unmediated

Croquet is out

We already spoke about Croquet in this blog ; but until a few days ago, only a prerelease, "alpha" version, named Jasmine was available on the net. Last week, the first beta version of croquet (full of bugs, but existing) can be downloaded at www.opencroquet.org. Among the creators of Croquet, one may find Alan Kay, one of the greatest pioneers of computer science, former member of the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research center) where the modern computer was invented in the 70’s.

What is croquet ? it might be the future of computing. As its creators say: "…a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using Croquet, software developers can create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations."

documentation they add:

"There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world. There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating."

"The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way tocontrol the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. Thiswas great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end – technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides ofthe castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology enables this."

Public Access TV dead?

Yes, it looks pretty grim.
Link: Congress Poised to Kill Community TV

Public Access TV is not the favorite channel for Americans.
But in many communities, it is the only TV channel that actually shows people like them talking...and expresses their opinions and ideas. 
As many of you know, I worked at a public access TV in Manhattan until recently.
I brought many of the philosophies I learned at this community TV station to videoblogging.
"Get everyone involved in the conversation".

These community TV stations are funded by local franchise agreements with the Cable Companies who are given a private monopoly to run the cable system in a given city.
All they must do is give back some channel space and a small amount of funding to allow the people to put on their own programming. Its literally pennies compared to their multi-million dollar yearly profits. The Cable and telephone companies now want out of this set-up now that they have secured monopolies across the country.
What could be a bigger hassle than to deal with thousands of local communities across the country who want access to put out their own media?
 
In my mind, this makes Videoblogging even more important.....and each
of our efforts to spread the knowledge of how to get involved.
Strange days.

Gena says:

My concern is now with the potential walling off of the Internet by
the phone companies. Step one - they lock us out of public access.
Step two - the phone companies put the squeeze on Congress & FCC or whoever to charge for faster/heavy bandwidth usage. Segregation for the elite, reduced access (and videoblogging) for the rest of us.

Now this will bite them in the tukas in the long run cuz this is just
going to inspire some latent genius to invent something to bypass
phone company distribution and away we go into the new frontier.

David Meade's player-embed generator

Media Player Test

This script is designed to find all media links on a page and give them an inline (embedded) player. This script requires no special code in the html, all you have to do is include a link to your video (or audio) file. This script is designed to work even for videobloggers who dont know anything about DIV tags, IDs, classes, Javascript, or onClicks ... and who don't or can't worry about crafting specially coded links with onClicks in their posts. The script will do that for them.

Anybody know of other, similar, things?

Meedio released for free as Yahoo Go for TV

Earlier this month, Yahoo purchased much of Meedio and everyone speculated that it would bear fruit in the form of a future DVR software package from Yahoo. Well that happened much sooner than I thought with the launch of the free Yahoo Go for TV software.

Dave Zatz and Eirik Solheim have detailed reviews featuring screenshots and experiences with the install and use of the package. Sounds like it integrates much of Yahoo's properties (like Yahoo Photos and Launchcast for Music) as well as act as a DVR.

@ NAB: New NAB CEO Rehr On RIAA, ETC.

NAB president and CEO David Rehr sat down with a few reporters as the conference drew to a close. In between juggling questions about getting through his first show — he was president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association until late last year — Rehr also talked about policy.
– Talks with the RIAA about how to handle digital radio aren't moving at a rapid clip. Leaders from the two groups met a month ago in New York. "We found a lot of commonaity, one, which is disintermediation. We don't want people to be able to create jukeboxes because they have less incentive to listen to radio and that's a big issue with the RIAA. ... I don't know if it's going to take three months or two years." Other constituencies have to be brought in as well; he recently met with music publishers."
– The NAB and others managed to get a proposed amendment on retransmission withdrawn in the House Wednesday; the campaign was part of Rehr's opening speech. Told that a member of Congress was suggesting a roundtable on the issue, the former congressional staffer replied: "We've already had two hearings on it in the House. A roundtable discussion is a method by which members of Congress can keep their issue alive when they face overwhelming opposition."
– By policy, NAB does not get involved in private network-affiliate business matters but Rehr stood by a statement he issued after Disney's Anne Sweeney spoke here Tuesday. NAB "welcomes her comments on new opportunities presented to broadcasters from the explosion in new technology. ... we believe the opportunities for additional revenue for all broadcasters presented by technology are enormous."
The NAB coverage is sponsored by Javien.

SURVEY: NEW MEDIA

Among the Audience

"The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole.

As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many "lectures" (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, "don't get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility." From Among the audience, SURVEY: NEW MEDIA, The Economist print edition, Apr 20th 2006.

Sex talk: conference agenda released

Filed under: Culture, Simulations

The agenda for the Sex in Videogames conference has been published, and there are some interesting topics up for debate in San Fran this June. From the cultural to the technological, the conference will cover such diverse topics as cybersex, emergent behaviour, technology for realistic simulation and MMOEGs.

This will definitely be one to watch; sex is becoming part of gaming as a specialist genre, as well as becoming integrated into our everyday gaming lives with emergent behaviour. As with other media before it, the human interest in sex is likely to fuel some interesting developments in games -- and not just in the field of "jiggle physics".

[Via Sex & Games]

Using Pictochat as a Backchannel in conference

Yesterday at the student presentation (Interactive Media Program at the Annenberg), there was a guy who briefly talked about the use of Nintendo DS’ pictochat as a backchannel device during conferences. I found it pretty neat. Quoting his friend who gives the account:

The third best thing about the show was apparently the amount of Pictochat action going on in all the major keynotes. Of course, this anonymous metachat style leads to merciless barbs, such as when Valve’s Gabe Newell accidentally started talking about ‘beef’ (as opposed to ‘brief’) in his Choice Awards intro spot, to a chorus of Pictochatted ‘LOL’ comments. Next time, GDC, let’s see the Pictochatrooms projected on the screen behind the speakers - OMG?

More about what they do at the Zemeckis Media LAb in terms of backchannel in this paper: Justin A. Hall, Scott S. Fisher (2006) Experiments in Backchannel: Collaborative Presentations Using Social Software, Google Jockeys, and Immersive Environments. CHI 2006 workshop about Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques
for Collaboration across Multiple Displays.

A pictochat picture taken from the Wikipedia:

Why do I blog this? I find backchannel interesting, especially when using simple and ubiquitous devices such as the Nintendo DS with its simple pictochat interface. It’s a very efficient way to create and ad-hoc discussion. With this sort of things (as well as the Opera web browser), the DS is starting to be more and more relevant as a platform to do more things than video-games.

Alice plays catchup

Holy cow, did I miss some juicy happenings while away, or what?

Peter Molyneux gets bought by Microsoft. Massive Inc also gets bought by Microsoft. I say.

EA chaps claim games are as valid as TV and movies: quite right, to some audiences, though not as broadly valid as TV and movies. Yet.

MTV buys up X-Fire: the giant gaming IM goes to MTV. Curious! For a wallop-load of cash, too.

Mutants sign up for X-Men game (cor I'm looking forward to that movie, total sucker for comic conversions):

"When you plan on producing a game that features characters that the fans have come to know well in film, one of the things you must address is having your audience perceive your characters as 'genuine,'" said Activision executive producer Scott Bandy. "One of the best ways to ensure this is to work with the same talent that has brought the character to life in the films."

There's also been some announcements on the USC's Public Diplomacy game competition, but I left the URL at home. Duh. More later.

Amazon.com: Secrets of Videoblogging: Books: Michael Verdi,Ryanne Hodson,Diana Weynand,Shirley Craig

You should really pre-order this book TODAY! Amazon.com: Secrets of Videoblogging: Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand, Shirley Craig

JVC Introduces GY-HD200 and GY-HD250

(Continued at CamcorderInfo/)

42% of Americans Have Broadband

"Over 1/2 of internet users are on broadband but still a significant number slug along on dial up. But given today's new of 9 million HSI subs for Comcast that puts their penetration at less than 1 in 4; that is less than 1 in 4 Comcast HSI subs who can get their broadband service bother to buy it. This is something to keep in mind the next time we see low US broadband penetration statistics. It's not that people here can't get it, people simply don't want it and this news shows that quite a few are happy with dial up."

Lets P2P

Here are some notes on p2p to accompany this post by Dave Winer on the next steps towards pushing bittorrent adoption.

Perhaps p2p would work best for most kinds of group transferring on the internet, and right now, the best examples out there to help show off the value/worth - the obvious spokesperson - is the regular personal publisher of media files, or, podcasters and videoblogs. These kinds of new media people have reoccurring audiences that come and download the media all at the same time, literally; whenever there is an RSS update, within minutes, computers begin to automatically retrieve the media files and appear all at once.

With Rocketboom for example, as with any blog pretty much, the moment we release a video each morning, we get a big spike because everyone is automatically jumping in on the downloads:

So once we have everyone who uses RSS using p2p too, they will enjoy the best d/l experience because they will be there with the most seeds; it will be the fastest and most efficient time. While you may know this already, and I certainly have been talking out loud about it for about 2 years, it makes a very big, very outstanding difference when we are talking about 40 terabytes a month. For us, stuck with the burden of a major bandwidth bill, costing more money theoretically to burst at 9am per gig then at 10pm per gig even, if everyone used p2p we would instead have this:

It may look messy, but this p2p/rss situation would mean that the audience would take care of the spike themselves while being more efficient for themselves. This obviously cuts off strife for us.

So, here are a few obstacles right now to add to the table.

SELF PUBLISHING?
How/Where do content creators like myself host torrents? It's still a real bitch to install on the server. I have had some luck before with blogtorrent last year but it was too much of a resource hog and crashed regularly. It needs to be developed still.

We use Pordigem, and have everything automated perfectly. I never do a single thing to publish the torrent each day. Once I hit post on our Moveable Type entry, MT updates our xml bittorrent page. A script that resides on my .edu server checks every hour and then pulls the new video onto prodigem's server with an API, then Prodigem seeds it and in turn updates our public torrent xml feed. Whew!! There are many pieces to that chain. Point being, its not easy at all for people to publish torrents on their own. You can sign up for an account at Prodigem and its great, but its not home. There is no other blog plugin, API, etc that I know of without coding up some soup on your own server.

BUSINESS
Because it seems the industry never gets excited until the dollar signs go off and then actually appear, there is a big side to the economy of p2p which is making the ding-dings go off in my brain prematurely; this is better than buying 31 cents stamps and selling them for 32 cents:

Rocketboom is amazing because it does not cost much to make. As our business scales up, aside from salary/support staff, our entire business model must mostly account for the bandwidth; as we grow, our costs grow. With p2p in the business model, of course, the more people that subscribe, or rather, the more people we must work to take care of, the more we get a business model that works like this:

NOMENCLATURE
Am I correct in calling the topic at this level "peer-to-peer" instead of Bittorent Inc.? Though open source, the name brand and a protocol are by the inspired Bram Cohen, copyright 2001-2006. All rights reserved. BitTorrent, the BitTorrent Logo, and Torrent are trademarks of Bram's. Microsoft is using something not called bittorrent I believe. There is metacast, swarmcast, and many other brands or varieties.

Hm!

(An) Understanding (of) the Media Landscape

When I was at Columbia a couple of weeks ago on a journalism panel, I met Maria D'vari who just e-mailed me a report by Growing Audience which mentions (on page 3) Rocketboom in the context of portraying a fictional character in a new digital world (how's that for a prepositional run?)

Understanding the Media Landscape, for the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America :

• The number of prime-time network TV watchers has
declined 30 percent in the past 10 years.

• Cable market penetration in 2005 hit a 13-year low of 64.8
percent, with viewers migrating to other video sources
such as satellite television services (20.2 percent)

• When 18-34 year olds were asked about their top media
choices, 46 percent said the Internet and 35 percent said TV

• Even older Americans are changing: 61 percent of those
55 and older say they use the Internet more this year than
last and about 44 percent said they watch TV and read
newspapers less

• Viewership for the three nightly network newscasts
declined 45 percent from 1980 to 2004

• Local early evening news lost 16 percent of their audi-
ence share from 1997 to 2003, while local late news lost
18 percent during that period

• 80 percent of online adults used the Internet for news
in the past 7 days and about 26 percent said that use
reduces their use of traditional news sources

Vloggercon 2006

Vloggercon
VLOGGERCON 2006 is the intersection between media-makers and technology. A space for dialog and interaction. Of creation and collaboration. A media village born on the internet, and making camp for one weekend in San Francisco.

Coming up quick!

Busker Du has launched!

Busker Du
One of the project from my class, a service for recording and distributing Busker performance has launched.. It is great, I love the podcast!

