and forwarded on to the user’s computer. The ISP would see nothing but a bi-directional stream of packets, all encrypted, flowing between the user’s computer and the gateway.

The most the user can hope for from a VPN is to force the ISP to handle all of the user’s packets in the same way. The ISP can still penalize all of the user’s packets, or it can single out randomly chosen packets for special treatment, but those are the only forms of discrimination available to it. The VPN has some cost – packets must be encrypted, decrypted, and forwarded – but the user might consider it worthwhile if it stops network discrimination.

(In practice, things are a bit more complicated. The ISP might be able to infer which packets are which by observing the size and timing of packets. For example, a sequence of packets, all of a certain size and flowing with metronome-like regularity in both directions, is probably a voice conversation. The user might use countermeasures, such as altering the size and timing of packets, but that can be costly too. To simplify our discussion, let’s pretend that the VPN gives the ISP no way to distinguish packets from each other.)

The VPN user and the ISP are playing an interesting game of chicken. The ISP wants to discriminate against some of the user’s packets, but doesn’t want to inconvenience the user so badly that the user discontinues the service (or demands a much lower price). The user responds by making his packets indistinguishable and daring the ISP to discriminate against all of them. The ISP can back down, by easing off on discrimination in order to keep the user happy – or the ISP can call the user’s bluff and hamper all or most of the user’s traffic.

But the ISP may have a different and more effective strategy. If the ISP wants to hamper a particular application, and there is a way to manipulate the user’s traffic that affects that application much more than it does other applications, then the ISP has a way to punish the targeted application. Recall my previous discussion of how VoIP is especially sensitive to jitter (unpredictable changes in delay), but most other applications can tolerate jitter without much trouble. If the ISP imposes jitter on all of the user’s packets, the result will be a big problem for VoIP apps, but not much impact on other apps.

So it turns out that even using a VPN, and encrypting everything in sight, isn’t necessarily enough to shield a user from network discrimination. Discrimination can work in subtle ways.

"But while it may be fun, creator Michael Kabbash, a graphic artist and Arab civil rights advocate, is serious about how he feels the law has curtailed Americans' freedom.

The object of the game is not to amass the most money or real estate, but to be the last player to retain civil liberties.

"I've had people complain to me that when they play, nobody wins. They say `We're all in Guantanamo and nobody has any civil liberties left,'" he said. "I'm like `Yeah, that's the point.'"

The Municator is a 146$ Linux computer (Thinix OS) from China that does all the basic things most people need, like browsing (firefox), emailing (thunderbird), instant messaging (gaim), skype, word processing (Red Office), audio/video playback (mplayer), e-learning, all through a very user-friendly very basic interface and is software upgradable. It has got 40GB, a 400mhz/800mhz Godson 2C processor, 256mb ram, 4 usb2 ports, VGA-output, ps2 input, tv-output and weigths something like 400 grams. Their slogan is "Say no to Wintel"

From building Mefeedia, I’ve learnt quite a few things.

I’ve learnt that half of the features I’ve come out with in the past year don’t matter. The other half are ok, but they are still not there.

Usability testing matters. Even if you’re an experienced usability reviewer.

Engineering matters. The site has been very slow lately.

Featuritis? I give you informationarchitecturitis! Too much thought going into IA structures. Not enough in talking to users.

Yep. I am learning. Building something real is great for that.

Thomas Hawk: CozmoTV: Welcome to Television 2.0.

Continuous Motion Propels Game

The game Wanderer was developed during the CARGO WORKSHOPS 2005 in Oostende, Belgium. The theme of the workshop was to create an innovating game that uses Global Positioning System (GPS). The game Wanderer is played outside. The object of the game is that the player has to be in a continuous motion and has to respond to auditive signals provided through a headphone that is connected to the game system. Because the game is not mapped onto the coordinates of the physical space, it can be played in any location. The player is continuously confronted with the objects in public space functioning as game obstacles. In this way the game transforms the meaning of the physical object in public space. More about it here (English). [blogged by nicolas on pasta and vinegar]

American Idol fans can submit :10 second commercials on why they love AmericanIdol.com and the top five spots will air on Fox in May. "This is a great chance for our fans to grab a little fame for themselves and help promote Americanidol.com," said Jeff King, VP Fox Interactive Media. Press release follows below...PRESS RELEASE -- Los Angeles, Calif. - March 20, 2006 - Americanidol.com, the official online community for American Idol fans, today unveiled "Video Chance for Fame," a user-generated video competition that invites fans to create and submit a ten second commercial on why they love Americanidol.com the website. The top five commercials, as voted on by the Americanidol.com online community, will air in May during an American Idol telecast, with the winning commercial airing during the highly anticipated finale on May 24 on FOX.

"Americanidol.com is the online home for the millions of American Idol fans, and in true American Idol spirit, we wanted to give them an opportunity to have their voices heard," said Jeff King, VP Fox Interactive Media. "This is a great chance for our fans to grab a little fame for themselves and help promote Americanidol.com."

Americanidol.com offers fans exclusive online content including hundreds of original videos, thousands of behind-the-scenes photos, downloads, original music, style columns, dynamic games, contests, blogs, and personal photo galleries.

According to ComScore Media Metrix, Americanidol.com is the internet's most highly trafficked single television-driven show website with an estimated 6.4 million unique visitors for the month of February. This number is forecasted to rise to over 10 million unique visitors for March.

Video Chance for Fame Rules

Video length must be ten seconds in length, no more, no less, and focus on Americanidol.com the website. Videos touting the website cannot show favoritism for one contestant more than any other. Use of copyrighted music is prohibited. Only videos on MiniDV, DVD or BetaSP will be accepted. Deadline for submission is May 15. Send to: American Idol Video Submissions c/o Fox Interactive Media, PO Box 5533, Beverly Hills, CA 90209.

"Of the 20 million viewers who watched this crazy orgy of sin in December 2004, an estimated 225,000 people were offended. That comes out to, uh, 1.12% of the viewers."

"Use Withoutabox to search festivals and competitions worldwide and then click to submit your works. Fests can use it to organize their submission process and market to the world."

Digital music middlemen.

Spatial hypermedia is accomplished through image recognition and camera-equipped mobile devices.

We are a team of independent game developers who believe video games are not simply an amusement.

Games and simulations can also make us think about what is going on in this world.

Periodically, we will use games and simulations to analyze, debate, comment and editorialize major international news.

Come and join us.

It's not as superficially elegant as pixoh, but it's pretty stunningly hardcore

Former Apple video chief calls for HD boycott - The studios are salivating at the prospect of you never actually being able to own content again

With this design, its design is more similar to a steadicam in that it is not a "pogostick" that is vulnerable to moving due to a change in speed.

theres a new kid in town... MediaCoder is a free universal audio/video batch transcoder, putting together lots of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution, capable of transcoding among different audio/video formats with many extra features.

Tribler is a new, free/open source P2P network designed by Dutch academics to provide greater scalability and relevance to BitTorrent-style networks.

The Entertainment Technology Center at USC is an organized research unit at the University of Southern California within the School of Cinema-Television founded in 1993. Our goal is to understand the impact of new technology on all aspects of the entertainment industry - technology development and implementation, the creative process, and existing business models.

Our Sponsors comprise the seven major studios: Disney, MGM, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Viacom/Paramount, and Warner Bros.; along with Lucasfilm, Laser Pacific Media Corp. (A Kodak Company), and Panasonic.

Our Projects include the Digital Cinema Laboratory in Hollywood, a high quality testing environment for digital cinema distribution and display.

Surveillance in the Internet of Things

"I was recently asked to consider how the new surveillance is (or might) operate in the era of networked Things. It's not a hard one to think through, but I reflected upon the role that visual surveillance has played in reshaping and refashioning physical space and thought maybe visual surveillance doesn't matter so much any more. Video surveillance was once all about "the man" having more power to see and reveal than those who were being watched. It was easy to grow wary of video cameras and their use, particularly by private entities whose cameras captured activity in public space, especially when there are no formal accountability protocols. I could get hopped up about that, certainly. I spent a day with the Institute for Applied Autonomy back several years ago, helping map out surveillance cameras in Manhattan as part of a wonderful exhibition that Eyebeam put on called We Love New York. It was about mapping the ways in which public space becomes a space that surveilled in a problematic way. It's too secret, this surveillance.

Log files and Arphids are what we have to worry about, not video surveillance. In the Internet of Things, it's a web hit in an access log that'll send you to the big house. Continue reading Society of the Spectacle (2.0): Surveillance in the Internet of Things by Julian Bleecker.

Originally posted by jo from networked_performance, ReBlogged by angus on Mar 15, 2006 at 05:49 PM

Web-based operating system with rich text editor, chat, email, RSS, file management, stickies, Flickr RSS, and more

it tracks where it goes, and it remembers where it's been. That's pretty much it. The Track Stick records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals.

Fellow Creative Commons board member and friend James Boyle helped work on and just released this very cool comic book that depicts in a cool and easy to understand way, the copyright struggle going on right now. You can buy the book or download it

Yale University is throwing a conference on "Access to Knowledge" -- an umbrella term that encompasses the humanitarian, creative, entrepreneurial and scholarly elements of the copyfight.

The study found original reporting in just 5% of blog postings it reviewed.

Create a slideshow with PJ on vMix and then easily put it on your MySpace page.

Discussion of how to formally represent the significance of news events to specific entities, for facilitating the machine processing of news.

You can insert your own "news article" into Google News, for thousands or millions to discover and read.

Shadow culture secretary Hugo Swire criticised the "cosy" BBC Trust plans and called the White Paper "a huge missed opportunity for change and innovation"....

The first post at the editors’ blog at the brand new Guardian opinionfest, Comment is Free, is a report on the daily morning editorial conference at the paper, with a promise to give us minutes of the midday meeting next. Don’t expect minutes of news meetings to be scintillating reading — attending them is no thrill ride, either. Doesn’t matter. It’s there for those who want it. CBS put up video of at least one of its story meetings at Public Eye. It appears as if this is going to become a habit at the Guardian. This shows the right attitude: opening the door and leaving it open.

This Thursday, March 16 at 7pm I will be presenting the souped-up 7 minute version of "Joywar" on a panel with Siva Vaidhyanathan, (author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity), Carrie McLaren (Stay Free! Magazine) and others in conjunction with:

Illegal Art
Art + Culture Center of Hollywood, FL
Feb. 4 - April 2, 2006
Curated by Carrie McClaren, editor of Stay Free! Magazine

Participating artists include Eric Doeringer, Tom Forsythe, David Byrne & Danielle Spencer, and others...

Illegal Art is a multi-media exhibition celebrating what is rapidly becoming the "degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas, but is now being used to stifle it. Loaded with gray areas, this exhibition explores whether intellectual property laws discourage the creation of new works and provokes the questions: Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the First Amendment and intellectual property law collide? What is art's future if the current laws are allowed to stand?

