unmediated

"Culture, Commerce, and Public Media: A New Forum for Creators" addresses how commercial and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media can make their materials—current productions, and legacy content—more openly available. June 5-6, 2006.

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

Multifunctional Picture viewer and Video control script for Second Life.

An estimated 100,000 people have squirreled away 9/11 materials. They range from video and document collections to flags, badges, roadside shrines, electronic archives of trade center blogs and even compilations of conspiracy theory materials.

MediaSnackers is a site/weblog/project/call to action for people interested in how young people consume and create media across the globe.

Via del.icio.us/rybesh

Excerpted from Apple Daily via InMediaHK:

What is the most popular movie in Hong Kong?   It is not M:i:3 (which is likely not to be shown in mainland China) and it is not Da Vinci Code (which is severely criticized by the Catholic Church).  No, it is a stealth video clip entitled "巴士阿叔, Bus UncleTube.

The incident occurred on the top deck of a Number 68X Kowloon bus on April 29.  A young man observed that the middle-aged person in front of him was talking too loud on the mobile telephone.  So he tapped the man's shoulder and asked him to keep the volume down.  This led to a vigorous response, including a string of obscenities.  The entire proceedings were recorded by another passenger named John using a mobile camera phone.  The film was uploaded on YouTube and then seen by the whole wide world.  As of May 19, 1.2 million people have watched the video clip! (Update: 1.9 million as of May 26; ETTV cited a 5.9 million figure on May 27, which probably combines all the editions).

Yes, but so what?  

Well, I must say that even I am astonished by the spontaneous media exposures and brand extensions that have occurred so far.

Filed under: Culture, PC, Online, MMO, Business

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Microsoft have unveiled a completely new image file format, called Windows Media Photo (.wmp files), at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, which will apparently be of better quality at half the size of a comparable JPEG image.

Strangers and friends are connecting in online communities, as described in this Memorial Day article in the Washington Post:

As the country observes the memory of those who died in its wars, online memorials have altered acts of bereavement and become palliative retreats for some who grieve. Web sites dedicated to the deceased now number in the millions in the United States, and for those left behind, posting stories, photos and videos is a way of keeping a permanent record of the person's life. Material added to mark important days such as birthdays, Mother's Day and Memorial Day, or even notes left by well-wishing strangers help the page evolve, so the memorial itself can take on a kind of second life.

By Robert Niles: The Sunlight Foundation hopes to use reader-driven grassroots reporting to help uncover news from the U.S. federal government.

the game has a life of its own, with a retail GBA release [via]

Playing a game within a game, like an electronic version of a Matreshka.

Originally from Waxy.org Links, ReBlogged by eteam on May 29, 2006 at 07:51 PM

a graphical visualization map of the websites people are visiting, updated every second with where people are going & coming from. as sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm & grow larger. conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center & grow smaller. website traffic is symbolized with thin lines: each line symbolizes a move from one site to the other.
see also google browser.
[swarmthe.com]

It's called "Sway's Hip Hop Owner's Manual," an upcoming series that's produced exclusively for mobile devices. The show's host, Sway Calloway, is shot tight for the small screen. During an interview, Calloway and his guest are asked to "stand a little bit, um, unnaturally close to each other." One of the show's producers, Sean Lee, explains that it becomes personal in a way TV never does. "He's saying: 'Hey, it's me, on your phone. I'm talking to you.' "

TV Week: Video use on cell phones still 'surprisingly low'

TechCrunch profiles CNET's AllYouCanUpload.com, a new site that allows users to upload photos -- free, without registration, without limits -- for posting anywhere on the web. "We are seeing more and more new web applications that keep piling on new features to the point where it’s nearly impossible to understand what they are doing," writes Michael Arrington. "When I see something like this -- a service that strives to do one thing efficiently and without friction, it makes my heart warm. Simple does not equal boring. Simple can be disruptive. I want more services like AllYouCanUpload." There's a powerful lesson here for traditional media who try to do everything and force it all on the home page.

Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions

Keynote: The Naked Interface - Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions by Luke Williams: Friday, July 21, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm.; Webvisions 2006, Explore the Future of the WebJuly 20 to 21, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.

Throughout the electronic age, people have become accustomed to interacting with digital media indirectly, mediated through screens and peripheral devices. But now, as digital technology becomes invisibly embedded in everyday things, the "feeling" of everyday things is also increasingly becoming embedded in digital technology.

In many senses, physical objects are becoming more important. In an immediate way, they can help us define new systems of relationships with digital information. This presentation will examine how perceptions and gestures formed through our experiences with physical products can effectively bring liberty to the relationship between brain, body and digital media interface.

What the audience will learn: :: How patterns and archetypes from product design now frame new ways for people to orientate themselves around information. :: The principle of stimulating one sense through another to create multi-sensory interactions. :: New developments at the collision point between "real world" objects and "digital interfaces" – the touch screen.

According to the Miniwatts Marketing Group's Internet Usage and World Population Statistics (last updated March 31, 2006), worldwide Internet penetration is only 15.7%! So much for the World Wide Web... this is indeed sobering stuff for those of us obsessed with 'web 2.0' technology. Here's the main table of stats:

WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS
World Regions	Population % of World	% Population (Penetra- tion)	Usage % of World	Usage Growth 2000-2005
Africa	14.1 %	2.6 %	2.3 %	423.9 %
Asia	56.4 %	9.9 %	35.6 %	218.7 %
Europe	12.4 %	36.1 %	28.5 %	177.5 %
Middle East	2.9 %	9.6 %	1.8 %	454.2 %
North America	5.1 %	68.6 %	22.2 %	110.3 %
Latin America / Caribbean	8.5 %	14.4 %	7.8 %	342.5 %
Oceania / Australia	0.5 %	52.6 %	1.7 %	134.6 %
WORLD TOTAL	100.0 %	15.7 %	100.0 %	183.4 %

Source: World Internet Usage Statistics and Population Stats (nb: removed two columns to make it fit)

In North America, where most Web innovations still come from, the penetration figure is 68.6%. However in Africa it's just 2.6%, Asia 9.9% and the Middle East 9.6%. Together Africa, Asia and Middle East make up 73.4% of the world's population. So that basically means 3/4 of the world has extremely low Internet penetration. The one positive note is that usage growth rates are encouraging (see column on the right). 