From the site:
Busker Du (dial-up) is a recording service for buskers through the telephone (preferably public payphones hidden in subway stations).
Audio recorded will be posted to this audio-blog and made available to all who cherish lo-fi original music. Try it out at your favorite subway station or street corner.

World's digital divide is narrowing

The digital divide is narrowing as citizens in emerging markets get online via computers and mobile phones, with some regions now on a par with developed nations, a ranking of Web-savvy nations showed on Wednesday, reports Reuters.

The difference between the world's Web-savviest nation Denmark and the least "e-ready" country Azerbaijan remains nevertheless huge, with respective scores of 9.0 and 2.9 out of a possible 10.

uding their less developed provinces, scored 4.25 and 4.02, ranking No. 53 and 57 respectively.

Switzerland entered the top three, replacing Sweden which dropped to fourth place, while the United States held on to its No. 2 spot.

... Six nations in the top 10 are European, taking advantage of cheaply available broadband offerings and good education. The U.S., Australia, Canada and Hong Kong complete the top 10.

Second Life As 3D Design Platform and Reality/Virtuality Tagging

[via Social Synergy Weblog. Thanks Bryan!]

Clickable Culture has a fascinating article about using Second Life and the World Wide Web as a 3D design platform. In this case the designer is creating a "historically based game-like environment". However, these tools could possibly be used to recreate communities and whole cities, to demonstrate the redesign of public places, for instance. Or , even to give a community, college students, or a design team a sort of "3D wiki" of their community to work with? There are lots of possibilities and potentials here. Perhaps all of the potentials are not currently possible in Second Life as it exists right now. many of them do not seem too far off or out of reach, though.

Here's some quoted text and images from the Clickable Culture post:

In building the sets and props, I first turned to Google Image Search in order to source textures based on the real-life locations to be depicted (locations I've been to in person, I might add). I managed to source an excellent photograph of a suitable historical house that included the entire home from pavement to roof. With substantial manipulation in Photoshop sliced it up into textures. I quickly re-created the house in Second Life using basic primitives and applying the appropriate textures. I isolated the door, window-shutters, and hanging flowers as separate objects so that the house wouldn't look so flat when seen at an angle. This single house formed the basis of all the houses on the inner-city street.

A row of houses turns into a street

I truncated the house lengthwise for some houses, and shortened it to two stories from three for other houses. I then tinted the door and shutters of the houses to further differentiate the dwellings. I added details such as adjoining awnings and a cobbled sidewalk to my row of houses, which was curved inwards to enhance the sense of perspective. Once the row was tweaked to my satisfaction, I simply copied the entire row, and rotated it 180 degrees to form the other side of the street. I added brick pavement and details such as crates. At the end of the street (which was supposed to be in a besieged town), I added a broken-down cart I'd built over a year ago for my own use, and some animated fire objects available freely in Second Life.

Inner-city concept screen.

Steve Mann'sopen source Mediated Reality Toolkit allows a wearer of his Eyetap devices to overlay physical reality with Internet content. Example:

The sign above is overlayed with a web browser when viewed through and "eyetap" device.

So, eventually it may be possible to make a "doorway" to virtual worlds. Or, it might be possible to overlay reality with 3D created virtuality.

I also wonder whether people will eventually want to use these eyetap and Second Life virtual-world-style technologies to start creating personal knowledge bases of both reality and virtual worlds.

We now use the WWW and search tools and "tagging" or personal knowledge base tools, like WebAssistant, del.icio.us, flickr, etc ., to store and taxonomize and map pieces of knowledge and information that we create or find online. Will people also desire to use tools like these to collaboratively store information about virtual worlds, and about an always-on digitized intake of reality itself? My guess is that they will.

My guess is also that peer to peer production and social software will find it's way into mediated realities and virtual world as well.

USPTO: TV + IM = Microsoft Patent

(Oh no way. I can think of a few TV+IM implementations from before December 1999. -kc.)

RFID for fitness clubs

Casio has developed RFID'd rubber wristbands for fitness clubs. The training facilities would have to fit each piece of their training equipment with a a PDA that reads the wristband tags. The PDA would recognize who's using the equipment and display a personalized training session. It also records and displays personal health-related data.

The RFID-tagged wristbands can also do the usual stuff: manage check-in/out, track members' activities, monitor kids' attendance to a fitness program, call fitness club staff in an emergency situation, and serve for cashless payment.

Casio hopes to sell the system to gyms, hot springs, swimming schools, and public bathhouses as well.
Whatever! As long as that bracelet doesn't start to beep loudly when I'm cheating on the treadmill, I'm all for it.

Via RFID in Japan.

Media Futures: on rebundling and intermediaries

John Hagel has a thought-provoking post about microchunking and media businesses. It follows on from Umair Haque's post, in which Umair said that "unbundling" media (e.g. Disney releasing tv shows for free online) is only half the equation. The other half - the real value - is in "rebundling". By which he means individual users doing their own aggregation and filtering of media. Oftentimes Umair is hard to grok, but I think he nails it with this precise statement: "rebundling will be the future of connected consumption". If you consider what's happening with tv for example, you're starting to see the more adventurous vendors (like Tivo and BBC) give users the tools to personalize and organize their tv-watching experience.

Back to John Hagel's post, which nicely extends Umair's points. John notes:

"The most powerful brands in the media business will be held by successful intermediaries that help to consistently improve return on attention for audiences. In the process, the nature of the brand promise will change in a profound way.  It will be a massive opportunity for media companies that understand the shift in economic and competitive dynamics and that focus on the rebundling plays required to build these brands."

What this says to me is that there are opportunities here for "intermediaries" to aggregate and filter all the media (pro and amateur) coming at us nowadays, a lot of it directly via the Web. Some of those intermediaries will provide users with the tools to aggregate and filter - e.g. Tivo, Rojo, Google, Last.fm. Other intermediaries will directly do filtering themselves, for easier 'consumption' (yes I dislike that word) by users - e.g. what PaidContent does for its users and indeed what NY Times does for its readers. Of course there'll be a lot of intermediaries who mix n' match - e.g. Yahoo provides both aggregation/filtering tools for its users, but also has a strong human editorial process (take a look at the podcasts homepage for one example).

John goes on to make a distinction between product businesses and audience relationship businesses:

"Here’s the test:  how open is the media company to providing access to third party content on behalf of their audiences?  If the answer is not very open, the company is primarily a product business.  If the answer is very open, then the company is primarily an audience relationship business."

He's suggesting here that being in the audience relationship business is the way to go for media companies - i.e. don't try and control the content. Google has in fact already proved how successful this strategy is, because the raison d'etre of the Google homepage is to send users away to external content.

I'm exploring more on all these themes in my Microcontent Design series. Incidentally, I sometimes wonder where to place myself when I'm writing media posts. John Hagel comes from a management/strategy background, Umair is the Economics whizz, my pals at Rights Marketing are marketing folks, Fred Wilson is VC, Jeff Jarvis and Scott Karp are real media. As for me, I've discovered my focus is on the products - specifically the web technology. It's what I do as my day job too - analysis/research/product dev. So that's my beat. Anywho, this last paragraph is more for my benefit than yours :-) Everyone likes to have their place in the world.

Photo: carpeicthus

Digital Cities: Saving the Internet?

Vint Cerf, the “father” of the Internet and currently Internet Evangelist at Google, kicked off the jam-packed Digital Cities Expo in Reston Virginia today (Agenda, Speakers and Sponsors), with a wide-ranging keynote speech, reports IP Democracy.

Cerf offered first a bird’s eye view of the development of the Internet, noting that there are currently more than a billion users on the Internet and more than 400 million machines running in server mode.

Despite this phenomenal presence, “when there are 6.5 billion people in the world, you realize we have a long way to go,” he said.

Cerf argued against the concept of a two-tiered Internet advocated by some broadband providers, telcos in particular. He recapped the idea that the Internet is built on an end-to-end principle, with one user paying for his access on one end and the other user paying for her access on the other end. Once each endpoint access is paid for, the two users are free to communicate back and forth.

“The reason that’s important is that the network allows people to do pretty much what they want to do. You don’t have to ask permission from the ISP,” Cerf said. “The permission-free way to the Internet has fostered all kinds of innovation.”

Opinions vary on whether the United States should put "net neutrality" into law. Om Malik thinks the issue is overblown. Savetheinternet.com believes legislation is vital.

More Americans would be forced to pay taxes subsidizing broadband service in "unserved" locales, and cities would be free to go into the Wi-Fi business under an upcoming U.S. Senate bill by Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican from sparsely populated Eastern Oregon. Smith's bill would require the FCC to establish rules requiring that all companies "capable of supporting two-way voice communications" pay into the Universal Service Fund. Conspicuously absent from the bill, however, is any mention of Net neutrality, observes C/Net.

Sen Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat from urban Portland, has the opposite view - he proposed a bill that would put Net Neutrality into law.

Open Revolution

Robert Price has the skinny on Nokia's three new NSeries phones, the N72, the N73 and the N93. Nokia has a demo, specs and description.

• The N72 (pdf) has a 2 megapixel camera, integrated digital music player, integrated browser, FM radio and Visual Radio. It runs on the S60 2nd Edition Operating System.

• The N73 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera, auto focus, FM radio, integrated stereo speakers with 3D sound. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System.

• The N93 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, video capture, TV connection, integrated WiFi (b/g) and FM Radio. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System and features internal memory of up to 50 MB, which can be further expanded with a hot swap miniSD card of up to 2 GB, allowing users to capture up to 90 minutes of MPEG-4 VGA at 30 fps. It's expected to be available in July 2006 with an unsubsidized price of 550 euros.

The new devices support direct uploading of photos to Flickr from the phone. The Flickr uploader can also be repointed to other services like Typepad. If it runs on the 2nd edition S60 platform (i.e. the N72), it may be back portable to the current 2nd edition phones out there. Time to keep an eye on the Nokia download sites incase it sneaks out there.

Nokia seems to be the only company that makes a decent camera phone. I understand that a tiny CCD/CMOS chip can't compete with larger chips in digital cameras, but those lenses -- gosh, what are they thinking?

Nokia's Carl Zeiss lens make a big difference, enabling camphones (with MPEG-4 video) to be competitive with dedicated cameras. Another plus is the WiFi connection. It's perfect for moblogging. Shoot and upload.

Nokia teamed with Six Apart so you can upload posts to your TypePad blog account. TypePad's SplashBlog runs on a wide variety of camera phones and their Widgets provide flexibility. Nokia's Lifeblog 2.0 comes in two parts; software that is loaded onto phones plus compatible software for PCs.

Nokia and Yahoo! announced a deal today to make it easy for mobile photographers to upload and add comments to Flickr. Consumers can connect to their online Flickr accounts without the need to download or install any additional applications. The Nokia N93, Nokia N73 and Nokia N72 are the first Nokia Nseries devices to support Flickr.

You can upload full size photos to Flickr directly from the camera or their image Gallery application. Once uploaded to Flickr, photos can be sent to your blog, as well as edited, organized, tagged and shared. SocialCanvas has a different approach. It enables multiple people to simultaneously zoom in and move around. Extremely high resolution photos are stored on-line, but they're displayed fast in screen resolution.

Of course, WiFi enabled cameras are not standing still.

Kodak is upgrading their Wi-Fi camera this summer to work directly with hotspots and ISPs. The new 6 megapixel model will cost $299 with a $99 Wi-Fi card as an option. Their original 4 megapixel WiFi camera is now $399. Kodak also announced a dual lens BLUETOOTH camera ($449) with 6 megapixels and a 10X optical zoom (right). It shoots MPEG-4 videos at 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 @ 30fps.

EyeFilm combines storage and Wi-Fi into a single SD card and should cost around $99 for a 1 gig version. Whether it can effectively convert a non wireless camera into a wireless one remains to be seen.

You Tube and Google Video may soon allow similar mobile posting. Poynter explains; with a cellphone, you're a journalist.

Want regime change? Talk to the Fins. They are instigating an open revolution.

James Murdoch on Mobile Video Business Models

In an interview with World Screen, James Murdoch, the CEO of BSkyB, says it is early, but "it's not so early that we can't start to put things in place. The way we look at it is a subscription price..[and] allow customers to buy the product and then use it in the most flexible way possible. We like to consider whole-family, whole-home solutions for customers, where they have very predictable pricing and they can use the programming or the services across a variety of platforms either in their home or out of the home.
Now, the challenge is, when we partner with a company like Vodafone or other service providers, there are additional charges they may apply depending on the networks that they're delivering over, etcetera. So it's about finding that balance between two different sides and their incentives, but I think we're starting to find it. Generally speaking, we would look at television, even on-demand television, continuing to be fundamentally a subscription-model business because it's so attractive to customers. They like to have that kind of predictability and also have a clear way to assess what kind of value they're getting." I find that way of thinking refreshing…

Who’d a thunk it? Google getting into design and usability

Google has always been good at minimalism, but as they expand into more complex apps (UI-wise), there seems to be a move towards getting “designers” involved. Google calendar got help from Douglas Bowman, Google got Jeffrey Veen to join them with their purchase of measuremap from Adaptive Path.