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist, ReBlogged by angus on Mar 14, 2006 at 05:57 PM

A hack to use one cell phone shared by hundreds of people, without operator intervention

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that... gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

NADA affords both the technical novice and expert an unified platform for prototyping physical interfaces and digital content - from handheld product concepts to reactive environments that can be connected across the Internet.

hot. gotta imbed these in my site

"I suspect just from looking at the surface of this move to a media rich two-way world that creativity and innovation is just beginning to explode and that the student will find their diverse paths faster and truer, and be spurned on with increasing energy to reach new heights, and to sustain their interest and wonder far longer before being worn down by time and age."

Mobile Phone Kiosks with phones that looks like landlines

A description of the callback system and how it works

Technology and market research company BigChampagne is introducing a measurement tool called BCDash to let media companies quickly track how people -- legally or illegally -- use their products online.

John Kerry is reminding Bush about a promise he made to make broadband access "universal" by 2007, during his 2004 campaign. He says that rules freeing spectrum for new data technologies such as WiMax are being sat on by the FCC and these rules can "help correct the problem". (the statistics on US broadband penetration, quoted by Kerry, and from the industry, seem to significantly differ from today's Nielson survey).

Alexa looks behind the MySpace curtain to uncover how the site became a globally top-10 ranked site. The secret, unsurprisingly, is kids. They're in charge now. Alexa also dispels the myth that MySpace is bigger than Google. MySpace gets a little more than 50% of the pageviews of Google.

Technorati Tags: Google, MySpace, COGs, centersofgravity

Short films have been shown only in film festivals till now. That may change if these videos are made with smart phones and handheld devices in mind. The problem is till now most of the content that are available on small screens were originally developed for a larger screen. But that will not work in the long run, say experts who debated the need for mobile films at a panel discussion at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, California. "It’s not viable to just make stuff smaller," said Mitchell Weinstock, vice president of business development for Kinoma. Palm's Matt Crowley advised the filmmakers to think of mobile devices as a potential home for short animated films that traditionally haven’t reached large audiences outside of the festival community.

Ten years ago Duke Law Professor (and now CC board member) Jamie Boyle coined the metaphor cultural environmentalism, drawing on lessons from the environmental movement for free culture and the legal environment that fosters or hinders free culture. A conference on Cultural Environmentalism at 10 was held at Stanford over the weekend.

Today at SXSW on the Digital Preservation and Blogs panel it occurred to me that digital preservation could be thought of as an instance of cultural environmentalism. To stretch the analogy, just as environmentalists care about species and habitat preservation, cultural environmentalists should care about digital preservation.

Preserved culture is not fossilized culture -- so long as archives are not "dark" (inaccessible to the public) preserved culture can continue to be built upon. Creative Commons licenses lower the legal barriers to effective preservation. Excerpt from Requirements for Digital Preservation Systems in D-Lib Magazine:

If it is necessary for each and every journal, even a very cheap and easy negotiation gets expensive. Wider adoption of the Creative Commons license, which provides the permission needed for preservation and thus eliminates negotiation, could greatly reduce the cost of preservation.

By applying a Creative Commons license to your work you're saying "please share" and (in some cases) "please remix" and also "please preserve for posterity" or more simply -- "please backup!"

Pricing is hard. A lot of new businesses are trying to figure it out. One startup wants to let people charge for their content. But their system doesn’t let me sell a video for 1.99$. So that’s out for me.

It’s all about convenience and value. Can I backup my pictures folder? I’ll pay 35$/year for that. No need for it to be highly available, I’ll only need it when I accidentally delete something or my computer crashes. Can I backup my business files? 4.99/month sounds reasonable. The backup needs to be automated.

It’s very hard for the creators of a service to understand what people will pay for. Ringtones sell for 2.99$ a piece! For a ringtone! It’s the convenience and the value - not the data. iTunes set the price of a song at 99c. A movie at $1.99. And it’s convenient.

I wonder if there are any good ways to research pricing in a new market?

The Media Giraffe Project at University of Massachusetts at Amherst announces its summit:

"Democracy and Independence: Sharing News and Politics in a Connected World" set for June 29-July 1,2006, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It's a combination roundtable summit and think tank, workshop, conference . . . and rendezvous. We're bringing together ... thought leaders, innovators and doers in media, politics, education and technology.

Go here for more information.

The big API news today is that the web as platform now has a new world-class storage system designed specifically for developers: Amazon S3, their Simple Storage Service. Amazon has basically taken the online storage infrastructure behind their core online services and provided a public, fee-based interface to it. There’s now a viable “storage cloud” out there for you to use.

Storage isn’t sexy, but as anyone in IT can tell you: almost nothing’s more important than a reliable storage infrastructure. So it’s good news for web platform developers to have this class of storage service available for whatever they need it for. Here is a key part of your virtual data center.

Yesterday I spoke with Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s Web Services VP of Product Management, and Dave Barth, the Product Manager for Amazon S3. They emphasized that that API was designed to a focus on a core set of functions and do them well.

A couple of examples cited in Amazon’s announcement may trigger ideas on what it might be used for:

• University of California Berkeley “Stardust@Home” Team: Saved money by using Amazon S3 to store and deliver the 60,000 images that represent the data collected from their dust particle aerogel experiment. These images will be delivered to 100,000 volunteers around the world who scan the images looking for dust particles from comet Wild2. Since this phase of the project needs the storage for just a few months they were able to ramp up and back down with less investment.
• CastingWords: This small startup offering podcast transcription services were able to save effort and time by using S3 to store and retrieve the original audio files and the transcribed texts.
• BitTorrent: Oh yes, and there is even a section in the online documentation on how to use S3 for BitTorrent files. For publishers of large, popular files the amount of data actually supplied by S3 can be substantially lower than what it would have been serving the same clients via client/server download. Less data transferred means lower costs for the publisher of the object.

Note also what this isn’t: it’s not an online storage service in the same vein as what you’d get from box.net or their competitors. It is a service for developers and not end users. Here, not only there is no friendly user interface, there is no UI at all. For now you can only get to it via code. It is completely and solely for developers to build tools and applications on top of. Thus eventually there will be pretty tools, OS desktop integration, and so on. Amazon pioneered a bit of this API-only model with their unique Mechanical Turk API.

Nor is it like hacks people have built on top of GMail, those are just handy hacks for some power users (speaking of which, it could be that the often rumored GDrive will provide a comparable API but that remains to be seen and Amazon’s API is live now). And while Amazon is first out of the gate in this league there will certainly be some serious competition from the usual suspects.

What does it cost? It’s $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. This model is nice because you only pay for what you use, no more, no less, with no setup fees or monthly minimums.

Technical details? It supports both REST and SOAP, but both score high on simplicity. No fancy extras, just core file services: store, retrieve, delete. No nonessential services. The REST API maps these functions directly to the core HTTP RFC 2616 requests: GET, PUT and DELETE. Everything is an Object which is opaque to Amazon. For more details see their site or the Amazon S3 entry here at ProgrammableWeb.

How reliable is the service and is there an SLA? Amazon says this is a four-nines service with 99.99% uptime and that you can trust it because it’s the same platform they run amazon.com on. There is no written SLA in the same form you would get from your ISP. For some this might be an issue, although certainly many SLAs have no teeth anyway. Given the issues that Salesforce.com has encountered, reliability is a key success factor for Amazon. It would be nice someday if they have some form of a service status dashboard similar to the Salesforce.com’s status.salesforce.com/.

The idea that secure, reliable storage for any given application will just “be there up in the cloud” is powerful and this is a big step in that direction.

For quite some time now, plenty of people have been pointing out that for all the whining from the movie industry that BitTorrent and the simultaneous release of DVDs and films in theaters, the real issue was that the theater owners have completely forgotten that going to the movies is a social experience -- and if the experience was improved, more people would be willing to go. Instead, they give paying customers lectures and treat them like thieves. At least some companies are trying to provide new technologies to improve the pre-show experience with the ability to play games from in-seat consoles or via mobile phones. It's a nice feature -- and probably beats the traditional pre-movie trivia, but it still seems to be too narrowly focused. No one goes to the theater for the pre-show entertainment. Making it less annoying isn't exactly a selling point. Also, the article doesn't indicate it directly, but seems to imply that some theaters are looking to push ads to mobile phones as well, for those who participate in these games. Talk about killing off whatever advantage such a system would give the theaters.

[via many2many]

Danah Boyd has posted a crib of a talk that she gave at Etech 2006 about “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide”. Definitely worth a read:

Glocalization is the ugliness that ensues when the global and local are shoved uncomfortably into the same concept. It doesn't sit well on your palette, it doesn't have a nice euphoric ring. It implies all sorts of linguistic and cognitive discomfort. This is the state of the global and local in digital communities. We have all sorts of local cultures connected through a global network, resulting in all sorts of ugly tensions. Designers who work with networks must face these tensions and design to take advantage of the global while not destroying the local. This is a hefty challenge and one that i want us to dive into.

I want to talk about what it means to connect the global and local together in technology and how this affects the design process. I want to talk about why social software must address glocalization in order to succeed. This means thinking about all sorts of squishy stuff like language, economics, policy, culture, social relations, and values. These are not just issues for marketing or business; they directly affect how people use your technologies and, thus, how you must design them.

The digital era has allowed us to cross space and time, engage with people in a far-off time zone as though they were just next door, do business with people around the world, and develop information systems that potentially network us all closer and closer every day. Yet, people don't live in a global world - they are more concerned with the cultures in which they participate.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest "State of the News Media" report is heavy on self-pity and light on understanding the forces driving the decline and fall of professional journalism. This is to be expected, I guess, but it's a bit like wasting time staring at a wound instead of moving to fix the thing.

(Continued at The Pomo Blog.)

Today with Rocketboom’s episode 349, the rules of advertising have changed forever. Rocketboom has created a new, spellbinding advertising format.

Rocketboom is an entertaining video-blog with a news-format that hundreds of thousands of people download every weekday morning at 9AM EST. I’ve been staying with them as they burn the midnight oil putting the finishing touches on the internet ad that ushers in a new era in advertising. I’ve watched the team of crackerjack media-makers, Andrew Baron, Amanda Congdon, Mario Librandi, and Kevin Chapados edit long into the night putting the finishing touches on their first episode with an advertisement.

It was only a month ago that they sold their first advertisement package on ebay. The highest bidder, an atm company, gets an advertisement put at the end of every Rocketboom for a week. Rocktboom gets complete creative control and retains the creative commons copyright on it and so if their client likes the advertisement and wants to show it on tv, they have to buy !

Today’s one minute advertisement shows up at the end of their 4 minute show and this is no ordinary advertisement. Normal television ads know that they have thirty seconds to get their message across. They have to rely on simple powerful messages that give a one-two punch to the audience’s reptillian brain.