Interesting to note that China, seen by most analysts as a big growth market for Web technologies, has an Internet penetration of only 8.5%. Considering that great parts of China are rural, this isn't overly surprising. Also mobile technologies have a much bigger impact in China, than the PC. 

Still, these figures put things into perspective. I feel very lucky to live in a country (New Zealand) that has 76.3% penetration - even if the broadband is slow and expensive!

p.s. amazing how in these circumstances Pete Cashmore has managed to get 5 billion RSS subscribers ;-)

Have Money Will Vlog About

I like the concept.. A bit like turning video blogging into a sustainable "public medium". Maybe.

Would like it even better if the creative output of this was Creative Commons licensed, perhaps Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License would be appropriate.

From the site:
Have Money Will Vlog? What’s the deal?
Many good projects need only action to be successful. With the distribution of the internet, a person with a good video project can be seen by thousands of people. But some ideas need money.
Money for equipment.
Money for travel.
Money for time.
Traditional artists can apply for grants to make their work. Have Money Will Vlog supports videobloggers trying to do the amazing. The power of the community can fund projects on a regular basis. You easily spend $10 or more everytime you go out to see a movie…so consider donating $10 a month to a videoblog project. If we have 100 people that give $10 a month, that’s $1000. Let’s energize creators.

Google Cleans Ajax for Java
Very interesting.. Will have to give it a shot..
From the article:
The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) released this week is a framework that converts a standard Java application into Ajax that will work in all browsers.

FMJ - Freedom for Media in Java
From the site:
FMJ is an open-source project with the goal of providing a replacement/alternative to Java Media Framework (JMF).

JMF is still dead in the water, despite some folks from Sun making a little bit of noise a couple of months back. Let's hope this effort keeps it going.

qp: Command Line QuickTime Player

QTCoffee

qt_tools

The fact that tactical media artist Adam Hyde is a traveller manifests itself in his work in many ways. For example, he recently established a mobile low-res artist’s residency in a campervan in New Zealand; the mobicast system he developed in collaboration with Luka Prinic was first used on the Tran-Siberian Express; and his latest production comes in a suitcase. The Streaming Suitcase is a portable box of tricks for Hyde’s streaming workshops on free and open source software. The project’s website makes these tools available to the greater public, along with blueprints creating a ’secondary economy’ for information. Visitors will find manuals offering plain-language instructions for streaming audio and video over the internet, as well as a glossary of terms and a handy list of links. The suitcase can help one learn the basics of Linux and PureData, and even build their own mini FM transmitter. In the true spirit of open source, Hyde invites viewers to ‘have a browse and take what you want.’ - Helen Varley Jamieson

http://www.streamingsuitcase.com

Originally from Rhizome.org Net Art News at May 29, 2006, 03:00, published by Marisa S. Olson

Type commentary
Genre work, archive
Keywords open source

a New York-based information bureau dedicated to world wide distribution of information for contemporary visual arts institutions via the Internet.

A sharing platform for social groups

Here's our current theatrical release schedule for The War Tapes. When we know more, we'll tell you, but save the date -- make sure you're there on opening night:

6/2 – NYC (Sunshine)

6/30 - WASH DC (E Street)

6/30 – BOSTON (Kendall Sq)

6/30 – SAN FRANCISCO (Castro)

"Cactuses" is a feature-length movie made entirely by a group of Central Valley youth, with ages ranging from 14 to 21, and funded exclusively by a youth-targeted non-profit organization.

You easily spend $10 or more everytime you go out to see a movie…so consider donating $10 a month to a videoblog project.

Open source documentary of a trip across America, CC-licensed, plans to Annodex all the media.

Sites that link up users in affinity groups are wildly popular. Even better, they seem to have figured out how to make money

Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, telephones, billboards, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and e-mail all are vehicles for conveying information within a medium or media. These vehicles aren't the media or a medium in which they operate.

Here's an overdue product -- a USB WiFi client with an antenna connector. WIFI-Link's USB adapter (WL-USB-RSMAP) has a female reverse polarity (RP) SMA connector so you can choose from a huge variety of WiFi antennas (in addition to the one that comes with it).

The MSRP of $49.50 is reasonable. In quantities of 100, it's only $29/each. Coupled with a 16db Vagi ($35, left) it may be just the ticket for residential penetration of WiFi city clouds. It's compatible with Windows 98se/ME/2000/XP and offers up to 256-bit WEP and WPA2 protection.

USB clients are a snap to install. USB cords are cheap and available at any store. USB clients also eliminate expensive, easily broken PC card connectors, RF cable losses and power cords.

The key to "city cloud" residential penetration is a strong signal with a low ($30-$60) CPE price. This may be the proverbial "it".

As was expected, four major studios and three television networks have sued Cablevision for their plan to eliminate the residential DVR, instead allowing users to store and control content from the Cablevision network side (see previous report). An MPAA spokesperson tells Reuters Cablevision "can't establish a for-profit, on-demand service without authorization from copyright owners whose content is used on that service."

"This lawsuit is without merit, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Cablevision's remote-storage DVR and ignores the enormous benefit and well-established right of viewers to time-shift television programming," said Cablevision in a statement. "We hope and expect the court will allow our customer-friendly technological approach to move forward."

Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max and an ongoing presence in developing its open source cousin, Pure Data (Pd), recently told the Pd mailing list he had compiled Pd for Intel Macs. You can download the Intel-native version on his Website:

Software by Miller Puckette

(Curiously, he calls them “iMacs”, but unless he’s modified the UI to look nice on white computers, I think that means Intel Macs!) This is the first step on what should soon bring the full-fledged Pd platform to Intel Macs. In the meantime, I would honestly suggest booting into one of the excellent Intel Linux distributions on this machine, since Pd runs very well on Linux. But it’s good news, nonetheless.

I keep hearing wonderful things about Pd, even from Max/MSP users who use it as to complement Max on various projects. We’ve got a good thread going on the CDM forums about how to learn Pd, alongside a previous thread on open source sound tools, and I just looked through various Pd tutorials on a site called Streaming Suitcase. If you’ve ever got Pd patches you’d like to share, let us know.

learning, Mac, Mactel, open source, Pd, software

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=vDSDjr">

Speaking this week at the CableLabs Financial Analyst Conference in New York, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said the company's primary thrust in 2006 has been to employ switched digital video (SDV). The technology frees up bandwidth on cable systems by delivering fewer channels to the cable-box, and keeping the rest waiting at the edge router.