The challenge will be to: a) create a somewhat consistent feel in all their new ajax apps (which is somewhat happening), and b) instill a culture among engineers that values “design” enough for their products to be usable.

They seem to be well on their way. The word on the street about Google is that they’re actually getting very advanced at doing usability testing and measuring results. I have the feeling they’ll be like Amazon: no apparent focus on design and such, but a very deep, measuring, “engineer”-like way of doing usability and design. So far, some of their apps have been horrendous to use (RSS reader), others I quite like (the new calendar).

No more 'naked' PCs in China

The country's Ministry of Information Industry, the State Copyright Bureau, and the Ministry of Commerce recently said all computers made within China's borders, "should include a pre-installed operating system".

Now, "The ban will take place by the end of this year and is aimed to further protect intellectual property of software, said Wang Yefei, deputy director of the bureau, at a press conference," declares state news agency Xinhua.

"Government departments shall not purchase computers without legitimate software, and all domestically-made and imported computers are required to be sold with legitimate software pre-installed, said Wang."

Beijing will, "target governments of townships on protection of legitimate software this year, and in late April it will carry out pilot programs to fight pirate software in large-sized state-owned, private and foreign companies."

Chairman Bill once applauded the tendency of some people in China to use unlicensed software saying, "as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

The next decade is here, and then some, and as a p2pnet reader observes, "Isn't that the way drug dealers work too? 'Come on, kid, try it, the first one's free..'

"It makes one look at these 'donations' of software from Microsoft in a somewhat different light."

Taxing Downloads: 15 U.S. States Now Do It

A News.com story/analysis shows that 15 states and the District of Columbia now tax downloads of music, movies and electronic books. Some high-tax states such as California do not levy the same charge on online downloads, but that could also change soon.
These taxing states typically say taxing digital-media downloads is a matter of treating physical shopping and online purchases the same. Taxpayer advocates don’t accept that premise, saying it represents an unfair addition of tax laws…the story also goes into other intricacies and runarounds that may allow other states to tax digital downloads as well.

Elgato releases the tiny EyeTV 250

Elgato, the creators of various software and hardware PVR solutions for the Mac market today released the EyeTV 250.

It only does analog cable/antenna recording, but it does so in a package about the size of an iPod, which is pretty impressive and goes well with the sleek, uncluttered look of most Apple systems. It's $199 and I could see this being a great way to record and load up shows for a video iPod (EyeTV 2 software does this automatically). If I still took a subway to work every day, I'd buy this in a heartbeat to load up The Daily Show and the Colbert Report for my commute each day.

Overdue recommendation for Will Richardson’s book

This is criminally overdue: I got a copy of Will Richardson’s excellent book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, but I’m embarrassed to say that I misplaced it in the mess that is my office and my life. It surfaced like an iceberg of knowledge and I have to tell you that it is very good: clear, concise, useful. A far more important critic than I likes it, too. I apologize to Will and to you for taking a few weeks too many to recommend the book. But if you’re planning to use these tools in classrooms — or other organizations — I’d buy it.

: LATER: Another far more important critic, Howard Rheingold, likes it, too. Like me, he’s taking Will’s advice for the college classroom, not just elementary and high school. I’d say it works in any learning environment — which should mean companies, too.

Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes

I wrote yesterday about the HDCP/HDMI technology that Hollywood wants to use to restrict the availability of very high-def TV content. Today I want to go under the hood, explaining how the key part of HDCP, the handshake, works. I’ll leave out some mathematical niceties to simplify the explanation; full details are in a 2001 paper by Crosby et al.

Suppose you connect an HDMI-compliant next-gen DVD player to an HDMI-compliant TV, and you try to play a disc. Before sending its highest-res digital video to the TV, the player will insist on doing an HDCP handshake. The purpose of the handshake is for the two devices to authenticate each other, that is, to verify that the other device is an authorized HDCP device, and to compute a secret key, known to both devices, that can be used to encrypt the video as it is passed across the HDMI cable.

Every new HDCP device is given two things: a secret vector, and an addition rule. The secret vector is a sequence of 40 secret numbers that the device is not supposed to reveal to anybody. The addition rule, which is not a secret, describes a way of adding up numbers selected from a vector. Both the secret vector and the addition rule are assigned by HDCP’s central authority. (I like to imagine that the central authority occupies an undersea command center worthy of Doctor Evil, but it’s probably just a nondescript office suite in Burbank.)

An example will help to make this clear. In the example, we’ll save space by pretending that the vectors have four secret numbers rather than forty, but the idea will be the same. Let’s say the central authority issues the following values:

Suppose Alice and Bob want to do a handshake. Here’s how it works. First, Alice and Bob send each other their addition rules. Then, Alice applies Bob’s addition rule to her vector. Bob’s addition rule is “[2]+[4]”, which means that Alice should take the second and fourth elements of her secret vector and add them together. Alice adds 19+7, and gets 26. In the same way, Bob applies Alice’s addition rule to his secret vector — he adds 13+13, and gets 26. (In real life, the numbers are much bigger — about 17 digits.)

There are two things to notice about this process. First, in order to do it, you need to know either Alice’s or Bob’s secret vector. This means that Alice and Bob are the only ones who will know the result. Second, Alice and Bob both got the same answer: 26. This wasn’t a coincidence. There’s a special mathematical recipe that the central authority uses in generating the secret vectors to ensure that the two parties to any legitimate handshake will always get the same answer.

Now both Alice and Bob have a secret value — a secret key — that only they know. They can use the key to authenticate each other, and to encrypt messages to each other.

This sounds pretty cool. But it has a very large problem: if any four devices conspire, they can break the security of the system.

To see how, let’s do an example. Suppose that Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Diane conspire, and that the conspiracy wants to figure out the secret vector of some innocent victim, Ed. Ed’s addition rule is “[1]+[4]”, and his secret vector is, of course, a secret.

The conspirators start out by saying that Ed’s secret vector is (x1, x2, x3, x4), where all of the x’s are unknown. They want to figure out the values of the x’s — then they’ll know Ed’s secret vector. Alice starts out by imagining a handshake with Ed. In this imaginary handshake, Ed will apply Alice’s addition rule ([1]+[2]) to his own secret vector, yielding x1+x2. Alice will apply Ed’s addition rule to her own secret vector, yielding 26+7, or 33. She knows that the two results will be equal, as in any handshake, which gives her the following equation:

x1 + x2 = 33

Bob, Charlie, and Diane each do the same thing, imagining a handshake with Ed, and computing Ed’s result (a sum of some of the x’s), and their own result (a definite number), then setting the two results equal to each other. This yields three more equations:

x2 + x4 = 18
x1 + x3 = 41
x2 + x3 = 24

That makes four equations in four unknowns. Whipping out their algebra textbooks, the conspiracy solves the four equations, to determine that

x1 = 25
x2 = 8
x3 = 16
x4 = 10

Now they know Ed’s secret vector, and can proceed to impersonate him at will. They can do this to any person (or device) they like. And of course Ed doesn’t have to be a real person. They can dream up an imaginary person (or device) and cook up a workable secret vector for it. In short, they can use this basic method to do absolutely anything that the central authority can do.

In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does it. I’ll talk next time about the implications of that fact.

[Correction (April 15): I changed Diane’s secret vector and addition rule to fix an error in the conspiracy-of-four example. Thanks for Matt Mastracci for pointing out the problem.]

Is Network 1.0 also Network 2.0?

By Robert Young

As the debate and discussions reached a boiling point last week about the strategic implications surrounding the major TV networks and their bold moves to embrace the web, the big question that popped into my head was… where does this leave Google, Yahoo!, and all the other established web players who were counting on becoming major distributors of Hollywood media products?

For instance, by deciding to offer up primetime fare directly on their web site for free (with ads), did ABC just dis-intermediate the portals? If so, what does this mean for the fledgling Yahoo Media Group and Google Video initiatives, in terms of long-form, high-production quality content? My bet is that Lloyd Braun and Co are going to be busy contemplating “plan B”, and in fact working on “plan C”.

I find it telling that ABC chose not to include even their own affiliates, where local stations could have used their own web sites to stream episodes. As for Rupert Murdoch, while his Fox network did reach a revenue-sharing agreement with their affiliates, they also did not provision the affiliates with the ability to distribute shows on their own sites.

As the major TV networks increasingly place their programming on the web, what’s interesting is how little differentiation there is between the Yahoo’s of the world and the networks’ affiliates (e.g. when everything becomes a bit, the Internet is the great equalizer). It essentially becomes a game of who can offer larger audiences and better financial terms.

Wittingly or unwittingly, the major TV networks may be setting up their own affiliates to compete head-on against the major web portals (setting up your old distribution channel to compete against the new outlets is actually a smart chess move). The same competitive dynamics will also impact the traditional syndication market and home video/DVD distribution. Of course, a cynic could view all this simply as an stunt by the media companies to appease the stock market mandarins who have been baying like a pack of wild dogs.

But assuming that the broadcast networks have indeed turned over a new leaf, what should Yahoo et al do? In one sense the answer is simple… given that they already have the Internet audience, they can win the battle as long as they’re willing to put up the money (and Google certainly has the cash). But the reality is much more complex, of course, and the old distribution channels will fight hard. Either way, the major broadcast networks are looking at a chess board where they can’t lose… and they may end up proving that content is king after all.

Having said all that, there is one media player that stands out with unique leverage, and guess who that is. Yup, it’s Murdoch. With his ownership now of MySpace, he doesn’t need a Yahoo or a Google. This will give him tremendous leverage, and a significant comparative advantage, against all other networks as well as distribution channels, both old and new. Like him or hate him, call it luck or skill, his brilliance never ceases to amaze. I should also mention that the other media giant that’s nicely positioned, given the shifting strategic landscape, is none other than Time-Warner… their ownership of AOL may turn out to a major win after all.

Check out, MySpace versus networks via Alexaholic.

Robert Young is a serial entrepreneur who played a major role in the invention & commercialization of the world’s first consumer ISP, Internet advertising (pay-per-click ads), free email, and digital media superdistribution.

¢apital magneti¢

Social Music Composition with Credit Cards

Each magnetic card, like its owner, is unique. ¢apital magneti¢, by Mark Trayle, is a network-based installation that explores the musical possibilities of the credit card. Participants can use their credit cards and bank cards to compose pieces of music in cooperation (or competition) with other participants. Special ATM machines are used to read the card: they contain a PC, a monitor, a credit-card reader and two speakers.

Each time a card is swiped the contents of its magnetic stripe are captured and parsed to form the melodic motifs of a short musical composition. Using genetic algorithms, compositions compete in a simulated music marketplace. Some become dominant, others less 'popular'. Some combine to form new 'styles' or 'genres' that in turn influence the more popular ones, etc.

Trayle will be on Friday April 7th 8pm at Machine Project in Los Angeles, to read your credit card data and turn it into music.

From Musical Credit Cards on we make money not art.

DIY cell phone tracking

Our pals at Popular Science have a write up of a low cost way to do your own cell phone tracking - "...Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I've turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time." - Link.

Related:
DIY GPS tracking with Mologogo - review - Link.

This wave is about to break... (or if you prefer, we are reaching the tipping point) -AM

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by agmilmoe on Apr 17, 2006 at 09:08 AM

How Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break the News

Trying to understand the complex relationship between bloggers and journalists has become my own personal Waterloo.

I've taken a few stabs at it already, and learned a lot along the way.  Lesson One: Blogs can do a tremendous job breaking news, and journalists are wise to start their own to tap that power.  Lesson Two: Some rare bloggers become amateur journalists, a status which brings with it its own unique ethical challenges.  Lesson Three: Most bloggers are more like Columnists than capital-J Journalists.

Still no matter what I did, the weblog/journalism relationship seemed to defy reduction.  No metaphor seemed complex enough to capture the subtleties of their interactions.  I greatly enjoyed one set of metaphors from fellow metablogger Doctor Weevil:

blogger : journalist :: tick : sheep
bloggers : journalists :: dung beetles : elephants

But surely bloggers are more than just ticks and dung beetles feeding off of their journalist hosts!  True, the majority of links in weblogs are to articles written by journalists...  but I've seen too many articles by journalists pulled straight from weblogs, Blogdex, and Metafilter to buy fully into the Bloggers/Parasite metaphor.

Cloud Art

Ball State University is launching a digital media sculpture, consisting of 4 projection screens, computers, speakers and lights. It will broadcast interactive media that reacts to the amount of traffic on the campus' 15 wireless zones, April 18 & 19.