Rocketboom changes all that. Because they are not limited to television’s thirty seconds, they have added subtlety and intruigue and a great narrative story to the advertisements that will make Rocketboom subscribers sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the next days advertisement. When people download Rocketboom every morning, they have the episode on their computer and the Rocketboom team have taken this advantage and scored a touchdown. They made a commercial where the idea is simple, but the story is full of intruiging and subtle details. If you want to get it, you just watch it once, but if you want to really get it, you have to watch it over and over for all the easter eggs and cool details that lie just below the surface.

Rocketboom can track how many times it’s downloaded, but there is no measure for the millions of times that people around the world will watch this commercial over and over again getting new subtle insights into the clever masterminds of Rocketboom’s creative team.

Advertisers, I speak to you when I say that your day has come. You are no longer bound to make your advertisements fit into the square holes of the old media. With video-blog advertisements your world has opened up and the creative possibilities are endless.

Advertisers, the time is now to go forth and find your favorite video-blog and pay creative people to make provoking narrative advertisements that people will watch over and over again. Now is the time to make the investment in video-blogs and internet media, while it is still fresh and the barrier to entry is low and the playing field is wide.

Crossposted by author from I Make Things

Employees are now regarded as a greater danger to workplace cyber security than the gangs of hackers and virus writers launching targeted attacks from outside the firewall, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. "With email and instant messaging proving increasingly popular and devices such as laptop computers, mobile phones and USB storage devices more commonplace in the office, the opportunities for workplace crime are growing." ... The rise in internal security attacks has come about because outside criminal gangs realise that recruiting or tricking employees to hand over insider knowledge is less expensive and traceable than other forms of cybercrime."

(All I ever needed to know about hacking I learned in kindergarten. -kc.)

"Suppose that you defect — when your packets are dropped you keep on sending packets as fast as you can — but everybody else keeps the deal. By ignoring the congestion signals you are getting more than your fair share of the network."

a physical data visualization system that models a bio-degradable, starch-based block of foam using spam & email as stimuli. based on the content of an email, the system rotates the block & lowers or raises the sprayer, to erode parts of the foam with sprays of water. see also the email erosion prototype.
[emailerosion.org|via turbulence.org|thnkx Scott]

Vit Sisler from Charles University in Prague has posted two excellent articles about political games, mainly focusing on the work of Afkar Media (the second article is an interview to its executive producer, Radwan Kasmiya). I have some issues with them -that’s not unexpected given the hot topic of Middle Eastern politics + political videogames. For example, it sort of

Originally from Water Cooler Games at March 13, 2006, 18:25, published by Pau Waelder

Clear Channel has inked a deal with a company called Skinkers to power a desktop service that includes tickers, RSS feed, alerts and streaming video. A Skinkers representative says another TV group deal is "close."

Fresh from celebrating his 75th birthday, Rupert Murdoch warned the media industry to adapt quickly or face certain extinction. "Companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall," he said. Murdoch predicted a future in which "media becomes like fast food" with consumers watching news, sports and film clips as they travel, on mobile phones or other wireless devices.

DanMelinger posted a photo:

Sony introduced its MSVR-A10, a digital video recorder that records video from a TV or DVD player via composite or S-video and analog audio inputs, recording the signal directly onto a Memory Stick Pro Duo for playback on the Playstation Portable (PSP). That gives you two to four hours of video on a 2GB Pro Duo memory stick. Available in mid-April, it will sell for $215.

Sony MSVR-A10 Memory Stick video recorder [newlaunches]

Comment on this post
Related: Belkin Developing iPod FM Transmitter, Car Charger
Related: Upgraded PSP for Christmas?
Related: CeBIT '06: Brainic VW-500 Vibrating MP3 Player

Edit and combine your videos online. Share your video and mixes with the world for free.

This paper will describe the design methodology and the results of using a single 300MHz software configurable processor to achieve H.264 encoding of Standard Definition (SD) video at 30 fps.

Does this anecdote — that an unpopular cable news show and a wildly popular Web site draw similarly sized audiences — prove that the Internet is upending the economics of the television business?

Amazing software which uses a microphone as input to remix audio and video

"Step aside, BOOB TUBE. Networks are scrambling to make iPods, PCs and cell phones profitable new delivery devices..."

Grassroots journalism evangelist Dan Gillmor has begun a series of columns for the BBC in which he introduces and explains the development of citizen media.

Journalism.org: Online journalism is still not really paying its own way. And it isn’t entirely sure what it will be doing when it grows up.

Big news at the IEEE mesh standards meetup last week in Denver, reports TelecomWeb and WiFiNetNews: a standard for mesh networking may be coalescing.

The new standard, 802.11s, will create a protocol for auto-configuring paths between access points over self-configuring multi-hop networks. With a standard, interoperatiblity between vendors may be possible.

Currently, all "city clouds" that use mesh networking to interconnect nodes use proprietary technology. Placing a multi-million dollar bet on one supplier is asking for trouble. A mesh networking standard would likely lower both risk and cost.

Status of Project IEEE 802.11s

ESS Mesh Networking

---

March 2006, Denver, Colorado

ESS Mesh Networking Task Group Report
The ESS Mesh Netwokring Task Group (TGs) met on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoon 7-9 March 2006 at the Hyatt Regency Denver Convetion Center hotel.

• The updated agenda for the meeting is in submission 11-06/256r10.
• At the January meeting, TGs suspended its proposal selection process to expedite the two remaining proposals, SEE Mesh and Wi-Mesh Alliance, working towards a merger. This merger was successful and a single joint proposal was presented and confirmed unanimously at the March meeting as the starting point for the 802.11s standard, although much work remains.
• TGs has scheduled three teleconferences on the following dates at 11am US Eastern Time to discuss mesh security and its May agenda.
  • 5 April 2006
  • 26 Paril 2006
  • 10 May 2006
• Activities at the May 2006 meeting are expected to be to resolve informal internal technical review comments on its Draft, hear other technical presentations and possible amendments.

"Mesh-networking features will help keep IEEE 802.11, already dominant in the WLAN arena with over 100 million chip sets shipping annually, at the cutting edge of technology for the maximum benefit of its users,” says Mesh Networking Task Group Chair Donald E. Eastlake III. He adds that final approval of the new addition to the 802.11 family of standards is targeted for 2008.

SEEMesh (short for Simple, Efficient and Extensible Mesh) and the Wi-Mesh Alliance are apparently merging. SEEMesh is backed by Intel, Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, and Texas Instruments. The Wi-Mesh Alliance is backed by Nortel, Philips, Thompson and Mitre. Details of the proposed standard are not yet available.

But the biggest names in the metropolitan-area mesh network space, BelAir Networks, Tropos Networks, and Strix Systems, are not buying in, reports Enterprise Networking Planet.

Strix and BelAir both have said that 802.11s may not cover outdoor mesh networking effectively.

Tropos, the mesh market leader, uses a single radio with their patented Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP). Tropos may not feel compelled to jump in bed with the first mesh standard that comes down the pike.

In other mesh news, Trango Broadband Wireless is offering a wireless mesh system that can be used as a backbone ring (right).

The new HD Mesh system creates a self-healing backbone ring network capable of speeds of "up to 45 Mbps". It is available for operation in the licensed 4.9 GHz public safety frequency band, as well as the 5 GHz unlicensed bands.

 

A total of six additional Ethernet devices, such as cameras and access points, can be added to Trango Broadband's HD Mesh micro-cell base station. It is designed to support WiMAX-ready radios and 802.11g Wi-Fi hotspots.

Related DailyWireless articles include; Mesh Standards?, Mesh Standards Proposed, Community Mesh Developments and Mesh Roundup.

"flOw" is a simplistic game created as a practice of "player oriented flow adjustment", methodology defined through my thesis research - "Flow in games". (WIP)

Your play experience and feedback will be a huge contribution to my research, meanwhile, it will be fun =).

Not that it's news that a old-media industry organ like Variety is out of its mind when it comes to the internet and music, but the sheer unreality in this story on the situation in Canada made my eyeballs pop out of my head.

At the beginning and end of the story it's all about stealing and illegality:

The dip is part of a 10-year decline that the CRIA blames on illegal music downloading. [...] The goal of a vibrant digital marketplace in Canada will remain beyond reach until our legal environment encourages people to buy music instead of passively accepting theft on the Web.

But buried in the middle, in the space where professional journalists traditionally put balancing viewpoints, is unambigous acknowledgement that nothing even faintly illegal is happening:

Last March, the Federal Court ruled music file-sharing on the Internet was legal and that neither downloading nor sharing digital music online infringes copyright.

QuickTime Embedding WordPress Plugin
I got tired of my XML-RPC posts with QuickTime movies messing up the design of my blog. WordPress automatically would add end param tags and paragraph breaks and all of that inside my Embed and Object tags.
Check it out

: This is certainly a first by a TV network, even if not sure why it makes sense: USA Network, now part of NBC Universal, is launching its own online social networking hub, called ShowUsYourCharacter.com.
The site will allow users to create profiles, upload video and, most important for the network, gather in fan communities for series like "Monk," "Nashville Star" and "The 4400."
The site is tied to USA's "Characters Welcome" branding campaign, which is meant to create a distinct identity for the general entertainment network.

-- The IPTV portals to nowhere:Why would anyone want their TV provider to be the gateway to their highly personal interactive services? Can we imagine a time when people will log in to check their Sky.com email account for instance?
-- IPTV World Forum 2006: the role of broadband in content delivery:T he telcos' message for the studios was to "soften" their attitude towards telcos' entry into the content delivery space and to increase their confidence in the telcos' ability to execute successful DRM.
-- Industry goes mad for IPTV: The truth is that IPTV is going through a first round of consolidation.
-- Microsoft: IPTV to reach critical mass this year: Ed Graczyk, director of marketing and communications for Microsoft TV, said the number of commercial users of IPTV services should scale up by the end of 2006.
-- IPTV: What Does It All Mean?: According to a survey of 6,000 users across the US and Europe (Spain, UK, Italy, France and Germany), which was commissioned by Accenture, 46 per cent did not understand what the IPTV term referred to. (In Italy, four percent of respondents thought IPTV was a new TV game show.)

Blom, J. and Monk, A.F. (2003): Theory of Personalization of Appearance: Why Users Personalize Their PCs and Mobile Phones, Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 18, No. 3, Pages 193-228, Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 18, No. 3, Pages 193-228.