A trial of the technology in Austin resulted in bandwidth savings greater than fifty percent, according to Time Warner execs. Out of the 1,000 homes in that trial, 45 out of 170 channels were being simultaneously viewed. The remaining un-used channels still gobbled up network bandwidth while sitting un-viewed.

Time Warner, the most aggressive MSO on this front, says they've deployed this technology in three markets, with four to six planned next year. When asked about the cost of such an initiative, Britt states the MSO rolled out switched digital, digital simulcast and "Start Over" technology in one recent market for about $16 per home.

Here's a rather special Media Recorder, not really the kind that you will see in everybody's home. The Samsung SVR-1650 is a media recorder and more specifically a standalone DVR for security purposes, it's capable of receiving data from 16 video sources, then encode all that into Mpeg4 at 480fps in 720x480 and store it onto its 250GB HDD (2TB optional) and burn it onto DVD... Cooool!

Want a truly powerful device for interfacing with motors, sensors, lights, and more? CDM’s assistant editor and Web ninja Jaymis Loveday and I are both excited about the upcoming MAKE Controller Kit, built by MakingThings (of Teleo fame). MAKE has started taking preorders, and shipping should start in a few weeks. You might want to preorder early; this run could sell out given the rapid growth of MAKE Magazine. (If you’re not reading and you’re into DIY, run and get a subscription.)

MAKE Controller Kit

Why is it cool?

It’s 32-bit and much faster than even more-expensive competitors, it’s surprisingly cheap for its capabilities ($150), it’s open source, you can count on lots of documentation and examples from MAKE (well, certainly from me, if you bug me enough), and software for interfacing with Processing, Flash, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd, and C/C++ is all included. That makes it both an incredible bargain and unusually versatile. And it’s great to see MakingThings, which had previously made proprietary hardware, go open source and publish their firmware, even if you never touch it.

The only real problem I can see with the Controller Kit is that it’s overkill for some jobs, larger because of its expanded I/O, and not likely the kind of thing you’d build yourself. There will still be a place for simple USB and MIDI sensor boards (hence we’re covering those today).

The current issue of Make Magazine has a great story on how the board came to be, the process of designing it, and the design goals.

DIY, Electronics, hardware, homebrew, physical computing, Sensors

Broadband video consumption surged 18 percent in the six months between October 2005 and March 2006, according to comScore's new Video Metrix service. In March, U.S. Internet users streamed 3.7 billion pieces of video content watching an average of...

Continue.

Clayton Christensen, five years ago:

One of the litmus tests is that, in almost every case, a disruptive technology enables a larger population of less skilled people to do things that historically only an expert could do. And to do it in a more convenient setting.

Terry Heaton, today:

This is precisely the issue with the triumph of personal technology over mass technology, and it offers amazing opportunities for local media companies. If you're a local station, for example, pick a local information niche and go after it as if you weren't a TV station (or radio station or newspaper). What would you do and what would you build that would meet that need effectively and efficiently? I promise you it won't be an on-demand piece of content.

Because here's the deal. The tools available to everyday people that are turning the media world on its head are also available to professional organizations. You don't have to approach everything with a $100,000 solution when $10,000 will do just fine. If aggregation is where its at (and I believe that it is), then build aggregators. Let other people be the content creators and move yourself to the edge. Not only is it fun there, but that's where the profitability is going to be downstream.

Lots more at that last link. Dig it.

Appropriate technology is an approach to design for development which emphasizes, in a nutshell, better design for essential low-cost technologies which local communities can build and repair themselves. The Appropriate Technology Wiki Porject is a new effort to both update the classic Appropriate Technology Sourcebook and to facilitate open source design.

It's a really cool site, with already including ideas for Agricultural Tools; Aquaculture; Beekeeping; BioGas; Crop Drying, Preservation, and Storage; Improved Cookstoves and Charcoal Production; Nonformal Education and Training; Small Enterprises and Cooperatives; Solar Energy; and Water Supply and Sanitation as well as a bunch of other interesting information.

(via Emeka)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 07:53 AM)

Powered by three LEDS rather than the traditional lamp, Mitisubishi's PK10, they claim, is the world's smallest projector. The Japanese electronics giant showed just what the PK10 PocketProjector can do when it was installed in a concept car of theirs. Whilst mounted, the projector was used to display various data on a transparent screen on the dashboard.

The PK10 PocketProjector features your everyday RCA inputs on the back, allowing users to connect any number of electronic devices to the projector for some wholesome projector fun.

Mitubishi hails the projector's low cost as a major coup, yet doesn't bother to release price or availability information, if it's coming out for consumers at all.

Mitsubishi PK10 PocketProjector - Worlds Smallest Projector Tried Out In A Mitsubishi Concept CT Care [Mobile Whack via Ubergizmo]

 
Comment on this post
Related: LG External Drive Burns Everything
Related: AirPort Express Stations Frying
Related: I-O Data HTH-USR for Nervous Types

Yesterday marked the beginning of Institute for the Futures annual Tech Horizon conference. I have really been looking forward to this event since I got to meet so many visionary people at the last IFTF event.

Larry Smarr the Director of California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology was giving the first keynote tonight about telepresence and its social implications. And by telepresence he is talking about videoconferencing systems where the technology has intuitive interactions and the present difference between interactions face-to-face and a videoconferencing interaction will not be sensed – also called transparent telepresence.

He had some really interesting perspectives on processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth which will surpass human capabilities within the next 10-15 years and enable real time human level telepresence.

To give an example of his views of technology surpassing human capabilities is the eye-to-brain communication which is being done at about 1 gigabit/sec, a bandwidth speed introduced to the mass market some years ago but has yet to reach Internet Service Providers portfolio.

A possible social change with real time human perception level telepresence technology would be that humans have less real contact and would travel less. A scary forecast which I could see happen from a corporate point of view or the gaming room of teenagers chatting with friends, though studies has also concluded that the usage of current telepresence systems of remote interaction only encourages the drive to meet the people at the other end in real life.

If that study will reach the same conclusion when future telepresence systems gets similar abilities of real life human presence will be up for debate.

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 24, 2006 at 03:11 PM

Bruce Sterling, Wired: "Bloggers are sometimes pigeon-holed as pundits or journalists. In the Web 2.0 economy, they can be kingmakers, channeling crowds of willing participants wherever- they like."