The sculpture will contain its own wireless access points, sensing local interactions of viewers using wireless devices. The carillon bells in the Shafer Tower will also be incorporated into the performance via MIDI control. The data captured will be blended together in real time to create a multi-sensory digital experience. The event will be streamed live from 8-11 p.m.

Sound and video will be live-processed by several Apple PowerMac G5 computers using Cycling 74 Max/MSP and Jade as the interactive software. Sound will be created and manipulated by using the application Tassman, by Applied Acoustic Systems, which will be physically modeling (synthesizing) sound as well as using sampled audio streams from the internet.

Video output will be generated via MIDI control using Apple's Motion software and Jitter. The video imagery will be a combination of 3-D graphical elements that represent the historical samples of wireless internet activity.

You can connect sensors and devices to a MidiTron ($149) using its screw terminals. It simplifies the process of creating sensor and robotics based electronic art projects because it is easily user configurable and provides 20 terminals of digital and analog inputs and outputs in any combination.

How about a giant umbrella on Waterfront Park that visualizes "city cloud" status and acts as a collaborative art project:

• The umbrella handle, resembling a small tree trunk, is created from 1,000 recycled cell phones. They randomly ring with bird and animal songs.
  



• The umbrella would be 25 feet in diameter and composed of 2,000 LEDs, changing colors depending on node activity in the city cloud.



• Electro Luminesent wire (ElWire) would delineate 32 sectors and "sweep" like a radar



• A java applet, based on the Daisyphone (right), could be downloaded into cellphones or laptops to create a collaborative musical composition as the radar sweeps around the umbrella.



• A picnic table under the umbrella provides shelter.

Eyebeam and Rhizome have more ideas.

International Remix

This week the 49th annual San Francisco International Film Festival starts, and I’m happy to report that the team of media hackers I work with at Yahoo! Research Berkeley was able to contribute to part of it. That contribution is International Remix, a web-based tool for re-editing selections from this year’s festival. 19 directors from Brazil, Canada, England, Macedonia, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States agreed to allow their films to be sliced and diced by the world’s remixers. From Indio Nacional to The Pretty Boy Project, these films are yours for the cutting. Read on for details, or go play with it now. If you have any problems or suggestions, shoot an email to remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com.

After logging in to the tool (a simple matter of choosing a username and password under which your work will be saved), you’ll see a selection of “Director’s Clips” in a list on the left side of the screen. These are the original selections from which you can choose. Click on clips to load them into the preview window for viewing and editing. You’ll see some details about the clip’s origins displayed below the clip list.

In the preview window you can watch clips, and then adjust the “Clip Begin” and “Clip End” points to select a segment you want to use in your remix. The buttons to either side of the central play/pause button allow you to move foward or backward 1/10 of a second. You can use the right and left arrows on your keyboard to do the same thing. This is especially handy for fine adjustments to the clip begin and end points: just select one of the yellow triangles by clicking on it, then use the frame advance buttons or arrow keys to move it. Once you’ve clipped the segment to your liking, press the “Add to My Clips” button to add it to your clip bin. Or you can drag it into your clip bin by clicking and dragging anywhere on the preview screen. Or just drag directly to the remix timeline.

On the right side of the screen is “My Clips,” a list of all the segments you’ve clipped. These clips are persistent across logins, so you can start working on a remix, log out, and come back later to pick up where you left off. You can rename your a clip by clicking on its title. You can also add special black and title clips for your transitions. To add a clip from your bin to your remix, just press the “Add to My Remix” button, or drag a clip to the timeline.

The timeline at the bottom of the screen is where you sequence the clips you’ve trimmed into your final production. Just click and drag clips around to re-order them. If you click on a clip in the timeline, it will load into the preview window, so you can tweak the endpoints until they are just right. You can add a soundtrack to your remix using the drop-down select list on the right side of the timeline–hover over the selections to hear a preview. You can also turn on and off the audio for individual clips by clicking the “Audio On/Off” buttons at the bottom of each clip in the timeline. When you’re ready to view your work, press the “Play My Remix” button.

After you’ve had a chance to see what you’ve wrought, you can go back and work on it some more, or declare it finished and submit it to the Remix Gallery. You’ll have the chance to give your remix a title and a description, and to select up to five “poster frames” or keyframes to represent your remix in the gallery. Drag the slider back and forth to get the frame you want. Press the orange button with a plus to add another frame. To get rid of a frame, slide it as far as you can to the right or left, and it will disappear. Once you’re happy with the presentation, press “Submit” and your remix will show up in the gallery, looking something like this.

That’s it! So go check it out. Submit your remixes. And definitely show up for the party we’re throwing at Edinburgh Castle on the 24th. Finally, if you have any ideas, complaints, or just want to chat about International Remix, you can email remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com, or join our Yahoo! Group. Or just leave your comments below.

Futures of Music

Wednesday night's CC Salon San Francisco concerned the future of music.

James Polanco spoke about Fake Science's CC licensed podcasts and emphasized that Fake Science is not a record label, but a digital distributor with a far lower cost structure -- and lower costs for both artists and patrons. Fake Science has a great slogan: Be a Patron of the Arts, Not a Consumer.

However, business is tangential to the future of music: how it is made and what it sounds like.

Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze each gave deep, highly compressed thoughts on the future of music that I will not attempt to summarize here. Watch for future articles and blog posts from them. One point they seemed to agree on is that though the constraints have changed (e.g., decline in mechanical reproduction, album-length works and album-length attention spans), new constraints are just as interesting. Gonze suggested that a new generation of "blog musicians" will slowly build up a body of small, inexpensive works.

Bob Ostertag speaks.

Minus Kelvin giving a shout out to Victor Stone and ccMixter.

Photos by Ryan Junell licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The next CC Salon San Francisco is May 10, featuring Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley, Tiffany Schlain of the Webby Awards, and Abram Stern and Michael Dale of Metavid. Be there then or be cube.

What threat?

Shelley Palmer in Cable Vs. The Unknown:

There were at least 1,500 professional cable industry types in the audience, and they were asked to vote on the following:

"What or who will be your biggest day-to-day competition in three years from today?"

Now remember, the audience is full of cable people (many of who do not know how to send a text message with a short message code, but that's for another column). They chose from five possibilities, and here are the results:

DirecTV--37 percent
Google--0 percent
Municipal Wi-Fi--10 percent
Something not yet invented--25 percent

It's not surprising that almost 40 percent of the cable industry audience thinks that satellite companies will still be their biggest competitors in three years. It's a little surprising that they give the telcos as much credit as they did--since it is physically impossible for the telcos to deploy and market that much television product in that amount of time. But what blew my mind was the 35 percent of the audience who thought that municipal Wi-Fi or something not yet invented was going to be the source of the biggest day-to-day competition in three years time. And, to that end --the idea that Google would not enter into their competitive equation.

I wonder if they asked what the biggest oppportunities were.

How many cable customers would trade all their current television service for symmetrical high-speed fiber service to their homes? How much will that number change in the next five years?

The Because Effect, cont'd

J.P.: If we accept that blogging is the opensourcing of ideas, then we need to expect returns from blogging that are consistent with opensource software. Let¹s see how that plays out...

Local Cultures Connected Through a Global Network

Worldchanging ally danah boyd has written a fine essay on glocalization, networks and local cultures. Definitely worth the 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. ...

"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 Atlantic's Internet Censorship Map

From Asia Pundit: internet censorship map: "The Atlantic has created a censorship map based on ONI data. (I’ve archived a local mirror of the map and the accompanying article).
The accompanying article is a bit overzealous in its description of China but I liked that fact that the article specifically highlighted that Internet filtering is not exclusive to China but is spreading — essentially becoming the “norm” — worldwide. In terms of targetted content, porn is defintely targetted but the numbers are skewed by the fact that the use of commercial lists (there are open source lists too) allow countries to block a lot of porn easily. But in terms of significance porn is, in my opinion, of rather low importance. the blocking of several key sources of local language alternative information or an social movement group is much more important. The sgnificance of the content rather than the total number of sites blocked in category seems, to me, to be of more importance but is much harder to measure."
Map and text via Internet Censorship Explorer.

Technorati Tags: censorship, china, map, internet

Best of "Literacy of Cooperation" video

A short compendium from the "Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation" course at Stanford, Winter 2005. The full set of lectures is found at the Cooperation Commons resource page. Includes clips from Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, Peter Kollock on Social Dilemmas, Bernardo Huberman on prediction markets, Ross Mayfield and Zack Rosen on emergent democracy, Steve Weber on the success of open source, Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri on a new literacy of cooperation.

Susan Crawford on forward-thinking remedies for Internet monopolization

Susan Crawford proposes forward-thinking remedies for possible violation of net neutrality"

How about this: let's create a Draconian set of escalating remedies (injunctions, escalating damages, structural separation mandates) and write them down in careful detail. Let's say that unless the network providers show over the next two years that they are not, in fact, illegitimately shaping network management in order to favor their own business plans, these remedies will be put in place -- two years from now. This delayed-action regulation might be easier to push through, and might just make the providers toe the line. If they do, we'll all be rewarded by solidified consumer expectations of an unfettered, blazing-fast internet for everyone.

A DVD of your own fun surveillance afternoon

Visitors to Alton Towers in England could soon be tagged and tracked by cameras in a new system to video their entire day that could also tighten security.

Wearing (compulsory) RFID'd wrist bands, guests would be watched as they use the park and will be filmed on rides, which the creators say would also cut crime. Nothing new in a theme park that tags its visitors but the innovation here is that at the end of the day they would then be given the option to buy the footage in a personalised DVD.

The system called Your Day could also be introduced to Busch Gardens, in Florida and Disneyland Paris.

Via BBC News.

A "photoshop" for dance

Rotosketch is an intuitive tool for sketching, doodling and notating on top of video, such that the marks that are made are linked in time with the video. This allows the user to draw strokes along the the axis of time, as well as the normal x and y axes, and for those strokes to augment, analyze, interpret, or even obliterate a video sequence.

The software, created by Zachary Lieberman together with Scott de la Hunta, and Susan Rethorst, explores how technology might be used to facilitate the dance making process in a creative and organic manner. "We were constantly asking ourselves, what would the "photoshop" for dance look like?" writes Lieberman.

Tutorial on the website explaining how to try the alpha version of rotosketch.

Via splines in space.

Don't miss another work by Lieberman: Drawn - an installation for hands and ink. See also its concert/performance version: Drawings with a mind of their own.

Get Your Blog Syndicated to Mainstream Media

BlogBurst is a syndication service that places your blog on top-tier online destinations. You get visibility, audience reach and traffic, while publishers weave the rich and diverse fabric of the blogosphere into their sites.

Some big name bloggers are already signed up like Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion and so are big name newspapers like the Washington Post and chains like Gannett

Here is a more complete story at Wired, which says in part:

Newspapers are looking to BlogBurst to provide expert blog commentary on travel, women's issues, technology, food, entertainment and local stories, areas where publishers may not have dedicated staff, said Pluck's chief executive, Dave Panos.

In return, a select group of popular bloggers are offered wider distribution for their writings, he said. The online syndicate drives traffic to blog sites, allowing featured bloggers to make money from resulting online advertising fees.

experimental geography

how to interpret the world around us

The work of Trevor Paglen is tactical media, speculative non-fiction - an "experimental geography" - as he calls it, accompanied, of course by "experimental lectures". The online component of his work has a travel-logue quality, with interventions and alien inspired expeditions validated by documented, journalistic interviews. Paglen is a cross-disciplinary practitioner and tactitioner in writing, installation, photography, lectures, performances, interventions, and exhibitions. He appropriates technologies and practices and originates the necessary techniques. One such, "limit-telephotography", was developed for The Secret Bases project to examine the non-space of secret bases and their supposed non-existence.

In projects like Carceral Landscape the Prison Infiltration and Surveillance Suit was performance attire developed to enable covert videography for the project. Documentation is shown from these visits. Pagen co-opts the stealth technlogies to spy back on the spies and uncover the covert, which he weaves together in speculative, but plausible narratives to help us interpret the world around us.

The Korea Times : Phone to Carry Video Projector

This is happening much faster than I expected. Buckel up it's going to be a wild ride!

Originally posted by thudlike from del.icio.us/tag/future, ReBlogged by agmilmoe on Apr 15, 2006 at 12:48 PM

RFID secured fire trampoline - "The High-Lighter"

Mikey writes - "What if you could control the intensity of a nearby fire while jumping on a trampoline? Sounds dangerous right? It might help if a RFID reader were included to require sign in by someone who knows how to deal with such a device. This project is a complete misuse of common backyard items such as trampolines and BBQ tanks. See how big a fire ball you can make at Maker Faire next week." - Link.