Abstract: Three linked qualitative studies were performed to investigate why people choose to personalize the appearance of their PCs and mobile phones and what effects personalization has on their subsequent perception of those devices. The 1st study involved 35 frequent Internet users in a 2-stage procedure. In the 1st phase they were taught to personalize a commercial Web portal and then a recommendation system, both of which they used in the subsequent few days. In the 2nd phase they were allocated to 1 of 7 discussion groups to talk about their experiences with these 2 applications. Transcripts of the discussion groups were coded using grounded theory analysis techniques to derive a theory of personalization of appearance that identifies (a) user-dependent, system-dependent, and contextual dispositions; and (b) cognitive, social, and emotional effects. The 2nd study concentrated on mobile phones and a different user group. Three groups of Finnish high school students discussed the personalization of their mobile phones. Transcripts of these discussions were coded using the categories derived from the 1st study and some small refinements were made to the theory in the light of what was said. Some additional categories were added; otherwise, the theory was supported. In addition, 3 independent coders, naive to the theory, analyzed the transcripts of 1 discussion group each. A high degree of agreement with the investigators’ coding was demonstrated. In the 3rd study, a heterogeneous sample of 8 people who used the Internet for leisure purposes were visited in their homes. The degree to which they had personalized their PCs was found to be well predicted by the dispositions in the theory. Design implications of the theory are discussed.

GRRR I cannot get the pdf (registration required)

The Economist writes:

Just as timeshifting lets viewers choose when to watch something, placeshifting lets them decide where. Of course, people have long been able to carry recorded shows (on videotapes or DVDs) around with them. But in the past few months, the placeshifting of live broadcasts, as well as recorded shows, has become possible. “What we're moving towards is having any content, anywhere, anytime, on whatever device is available to you,” says Van Baker of Gartner, a consultancy. This is, he says, part of a far broader trend: the personalisation of media consumption, from mobile-phone ringtones to music playlists.

e forefront of placeshifting is Sling Media, a start-up based in San Mateo, California. Last year it launched the Slingbox, which in effect lets you watch your own television from anywhere in the world via the internet.

The kids cable network unveiled a new round of programs, most of which were generated on alternative platforms like the Web and videogames, at its 2006-07 upfront Thursday in New York.

"We are in a digital era for kids, and our mission, obviously, is to keep up with kids, so we want to put our content on all the platforms they're looking for," says Cyma Zarghami, president, Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group.

Survey on Usability, Privacy, Security and Legal Aspects of Wi-Fi. Direct interaction between the user and the network.

site allows users to edit any web site instantly. Other website editors allow users to edit segments of their website which need to be installed by professionals. editables.com is truely INSTANT

BY CYNDI GREENING, AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA (CINEMA MINIMA) — After a day in Austin, I’ve started to do the natural comparison between the SXSW Film, Music and Interactive Festival and the Sundance Film Festival. They are quite distinct and each valuable in a different way.

Sundance takes place in Park City, Utah. It’s a tiny town, barely six blocks long. When the festival rolls in with it’s 48,000 attendees, the industry swallows the community. Everything in the town is centered on the festival. Park City starts to feel like a “company town.”

NOT SO at SXSW. Austin covers about 275 square miles and is home to over 600,000 folks. The second fastest growing city in the United States (according to the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau). While a lot of the activity is around the Austin Convention Center (ACC), I was wishing I’d rented a car. Some of the film venues are several miles from the ACC making it difficult to get between screenings. You’d never want a car in Park City because parking is impossible, the shuttles are great and everything is quite close. Next year, I’ll rent a car in Austin.

So, the SXSW festival feels like something occurring in the town rather than something that takes over the town. The other thing that’s quite different is how diverse the offerings are here. I am completely surprised at how many different types of panel discussions there are. There are film panels, interactive panels, mentoring sessions, keynotes, mini-meetings and DIY meetings. I can hardly wait for tomorrow because I’ve already chosen several panels that I’ll be attending. Among them:

• International Documentary Co-Production
• State of North American Documentaries
• Mini-Meeting Doc Filmmaking
• International
• Documentary Distribution
• Serious Games for Learning
• Theatrical Distribution
• Latin Filmmaking’s Emerging Talent
• Convergence & Advertising

Of course, there’s also the Blogging About Film Panel that I’ll be on with CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner, Cinematical’s Karina Longworth, GreenCine’s David Hudson, Movie City News’ David Poland and directors Joe Swanberg and Doug Block. It should be very exciting. I’m definitely the Chihuahua that’s running with the Blogging Big Dogs but it should be fun.

Lately, there’s all this press about how “yesterday” blogging is and how it may no longer be viable business model. Of course, I’ve never made money with blogging so that isn’t terribly important to me. At the exact same time, there’s all of this press in the New York Times about the power of niche marketing and Slivercasting on the web. There’s a Theatrical Distribution Panel at the same time so I’m hoping there’ll be folks attending. More about that later.

{ Visit Cinema Minima Amazon Shop: Your purchase through this link supports Cinema Minima! }

2-Way RSS uses HTTP [RFC2616] and XML [XML 1.0] to publish and edit Web resources.

DRM company encourages people to make unlicensed copies of non-DRMed game

Stories on graft just don't ring the clickthrough cash register. Neither do stories on politics in general. Or on wars or famines or other sorts of nasty business.

Web service of the newspaper about public TV and radio in the United States.

"The basic idea of an i-tag (identity tag, independent tag, intelligent tag - take your pick) is that a user could tag an object on their own site (photo, video, sound file, text or an entire blog post), where the tag, and the object, would then go out through the RSS feed or be spidered, with some additional information that doesn't now exist in tags."

Japanese media artist couple Mika Miyabara and Tatsuo Sugimoto's new concept for movie editing helps children understand the process of editing which has become too abstract since losing the actual film itself.

Movie Cards turns digital, abstract film material back into something tangible: paper cards.

1. Film your story with a digital camera.
2. Connect your camera to a computer with Movie Cards software installed.
3. The software will print out the movie cards. These small cards show the first image of each sequence taken from your camera.
4. Lay your cards on the table and arrange them in which ever order you want them to be.
5. Each card has a little QR-code or bar-code, so you can use a scanner or bar-code reader to beep-in your movie cards in the order you decided.
6. Preview on your monitor! Done.

The advanced concept of Movie Cards, enables you to print out each frame of your movie clips. The result looks very close to actually holding a film in your hand.

Since every frame has an individual bar-code printed next to the image you can edit the length of the clip by scanning the start and end frame of your sequence instead of cutting the film.

The developers also suggest to cut all of your desired frames and create a little flip-book.

Check also Cati Vaucelle's brilliant Moving Pictures : Looking Out! Looking In!.
Via PingMag.

eTech notes from Putting the Fun in Functional. Applying Games Mechanics To Functional Software.
Amy Jo Kim, Creative Director of Shuffle Brain. Her slides.

How can we use game mechanics to create compelling services and applications, even if those are not games.

How can games shape behaviour? By leveraging our basic, primal response patterns. Schedules of reinforcement (giving rewards within a certain schedule)

How to make interactive experience more addictive? By finding inspiration in 5 game mechanics.

Continue reading...

An uploader submitted part of an American Airlines training video to YouTube and Google Video, and now American is demanding to know whodunnit. American has subpoenaed YouTube and Google, claiming rights under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, requiring the companies to reveal the identity of the submitter. The name of the video in question? "Flight Attendant, Upside Down."

NPR : Watching Cable TV a la Carte

As an on-demand society affects TV-viewing habits, the FCC supports what is being called "a la carte cable programming." Viewers would pay for the channels they actually watch. New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera and Susan Stamberg discuss TV's future.

I don't know about your cable company, but mine makes no bones about being evil, and Nocera makes the point here that a la carte would weaken the cable companies.

Everyone wants to tap into iTunes' success, and Amazon wants to take it a step further. The company is in talks with three studios about creating a service that allows users to download movies and TV shows and then burn them on DVDs.

This article describes the implementation of a video compression platform on a configurable and scalable processor, the Vector Signal Processor (VSP). The VSP is a programmable architecture, and therefore capable of handling diverse video compression standards. Configuration takes place before manufacturing, and is used for assembling an tailor-made architecture optimized to exactly meet the application in mind.

scratch is a new programmable toolkit that enables kids to create their own games, animated stories, and interactive art -- and share their creations with one another over the Net

Mogwai tour site mashed up from Flickr, YouTube and Google Maps

A study has shown that half of all malfunctioning products returned by customers are in full working order. They are returned because customers can't figure out how to operate them.

Most of the flaws found in the study could be tracked back to the first phase of the development process: product definition.

The study was done Elke den Ouden from the Technical University of Eindhoven.

another interesting news stories treemap data visualization. each rectangle is a single article, of which the size & color indicate the article age & popularity (determined by clicks, subscriptions, or features in weblogs). the map can be filtered or rearrarranged to view articles that meet certain criteria, or that contain specific text. the Hive Group website shows a wide range of similar treemaps that are based on different datasets, such as the iTunes, Wikipedia or Amazon collection. see also newsmap & week in review. [newsisfree.com]

No kidding, this brain-to-computer interface will be shown at CeBIT this week, and it uses 128 electrodes placed on the scalp to translate thoughts into cursor movements on a computer screen. The project is being run by the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology in Berlin.

The concept is still in its infancy, as evidenced by the five to 10 minutes it takes just to write a typical sentence. It's also difficult to place those electrodes on the skull—it reportedly takes an hour to place all 128 in just the right spot. But the scientists are working on that, too, where they’re developing a contactless cap it will take the place of all those cumbersome electrodes.

The software learns along with its user, letting disabled people think their thoughts onto a computer screen, seemingly through telepathy. Sounds like a first step on the way to Ray Kurzweil's “Singularity.”

Brain-controlled device could help the disabled [Mail & Guardian]

Comment on this post
Related: Memory Ball Alarm and Radio
Related: Inline Skate Speedometer Watch

A number of folks, most notably David Janes, have been working a format called hAtom for quite some time.

hAtom has been created to enable using HTML documents as syndication feeds. It was been built after studying the emergent semantics of blog publishers (ie, what are the common HTML elements and attributes in blogs and other syndicatable media) and existing syndication formats (ie, RSS and Atom).

Anyway, hAtom looks really promising and after ironing out some issues in a face-to-face meeting at MashupCamp, we put the 0.1 stamp on it and are now inviting people to start using it seriously.

So, if you have a blog, or any other publishing system that could do with some syndication, have a go at implementing hAtom on your site. If you run into any problems or have any questions, feel free to jump into one of our discussion channels to ask for help.

tags

• Microformats
• hAtom
• syndication
• Atom
• RSS
• Blogging

Ben Hunt pointed me to an excellent essay he’s got up.

He points out that the next killer app ain’t an app - it’s:

- the killer Homepage

- the power of connections

- a tool for collecting connecting info

- future killer search

- future killer marketplace

- creating feedback loops

- future killer contacts manager

- future killer secruity features

- commercial interests

- open-source community

This essay - combined with posts like:

- Fred Wilson’s “the future of media”

- OPML 2.0

- BarCamps around the world

- 10 reasons why you need to build an Open API

- on-line storage

- SSE and the Live Clipboard

- Sxip 2.0 specs

……make for some pretty good guidelines as to how to proceed.