If you're eager to converse without Uncle Sam listening in, PGP creator Philip Zimmermann has released a new free beta of software that will encrypt VoIP calls. Dubbed Zfone, the software uses Diffie-Hellman to generate a per-session key for VoIP calls using the new ZRTP protocol Zimmermann proclaims is better than alternatives.

"better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another ZRTP client."

The software is free, and available for Mac OS-X, Linux, and Windows XP. Of course it won't work with Skype and other popular solutions, so you'll have to run a softphone like X-Lite, Gizmo, or SJphone as per the FAQ.

Symella, a Gnutella client for Symbian Smartphones
Listening to a presentation about this now. Pretty interesting but will have to wait to get back to NYC before I can try it (data isn't working in Europe for me).
From the site:
Symella is a Gnutella client for Symbian smartphones. Gnutella is a Peer-to-Peer file sharing network system with many clients (and servers) available on various desktop operating systems (for desktop Gnutella clients check out this site).
It is used for exchanging files, especially music, MP3 files. Because mobile phones have limited bandwidth and small memory cards, this client focuses only for downloading, not sharing. It is available on Series 60 and Series 80.

A new lifestyle trend is springing up in South Korea, one of the world's most advanced digital hotbeds more and more folks are retreating to their homes instead of socializing with others. The Korea Times reports.

Experts call the phenomenon "digital cocooning'' because such a fad is enabled and accelerated by the digital revolution, which is occurring here in a full-fledged manner.

et and wireless technology is generating two seemingly conflicting tendencies - some are enjoying a nomadic outdoor life thanks to wireless gadgets while others stay nested up at home with them,'' said Park Jung-hyun, a senior consultant at LG Economic Research Institute.

"The former can be called digital nomads, the latter digital cocoons, or ones who retreat into the seclusion of their homes for privacy or escape,'' Park added.

"If digital cocooning represents future trends, it is understandable that such digital alienation mushrooms in technologically-advanced Korea faster than other countries,'' he said.

... Samsung Head: Most Famous Digital Cocoon? Korea's richest businessman, Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web was knighted in the UK for his invention. The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, Tim Berners-Lee said. Sir Tim was speaking at the start of the WWW2006 conference on the future of the web at the International Conference Centre in Edinburgh.

Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period".

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said. "Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

read more on BBC News
www2006 Social Wiki

Via Stephen Downes here is Jem Stone's summary of the BBC blogging policy for employees. This clear, cogent and reasonable document was written collaboratively, using a wiki.

"In the discussion that ensued, it was interesting to note that the ideas danced around the concepts of design--service design, product design, the relationship between the two, notions of ubiquitous computing, etc--but never actually mentioned design, and design as a process of taking technology and applying it in a targeted way. This identifies, at least for me, that there's a conceptual gap in the terminology."

A couple of weeks ago, the Experimental Digital Arts (EDA) of UCLA hosted Girls ‘N’ Games conference. Panelists ranging from anthropologist Mimi Ito to Brenda Laurel from the gaming company Purple Moon gathered to discuss everything from the perils of playing up stereotypes in “girl game design” to the differences in girl gaming in Asia, North American and Europe. Gamasutra gives a good overview of the discussion, while over at Joystiq, Jennie Lees offers an interesting counterpoint. She notes that much of this discussion was covered at the Women’s Game conference in 2005, and wonders if the debate has become stagnant. A fascinating discussion follows Lees’ post with commentary from many gamers, both male and female.

Via: Gamasutra and Joystiq

http://www.popgadget.net/2006/05/not_just_for_bo.php">Originally from Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 23, 2006 at 12:25 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog at May 23, 2006, 13:25, published by Marisa S. Olson

Advertising Age reports:

Google Adds Video Capability to AdSense

So sites like PJNet.org, which could sign up for AdSense, would not only get instant text ads playing off the website content, but also video ads.

Gokul Rajaram, product management director for AdSense, says:

"We expect it to be popular with movie studios who want to show trailers, automakers who want to show demonstrations of the vehicle or consumer package-goods companies," he said, adding that he envisions the offering will be popular with both large and small advertisers. Imagine, he said, the owner of a small beachfront vacation home in Maui showcasing the home through video ads in a specific travel blog on the Google ad network.

The blip.tv guys are some of the most clued in video technology guys around. Sure, blip.tv is no youTube, but thank god for that. They have a much brighter future. They did it again today, and launched a “very unofficial” Windows Movie Maker plugin.

It worked perfectly for me, here’s the movie.

Super easy!

Windows Movie Maker comes pre-installed on every Windows XP computer (it’s in the accessories folder in your programs), and for simple movies it’s actually quite nice. The plugin is a download and it installs in about 12 seconds (yes, I timed it). I don’t know how they did it, but the site mentions “Blip.tv support in Windows Movie Maker is not endorsed in any way by Microsoft”.

This will make me from a lazyvlogger (who doesn’t post often) perhaps into an active vlogger. It’s really cool. Add blip’s cross-post to your blog functionality, and you got a 1-click winner.

Here’s a screenshot:

Deleuze's Ontology as Expressed in the Global Indymedia Network

Introduction: Delanda, Deleuze and Indymedia: In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel Delanda tries to explain Gilles Deleuze's ontology in straightforward language “for an audience of scientists and analytical philosophers of science” (Delanda, 7). He tries to untangle the language of Deleuze, a writer who allowed for much play in his language, jumping between various concepts and frequently renaming those concepts. Still, in his writing, Gilles Deleuze developed a rich ontological framework with which one can view the universe. This ontology is based on a rigorous mathematical approach which Delanda explains in great depth.

In this paper I will explain a few components of Deleuze's worldview, as explained by Delanda, using the example of Indymedia, the global Independent Media Center movement. The global Indymedia site, describes Indymedia as “a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth.” (Independent Media Center, About Indymedia.)

Within the network itself, each collective organizes itself autonomously, without a top-down leadership, while still acting within a framework created by the Global Indymedia Points of Unity. Throughout the paper I will refer to various texts written by different local collectives. My intention is not to create a complete, thorough representation of the network, which is global and very diverse, but to use a few samples which relate strongly to ideas expressed in Deleuze's ontology.