A major goal has been reached "post about a RFID secured fire trampoline" - check.

Great interface... no blinking button grids here! --AM

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by agmilmoe on Apr 15, 2006 at 12:53 PM

Virtual Cash

User generated content can generate cash, but typically not a lot of cash.

Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Amazon Affiliate Program, Feedburner, Commission Junction, and a host of other services are happy to pay you for the right to put ads or links on your pages.

But the amount of money that results is usually not enough to quit your day job.

I give my blogging revenues away to charity. It makes me feel good. But even that has its issues. If the money is sent to me directly, I get a 1099 and generally have to pay taxes on the money I am giving away. I can take a deduction for that money, but there are limitations on the deductions and I get hosed by the IRS for doing something good.

This morning, as I was blogging and doing email, I was listening to Radio Paradise, a listener supported internet radio station. I was hit with the urge to direct all the money I make on Yahoo! Publisher Network for the next month to Radio Paradise. It was too hard, so I didn't do it.  I sent them cash via paypal instead.

What I want is a place I can send all the money I am getting from these various services to.  I don't want to pay taxes on that money unless I ultimately take it down personally. I want to be able to send that money anywhere I want, to my blog host provider, to my podcast host provider, to charity, to Radio Paradise, or anywhere else that I feel like it should go.

It would be great if PayPal or someone else could build this. I'd use it

Global Voices: Announcing Our Alliance with Reuters

Global Voices: Support from Reuters will allow us to do more outreach and training in parts of the world where there are currently few bloggers.

Yesterday Reuters announced a major contribution to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where Global Voices is based. This contribution has allowed us to hire our managing editor, Rachel Rawlins, to continue supporting our outstanding team of regional editors and to bring on translators, to provide better coverage of content in languages like Arabic and Russian. Support from Reuters will also allow us to do more outreach and training in parts of the world where there are currently few bloggers. Reuters’ generosity allows us to expand the range and quality of information we make freely available to anyone who cares to use it.

Live or Die by the Quality of Your Metadata

I've been using La La a lot lately. La La is a great, simple idea: create a CD bartering marketplace, exploiting the web as an extremely efficient machine for matching those who want with those who have, and borrowing a streamlined postal delivery mechanism from NetFlix. All you really need is a database full of CD catalog metadata, a neato AJAXified interface, and a bunch of preprinted CD mailing cases, and you can sit back and let the $1.50 per trade pour in.

But that CD catalog metadata had better be good. Every CD missing from it is a trade that will never happen. Every CD filed under the wrong artist is a trade that will never happen. Every box set listed as a single CD, every truncated album title… you get the idea. Even incorrect cover art could lead to confusion and inhibit trading. Bad metadata is especially destructive for the long tail trades–if only one person out there in La La land has the CD I want, and they have trouble finding a way to list their CD because it's listed in La La's catalog with the wrong info… well, it's goodbye La La and back to Amoeba for me.

Unfortunately for La La, their metadata sucks. They have all the problems listed above and more. Missing CDs I could possibly forgive–maybe they're due to legal doubts around imports–but mispellings, uncorrelated artist name variations, and truncated album titles I can't. My advice to anyone thinking of starting a similar venture: don't try to build your own metadata catalog, and don't buy one from some crappy closed metadata vendor. Closed vendors can't scale to the long tail. You need metadata from an open system: in the case of music, something like MusicBrainz or Discogs (I think Discogs is slightly better). The closed metadata company's drones won't get around to cataloging the latest Spoombung album or a limited edition Muslimgauze CD. Hardcore music fans, on the other hand, will–especially if it means they'll be able to trade them.

Services like La La exist by virtue of their metadata. If they aren't careful, they'll cease to exist because of their metadata too.

Genre-bending, Brilliant Music Videos: Dive In

Among the many "best of" lists spontaneously appearing on the CDM forums, contributors and readers have compiled a fantastic list of inspirational music videos from a variety of acts. One thing that strikes me is the breadth of aesthetics; whereas once electronica had very strong connotations (and the videos with it), these are really high-art experimental filmmaking with a range of styles. And they're a pleasure to watch, too, like the fanciful Sigur Rós video pictured here. (Thanks, Jaymis!)

Are visual pairings with music the wave of the future? With video production costs getting cheaper by the day and modes of digital expression expanding, they offer a compelling alternative to the somewhat slackened interest in CDs. And it seems indie musicians are next in line. The one stumbling block there to me is services like YouTube. Sure, they offer wide compatibility and free distribution . . . but the fidelity is crap. Then again, that’s how MP3s started out.

Certainly, musicians are becoming more interested in crossing from aural to visual media, not only in videos but live visuals, as well. (And yes, CDM will be revisiting those topics soon.) For just an indication, take a look here:

CDM tag: VJ
CDM tag: visual

Speaking of YouTube, those videos have been all over the Music thing blog lately, including fantastic Fairlight CMI and Kraftwerk videos. (What I notice about the Kraftwerk video: this once exotic kind of performance doesn't really seem at all strange any more. Pity they never got the musical lapels working, though. Bet you can one-up them. Click through for other neat Kraftwerk YouTube videos.)

Got a favorite music video (independent or otherwise)? Produced one yourself? Let us know. I want my music television.

dflare">

social forwarding.

I'd been searching for a term that more accurately described the process of peer to peer meme propagation regardless of the network or service through which it spreads. Eventually I settled on the term "social forwarding" and started throwing it into conversations here and there over the past year or two, and I still haven't heard it used very much.

So now I've resorted to blogging about it.

"The Wealth of Networks" Booklaunch with Yochai Benkler @ Eyebeam, NYC

"The Wealth of Networks" Booklaunch with Yochai Benkler

Eyebeam April 14, 2006 - 6-8PM 540 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011 http://www.eyebeam.org

Please join Yale Professor Yochai Benkler for the launch of his new book, "The Wealth of Networks," exploring how a new form of distributed collaboration is transforming the world economy. In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge and cultural production are changing and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves.

The evening starts at 6pm with wine, cheese, and informal conversation. At 7pm Jonah Peretti, Eyebeam’s Director of R&D, will introduce Benkler and give a quick tour of important and emerging open source and collaborative projects. Then at 7:15pm, Benkler will give a brief talk presenting the core ideas of his new book.

"The Wealth of Networks" examines distributed collaboration’s transformation of the world economy, heralded by innovations such as: 1) Open Source software like Linux and Apache that have surpassed commercial software made by huge corporations 2) A free, collaboratively authored encyclopedia called Wikipedia that rivals Encyclopedia Britannica, and 3) Volunteer research projects like NASA Clicks that are as accurate as the work of paid scientists.

Benkler does not see these projects as isolated examples, but rather as exemplars of an emerging mode of economic production. His book shows why labor done outside the constraints of free markets and giant corporations can still have a huge impact on the economy and social relations. He argues that a “third mode of production” offers the promise of a more free society, but only if we make the right collective decisions.

"The Wealth of Networks" will be available for purchase in the Eyebeam bookstore the night of the event. This event is open to the public free of charge.

- EYEBEAM 540 W. 21st Street New York, NY 10011, USA http://www.eyebeam.org

Originally by Amanda McDonald Crowley from Rhizome.org Raw at April 11, 2006, 08:53, published by nicholas economos

Type calendar, announcement
Genre theory, participatory, event
Keywords social space, network, labor

Thursday: Network affiliates in an on-demand world

I was just interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor for a story on what happens to local affiliates in the wake of on-demand programming offered by networks directly to viewers. This is a very touchy subject and one about which most local affiliate people remain silent. I'll tell you this, though. There are a LOT of nervous people out there, and I think they have reason to be concerned (NOTE to non-management readers: this applies to you, too!).

That's because the supply/demand scale has shifted in favor of the networks. As I told the reporter, follow the trendline as the networks have been cutting back compensation to affiliates for carrying their programming. We're headed to more of a syndication model for broadcasting, where compensation is reversed. You want Lost? You bid for it.

Attempts by stations -- most notably WRAL-TV -- to stream their signal, including network programming, are extremely cool, but the strategy is questionable in an increasingly on-demand culture. All this does is shift the broadcast model to the web, and that, folks, isn't what the disruption is all about.

Those in the industry who think that anything about their business model or brand will carry them into tomorrow are sadly mistaken. Local broadcasters are so far behind the curve on new media technology (except for podcasts, but that's not really new media) that it will likely be too late when the rug is pulled out from underneath them. I'm amazed, for example, at the number of local station websites that aren't written in XML, the language of unbundled media.

(Continued at The Pomo Blog.)

Build Your Own Video Game

Yesterday, I wrote about new tools for portraying better futures, saying it was getting easier and easier to use them. Here's a data point: this guy created an entire new video game ("Hackenslash") in 40 hours, on a dare. You can even download the game, if you're into that sort of thing.

"The bottom line is this: If you want to develop games, nothing is stopping you. You can find the time. You don't need a big budget or fancy tools. You don't need a team of specialists. You don't need years of training. All you need is the will to make it happen."

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 10:25 AM)

Movable Feast/ Fete Mobile

Carried by a twenty foot blimp, Movable Feast / Fête Mobile is an autonomously controlled vehicle that, nevertheless, offers its audience limited access to influence its trajectory as well as its optics through an online interface. An onboard wireless local-file server allows the public to exchange media files, remotely view their surroundings from above via a video camera, and display text message on an LED panel mounted on blimp.

The audience are invited to connect to the blimp's on-board wireless micro-computer through their laptop computers in order to exchange files with the blimp's mobile archive. This allows Fête Mobile to function as a kind of autonomous "sneaker network", physically out of reach of the authorities.

The project is concerned with public space, file sharing, and the phenomenon of local community wireless networking. It proposes a model for an autonomous system of media exchange that exists in the public radio spectrum. It also aims to question some of our beliefs in the invincibility of the Internet. The Internet is in fact merely decentralized. Catastrophic failure targeted at key switching stations along the Internet's backbone could sever communication between whole regions of the globe, overnight transforming the Web into a fragmented archipelago of networked sub-regions. In a world where communications over the Internet has become either impossible or unsafe, Fête Mobile would function as a lifeline.

At its most conceptual level, the project thus extrapolates current techno-political issues into a possible future scenario in which communities are locally connected through peering protocols whilst disconnected from Internet as a whole.

A collaboration between Luke Moloney, Marc Tuters and Adrian Sinclair.

Movable Feast will be deployed for ISEA 2006.

bookmarklet to produce XSPF from HTML

HubLog: VLC, XSPF, Dapper and Tango

I've added a plain XSPF button to Playr, which produces a playlist that can be opened with the external VLC application.

The indirect cause was XSPF support (still buggy) in the latest version of the VLC media player:

The newest version of VLC (OS X version on MacUpdate here), which will eventually be 0.8.5, now supports XSPF playlists. This means that you can make a simple XML playlist filled with URLs to audio (MP3, MP4, WMA, Real Audio, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, etc) and video (a similar list of open and closed formats) and have them all play one after the other, possibly for the first time ever.

April 13 notes

Alex Russell on the point of internet standards:

The web has succeeded in part because in trade for control over UIs, businesses gained the ability to deploy to everyone everywhere. In a world where the web is how business gets done, "cross platform" really means "cross browser". Single-render apps are bad for the web and bad business.

Will Somebody Please Think About the Pedos?

In all of the news bits dedicated to the Sexual Predators On MySpace meme lately, not a single mention has been made of the possibility that the existence of MySpace makes it easier for law enforcement to search for and find those needles in a haystack called pedophiles in ways that could never be done with AOL chat rooms or MSN webcams.

With one of the least respectful terms of service and privacy policy out there, MySpace can be a surveillance gold mine with the right judge's signature.

Too bad we're stuck on selling the culture of fear.

Telebeads: Social Network Mnemonics for Teenagers

I’ve recently read j-dash-bi latest paper and it’s very nifty: Telebeads: Social Network Mnemonics for Teenagers by Jean-Baptiste Labrune and Wendy Mackay (IDC2006). It’s actually a participatory design paper that describes how they designed a curious artifact:

This article presents the design of Telebeads, a conceptual exploration of mobile mnemonic artefacts. Developed together with five 10-14 year olds across two participatory design sessions, we address the problem of social network massification by allowing teenagers to link individuals or groups with wearable objects such as handmade jewelery. We propose different concepts and scenarios using mixed-reality mobile interactions to augment crafted artefacts and describe a working prototype of a bluetooth luminous ring. We also discuss what such communication appliances may offer in the future with respect to interperception, experience networks and creativity analysis.

addresses two primary functions requested by the teens: providing a physical instantiation of a
particular person in a wearable object and allowing direct communication with that person. (…) We have just completed an ejabberd server, running on Linux on a PDA, which will serve as a smaller, but more powerful telebead interface

See the bluetooth telebead ring and how to associate the ring and a contact image:

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of “mobile mnemonic artefacts” as part of a situated and cognition framework: that’s an interesting instantiation of communicating objects. Besides, the paper is full of good references about such devices.