There are hundreds of TV critics at newspapers across the country, but very few of them are looking at online video. Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times is one of them. "I have enthusiasm for [video on the web]," she said. "Maybe other people feel more cynical about it, but I am excited about it, and I love reading about it. And now that there's YouTube and GorillaMask.net, I'm on them all the time and it's cutting into my television watching. I wanted to find a way to write about it." While Heffernan gets it, you have to wonder if TV critics in general have the right attitude to review the web.

You may remember last week we posted a survey that suggests 75% of Americans don't really care about watching TV on a cell phone. Now there's this survey from Nokia -- so consider the source -- that's based on ongoing pilots with DVB-H (live video) in Finland, the UK, Spain and France. "[They've] revealed clear consumer demand for such services," Nokia concludes. In the UK, 83% of participants said they were satisfied with the service, and 76% said they would take up the service in the next 12 months. More below, including some interesting stats about mobile TV viewing patterns...PRESS RELEASE -- Results from pilots onbroadcast (DVB-H) mobile TV services amongst consumers in Finland, the UK, Spain and France have revealed clear consumer demand for such services as well as important indications over future business models for commercial mobile TV services.

Each of the pilots involved Nokia and a broad spectrum of companies, including broadcasters, mobile operators and broadcast network providers, revealing the widespread interest in making mobile TV a reality. Each pilot also involved broadcasts of live digital TV content over DVB-H networks to the Nokia 7710 smartphone.

Consumer demand for mobile TV

Interim results from the pilot in Oxford, UK, revealed that 83% of participants were satisfied with the service and over three quarters (76%) said they would take up the service within 12 months. In France, 68% said they would pay for mobile TV services while over half (55%) in Spain were willing to do so. Nearly 75% of Spanish participants would recommend the service to friends and family.

Pricing Models

The potential commercial benefits of mobile TV for the industry are made clear by these pilots with such a high proportion willing to pay for the service. The most popular pricing model to emerge is a monthly subscription for a package of channels. In the Helsinki pilot, half of those that took part thought EUR10 per month was a reasonable price to pay, while in France, 68% were willing to pay EUR7 per month for mobile TV services.

Viewing Patterns

New prime times for broadcasters and advertisers also emerge from the pilots. The UK results reveal a lunchtime viewing peak higher than the normal TV pattern, suggesting that viewers are enjoying their favorite TV content while on their lunch break. In France, participants watched mobile TV for 20 minutes on average per day with early morning, lunchtime and mid evening representing the periods of highest use. The Spanish pilot also reveals mobile TV viewing spread throughout the day with early evening representing peak viewing.

An interesting aspect of all the pilots was that many users watched mobile TV within their homes. Almost half of those taking part in the French and Spanish pilots claimed to mainly watch mobile TV at home. For almost a third of participants in the UK pilot, this represented their first taste of multi-channel TV.

Content

The overwhelming message from these pilots is that consumers want both a wide range of channels but also content that is suitable for watching on mobile devices. The most popular types of content were news, sports, music, soaps and documentaries. Interactivity was also an important functionality with over half of Spanish users (58%) saying they wanted specific, interactive content adapted to shorter viewing times. In the Finnish pilot, the San Marino and Monaco Grand Prix as well as the UEFA Champions League match between Liverpool and AC Milan were among the top 10 programs viewed.

"These pilots, as well as those currently taking place across the globe, are a vital component of the development of broadcast mobile TV, demonstrating consumer demand and the business models for viable commercial services," commented Ilkka Raiskinen, Senior Vice President, Multimedia Experiences, Nokia. "We are delighted with the results of these pilots which have involved such a broad spectrum of different companies from the mobile and broadcast industries. These pilots have proven to be very useful for all the different players involved in the mobile TV industry."

DVB-H technology allows TV channels to be distributed effectively to mobile devices. It provides the best user experience in the mobile environment with excellent, broadcast quality picture, reduced battery consumption and wide range of channels (up to 50 channel are possible). Nokia will bring the Nokia N92 device together with Nokia's Mobile Broadcast Solution 3.0 network elements to the market in summer 2006 to provide the most complete implementation of existing broadcast mobile TV standards on the market. According to Informa, there will be 50.97 million DVB-H devices sold globally by 2010.

Ajit Jaokar quotes Tomi Ahonen: "Total SMS revenues in 2005 were about 75 Billion USD. To put it in context, Hollywood box office is a bit below 30 B USD. Global music industry revenues are about 35B. Videogaming, consoles and all software are about 40. And the total value of all laptop computers sold in 2005 was about 65 B USD. SMS alone earns more than any of those industries.... And SMS is still over 90% profit. Do we love this industry or what?"

MyToday.com (created by us at Netcore) is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. It is simultaneously available on the web through an Ajax client and on the mobile phone in WML. Check it out and let me know what you think of it, and of enhancements you'd like to see.

Ajax version: http://www.mytoday.com/
Mobile version: http://m.mytoday.com/

Here is how my colleague, Veer Bothra, describes the thinking behind MyToday.

Public versus Personal Aggregators
Personal aggregators like bloglines.com, my.yahoo.com, live.com etc. give the users an empty plate which needs to be filled with feeds which the user knows about. This approach ignores the fact that users in general are interested in a subject but not necessarily aware about quality feeds and sources in that area. A public aggregator like MyToday.com depends on editorial expertise to choose and pick the best sources in a subject. This way, the reader can get going without any sweat.

Source versus Stories
Aggregators like news.google.com, topix.net are story based. Their endeavor is to distill the most important stories at any point of time. MyToday’s selection is based on the quality of the source and not on the stories. Therefore the selection process when making a Daily is stringent to maintain the quality of content.

Micro-content Client
MyToday consists of a Micro-content client and an aggregation system. The micro-content client is built keeping in mind the nature of micro-content like blog posts and news stories. They are small in size, large in volume and more often than not, time sensitive. MyToday’s micro-content client makes it easier to consume lots of information quickly.

Aggregation System
MyToday’s underlying feed aggregation system claims to turnaround Dailies in 30 minutes. Give it an OPML of feeds and it can create a new Daily in 30 minutes which then auto-updates. Niche information / content verticals, available on both PC and mobile, can be created and served with low human intervention.

Personalisation
The reasoning behind public aggregators is that most users want to start with a choice made by the experts. But it is also true that most wouldn’t be satisfied with the default for long. They would want to tweak it a bit - add a thing and remove some. This is where personalisation comes in as the natural next phase of development. Keep watching.

This is what Jonathan Boutelle had to say after he saw it at BarCamp Delhi:

It seems to be a specialized AJAX homepage. It allows the quick creation of niche publications that aggregate and present rss data. The design is very slick, with geographic filtering. It also has very rich integration with phone (at sister site m.mytoday.com). It makes it very simple to great aggregated feeds. Check out mytoday.com/bcdelhi, which they built in an hour and which is consuming all the blogs, tagged photos, etc from barcamp delhi. Awesome!

of this approach seems to be that most "real people" won't build up an rss reader from scratch. But they'll be OK with deleting feeds from a pre-existing set.

"Hobbes and Rousseau argue about Dave Winer."

"It was interesting to hear Jon talk about patterns, because that what's I want to talk about. I want to propose a pattern language for moderation systems, talk a little bit about why I think we need such things...."

a cool film about vj culture, video art and... the signal:)

vadePD is an example PD patch and cocoa application that work together as a test video/3D OS X native application. The Paradiddle framework allows a Cocoa app to commuicate via udp to Pure Data and send/receieve variables.

Jot is a program that lets designers, artists and animators directly annotate 3D computer graphics models (and animation) for stylized (NPR) rendering.

The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression is currently in its 5th year. Researchers and musicians from all over the world gather to share their knowledge and late-breaking work on new musical interface design

Share is a community for portable performers founded in 2001 by Barry Manalog, geoffGDAM and Newclueless that provides an open space for knowledge exchange and audio/visual performance. Every week we host a free multimedia jam open to all participants and observers. Walk-ins welcome.

Currently, Share events take place in New York City and San Diego, USA, Montreal, CA, and Wiesbaden, Germany.

drawing from extrastruggle.

We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated?

In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!".

What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states,

"I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\"

Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden.

Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow.

So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;)

michael

PictureCloud lets you easily create 360 degree images from a series of digital camera photos...for free

ccMixter is looking a few good beta testers of a new cross-domain service that we're implementing and evangelizing called "Sample Pools."

Spam Cube Inc. is introducing a squared box called the Spam Cube that plugs into any PC or MAC to scan for potential SPAM e-mails

Boxxet offers to create websites on any subject, allowing web surfers to sit back, relax and watch a virtual space automatically fill up with relevant news stories, blog posts, maps and photos.'

a community driven discussion for building your own PVR / DVR / HTPC (think Tivo without a recurring $ub$cription). Anything from mini-itx, case modding, which video card, to which software package is most advanced is fair game.

kermit as keanu...miss piggy as ...well, u can guess. And beaker with some awesome bullet moves...this is what fair use is about...students getting their chips and referencing culture.

How to build a large, removable, disposable bluescreen for under US$30. Size: 24′ x 8′ | 7m x 2m. [Stormforce Pictures] [digg / movies]

Fantastic visualization of IRC participation at etech.

Right. Well, here's a verbal, eyewitness account of what Jeff Han was up to with his tangible interface. "The crowd went wild." Yeah, they were digging him.

http://lookingabout.blogspot.com/2006/03/multi-touch-user-interface.html Make somebody else blog it; my, how handy

It sounds so Minority Report? --PL

Originally from Beyond the Beyond, ReBlogged by perry on Mar 7, 2006 at 04:07 PM

Intel has videos up showing more Origami/UMPC prototypes and scenarios in which they'd be used (including, thank heavens, a model with a sub-notebook/tablet design). Lots of happy, beautiful folks use their UMPCs to instant message, watch videos, sync up videogame save states, and respond to email—all using an interface that looks considerably different than regular Windows XP, we might add.

ultramobile2 Videos [Intel via Ultramobilize]

Comment on this post
Related: Origami: Buzz Killer?
Related: CeBIT '06: "Dream Machine" PC Hits 5.46GHz
Related: Origami Revealed: It's a 7-Inch Tablet PC Platform

If we can have video on demand, pizza on demand, why not events on demand. Business 2 Blog reports that EVDB-powered Eventful is launching a new service where consumers can create a groundswell for certain concerts and events from performers.

The idea is to use the Web to aggregate demand for different kinds of events—anything from rock concerts to book readings. So someone in Omaha who really wants U2 to play there could start a campaign on Eventful, and if enough people join and demand that U2 plays there, the tour manager would probably be wise to add an Omaha date to the tour.

This is a good idea particularly for smaller bands. I wonder what is the “monetization strategy.” I had recently met with a company which was working on developing a technology that would allow people watch live concerts using the IM networks for a small fee. Again a nifty idea with a business model. How big these things could be? Who knows… clearly, broadband is working its magic in unusual ways don’t you think?