While I realize that Deleuze's ontology serves perfectly well to explain far more simple entities, such as a chair, it is my hope that this analysis will reveal some interesting dynamics because of the affinity between Delanda's motivations and those of the Indymedia network. Delanda states that one of the conclusions of his book is that “the very idea that there can be a set of true sentences which give us the facts once and for all, an idea of a closed and finished world, gives way to an open world full of divergent processes... the kind of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and present it as the final truth.” The Indymedia Network works to challenge the claim to objectivity, or truth, of corporate media outlets by providing a space where people can tell their own stories and comment on other's stories, in an ongoing process, in order to help create social change. The processes that create this space will be further illuminated throughout this paper.

Multiplicities not Things

Delanda explains Deleuze's how realist ontology replaces the concept of essences with “dynamical processes” and the “multiplicity”. (Delanda, 5) Where many realist traditions are based on the transcendental concept of essence, describing for example the ideological category of “a chair”, Deleuze replaces that simplistic idea with the multiplicity, “a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations, together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels.” Delanda goes on to describe the relation of this concept to group theory and its difference from categories, which define individuals in a population a aberrations from the abstract instead of processes, which are defined by the set of individuals they describe.

The global Indymedia network can be seen as a result of a number of social, technological and economic processes itself: ubiquitous cheap internet access, a tradition of media activism including newspaper propagandists and pirate radio dj's, corporate globalization. At the same time, the Indymedia network is embodied by a number of processes.

Indymedia defines itself as a non-hierarchical network, not as a federation, coalition or collective. Networks are defined by communication among a disparate set of nodes. As a network, Indymedia can itself be seen as a population of collectives, or as a multiplicity described by the characteristics of the collectives in the network. The Global Indymedia Points of Unity, agreed to by all collectives in the network, state: “The Independent Media Center Network (IMCN) is based upon principles of equality, decentralization and local autonomy. The IMCN is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process, but from the self-organization of autonomous collectives that recognize the importance in developing a union of networks.” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity) As such, there is a wide degree of play across a number of variables such as number of participants, focus on various mediums, degree of cooperation with local communities, degree of transparency of process, openness to differing political viewpoints, amount of finances and more. Systems with many degrees of freedom can be seen as complex systems or dynamical processes. In addition, although there is an official collective that approves entry into the Indymedia network, over time some collectives fade away while others are closely integrated with projects outside of the network, making the strict definition of the network even harder.

Within the network, different collectives can also be seen as multiplicities, some more so than others. In particular, Portland Indymedia defines itself as “not a membership organization; it is a tactic, a concept, and a movement that can be effectively utilized in many different ways.” While some other Indymedia centers do have official membership, many do not and are based on loose affinities and degrees of individual participation. Unlike traditional unions or other forms of political organization with rosters of dues paying members, Indymedia is defined by a process of communication, affinity and participation. Delanda sums up Deleuze's view of things as processes saying “the alternative offered by Deleuze is to avoid taking as given fully formed individuals, or what amounts to the same thing, to always account for the genesis of individuals”. Further blurring the definition of membership in Indymedia is its Open Publishing policy where anyone can post to Indymedia websites, many people do and consider themselves part of Indymedia. As many Indymedia sites say “you ARE Indymedia.” (San Diego Indymedia)

Asking The Right Questions

Open Publishing was a founding concept of Indymedia in 1999, before blogs and myspace were commonplace. Open Publishing has been defined by people within the Indymedia network as “mean[ing] that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available.” (Arnison) The actual implementations of this vary widely and opinions on how open Open Publishing should be very widely even within local collectives. Delanda presents Deleuze's “problematic approach”, saying that “a solution always has the truth it deserves according to how well specified the corresponding problem” and goes on to say that “problems can replace fundamental law statements.” (Delanda 163) While Delanda's approach contains a high degree of rigor and describes specific mathematical models resulting in specific physical entities and populations, one can still see a high degree of correlation in Indymedia's approach of asking questions instead of promoting a party line. Unlike organizations that choose a linguistic statement of truth and promote that statement, Indymedia seeks to create a space for open publishing, diffusion of a variety of varying ideas and debate. The network does engage in editorial work on their sites, based on the Points of Unity which reject hate speech, but within that framework, they seek to ask questions, not provide answers.

The problematic approach is further exemplified by Indymedia's non-hierarchical structure. Since the Indymedia network “is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity), there is no single set of statements that define the truth of what Indymedia is. There are principles that collectives in the network have agreed to, but those principles are subject to local interpretation and to change at any time by a network wide consensus. Indymedia is defined by a set of problems it is trying to address simply stated as corporate controlled media, not by the theories of any individual or the policies of any bureaucracy. As Richard Day states in Gramsci is Dead, there is “a shift away from hegemonically-oriented 'movements', and towards non-branded strategies and tactics such as Independent Media Center”. (Day 9) The Indymedia network is an example of a tactic for creating change which does not strive to promote a simple set of truths but a set of questions, an invitation.

Time and Communication in Delanda

Moving onto Deleuze's conception of time, Delanda delves into communication theory. While multiplicities can define populations, they still must have invariant properties within those populations that bind them, and “whenever we speak of the invariant properties of an entity we also need to describe an operator, or group of operators, capable of performing rotations, translations, projections, foldings and a variety of other transformations on that entity.. The quasi-cause is, indeed, this operator and it is defined not by its giving rise to multiplicities but by its capacity to affect them.”

The quasi-cause affects multiplicities and links them together. To explain the quasi-causal operator, Deleuze and Delanda use the example of an information channel. (Delanda 84) If one imagines the individual Indymedia collectives as multiplicities, then the information channel between them, the broader network, can be seen as this kind of operator linking them together. When Deleuze says “once communication between heterogeneous series is established, all sorts of consequences follow within the system. Something passes the borders, events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning,” (Delanda 150) one can see a clear parallel to the global information sharing within the network where the stories of burning tires from the streets of Argentina or of mass border crossings in Morocco are passed from country to country, city to city, through Indymedia.

Attractors and the Virtual

Delanda's book, in Describing Deleuze's ontology, is largely about the virtual and its effect on the actual world. Deleuze says “it is correct to represent a double series of events which develop in two planes, echoing without resembling each other: real events on the level of engendered solutions, and ideal events embedded in the conditions of the problem”. One critical example of a virtual entity is an attractor. “Attractors... may be defined as special subsets of state space, that is, as limit states” (Delanda 80) Later, in his definition of multiplicities, Delanda states that the attractors are “never actualized”. (Delanda 30) For example, the policy of having Open Publishing and the Global Indymedia Principles of Unity can be seen as being two attractors, or as being the virtual corresponding to the actual Indymedia network. While they are stated goals, varying collectives follow them to varying degrees, representing different states in the system at varying distances from the stated goal or the attractor. Deleuze states that “The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual... Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object”. The attractors that influence the trajectories of multiplicities are no less real because they are not actualized. They are observable.