HDMI and Output Control

Tim Lee at Tech Liberation Front points out an interesting aspect of the new MovieBeam device — it offers its highest-resolution output only to video displays that use the HDMI format.

(MovieBeam is a $200 box you buy that lets you buy 24-hour access to recent movies. There is a rotating menu of movies. Currently video content is trickled out to MovieBeam boxes via unused broadcast bandwidth rented from PBS stations. Eventually they’ll use the Internet to distribute movies to the devices.)

This is a common tactic these days — transmitting the highest-res content only via HDMI. And it seems like a mistake for Hollywood to insist on this. The biggest problem is that some HDTVs have HDMI inputs and some don’t, and most consumers don’t know the difference. Do you know whether your TV has an HDMI input? If you do, you either (a) don’t have a high-def TV, or (b) are a serious video geek.

Consider a (hypothetical) consumer, Fred, who bought an early high-def set because he wanted to watch movies. Fred buys MovieBeam, or a next-gen DVD player, only to discover that his TV can’t display the movies he wants in full definition, because his TV doesn’t do HDMI.

Fred will be especially angry to learn that his MovieBeam box or high-def DVD player is perfectly capable of sending content at higher definition to the inputs that his TV does have, but because of a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo that Hollywood insists upon, his set-top box deliberately down-rezzes the video before sending it to his TV. Just imagine what Fred will think when he sees news stories about how pirated content is available in portable, high-def formats that will work with his TV.

The official story is that HDMI is a security measure, designed to stop infringers. It’s been known for years that HDMI has serious security flaws; even Wikipedia discusses them. HDMI’s security woes make a pretty interesting story, which I’ll explore over several posts. First I’ll talk about what HDMI is trying to do. Then I’ll go under the hood and talk about how the critical part of HDMI works and its well-known security flaws. (This part is already in the academic literature; I’ll give a more accessible description.) Finally, I’ll get to what is probably the most interesting part: what the history of HDMI security tells us about the industry’s goals and practices.

Officially, the security portion of HDMI is known as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HDCP. The core of this security design is the HDCP handshake, which takes place whenever two devices communicate over an HDMI cable. The handshake has two goals. First, it lets each device confirm that the other device is an authorized HDCP device. Second, it lets the two devices agree on a secret encryption key which only those two devices know. Subsequent communication over the cable is encrypted using that key, so that eavesdroppers can’t get their hands on any content that is distributed.

In theory, this is supposed to stop would-be infringers. If an infringer tries to plug an authorized video source (like a MovieBeam box) into a device that can capture and redistribute video content, this won’t work, because the capture device won’t be able to do the handshake — the authorized video source will recognize that it is unauthorized and so will refuse to sent it content. Alternatively, if an infringer tries to capture content off the wire, between an authorized source and an authorized TV set, this will be foiled by encryption. That’s the theory at least. The practice is quite different, as I’ll describe next time.

Blog the world: Jeff Axup on backpacker communications

(Via Mobile Community Design)

The latest issue of the always-interesting Receiver has an article by Jeff Axup about his research on the way backpackers use mobile communications:

It has been argued that we are rapidly evolving into a "culture of mobility" where movement is a regular part of life and the world is increasingly small and interconnected. Sociologists have also demonstrated that communities which used to be largely geographically bound are now "glocalized" and consist of distributed members, with larger numbers of people connected by weak ties. Frequently these networks move and change, and the people within them multitask and move with them. Thus, the normal life stages which individuals go through are increasingly taking place in a mobile setting that challenges the individual with new activities, customs and lifestyles. An interesting component of this is the increasingly popular activity of backpacking. This form of budget travel is different from wilderness hiking or trekking which commonly goes by the same name. Backpacking increasingly refers to younger people who travel on small budgets for long periods of time as an exploratory part of their lives. For many backpackers, the time spent traveling will be a period of extreme mobility before they eventually choose more stable situations in which to build careers or find homes. Examining what technologies could be used to support this highly mobile stage of life may provide insights into how to support their increasingly mobile home life as well.

Backpackers tend to be young and well-educated, and are increasingly adapting existing technologies to fit their needs as travelers. Some of these tools include email, mobile phones, SMS, instant messaging and blogs. For the past several years a group of colleagues and I have been looking at the existing technology use and communication habits of backpackers in order to inform the design of new tourism technologies. My doctoral research specifically focuses on research methods for designing mobile devices for mobile groups and communities such as backpackers. The frequent movement, distribution and unique culture of mobile communities pose challenges for existing observation and design methods, and thus make a good research problem. So far our Australian-based studies have ranged from groups of backpackers wandering around tourist attractions with "magic mobile devices", to simulations investigating how backpackers respond to being paired with others to chat with. A particularly intriguing design problem is how to augment existing offline chatting systems with digital tools to make swapping tips more effective and enjoyable. But before we do that we need to look at what backpackers already do, and what tools are currently being used for recording, communicating and sharing.

Tankman Goeth

Frontline aired a program on the Tiananmen Square uprising this week showing how China blocks internet searches. Photos searches of Tank Man (Google China & Google English) were compared.

Google said this week that it did the right thing in appeasing the Chinese government in order to offer service in the country. The comments were made by CEO Eric Schmidt during a press conference in China to announce a Chinese-language brand name and research center to be located in Beijing.

Yahoo, Google Cisco and Microsoft were mentioned as being complicit in providing information about their users to Chinese authorities. Here's Video of the Senate Hearing: The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?

Google was heavily criticized in January following the launch of its Chinese language Web site. Searches on the topics of human rights, Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and democracy omitted certain Web sites and redirected to Chinese government URLs. Google also announced that it is going to open a research and development centre in Moscow this year.

Schmidt defended Google's decision, because without it they could have not properly served the 111 million people now online in the country, he said. China now is the second largest country online in terms of Internet subscribers, behind the United States.

At the end of 2005, there were 393 million cellular users in mainland China. It's expected to hit 520 million by 2008 and 600 million by 2010.

Monopoly players such as China Unicom, China Netcom, and China Telecom, are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to complete last mile connectivity using cellular and WiMAX

China Telecom, the nation's largest fixed-line operator, is looking at ways to block phone calls made over the Internet such as the popular service offered by Skype, according to media reports. China Telecom and its largest rival, China Netcom, do not offer VoIP services.

China Wireless Communications, Inc., headquartered in Denver, CO, has signed a contract with Tianjin University. The company is focusing its efforts on becoming a premier information technology company in China, providing broadband data services, support for Internet access and Voice over IP.

CyberLink demonstrated digital TV playback via a mobile handheld at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei this week and will display its mobile solution in Beijing next week. Based on the DVB-H standard, it supports the playback of audio-video bitstream and Electronic Service Guide (ESG) data.

Of course the United States is not above spying on citizens, either:

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T engineer who is now participating in the case as a witness, has released a statement to the media in which he outlines many of the allegations that are currently under seal. Chief among them is his claim that AT&T installed powerful traffic monitoring equipment in a "secret room" in their San Francisco switching office at the behest of the NSA.

According to Klein, this room contained (among other things) a Narus STA 6400 traffic analyzer into which all of AT&T's Internet and phone traffic was routed; Klein himself helped wire the splitter box that made this possible. In addition to AT&T's own traffic, Klein alleges that the company also routed its peering links into the splitter, meaning that any traffic that passed through AT&T's own network could be scanned.

Futhermore, San Francisco wasn't the only place such secret rooms were built; Klein claims that AT&T offices in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego also have them.

AT&T lawyers are now trying to get possession of the EFF documents.

Newsweek and The Baltimore Sun say the NSA spent $1.2 Billion on their Trailblazer datamining initiative, similar to the Total Information Awareness program, with little to show for it.

DailyWireless has more on Dataveillence by the NSA.

Exploding TV: Pick your fuse

Kevin Marks puts together a nice chart comparing all the ways to watch TV now.

USB Flashbag

Visual representation of the amount of data your USB flash drive is holding. The more data you have, the bigger this thing gets [2GB cap]. The balloon like quality is powered by a minco pump from within the device itself. Load it full of data depending on how much of a ergh pant bulge you want.

Cable-Free Vrs Wireless USB

The battle between the incompatible Wireless USB and Cable Free USB is heating up (or is it melting down). Freescale Semiconductor pulled out of the UWB Forum which it co-founded with Motorola and Pulse-Link to focus on Cable Free USB.

Meanwhile, Intel and others are backing Wireless USB, based on the incompatible UltraWideBand standard by WiMedia. WiMedia's Wireless USB now has more supporters and momentum. The Bluetooth standard will integrate WiMedia's UWB approach into faster Bluetooth. Bluetooth throughput will be improved from its current 0.7 Mbps or 3Mbps to new speeds ranging from 53.3Mbps to 480Mbps.

Wireless USB can send HDTV signals from settops to montiors. It can also send low data rate sensor data to tiny PCs like the OQO or Ultramobile. Think "smart clothing".

A McGill University neuroscientist will attach sensors to Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockart, five musicians and 50 audience members. The goal: measure physiological responses to the music (NPR audio).

The Conductor's Jacket, is a wearable physiological monitoring system for musicians, designed to provide a testbed for the study of musical and emotional expression.

The project has two aims, Dr. Levitin explained. "First, we're hoping to see distinctive physiological signatures of the emotions that Maestro Lockhart is feeling as he conducts, and then see the transmission of them to the musicians and the audience members. Second, we're hoping to quantify differences in physiological arousal and impact between actually being at a concert versus seeing it on a large screen."

The sensing equipment was designed by Dr. Teresa M. Nakra, herself a conductor and music technologist. Nakra teaches at the College of New Jersey and runs Immersion Music Inc., a nonprofit organization she founded to develop interactive musical experiences that blend traditional forms and new technologies.

You're The Conductor is an interactive exhibit for children to conduct the Boston Pops orchestra. To use it, you simply pick up the custom-designed infrared baton and start conducting. In front of you, you will see and hear the orchestra playing, following your conducting gestures, on a large projection screen. The larger your gestures, the louder they play. The faster you conduct, the faster their tempo becomes.

Here are some midi technologies that can be used. Video sources can also be used to recognize gestures that don't inhibit a performer's physical movement.

Online burn-to-DVD service

Vivid Entertainment is selling DVDs over the internet — without actually including the DVD — but its delivery company doesn’t want to talk about it. If you could buy a porn video, download it in about an hour and burn it to a DVD that will play in any standard drive, would you do it? What if it had built-in digital rights management (DRM) code that only let you burn the file to disk one time, and one time only? Vivid Entertainment has launched a new Burn-to-DVD service with the expectation that you, and millions like you, will. [Wired News: DAT’s Entertainment]

The last gasp of the power of the press

“We know how to destroy people,” Mr. Stern said, according to a person reading a transcript of the meeting. “It’s what we do. We do it without creating liability. That’s our specialty.”

That’s the kicker from today’s New York Times summary of the juicy-as-a-peach gossip scandal at the New York Post’s Page Six: Part-time boldfacer Jared Paul Stern was caught on tape allegedly shaking down billionaire investor Ronald W. Burkle for $100,000 down and $10,000 a month in return for snark-protection from The Post. The arch-rival New York Daily News, the duller tabloid, was overjoyed to break the scandal and today reported that the scam started when Burkle wrote to his friend Rupert Murdoch complaining about nasty coverage from Rupert’s paper. All this has caught the Post in an uncharacteristic pose: with tail between legs. And it has created metagossip about gossip for online Page-Six-wannabe Gawker.com.

But I’ve been wondering what, if anything, is the greater meaning of this episode. And I’ll propose that it’s this: We are witnessing the last growl of the unbridled power of the press. Some in the press would like to think — but would not be stupid enough to brag — that they could “destroy people” for a living. And though they certainly can cause headaches for people in the spotlight, the odds of fatality go down by the day as there are more and more means of response. Now the targets can turn the tables on the journalists. I’ve seen reporters go ballistic when their emails to sources or transcripts of their interviews are published on blogs. Well, tough. What’s good for the goose is now grist for the gander. Accidental billionnaire Mark Cuban is the master of using his blog and email to show how the sausage is made and many more are following his example. Transparency works two ways.

At the same time, journalists are not the great gatekeepers they once were. Flacks are. In the old days, reporters had access to the press and that gave them power no subject could match. But when celebrities discovered the value of their faces to market media, they gained the upper hand. Now, you won’t hear a reporter or columnist threatening to ruin a star. Instead, you’ll hear the star’s publicist threatening to cut off a magazine or show if they don’t obey demands to grant a cover, approve a photo, or select a reporter.