One of many things planned in the relaunch has been revealed.  AIM now has APIs.

There are almost 70M AIM users.

Think about what you could do with that?

- connect AIM to Skype and create some sort of universal conversation manager.  Oooops - hmmm - maybe that’s restricted! (Susan Mernit has some comments on this!)

- send important updates, alerts, data, blog posts, microcontent anything - through the AIM infrastructure to anyone of those 70M people

- AIM has a huge eco-system surrounding it - so mobile, presence management, tie into all sorts of commerce

- AIM interop is what Microsoft and Google wanted.  If they want it - perhaps you might find it interesting - as well.  Just the access to all those people shoudl be enough to do something!

:-)

Congrats to the team for shipping!  Controversy is already swelling up around this.  They’re still restricting the notion of a ‘multi-headed client’ - even though that’s exactly what Google is doing.

The other big API news to start the week comes from MapQuest with their announcement of the MapQuest OpenAPI. They’re an established player in online mapping but a latecomer to the open API party. It looks like they’re going try and play off their strengths which include high-quality maps and good routing. Here’s the first new MapQuest mashup: mapzierge.

The API itself is a JavaScript-based API that provides:

• Routing - Integrate MapQuest’s ultra-accurate driving directions to show your users exactly how to get there.
• Mapping - Plot multiple locations on a single map. Choose one of our map styles to create a truly integrated look-and-feel with your website.
• Active Point Markers - Add up to 100 active point markers to a single map. You can also add events, like a pop-up box with key information displayed when users click on or roll over the marker.

The limits? Free of charge for non-commercial use within the stated transaction levels of 50,000 combined maps and geocodes and 5,000 routes per day.

MapQuest’s Anthony Pegg is presenting a session on this tomorrow by at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

And lastly, to go along with the launch of these APIs, they’ve announced a Developers Challenge:

The winning entry will push the mashup genre beyond merely plotting locations on a map, demonstrate some real usefulness to a broader, non commercial community and leverage the full set of tools available in OpenAPI with an emphasis on routing.

March 31st. This has now been added to the ProgrammableWeb /contests page.

This news article says "teachers who express radical left-wing views in the classroom are facing a new tactic in America:conservative parents are encouraging students to make recordings of their views.The use of micro-recording devices,often in mobile phones or digital music players,is the latest twist in conservatives' struggle against what they see as the leftist slant of American education.A high-school geography teacher was placed on leave last week in Colorado after a 16-year-old pupil recorded him comparing US President George W. Bush to Hitler".Further,"an alumnus group at the University of California at Los Angeles has also caused an uproar by offering a $US100 ($135) bounty for taped evidence of professors' radical rants.The Bruin Alumni Association was founded by Andrew Jones,the former head of the student Republican organisation who was fired from a job at David Horowitz's Centre for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles.An outcry forced Mr Jones to withdraw the $US100 bounty, but he is still collecting recordings of politicising professors for his list of the university's "Dirty Thirty" academics".

Whiff of McCarthy as pupils out teachers

Copyright-abusing-machine and creative intelligence instrument at the same time, sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!" is described by its creator Sven König, as a bastard between database and as a sensitive composer for radical plagiarism.

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! attempts to develop an artistic strategy that could shed some light on evident but confusing problems of intellectual property.

The mind music machine is a software which consists of a pre-analyzer, a database and a synthesizer. Using the pre-analyzer it is possible to automatically split up audio material into small musically and rhytmically meaningful snippets. The sonic properties of each snippet are extracted and saved in a database so that a soundpool of samples referenced by their sound signatures is available.

The synthesizer analyzes an audio input stream and again splits it up into small snippets and calculates their sound signatures. For everyone of the input snippets the best match out of all the snippets in the database is found and each input snippet is continuously replaced by the best matching (most similar-sounding) snippet from the database.
The audio input, which can be other music or as I use it, just human voice, is virtually describing music to be automatically constructed out of samples found in the database.

Video.

Performance during the ">VIPER festival, in Basel, Gare du Nord, 18 March 2006.

Flash: Podfading ravages the landscape of logorrheic bloggers | 43 Folders

I understand its useful to look back toward what new technologies remind us of, but you wont tease out the more novel uses of something until you let it just be what it is, allowing it to evolve without all the herding and expectations. In the fifties, the future always looked like TVs, and in the sixties it all looked like rocket ships. And so, today, podcasts look like relatively easy-to-produce (usually long-ass) radio shows, and thats cool, I suppose.

But if we are to be stuck with this radio mindset for now, I do wish more of the many talented podcasters out there would aspire toward making a series of brilliant poppy 45s rather than manufacturing these hour. long. news. casts. Seriously. Just do 3 fun minutes every couple weeks, and then stop for a while. I want Love Me Do, not The Ring Cycle.

fast and dirt cheap because you don't have time for anything else. Why should podcasts be epics?

I am hearing the wording "legal downloads" used to distinguish the class of stuff that you get from the iTunes music store, Rhapsody, eMusic, Yahoo Music Unlimited, etc. This annoys me because it carries disinformation -- the idea that music has to be vetted or sponsored to be legitimate. "Paid downloads" expresses the real meaning better.

I think people say "legal downloads" because they have internalized the disinformation in the phrase "illegal downloading." This phrase carries the message that music on the internet is sinful by default.

"I’ve compiled a list of online video services that require Internet Explorer or shut out Macs altogether. Please send along sites that have frustrated you with similar requirements, and I’ll add them to the list."

NOTE TO STEWART from Michael Parenti : just give this guy some money and incorporate the feature on flickr... its damn hot

the Associated Press has this terrific article outling the state of visual remixes: Do-it-yourself mashups like a digital blender...this darknet post expands on it. great read.

Vonage Canada has issued a press release complaining that Canadian broadband provider Shaw is suggesting its customers pay a $10 tax to effectively use competing VoIP products. "Shaw's VoIP tax is an unfair attempt to drive up the price of competing VoIP services to protect its own high-priced service," complains a Vonage marketing exec. Shaw insists the "quality of service enhancement" fee is necessary to ensure the quality transit of indie VoIP traffic, but has refused to provide a technical explanation for how its enhancement works or why it is necessary.

Cell phone are hurting radio audiences, according to Mobile Mag, as people are phoning from their cars. "Radio commentators are steadily losing audiences in cars and other vehicles. A recent study conducted by Bridge Ratings showed that commuters listened to the radio 6 minutes shorter now than they did three years ago. The study also revealed an increase in talk time for those who use their cell phones inside the car. In 2003, a commuter only spent an average of 10.45 minutes a day on the phone. Today, 13.49 minutes a day is spent on the phone while in the car."

via a post from BoingBoing from 2004,

Spammers have come up with a brilliant way to defeat the 'captcha' distorted-word test that prevents spamming bots from signing up for free email accounts or posting to blogs: leverage the masses of users on the internet looking for free porn. Spammers set up free porn sites where users have to solve a captcha to enter, then that solution is fed through to the bot signing up for free email accounts.

This is like the evil spammer version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk project (earlier SmartMobs post), which the website describes as 'artificial artificial intelligence.'

(Thanks Luke)

OmniFocus enables an "instant focus" function for mobile camera phones in full resolution at 15 frames per second at 3.2 megapixels... hot damn!

author of the blog editing tool Ecto and 1001 just released Endo his new aggregator/feed reader.

Found via Technorati: smartspace by Scott Smith of Social Technologies (an international futures research and consulting firm based in Washington, DC):

Welcome to Smartspace, a new blog about annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes–the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit.

ludes discussions, observations and insights on ubiquitous and embedded computing, mapping, location-based services, surveillance and tracking, geotagging, smart homes, intelligent environments, the annotated reality, and virtual worlds, where the increasingly intersect with the physical.

An increasing amount of interest, research, development, investment and regulation is being directed at the world of smart spaces. The purpose of Smartspace is to provide context and explore implications of the convergence of the above mentioned factors as they relate to these activities. Hopefully we will feature interviews, guest authors, and other interesting features and contents that make Smartspace a compelling read.

I found it because he expanded the discussion about my post about the giving of one’s location while calling with a cell-phone, Scott adds this intriguing walkaround:

Meanwhile, I find it interesting that, while we are waiting for applications that alert the person on the other end of a mobile discussion automatically as to our location as the call comes in, it would be easier at the moment to take a picture of myself on the train and MMS it to my wife using something like ZoneTag, allowing her to see where I am before I call. Talk about a workaround.

Indeed, image can bring the context that the user wants to show, with the level of accuracy (in terms of contextual cues) the user may want to show and convey in his/her message.

Why do I blog this? another interesting contributor in the field of social usage of space/place/locative tech, very relevant ideas so far.

Thank you God. Thank you.

The no-framework PHP MVC framework

An intelligent way to build a scalable PHP app. All this stuff I’ve had to figure out for myself, and some of it I got wrong.

I do prefer 1 thing different though. I use a simple template engine. I have NO PHP in my HTML, ONLY html. I edit my HTML pages in Dreamweaver, and often move stuff around and redesign, so this works for me.

With all of the discussion about our libraries becoming user-centered and user-focused, I wonder when/if the time will come when we start "storing" and "carrying" their stories. Take a look at The Lit List:

"The Lit List is a site where readers submit links to online fiction—including short stories, eBooks and podcasts—and vote for their favorites. The most popular links are automatically 'published' to the front page. It's like a real-time literary journal edited by readers."

So, will the libraries of the future carry "books" written by community members? Will the library become the "publisher" of this content? It's really not that expensive if done in an online environment.

It seems to me that this is the next step in our user centered libraries...

If imitation is the best form of flattery, London-based record label BeatPick is handing it to Berkeley and London-based label Magnatune in spades. Similarities include CC license used (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike), a 50/50 artist/label revenue split, a menu of commercial licensing options and availability of wav, mp3 and ogg downloads.

Of course it's about the music and Betpick has its own set of artists. Check them out. If you're a musician you can submit your music.

Congratulations to Beatpick for copying a great business model. If you're interested in commons-based business models and happen to be attending SXSW, do not miss our panel moderated by CC board member Joi Ito and featuring Ian Clarke of Freenet and Revvr, Teresa Malango of Magnatune, and Jimmy Wales of Wikimedia:

Open source software business models have gone from theoretical to profitable over the past half decade-companies like Red Hat, MySQL, JBOSS, and IBM. How will peer production business models prove out in the content space? Learn how pioneering commons-based businesses are creating what Business 2.0 calls the next multi-billion dollar industry.

Update: David d'Atri of Beatpick responds below. For the record, I intended the above as a compliment to both Magnatune and Beatpick. Many (not just two!) commons based business models are great. As hinted in the above panel description, the field is ripe for exploration and innovation (which includes copying and improving, even though that isn't what Beatpick is doing). David d'Atri:

We admire Magnatune but think we are not a copycat.