Conclusion

Any attempt at a mathematically rigorous description of a thing so large, complex and nebulous as a social movement is bound to fail, or at best be inexact. This difficulty is compounded by a the fluidity of a network such as Indymedia. This paper is an attempt to describe the global Indymedia network as an entity within a Deleuzian ontology, while showing affinity between Deleuze's approach and that of Indymedia. Manuel Delanda's book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is an attempt to construct a clear picture of Deleuze's ontology and to provide a detailed alternative to Deleuze's explanation of the mathematical foundations of dynamical processes. (Delanda 5) In bringing Delanda's text, which attempts to described specific physical processes, together with the study of social movements and media culture, there is a bit of inexactness. Nevertheless, as Delanda states, “we philosophers must invent devices to allow us to become 'the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator'”, and in that tradition this paper is an attempt to explain some of the connections I saw while reading Delanda. As the Zapatistas said in the Second Declaration of La Realidad “We are the network, all of us who resist.” (Graeber)

Works Cited

Arnison, Matthew. "Open publishing is the same as free software" March 2001. May 1, 2006. http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html.

Day, Richard J.F. Gramsci is Dead. London: Pluto Press, 2005.

Delanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2002.

Graeber, David. "The New Anarchists". The New Left Review. Jan-Feb 2002. May 1, 2006. http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24704.shtml.

Independent Media Center. "About Indymeda". Independent Media Center. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml

Independent Media Center. "Global Indymedia Principles of Unity". Indymedia Documentation Project. May 2006. May 1, 2006. http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PrinciplesOfUnity

Independent Media Center. "Indymedia FAQ". Indymedia Documentation Project. Jan 2005. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml

San Diego Indymedia. "About Us". San Diego Indymedia. Feb 2005. May 1, 2006. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/static/aboutus.shtml

[via nettime]

Summer of MySpace

Call for Participation: The Summer of MySpace - an online exhibition; Curated by Patrick Lichty - The Curator of MySpace; myspace[at]voyd.com; Friend Request Dates - 5/21/06 - 8/31/06.

MySpace is a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people have poured their lives into this online community, making it the most successful to date, surpassing Friendster, Xuqa, and Facebook. Millions of hours of creative time by its users, aspiring bands, models, and magazines have been placed into this online agora. But is MySpace a creative space? "Summer of MySpace" asks a number of questions about this burgeoning hang-out haven:

Has MySpace become a new art medium or New Media/Net artform, or can it be used as one? Can the selection of 'friends' and their spaces be called a form of curation? In making profiles, do we make ourselves into art objects? What does it mean to ask to be a 'friend'? Is a form of curation?

Is MySpace merely a space for the colonization of youth culture by corporations and consumer culture? Is MySpace's success representative of a truly new form of community? What other questions about relationships, society, art, and culture does MySpace present? Is MySpace limited by the way it's made, or can we subvert the profile for our own desires?

"Summer of MySpace" fires a probe into this unknown territory, asking all these questions, and setting up a stage for the Internet Summer of Love of the 00's.

Come, be my friend. Let me show you as a shiny new piece of art. Let us curate and be curated, befriend and be befriended in this brave new land of joy and irony.

Let's see what happens. Get on the magic bus.

Submission Procedure:

All you need to do is to set up a profile, make it into an 'artwork', make yourself into an 'artwork', make a place for your 'artwork', and ask me to be your friend. That's what curation is all about, isn't it? The rest is up to us!

Peace, all!
-Patrick Lichty
(The Curator of MySpace)

Keeping Distributed Groups Connected

Monkey Business is a system that attempts to keep distributed group members more connected and aware of each other's activities; the system aims to facilitate informal and spontaneous communication, while minimizing interruption at inopportune times. The system consists of a network of animatronic agents, one of which will reside in the office of each member of a distributed group. We have chosen the embodiment of a monkey for the form of these agents; hence Monkey Business as the title of this project.

The agent uses a combination of microphones and sensors to recognize the activity in the office that it occupies. If there is a change in the state of the office activity, the agent broadcasts the information out to the network of other agents. The other agents, through subtle gestures, movements, and sounds, indicate the changes of state of the broadcasting office. Thus all members of the group, through their respective agents, are made aware of each other's activities in an ambient manner. more...

Also see Monkey Business: Creating social awareness among distributed group members, using a network of animatronic agents by Rachel Kern and Toward Lighthearted Mobile Non-verbal Expression by Rachel Kern, Chris Schmandt, and Paulina Modlitba. [via Jim Downing on Smart Mobs]

Just finished serving on a panel about podcasting and video blogging. At heart is the question: is there a business in this space? Yes, no, and maybe. Sorry, but that's the answer. Truth is it can be part of a business right now, but only as part of an overall delivery strategy. Podcasting, especially in news, only works in a very narrow segment of your audience and content. It's the reason why you need to think about original non-news content. In case anyone doubted how easy it is to podcast, I made one in front of the audience - complete with pompous, overblown, old-school broadcast news music. Fun.

went back to my 01/04 post -- http://www.saturation.org/saturationblog/archives/001460.html -- in end, it's always abt execution, not ideas. What's notable is not what U-M has dreamed up, but the way she is making it happen.

The main goal of the workshop is to develop an understanding of how mobile devices (particularly mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs) can be used as interaction devices. We will provide a forum to share information, results, and ideas on current research in this area. Furthermore we aim to develop new ideas on how mobile phones can be exploited for new forms of interaction with the environment. We will bring together researchers and practitioners who are concerned with design, development, and implementation of new applications and services using personal mobile devices as user interfaces.

Anti-DRM group from the Free Software Foundation

A movie project in which different people around the globe makes a movie together. The story is developed along the way, and while the actors and setting will change every 30-45 seconds, the story of the movie continues like nothing had changed.