And among big brands, new competitors abound across all media, shrinking the audience and thus the influence of any one outlet. So the Post threatens to destroy you. Well, then, there’s always the News… or a half dozen celebrity shows on broadcast TV… or two dozen celebrity shows on cable… or two thousand celebrity blogs online.

The days of the almighty gossip columnist are simply over — except nobody told hapless Jared Paul Stern that. And the same is true of the almighty journalist — just ask Judith Miller, formerly of The Times. Ditto the almighty columnist or editorialist — just ask the former readers who now write blogs instead.

The Times story would also try to lead you to believe that the age of the payola and favors in journalism is also over: “But gossip columns have always occupied a murky corner in the realm of journalistic standards, which traditionally preclude writers and editors from accepting gifts from those they cover.”

Not so quick. Oh, yes, the gossips always had richer Christmases. I remember seeing cases of booze going in and out of the offices of the big names in Chicago and San Francisco when I worked at papers there. When I (unsuccessfully) competed with one of them, hard-to-bear young show-off that I was, I tried to return a gallon of bourbon to the owner of a local restaurant and press hangout because that was my new-fangled policy, and he acted like I was insane and was trying to insult him. Oh, sure, reputable critics stopped taking junkets and journalists are supposed to refuse gifts. Yet there are other favors to be had: lunch or even better, access to a star or a politician or an event or best of all, a leak. But these favors are used now not to buy the journalist but, instead, to remind him who’s boss.

Howard Rheingold and Mimi Ito Interview

Jumper.it has an interview with Howard Rheingold and Mizuko Ito. An excerpt:

Keep in mind that the original operators who enabled SMS, the killer app for teens and mobile phones, had NO IDEA that it would either be popular with youth or would be a revenue generator. The engineers build the SMS specification into the GSM standard, When young people got their hands on a medium that enabled them -- for the first time! -- to communicate directly with their peers without parents or teachers overhearing, they started using it. The ability to send a few words to a friend, instead of initiating a phone call, became both economically and socially attractive to others. But keep in mind as well that the whole 3G model was created by the same operators who formerly had no clue that people would use SMS for social communication. The PC, the Internet, SMS, and DoCoMo were all successful because the users, not the manufacturer or operator, invented uses for the technology. Handset manufacturers have been slow to catch on, as well -- isn't it weird that the first millions of cameraphones were sold without a single-click mechanism for sending pictures to your online gallery? You can be sure that the most important applications of the next generation of mobile culture will be those that are adopted or appropriated by kids on the streets of Shanghai or Milan or Rio, not those that are invented through focus groups in skyscrapers.

bopuc/weblog: It's not about you

"But that's not what the bankrollers are on about. They don't care about your newfound ability to publish your thoughts or your pictures. They are just glad that you are doing so. Why? Because in an information based economy, data is your primary natural source. And flow of data creates movement which can be harnessed."

Kids corrupted ... BEFORE video games? [Update 1]

Filed under: Culture

Sure, Grand Theft Auto purportedly trains kids to kill hookers, but what about the decadence caused by the Waltz? According to The Times of London in 1816, this "foreign dance" was seen so unfit that the paper felt it "a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion." Then came movies in 1909, blasted for causing many to lead "dissolute lives." The telephone? Yeah, that, too.

Wired has a few choice quotes from the advent of each of these technologies and art forms, among others. Of course, the point of this comparison is to show that the current hysteria over video games -- "known" to promote drinking, drug usage, and sexual deviance -- is just an initiation rite. While some works of art will always cause controversy (Catcher in the Rye, for some reason, is still not allowed in some schools), as a sect of society this hooplah should be a passing phase in its maturity.

[Image from the film Footloose; Thanks, White Rose Duelist]

[Update: fixed a typo -- thanks, Garold]

Media 3.0

Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer
A new show to air on NYC TV. I scheduled the recording of the first one which is to air Monday at 11PM. I will give a better report after watching but it sounds interesting:

Media 3.0 is a weekly half-hour news/talk show about the media & technology business hosted by award-winning inventor, technologist, composer, author and producer, Shelly Palmer. The business and technology of media industry are changing at an ever increasing rate. As chairman of the Advanced Media Committee of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences NY, Palmer is one of the experts leading the industry’s rapid evolution.

From PVRs to PDAs, from IP Video to VOD ... Technology changes everyday, but business rules and our legal system don’t always keep up. Is it a parlor trick or a paradigm shift? Shelly Palmer, along with lead analyst Lydia Loizides, and subject matter experts focus on the issues that dominate the front pages of today’s business journals.

Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer is a show for consumers, media execs, investors and just about anyone interested in this exciting arena where the business of media meets technology. Fast-paced and combative, Media 3.0 doesn’t pull any punches. Interviews with senior management, opinions from respected business leaders and smart people who will make even the most complicated issues seem simple ... It’s Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer.

open, participatory platforms for audiovisual production

multi channel internet tv

At m-cult, the M2HZ collaborative, distributed television project, initiated in August 2005, proceeds with the first programme of 2006 - Map to Postfordist Life.

tablished in 2000 to support production, research and development of new media culture by an active involvement in the practices, policies and structures of the field. Aiming at a sustainable development of media culture, m-cult works to create productive and critical, interdisciplinary encounters between actors in culture, technology and society.

m-cult focuses on social and cultural innovations in urban, wireless and participatory media, and on developing open infrastructures and transdisciplinary competences in new media culture. m-cult carries out research projects, consults on media culture and technology development, disseminates information and organises events in media research, arts and technology.

m-cult's project to establish a lab for urban media now has a concrete target. The plan is to launch a collaborative production environment at Kansatalo ('People's house', named after an extinct insurance company) located in Kurvi, Eastern Helsinki. The Kurvi space is aimed to support production of urban and media culture and to house a continuous series of workshops, seminars and debates. Negotiations about the project are now in their final phase, and results are expected in May 2006.

live broadband tv

Exploding Television

Exploding Television is a live internet broadcast during Rotterdam Film Festival. Talks, Workshops, documentation of the Exhibition, and Artist Works can be seen in the archive.

See the streaming video of the DIY_tv session focusing on the growing phenomenon of independent microTV broadcasters.

The Italian microTV movement, Telestreet, started as a loose group of TV micro-broadcasters that first went to air in Italy in 2002 in a neighborhood station based in Bologna. These loosely affiliated broadcasters share an enthusiasm for exploring the socializing power of free-to-air video (TV) broadcasting. Often their content is sourced from the independent content archives such as V2V and the Italian viral video distribution project NGV. However, in the words of their manifesto, "Television must be considered a new prosthesis and an extension of the net [...] the horizontally of the net must meet the 'socializing' power of television."

In the words of David Garcia "[Telestreet] are squatting the shadows or blank spots which terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach." They not only make their own content, but also their own transmitters and antenna. Dedicated to the socializing power of broadcast television, the project has provided an important inspiration for many Italian media activists, and has fueled a movement dedicated to the development of critical approaches to localized production and distribution of TV.

A server on a mobile phone

After the server on a USB key, there is this project at Nokia of having a server running on a mobile phone (via).

The motivation here is quite technology-driven:

For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.

But things gets more interesting when they talk about the implications:

As a mobile phone contains quite a lot of personal data it is straightforward to semi-automatically generate a personal home page. And contrary to websites in general, a website on a mobile phone always has its “administrator” nearby and he or she can even participate in the content generation. For instance, we have created a web-application that prompts the phone owner to take a picture, which subsequently is returned as a JPG. That is, on a personal device the website can be interactive.

Further, that a website becomes mobile implies that certain properties of websites that hitherto have been mostly meaningless now need to be taken into account. As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change. With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the “administrator” to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website. Current search engines that update their indexes rather rarely may need modifications to be able to cope with the dynamism introduced by mobile websites.

Implications

We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the Internet landscape. If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves.

Why do I blog this? even though the motivation at first glance was very engineer-centric, there are some curious implications, especially when thinking of the internet of things/blogject mumbling.

See you in blog court

"Weblogs,or Internet diaries,are about to gain more than just curious readers.Korean courts are now experimenting whether they could operate court trials and hearings just through Internet postings,saving everybody the trouble of actually entering the courtroom,"the Korea Times reports."The Seoul Administration Court recently designated one of its court units,which rules on labor-management relations and industrial accidents,to develop a prototype model for Internet-based trial models by the end of this month.Although the court has not yet decided on a detailed framework,it plans to allow the parties in lawsuits to submit their list of evidence,legal documents and other data on Weblogs or Internet message boards to be operated by the court.The court decisions will also be announced online.The court also plans to allow people to buy court documents and other requirements in preparing for their lawsuits through the Internet by credit card or mobile-phone payments.Korea has one of the largest Internet populations in the world,with the penetration rate reaching over 70 percent".

Courts Test Internet Trials

This is What Democracy Codes Like

MySociety -- the British civic tech NGO behind such projects as WriteToThem, PledgeBank and TheyWorkforYou -- has launched a new call for proposals. Not only that, but mySociety will build out the best idea for a site with the following qualities:

Founded on electronic networks. This includes the internet, mobile and telephone networks, wireless, fax and anything related.

Real world impact on democratic and community aspects of people's lives. The internet is full of excellent commerce and entertainment sites: we are not about building more of those. It is also full of great information sites: we aren't about building these either. We want sites that users visit and leave having gained something tangible: a nascent relationship wth their MP, or the knowledge that they can achieve something with other people near them.

Low or zero cost scalability. This is key. We are looking for projects that cost the same (or virtually the same) to run for ten or a million users.

As ally Jo Twist told the beeb, "This is what politics and political engagement are about in a digital age. Direct, collaborative action, and direct response."

And that's precisely the point. While any one of these sorts of projects won't singlehandedly change the world, they both represent and reinforce a broader movement to use collaborative technologies to pry open the corridors of power and let in both the sunshine of transparency and the voices of citizens. We need a lot more of these kinds of efforts, and we need more people talking about what approaches and technologies are worth using in those efforts. MySociety is doing us all a favor by stimulating debate on what civic activism looks like in the 21st Century.

(Posted by Alex Steffen in The Second Superpower – Cooperation, Politics and Activism at 12:56 PM)

Beyond Broadcast, May 12-13 2006 - Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture Archive
Beyond Broadcast, a conference being put on at the Berkman Center is coming up in a bit more than a month. The conference second day will be a second convening of the Open Media Developers Summit and is shaping up nicely.

Please feel free to visit the blog and wiki, attend and participate.

From the blog:
You are invited to an open convening at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. 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.

Via sLop

affective document color bar

an approach for graphically visualizing the affective structure of a text document. a document is analyzed using a unique textual affect sensing engine. colors are used to represent different emotions in a color bar, which represents the progression of affect through a text document. an emoticon corresponding to the emotion depicted by that color is included to help reinforce the meaning of that color. a user evaluation demonstrates that the method facilitates a user’s within-document information foraging activity.
see also parsing the state of the union & power of words.
[mit.edu]

Control and Freedom Booksite

I haven’t had a chance to read Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (I need to get past a couple looming deadlines first). But I was just looking at the website, which is definitely one of the more interesting book-related sites I’ve ever seen. For starters, there’s an End-User License Agreement, a simulated packet sniffer and webcams, and some rather suggestive imagery. In terms of the book itself, if her ISEA keynote (pdf) is any indicator, it’s going to be a very thought provoking read.

TV on the Web ramping up in 2006

Some interesting posts recently on the Internet TV trend, which is really ramping up this year. Mark Cuban, who co-founded Broadcast.com in 1995 and sold it to Yahoo! in 1999, has a great post on his blog outlining some of the pros and cons of rich media on the Net. He notes:

"The reality of TV viewing is that people watch the same 15 to 20 channels over and over. They arent going to sit in front of their computers and look for video to replicate the experience of sitting on the couch or laying in bed. What we did learn at Broadcast.com, is that people will search, even if it takes some work, to find things they are passionate about that aren't on TV. [...] We also learned that people will go to portals to explore."
(emphasis mine)

He goes on to explain how user-generated content from the likes of youtube.com has taken off recently. He also talks about how Internet TV is a new medium, so just re-purposing TV shows for the Web won't work. For one there are no hit tv shows on the Web, at least not on the scale of TV shows like Lost and Desparate Housewives. Cuban sums it up:

"On the net, the value is in the network aggregator. On tv the value is in the show."

It's well worth your time reading the whole post from Mark Cuban - and don't miss the comments for extra key data.