Some thoughts:

BeatPick is a project that started in 2003 during my Master in Business Economics. The title of my -first class- final dissertation: "A paper on economic efficiency and the infringement of copyright in the music industry: An Insight into the Future of the Music Industry." I showed that a decrease of copyright rigidities in the music industry could lead to an increase in total welfare. Just ask for a copy if you can bother to read a "heavy" and very theoretical paper.

In 2003 I had no idea about Magnatune and I did not find out about it until 4 months ago when our project was already being developed.

Some basic differences with Magnatune:

1. We do not use a flexible price schema. We do not find it fair. Although it is really smart from a business point of view, we find no fair to use a clever type of price discrimination which aims to extract the total surplus from each customer by asking them to self-discriminate. We admit that it takes a lot of good marketing to ask people to self-discriminate and we think Magnatune does a great job. However we prefer to sell more at a cheaper price as we are for more people having more music. If we were to implement a flexible price schema then we would find fair to give artists 100% of the earnings over a certain amount.
2. We let artists go anytime. Agreement can be terminated in 30 days while Magnatune ask artists to commit for 5 years. We think Magnatune’s request is reasonable from a business point of view but it is not very fair as Magnatune does not commit to market each artist.
3. We have a completely different graphic and style. We target younger people. Our message is simpler and we think more direct. The graphic is not as serious as Magnatune. Graphic is very important and says a lot about who you are.
4. We try to create a network of artists collaborating for commercial and non commercial projects. ("commission work from our artists"). We get a commission on commercial projects but we get nothing for non commercial projects. Latest example is Tobor Experiment (experimental section) collaborating with HRF-LAB for the Lovebytes. Magnatune does nothing like this.
5. We try to deal with hip hop and video art music (experimental section). Magnatune does not.
6. We are going to make a section dedicated to VJ and use a similar business model. Magnatune does not.

Some consideration:

1. Most internet website split earnings 50/50. Nothing new. Certainly it was not invented by Magnatune.
2. Categories for music licensing were not invented by Magnatune's . Most music licensing websites have similar.
3. We have been operating for 30 days only and we have had an holding page for the last 2 months. Our results:

missions including many record labels.
1. More than 4500 emails.
2. 53 artists signed.
3. About 75 links to BeatPick on google.

Nobody has ever mentioned us to be similar to Magnatune, most of the people did not know about the Creative Commons. Are you sure we are operating in the same market Magnatune is operating? Are you sure is not good to have other similar business models? If not just to create hype around the Creative Commons. Are you sure there is no space for 2 similar business models in the market?

Net labels must be judged not only by the business but by their music, their graphic, their style, their marketing.

WAV and OGG...where is the innovation? I think is just normal to offer them now that broadband is getting truly "broad".

The main innovation is to offer music released under the Creative Commons and this is why we claim to support and believe in fair trade. Does Magnatune feature the CC logo in its homepage?

Some inspirations from Magnatune:

1. The licensing. I had in mind to sell music licenses. My original project was a sort of instant msn communication in order to provide clients with a an instant quote and a contract delivered over email. I was not sure how to build a music licensing control panel as we were short of money to hire a developer (no good myself) and a lawyer. 4 months ago I saw Magnatune and I thought I could give it a go as I understand Magnatune is pro Open Source therefore I do not understand why it should be unhappy about its business model being taken as an inspiration to build upon.
2. "The share 4 songs with friends" comes from a detailed analysis of network externalities in the music industry during my dissertation; I have a draft proposal of this idea written while working at a London record label more than 1 year ago.

Magnatune does a great job in marketing its idea and I do admire it. I do also admire John Buckman. I do also admit that is possible to find similarities but I think that you were way too harsh. You did not consider how good is for the Creative Commons, Fair Trade and the music business to have other record labels operating according to a fair business model. I do wish people to get inspired by this business model.

I thank you for the time you spent in reading this post and I do appreciate the opportunity we have had to say what we think. It's great to be on the Creative Commons blog.

David d'Atri
BeatPick -- FairPlay Music Label

This year is all about more bandwidth for audio production, and one of the buzzwords you're likely to hear a lot more of is PCI Express (PCIe). We're only just now seeing cards that use the cutting-edge bus, but over the coming months they should become more commonplace. Granted, if you're like me and focused on at-home music making, you probably spend most of your time using six or eight channels at a time, or, let's face it, often just two! But for those who need 24 or 48 channels, even at high-resolution, more PCI performance is very good news. (Yes, this requires a breakout box, as pictured here -- unless you had REALLY tiny audio jacks on the PCI card. Not really practical.).

Fans with way too much time on their hands (OK, I admit the sites are cool), are tracking characters from TV shows on dynamic maps. For example, with Idol Tracker (pictured), you can identify the location of the fan base of each of the contestants on the show. With Jack Tracker, you can see where the fictional Jack Bauer from 24 has raced all over Los Angeles to save the world. There's also The Sopranos, Amazing Race, The Apprentice, Veronica Mars and Seinfeld. (Thanks, Alice!)

It started when Academy President Sid Ganis took the stage and said the big screen -- not DVDs -- is the only way to really appreciate a movie. Enter Jake Gyllenhall a few minutes later. "You can't properly watch [epic films] on a television set, and good luck trying to view them on a portable DVD," he said. Good one, guys. In front of millions of people, tell them that they don't know how to appreciate movies in their own homes. On their big HDTV sets. And here's a little secret, Sid. Without skyrocketing DVD sales, movie productions would have to cut back costs. Drastically. You know, I can accept that old-thinker Sid would say such a thing, but young Jake has no excuse. Unbelievable.

As you might expect, Consumer advocates aren't particularly thrilled with AT&T's BellSouth acquisition plan. "Congress and federal regulators need to look carefully at the lifeless 'competition' their flawed policies have created and reject this merger," Gene Kimmelman, of the Consumer Union tells Internet News. Media reform outfit Free Press has started a campaign against the merger (see press release & petition).

Many industry analysts meanwhile, don't believe the merger will have much of an impact. "Consumers won't actually begin to see any real change in services for at least two to three years," Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research tells CNET. "Eventually, an integrated company could introduce new services more quickly. But there is a risk that a bigger AT&T could move slower."

The 360 Audiophiles Project is an idea proposed to explore the world of Amateur Audiobook reading using the various voices of the friends on Yahoo 360.

We will explore the thesis that traditional public media - public broadcasting, cable access television, etc - face a unique opportunity to embrace new participatory web-based media models - podcasting, video blogs, social software, etc - and create a stronger and more vital public service.

impossible to find a line to describe thiss comprehensive discussion of the science and evolution of vision... an excellent read with good examples

Form for getting the download links from a lot of video sharing sites

"We hope to provide a unique way of presenting the ubiquity and power of Public Access Television. Through maps we can provide better understanding of the current state of community media, existing threats and future possibilies."

"...a categorized list of all of the AJAX image solutions I've been able to find that were of some use."

The problem is that buyers are accustomed to the two benefits bestowed by cable TV: range of programming and video-on-demand. Without them, mobile TV will fail.

interesting new online photo editing app lets u import pics from flickr or any url and crop etc...in your browser, and exprot in any format. Why u would want to , i dont know...but hey

Do we really need 24 bits per pixel, or can we get by with less? Now this may not matter so much for large systems, but it can be important for embedded systems in which using fewer pixels equates to less silicon real estate, a reduction in computational

It seems the Google Video Getter Greasemonkey script I wrote a while back has become very popular. It was on Digg.com, and since then I've gotten tons of inquiries and comments about it. The Google Video service is still in beta and changes regularly. As such I've had to update the script a few times to keep it functional with their changes.

Here's the latest...

Google Video now uses javascript to load the Flash Player. This kind of breaks the method used previously by my Greasemonkey script because it essentially tries to hide the HTML that the script was searching for. Not to worry though, it was a pretty easy fix. I also tightened up the code to a mere 3 lines!

Click here to install the new Google Video Getter 2

So why do you need this script? Doesn't Google offer downloads for their free videos?
... yes and no.

If you go to any free video offering on Google Video and click the Download button for "Mac and Windows" it forces you to download a Google Video Player application to playback Google's own .gvp video format. These videos do not play in other applications. I checked out the .gvp file, and its really just a text file with a pointer to a video file on the web... I copied the code and manually downloaded the video referenced and discovered it was a .avi (presumably DivX), but it would not play in Windows Media Player because it uses a DRM scheme for file protection.

There are alternative download options for the free videos though. These include videos formatted for the Video iPod and Sony PSP. I haven't really tried these, but I assume they don't have the same DRM protection since they need to be able to play on those devices.

So really, you don't need this script at all. You can download the videos formatted for iPod and PSP from Google Video. But for some reason, people often write me and leave comments asking for this script and how to make it work again.

Mobile video: Get started with the QuickTime for Java API
From the article:
In this article, I'll first suggest some practical (and potentially very popular) uses for mobile video, and then present two programs to get you started using the QuickTime for Java API to create video content for the iPod. These programs let you easily add captions to existing video files and convert legacy video files into an iPod-compatible format. At the end of the article, I'll leave you with some example code that you can use to learn more about manipulating videos using the QuickTime for Java API.

"The real trick... is to get rid of the "secret sauce" that’s currently deployed by various post houses in the name of accurate handling of image and color data."

Take a Lassen iQ, an SD memory card, a LPC2138 ARM processor, mix in some FAT16 firmware and you get the new GPS logger from Spark Fun Electronics.

Based on EVC's two decades of experience, this comprehensive curriculum package helps middle and high school teachers and out-of-school program instructors guide youth in producing a documentary video. This practical toolkit of instructional strategies uses media and technology to engage all students in creative and rigorous inquiry-based projects on current issues of importance to them. Using this multidisciplinary approach, teachers can integrate English, social studies, art, and technology into video projects as students develop their literacy, research, critical thinking, and civic engagement skills.

(Also check out Arts Engine's Youth Media Distribution Toolkit.)

a visual recomposition of the scenes from the film 'The Battle of Algiers' (1965) according to a self-organising, cell-based structure. French Authority & the Algerian Nationalist cells are represented by stills from the film & move according to different behavior rule sets. when cells of different camps intersect, they trigger video cells displaying each side's tactics (as depicted in the film) according to the rules of the system. see also iraq war fatalities.
[whitney.org|via rhizome.org]

One of the reasons the network neutrality debate is so murky is that relatively few people understand the mechanics of traffic discrimination. I think that in reasoning about net neutrality it helps to understand how discrimination would actually be put into practice. That’s what I want to explain today. Don’t worry, the details aren’t very complicated.

Think of the Internet as a set of routers (think: metal boxes with electronics inside) connected by links (think: long wires). Packets of data get passed from one router to another, via links. A packet is forwarded from router to router, until it arrives at its destination.