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. I consider this to be among the most important I've written, because it raises issues relative to the current on-demand frenzy that many broadcasters see as a way out of the untenable position of shrinking audiences. Since I essentially coined the phrase "unbundled media," I'm clearly not "against" on-demand as a strategy. However, I think it's extremely dangerous to bet the ranch on it alone. Moreover, I think the greater downstream opportunities are in aggregating other people's content, and this essay offers arguments as to why.

The On-Demand Trap

“So everyone in our tech bubble thinks open data is a good idea but hardly anyone is doing it.” This and other very spot-on observations about the issues surrounding open APIs and the data they provide from Paul Hammond’s excellent presentation last week at XTech as very nicely summarized here by Suw Charman. Paul’s slides are here and his blog here.

In one slide he took ProgrammableWeb data and did a useful summary by API provider showing that a quarter of the 200+ APIs come from 7 providers:

Also noted: “There are millions of RSS feeds, but these highlight the problems even more. You can now get RSS feeds for almost anything you want, but try getting in depth sports statistics, or updated stock market data, or flight times. You can’t get it. RSS is intended to be read in an aggregator, and most of it can’t be reused or republished. So you can get any data you want from the net, so long as it’s the last 10 items on an RSS feed, and you don’t what to do anything with it.”

He then outlines a series of non-technical issues that are the real obstacles to API growth:

• Most companies don’t know what an API is
• They make money from data, so ask “Why give it away?”
• If you give it away, perceived value decreases
• It’s risky, including losing money already coming-in

On top of that, many companies couldn’t open up if they wanted to

• No rights for the data they use
• Exclusivity issues with partners and providers

In the end, it’s a perceived “nice to have”. Paul’s recommendations include:

• Don’t send an email demanding an API. That just makes you sound like a moron
• Be aware of the problems, including the fact that most are non-technical
• Have patience. Change takes time

Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis are engaged in an ontological debate about what constitutes “the edge” and what will ultimately be the winning business strategy at the edge. What struck me about their debate is how little clarity there is on how money will actually be made at the edge — and this despite Umair and Jeff working at the absolute bleeding edge of current strategic thinking (pun intended).

Here’s a point from Umair:

Fox’s acquisition thesis is a bit more complicated - but predicated on a much deeper understanding of the new media value chain. Fox invests in domains which are hypersocial (discontinuous shifts in social connectivity) or hypercultural (discontinuous shifts in cultural specificity): sports, karaoke, music.

Further, Fox invests at the edge of the new value chain: at the interface with consumers.

Here’s a counterpoint from Jeff:

Now I’m not denying the incredible power of MySpace. But I am wondering whether it is really fully at the edge — yet. In fact, I questioned here whether there is a disadvantage in trying to own a community — because then you become responsible for the community’s actions and its worst (i.e., the molester’s home page). And so I wonder, in turn, whether the real relationship play in the future is not to try to own community but to enable it. And enabling is sometimes known as infrastructure. That’s the point I want to probe. If they’re still “consumers,” is this really the edge? I say the edge is all about control by creators: That is, I control my own space, this space at the edge, Buzzmachine; I am subject to no one’s rules; I hold responsibility; I reap the benefits, if any; I have relationships as a result of having this presence online; this is mine, all mine; thus I can also relinquish control and, for example, put out full text on RSS and I can realize that the real conversation is not just the one in the comments but the one distributed across others’ sites. That is qualitatively different from a community destination: You go there, you benefit from their infrastructure but you are subject to their rules, you live in someone else’s space.

And now Umair again:

The bigger point I wanted to make was that it’s not technology, but the social and cultural that counts. And being social/cultural is vastly different in, say, cosmetics, than it is in sports. So I think generic infrastructure plays are the wrong approach.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoy this kind of intellectual debate, for the same reason, I suspect, that I enjoyed critical theory in school. But what I find absent from this an all other 2.0 discourses (including my own) is a clear explanation of WHO is going to pay WHOM how many DOLLARS for WHAT. How does the money change hands here?

There are two sources of revenue — companies and consumers. You can sell them content, services, advertising — the list is not that long.

Maybe people like Umair and Jeff operate on a different plane where they can see the dollars even though they don’t reference them explicitly. But if you read News Corp’s quarterly report, MySpace’s ostensible success at the edge is still not reportable in dollars and cents.

Maybe I’m just slow. But I still worry that the sea change that is upon us will lead to fewer dollars in the market and Google-like monopolization of the dollars that do remain. I worry that there’s no way to monetize either “owning” or “enabling” the community — both assume a 1.0-like role for a middleman. It still assumes control of something. AdWords is fully distributed, but it is an intermediary — Google OWNS the system, they control it, and they can make it do whatever they want — unless, of course, it’s being exploited by botnets. Maybe cybercrime is the real edge.

Oh man.

Maybe I just worry too much.

UPDATE:

If this post depressed you, read Jeff’s follow-up post on networks. You’ll be suicidal by the time you’re done:

My point, in the end, is only that we are entering uncertain and uncharted waters in fluid networks. It’s not clear where the value will be captured and how it will be shared.

I responded in the comments to Jeff’s post:

What if media isn’t a business anymore? What if it becomes like poetry — lot’s of people do it, but nobody ever expects to make any money from it.

I know, just because there aren’t obvious answers yet, doesn’t mean somebody won’t figure it out, but for the moment we all sound like the horse and carriage industry 100 years ago. Or the US manufacturing industry 20 years ago. There isn’t always a solution to structural decline.

"We make BitTorrent files out of your big files (mp3s, movies, Zips, etc) and host them for you. It's cheap ($2/ea), reliable and hassle free!"

Laurus has an Instructable and video of a DIY Bicycle mounted steady cam project - "I wanted to shoot some video while riding my road bike, but didn't want to deal with a helmet mounted camera and of course I didn't want to hold the camera in my hand. An initial attempt at mounting the DV camera was totally unsatisfactory, so my next step was to build a camera mount that would absorb some of the shock providing a better quality video." - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

You know when Gartner and IBM pontificate on Web 2.0, that we've reached a point where the term has become generally acceptable - mainstream even. Well-known research firm Gartner has drunk the kool aid:

"While Web 2.0 offers many new opportunities for companies to grow their business, few enterprises realize how to implement the full range of capabilities to succeed. By 2008, the majority of Global 1000 companies will quickly adopt several technology-related aspects of Web 2.0, but will be slow to adopt the aspects of Web 2.0 that have a social dimension, and the result will be a slow impact on business, according to Gartner, Inc."