On this topic, PaidContent.org has been covering industry moves in Internet TV. They report on BBC's trial of its Integrated Media Player, noting that:

"...most viewing took place between 10pm and 11pm [UK time], whereas the traditional peak time for viewing of linear TV channels is between 7pm and 10pm."

Interestingly the list of top tv programs downloaded on BBC's iMP are all traditional tv programs: Eastenders, Little Britain, etc. I wonder how the viewer numbers would stack up if the BBC had a breakthrough tv show that was made exclusively for the Web? Perhaps that is a year or two down the track...

Finally, check out Tom Coates' observations on TV distribution. He says that iTunes-like distribution of tv content on the Web is the best strategy. His prediction for the future:

"I think we're approaching a world in which a near-live media distribution environment will be a major partner to broadcast TV within five-ten years. This environment will be focused on show-by-show subscriptions and ultimate personalisation to get stuff down to viewers over normal broadband and mediated by the bog-standard boring old internet - probably even through the web."
(emphasis mine)

As you can see from the above 3 posts, Internet TV is a fast-growing world and a lot of media companies like BBC and Yahoo! are jostling for position. Not to mention the upstarts like youtube, the more established 'new tv' plays like Tivo, plus whatever Mark Cuban will invest in next in this field!

Photo: JumpTV

Social networking,blogging and local information

"While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites,it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking,blogging and local information,"the Washington Post reports."The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix,which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.Top-ranked sites growing the most,ComScore's data showed,were Blogger.com,a personal publishing site;MySpace.com,where young people do virtual preening and share musical tastes;Wikipedia,an open reference site jointly edited by millions of people;and Citysearch,a network of local guides focused on cities".

New Trends In Online Traffic

People choose groups where punishment of free-riders enables the group to profit

(Thanks, Sam!)

Study Links Punishment to an Ability to Profit is the New York Times headline about recent research results, published today in Science:

Sociologists have long known that communes and other cooperative groups usually collapse into bickering and disband if they do not have clear methods of punishing members who become selfish or exploitative.

Now an experiment by a team of German economists has found one reason punishment is so important: Groups that allow it can be more profitable than those that do not.

Given a choice, most people playing an investment game created by the researchers initially decided to join a group that did not penalize its members. But almost all of them quickly switched to a punitive community when they saw that the change could profit them personally.

The study, appearing today in the journal Science, suggests that groups with few rules attract many exploitative people who quickly undermine cooperation. By contrast, communities that allow punishment, and in which power is distributed equally, are more likely to draw people who, even at their own cost, are willing to stand up to miscreants.

An expert not involved in the study, Elinor Ostrom, co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, said it helped clarify the conditions under which people will penalize others to promote cooperation.

"I am very pleased to see this experiment being done and published so prominently," Dr. Ostrom said, "because we still have many puzzles to solve when it comes to the effect of punishment on behavior."

Dr. Ostrom has done fieldwork with cooperatives around the world and said she often asked other researchers and students whether they knew of any long-lasting communal group that did not employ a system of punishment. "No one can give me an example," she said.

Portable Film Festival

The Portable Film Festival call for entries is open until the end of May:

Compact, detachable, private and shareable, this is a film festival like no other. Film for Apple iPod. Film for Sony PlayStation Portable. Film for 3G Phones. Download them, take them away with you. Plug them into your friend's TV.

The International Portable Film Festival is calling for challenging and inspiring film and video content for pre-selection in the 2006 IPFF Competition which will take place in July 2006. This is the perfect forum for new ideas and new directions in film and we actively encourage those filmmakers who are unafraid to venture into the deep, beyond the known boundaries of film and the cinema, to submit. Those films that best express themselves through the portable medium will be considered for pre-selection.

Entry to the competition is free and is now open until the 28th of May 2006.

Prizes will be announced in late April. Films will be judged under the following categories:

DESKTOP EXPERIMENT
will explore new directions and innovations in animation, and digital filmmaking.

POSTCARD
will present short documentaries that look into the fascinations of real life on film.

NEW WORLD ORDER
will showcase short narrative films that charter new waters in brave new ways.

WATCH MY MOVES
will present independently produced music video clips that inspire this intriguing new genre of filmmaking.

GENERATIONAL EYE
will profile new work by filmmakers under the age of 18.

GENERAL
is open to all film submissions.

Films can either be posted through snail mail or compressed and uploaded onto the Festival website.

another piece of software exploring the media browser theme

MediaPlayerConnectivity is a Firefox Extension which "Allow you to launch embed video of website in an external application with a simple click". I haven't played around with it enough yet to say what it does in my own words.

A related entry in this (gonze.com) weblog articulating my perception of the zeitgeist this represents: Media Browser Cladogram.

Powazek: Just a Thought: Death to User-Generated Content

"They're words that creepy marketeers use. They imply something to be commodified, harvested, taken advantage of. They're words I used to hear a lot while doing community consulting, and always by people who wanted to make, or save, a buck."

Dude, Wanna Hear my GarageBand Loops Song?

Poor GarageBand. Loops can be a fantastic tool, a way of sketching out ideas, having virtual instrumentalists with which to practice your chops, or remixed into something truly original, and they're useful to beginners and pros alike in those roles. They don't replace live musicians, but that's not the point; they're useful for what they do well. They're also the most misunderstood of modern music tech. Unfortunately, non-musician journalists like The New York Times' Michael Walker keep trying to squeeze some deeper meaning about modern music-making out of loop-based software without understanding either music creation or technology. In Mr. Walker's case, researching an article means piecing together random loops, failing to impress KCRW radio's star DJ or the masses on MySpace, and then deciding the whole experience reveals something profound about digital music technology:

A computer had generated it. I had helped things along but was more of a spectator. Nevertheless, "Eventide" was something I had created, and like all creations was entitled to a measure of emotional exuberance from its creator.

NPR Podcasts to Cellphones

National Public Radio will become the first major media company to deliver podcasts to mobile phone users using Melodeo software. NPR will deliver 45 of its podcasts, which including All Songs Considered, NPR Story of the Day, and On Gambling with Mike Pesca.

Melodeo helped develop and launch the AOL mobile instant-messaging client as well as the T9 software that’s now embedded on more than one billion handsets.

Their Mobilcast software can be downloaded free, and turns any handset into a portable audio device. Melodeo works on Symbian Series 60, Java, Windows Mobile, and BREW phones, and can build the client directly into handsets. Details are available at the Mobilecast site.

While iTunes has pulled many new listeners into podcasting, it hasn't been a wireless experience. With Mobilcast, no special cellphone is required. Here's a list of current MobilCast programs by category.

NPR has done much more than simply repurpose its own material for podcasts. The radio giant is hosting podcasts for member stations, and selling and splitting underwriting revenues with them. Plus, it's launched three original podcasts under the new alt.NPR brand as an incubator for edgier content. NPR content is available on Mobilcast immediately. It digitally encrypts each file, so every purchased song becomes specific to the individual user. NPR podcasts are free.

The NPR podcast directory now includes 195 podcasts. The original 17 podcasts it offered last August have been downloaded more than 5 million times (as of 6 months ago).

Podcast Alley and Podcasts.Yahoo index thousands of great programs. In October, Apple cut a deal with Disney to make popular tv shows on the ABC network available for the video iPod on iTunes for $1.99. CBS and NBC have made similar forays into online content.

Rob Greenlee is Sr. Marketing Manager for Seattle-based Melodeo. He is also a long-time host, producer and founder of the wonderfully produced WebTalk Radio program (right).

Podcasting: Big or Not

Last year, people spent $2 billion online for everything from digital music and movies to research, dating site subscriptions, and greeting cards, reports the Business2Blog. While subscription revenues still account for 78% of the total, one-time payments grew 40% thanks mostly to iTunes.

The whole Entertainment segment (music, movies, etc) totalled only $573 million, but it surpassed the online dating segment for the first time, says Business 2.0.

Om Malik reports analyst Charlene Li at Forrester Research, is not bullish on Podcasting. Forester's report says only one percent of online households regularly download and listen to podcasts. In 2006, they predict that number will only be around 700,000.

The Diffusion Group has a different take. They predict “demand for time-shifted digital audio files or “podcasts” is expected to grow from less than 15% of all portable digital music player owners in 2004 to 75% by 2010.

A survey by Pew Research conducted last month found 6 percent of cell phone users play music on their device, while 19 percent wish their phone had that feature. A mere 2 percent watch mobile video or TV, but 14 percent said they would like to. Some 41% of cell phone owners say they fill in free time by making phone calls.

PodTech estimates that 15-20 million people are accessing podcasts on iTunes. Apple watchers put the iTunes client software penetration around 100 million worldwide. Podtech, incidently, has terrific podcast coverage of CTIA 2006.

Meanwhile, PayPal introduced PayPal Mobile, this week. The text message-based service enables consumers in the US and Canada to send money anytime, from anywhere, using their mobile telephones.

To use PayPal Mobile, customers first activate their telephones by logging into their PayPal accounts at https://www.paypal.com/mobile. After registering their mobile telephone numbers, users must choose a secure Personal Identification Number (PIN) which protects every mobile payment.

Podcasting WordPress Plugin

Mighty Seek - Web Application Security Podcast and Blog PodPress
Looks like a nice and fully featured WP plugin..

Features

Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM)
Auto Generation of enclosure tag
Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
Podcast Download stats
Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
Control over where the player will display within your post.
Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
Supports unlimited number of media files.
Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
Preview image for videos
Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes

Studios Agree To DVD-Download Simul-Release; Burn, But Only PC Viewing

WSJ: This is a step forward in the collapsing windows of the movie business, but is still crazily convoluted…Movie studios have agreed to give movies to their co-owned online movie service Movielink at the same time that the movies hit DVD and retail. This will start with “Brokeback Mountain”, that is being released on DVD tomorrow.
The pact is for both new and catalog titles.Meanwhile, the independently owned competitor CinemaNow, has made a similar arrangement with Sony and Lionsgate and also plans to begin selling films this week.
Some major points:
– 300 films will go on sale on Movielink
– Movielink will allow consumers to burn a backup DVD of the movie and to keep the movie on as many as three computers. But the discs burned from Movielink will play only in computer DVD player, not on regular (TV) DVD players. If consumers have a Microsoft Media Center Edition PC, they can stream their copy of a Movielink movie to a TV set connected to a Media Center extender or Xbox.
– The TV viewing is still a few months away as movie studios agree and work on the DRM part.
– Movielink: Newer releases will cost between $20 and $30 — higher than DVDs — and catalog titles will cost $10 to $16, in line with DVDs.
– CinemaNow’s prices for all titles will range between $10 and $20, although its customers won’t yet be able to watch their movies on other computers or burn them onto DVDs. It will start with 75 movies for now.
– The movies on both services require more than an hour to download, even on a high-speed connection.
– Walt Disney hasn’t yet signed up for the sales or the earlier release dates.
– NYT: Apple, Amaxon.com and nd other online retailers are also busily trying to cut deals with Hollywood to sell downloads.
– The downloads do not include the bonus features, like deleted scenes and filmmaker interviews, that often accompany DVD’s
– Whacked up example: “Memoirs of a Geisha,” from Sony, will cost $19.99 to download from CinemaNow and $25.99 from Movielink. As a DVD, by contrast, it is priced at $16.87 at Wal-Mart.
– Some studios, including Warner and Universal, plan to withdraw some movies from online sales in the period that they are appearing on pay TV networks like HBO.
Related: @ NATPE 2006: Portable Movies: Studios May Be More Receptive But iTunes Model Poses ProblemsMovies

semapedia physical wiki entries

the process of physically 'tagging' real-world objects with semacodes, so that users with mobile phone cameras can automatically retrieve relevant wikipedia articles on their device. see also qr code & grafedia.
[semapedia.org]

OGLE Captures Texture Coords

As of OGLE 0.3b, it is possible to capture texture coordinates (UV) for vertices that have them. This is enabled by the CaptureTextureCoords flag. Coupled with the fact that GLIntercept writes out to disk images for all the texture maps, this allows you to re-texture your capture in Maya with a little menial labor, eg:

This has tested to work accurately on some applications (World Of Warcraft) but on others it seems to misbehave, so it is disabled by default. I am working with Damian Trebilco, author of GLIntercept, to give OGLE the power to do this image-texture-assigning work automatically. Give it time...

Originally from OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D blogs, ReBlogged by fruminator on Mar 31, 2006 at 02:58 PM

Wired News: The Best Internet Spoofs

Some are so clever that it's easy to be taken in. Others are so patently ridiculous that you should probably slash your wrists for falling so easily. Here are 10 of the best.

daversy.tigris.org

That means that it can help you do the following things :

• Keep a history of changes to your database.
• Instantly create a database for any version of your software.
• Automatically generate upgrade scripts to update your deployed servers.
• Merge changes made by different developers on separate database and deploy them to an integration server.