Focus now on a single router. It has several incoming links on which packets arrive, and several outgoing links on which it can send packets. When a packet shows up on an incoming link, the router will figure out (by methods I won’t describe here) on which outgoing link the packet should be forwarded. If that outgoing link is free, the packet can be sent out on it immediately. But if the outgoing link is busy transmitting another packet, the newly arrived packet will have to wait — it will be “buffered” in the router’s memory, waiting its turn until the outgoing link is free.

Buffering lets the router deal with temporary surges in traffic. But if packets keep showing up faster than they can be sent out on some outgoing link, the number of buffered packets will grow and grow, and eventually the router will run out of buffer memory.

At that point, if one more packet shows up, the router has no choice but to discard a packet. It can discard the newly arriving packet, or it can make room for the new packet by discarding something else. But something has to be discarded.

(This is one illustration of the “best effort” principle, which is one of the clever engineering decisions that made the Internet feasible. The Internet will do its best to deliver each packet promptly, but it doesn’t make any guarantees. It’s up to software that uses the Internet Protocol to detect dropped packets and recover. The software you’re using to retrieve these words can, and probably often does, recover from dropped packets.)

When a router is forced to discard a packet, it can discard any packet it likes. One possibility is that it assigns priorities to the packets, and always discards the packet with lowest priority. The technology doesn’t constrain how packets are prioritized, as long as there is some quick way to find the lowest-priority packet when it becomes necessary to discard something.

This mechanism defines one type of network discrimination, which prioritizes packets and discards low-priority packets first, but only discards packets when that is absolutely necessary. I’ll call it minimal discrimination, because it only discriminates when it can’t serve everybody.

With minimal discrimination, if the network is not crowded, lots of low-priority packets can get through. Only when there is an unavoidable conflict with high-priority packets is a low-priority packet inconvenienced.

Contrast this with another, more drastic form of discrimination, which discards some low-priority packets even when it is possible to forward or deliver every packet. A network might, for example, limit low-priority packets to 20% of the network’s capacity, even if part of the other 80% is idle. I’ll call this non-minimal discrimination.

One of the basic questions to ask about any network discrimination regime is whether it is minimal in this sense. And one of the basic questions to ask about any rule limiting discrimination is how it applies to minimal versus non-minimal discrimination. We can imagine a rule, for example, that allows minimal discrimination but limits or bans non-minimal discrimination.

This distinction matters, I think, because minimal and non-minimal discrimination are supported by different arguments. Minimal discrimination may be an engineering necessity. But non-minimal discrimination is not technologically necessary — it makes service worse for low-priority packets, but doesn’t help high-priority packets — so it could only be justified by a more complicated economic argument, for example that non-minimal discrimination allows forms of price discrimination that increase social welfare. Vague arguments that you have to reserve some fraction of capacity for some purpose won’t cut it.

[Postscript for networking geeks: You might complain that it matters not only which packets are dropped but also which packets are forwarded first, and so on. True enough. I simplified things a bit to fit within a blog post; but it should be fairly obvious how to expand the principle I’m describing here to deal with the issues you’re raising.]

Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace

"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."

"In the very early days of hypertext research, people worried a lot about hand-crafted links. How will we ever afford to put in all those links? We also worried about how we'd ever manage to afford to digitize stuff for the Web, not to mention paying people to create original Web pages. Overnight, we discovered that we'd got the sign wrong: people would pay for the privilege of making Web sites."

Lloyd Braun: "I now get excited about user-generated content the way I used to get excited about thinking about what television shows would work."

Search engines are like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

Well, free via web services for now, downloadable db coming soon

The uncertainty of future delivery options will provide ample opportunities for content owners to make mistakes. The smarter ones like Rupert Murdoch and Bob Wright will probably not make them.

(But it's only through mistakes that new work is generated. -kc.)

TextOrgan was developed for use in conjunction with a DJ at musical events. By collaborating beforehand, the DJ and the TextOrganist can choose a selection of texts and discuss what sort of mood or themes they want develop in the set.

Julian Bleecker has finally posted his "Manifesto for Networked Objects" in which he discusses "Why Things Matter"

Give the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences folks some credit for offering this nontraditional category for "documentary programming created chiefly for non-traditional delivery platforms like iPods, cellphones and the web. If you are a local or regional broadcaster who distributes original news & documentary video programming over the web, or via a podcast or cellphone download, this is an excellent opportunity to receive national recognition for your work." (Deadline to enter: March 24)

ECLIPSE/MpowerPlayer
Looks like suitable instructions for getting J2ME MIDP 2.0 development going on the Mac with Eclipse using the Mpowerplayer SDK.
This has been a long time in coming.. Let's hope it works..

Feedwhip is built around a simple, powerful idea: we track all your favorite websites so that you don't have to. Every time one of your website changes, we'll send you an email!

Variety previews the American Society of Cinematographers’ awards show this Sunday. Allen Daviau asserts that “it’s part of our job to be aware of the advances in technology, and to know when they’re working in our favor and when they are not.” Daviau, who won ASC awards for his work on BUGSY and EMPIRE OF THE SUN, tells his students they will learn more by shooting film and by “previsualizing the photo chemical process. Film is going to last longer than people think as an originating medium, because they continue to make better film all the time,” Daviau asserts. “Digital cameras are getting better, too, and we can make beautiful pictures with them. But digital doesn’t offer the range of film.” [Scott Kirsner: CinemaTech]

The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) at the University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research initiative to explore the “The Meaning of the New Networked Age: Innovation, Content, Society, and Policy.” We welcome researchers from various disciplines including anthropology, architecture, the arts, business, communications, computer science, design, economics, engineering, history, international relations, law, library science, neurosciences, political science, rhetoric, and sociology.

2005 was the biggest year yet for camera phones, those pocket-size precursors to the participatory panopticon and potential planetary protection tool (yes, I got a special deal on "p"s, why do you ask?). Market research group NPD reports:

In 2005, 45 percent of all mobile phones sold in the U.S. were camera phones, up from 26 percent in 2004. Asia followed a very similar trend. Western Europe had a higher incidence of camera phones at 64 percent, and Japan had a much greater adoption rate with more than 90 percent of all mobile phones sold with camera capabilities both in 2004 and 2005.

This tells us two things: we're on the verge of seeing a major blow-up between advocates of strict control over recordings of intellectual property and advocates of universal use of communication tools; and we're approaching a point where location-based information and communication systems relying on cameraphones will have a large enough base of potential users to really make a go of it.

(Via Picturephoning)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 01:18 PM)

What would MySpace crossed with a MMOG look like? Questing while blogging? Guildchat crossed with IM? Levelling up by .. friends accumulation (urgh)?

Maybe it's the other way round. Bring social networking elements into MMOGs (I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?): SMS direct to avatar inboxes. Import music. Friends-of-friends name colours. Automatic upload of screenshot snapshots. User-generated artifacts, like the Black String Society's piece of black string...

WoW is a social fad like MySpace is a social fad. Both will be replaced sooner or later with the next social fad, and I'm wondering if it might take the best of both worlds...

Television Disrupted - The Transition from Network to Networked TV by
Shelly Palmer
Looks to be an interesting read. Guess we will find out in the near future.

From the site:
Television Disrupted The Transition from Network to Networked Television, follows the money and the technology that enables it. The book also looks at the business rules and legal issues that are having a huge impact on the future. File sharing, copyright laws, geographical form factors, temporal windows and much more. During the next few years, everything we know about the business of television is going to change - Television Disrupted The Transition from Network to Networked Television will serve as a guidebook and roadmap for the foreseeable future.

flash lite application - Google Search
I can't find any decent applications.. Someone tell me where to find the interesting Flash Lite apps, please..

While chatting about Takeshi no Chousenjou Andy mentioned Penn & Teller's "Smoke and Mirrors," a video game with the same aesthetic sensibility as their stage show. That is uncomprising, rude, and not always done with the audiences interest in mind. Andy writes:

Among the minigames is "Desert Bus," in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for six hours IN REAL-TIME to score one point. Then you drive it home. Also, I've heard the bus veers slightly to the right intermittently, so you can't just leave it propped up. And going offroad immediately ends your game.

Andy's made the game and the emulator files you need to play it available on waxy.org. He also highlights what seems to be the most excruciating "feature," the bus occasionally veers off to the right.

This got my attention because spontaneity and variation like this are what's missing from most games today, even as game play and interfaces get more interesting. The steps in Dance Dance Revolution are exactly the same every time you play it, likewise the beats and cues in Taiko Drummer are so static it could be played with your eyes closed. Both games overcompensate for their lack of variance in game play with over-the-top psychedelic graphics and sound effects. This is not a new problem of course with Pac-man and Super Mario Brothers often held up as classic examples. Mario Brothers even has it's own tablature!

Madden football treats variance as a feature, in fact it's one of the game's top selling points. The conditions and gameplay change from play to play as players get tired and injured, the sky gets darker and the field gets wetter (if it's snowing or raining) and the crowd gets louder (which distracts the visiting team from making plays). There's literally no end to the variation of games to play, which is one reason that Madden is one of the few true blockbuster video games year after year.

There's a further discussion of weather in video games over at armchair arcade (also at pasta and vinegar). Animal Crossing gets a lot of this stuff right as well, but I stopped playing when I got bored of watering turnips and picking peaches. We have a real peach tree in our back yard, it's much more exciting than the nintendo peach trees (even in the winter).

Katamari Damacy is somewhat of a sacred cow in hipster video gaming circles, but it's one of the worst offenders when it comes to turning innovative game play into a parlor trick. As Jason pointed out, the game is basically 3-D Pac-Man, with ~wild~ graphics and Asian accent/dubbing jokes thrown in to make the game seem more interesting. "We Love Katamari" was so disappointing as a seque, because it was the exact same as the original but bigger. There was nothing to introduce variation to the game play. A few things they could have done -

• Variation in the number, size and placement of the objects to pick up. This one is a gimme. Katamari as it's currently designed is the exact same every time you play it, which is why people can go on speed runs to the moon or attach rubber bands to their controller to roll up 10^6 roses wihtout human intervention. Any game that involves a speed run probably has little or no interesting variation.
• Truly collaborative game play - two players could work together to grow large enought to break through a barrier, or to roll over a very large object at the same time to knock it over and break it into manageable bits. Social gaming (Madden, Animal Crossing, Mario Kart) is the most obvious and effective way to introduce variance into games.
• Game play should change with mood and weather - the Prince should get tired, or angry, or fed up and sad. Wouldn't you, if you're abusive father kept insulting you and threatening to replace you?

ames are basically 3-D pac-man," game designers often exclaim, which is exactly my point. I do love Katamari, but I don't think Video Game designers are innovating fast enough.

This hack will guide you through the steps necessary to use your video enabled camera phone to post directly to your vlog.