...and David Boloker, CTO of IBM’s emerging internet technology software group, is also bullish on Web 2.0:

“Web 2.0 is a new class of affordable apps [that] are becoming do-able, delivering instantaneous value such as mash-ups and programmable web,” says Boloker. “Web 2.0 is comprised of everything from Ajax to social software, for example blogs and wikis; to a focus on simplicity, to microformats.”

I even have a personal example of how Web 2.0 has gone mainstream. I was at a New Zealand government strategy workgroup today and the term 'Web 2.0' was used profusely (and appropriately, I might add).

Now -- I've had an interesting and also bumpy ride with the term. I was the first blogger to focus on Web 2.0, starting back in 2004 soon after O'Reilly Media coined it. Indeed you could say that my blog has always been about Web 2.0 (read/write web, two-way web, etc). During 2005 my blog became very popular because of its focus on Web 2.0. My blog was the resource for Web 2.0, because I was one of the only blogs at that time writing about it. This was back in the days when Mike Arrington of Techcrunch fame kidded me about how many RSS subscribers I had - and that he'd some day overtake me. Which of course he did, I think starting from the moment I stepped into the Techcrunch ranch in Atherton in October 2005 :-) Now of course Techcrunch is number 1 amongst not only web 2.0 blogs, but arguably tech blogs in general - and deservedly so IMO. Techcrunch has simply become a must-read resource. Susan Mernit accurately described Techcrunch recently as the leading daily covering web 2.0 and startup land.

So what has happened to Read/WriteWeb? Well I've still been growing at a decent clip and I've gotten a lot of work via my blog. I've nothing to complain about reputation-wise. But in terms of Web 2.0, quite simply I got engulfed by the hype. You know that popular tech cliche: let a thousand flowers bloom? Well that describes Web 2.0 definitions by the end of 2005 - thousands of definitions "bloomed" in the second half of 2005, with the help of a lot of fertilizer from hypesters and naysayers alike.

Then on 18 December 2005 I made the infamous declaration that "Web 2.0 is dead. R.I.P.". Ever wish you hadn't pressed the 'publish' button? Well that was one of those times for me. Boy did that post cause some ructions. I tried to explain myself more coherently in a follow-up post - that defining Web 2.0 had become too distracting and I just wanted to focus on the the technologies and products. But no amount of explanation could get around that sensationalistic header I used.

So what's 2006 brought? Believe it or not, I think it's brought acceptance of the term 'Web 2.0'. That's actually caught me by surprise - I got it wrong. Web 2.0 hasn't died, it's actually morphed into a mainstream term that Gartner and IBM use. I still think it means everything -- and nothing -- at the same time. But in a weird way this has meant Web 2.0 has become the kind of umbrella term and catch-phrase that people identify with. From the 100 or so new and varied definitions of Web 2.0 you read every week (increasingly from mainstream media), to Dion Hinchcliffe's relentless pursuit of defining Web 2.0 for the enterprise, to VCs using the term to connote 'the period after dot com', to TechCrunch profiling the products of Web 2.0 and itself becoming a Web 2.0 success story, to Microsoft adopting Web 2.0 but re-naming it to The Live Web, to Yahoo continuing to put theory into practice and not naming it anything, to Google just doing it's own thing and being damn successful, to Valleywag rising up and creating a hilarious snark blog about the current boom (well, it'll be hilarious up to the point I get linked to), to 'old school' techs like Marc Canter and Dave Winer thriving in this new era, to Gen Y kids creating multi-million dollar businesses like YouTube and Facebook, yada yada.   

And now Gartner and IBM 'get it'. Get what? Web 2.0 of course. But what does it mean? Everything and anything you want. You mean the architecture of participation? Sure I do. What about Ajax? Yeh, why not. What about Flash then? I guess... Does Web 2.0 mean social networking? You betcha. APIs? Dude... Collective intelligence? Of course. Perpetual betas? Now you're talking...

Look: Web 2.0 is made of people (heh).

So I've come to terms with Web 2.0. Well I had to, because I sure as heck am not going to let Gartner and IBM get all the credit! :-)

By Steve Bryant: Broadband-enabled readers love online video. But what kind of video stories and services will get them to click?

little reminder for any infosthetic developer out there: for the first time, an 'infovis art exhibition' will be organized at the IEEE Information Visualization 2006 Symposium this year (Oct 29 - Nov 3, Baltimore). the deadline for entries is June 30.
"this exhibit aims to examine the merging of artistic intention & visualization technique, & is looking for artwork that reveals data patterns in aesthetic, innovative ways."
any questions can be directed to the organizers via email.
[computer.org]

We all know who rules the roost when it comes to downloaded music sales. But who's number two? The answer may surprise you.

In the 18 months since the relaunch of eMusic, the company has clawed its way to the number two position among digital download services (this does not include streaming music). Pakman claims that eMusic has 12 percent of the market compared to Apple's 61 percent, and that his company has now sold more than 60 million songs.

Ars looks at eMusic to discover how it has made a thriving business out of selling DRM-free music in an open format.

Glenn Fleishman over at Wi-Fi Networking News reports that the Task Group N schedule has slipped considerably, and the final version of the 802.11n standard may not arrive anytime soon. 12,000 comments on the Draft 1.0 proposal were received from the group (usually the group receives closer to 2,000). Says Glenn: "- if you want range, buy MIMO. If you want speed, wait. And whatever you do, don’t buy Draft N. The premium you pay isn’t worth the uncertainty and the many, many upgrades you’ll have to apply."

All that combining print and online operations will do is increase the sheer monetary numbers, not appreciably delay the time, when it becomes no longer economically feasible to produce either the printed or the Web editions of that newspaper.

Proving the point that the future of media is not distribution, it’s aggregation, TiVo announced today that it had recruited critics, magazine editors, and such to recommend TV shows — to create ad hoc networks, in other words. This cuts across and devalues the old networks; it unbundles and then rebundles them. The magazines are doing it for free because it promotes them and, they hope, their ability to find the good stuff for you: to aggregate. The next step for TiVo should be to have the people become guru guides for each other. Then I could subscribe not just to your blog and blogroll but also to your TV network.

We offer the freedom to create, play, and learn from technology without always being "tethered" to a PC or videogame console.

Filed under: Culture, Online

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

By Robert Young

Back in