unmediated

"Teach your avatar Ruby and double the population of Rubyists at once."

At the center of all great Live Web software will be one’s digital identity. Each end-user will control who has access to their personal data, who can use it and how.

hey ho lets go

Papers are sought for PerthDAC 2007 that will illuminate both the near and long term Future of Digital Media Culture.

I've seen this mentioned a lot when people talk about BitTorrent, but this bit from an announcement of BitTorrent 4.20 happened to push me over the apathy threshold:

It’s no secret that bandwidth concerns have been one of the more pressing issues surrounding the BitTorrent community. CacheLogic, which provides P2P caching solutions for ISP networks, has previously calculated that approximately 60% of a networks bandwidth is consumed by the BitTorrent protocol. This average varies according to the ISP, as some ISPs report less bandwidth consumption and other reporting more.

They're completely wrong about what the CacheLogic study says. The most recent numbers I could find from CacheLogic say that "P2P still represented 60% of internet traffic at the end of 2004" and "By the end of 2004, BitTorrent was accounting for as much as 30% of all internet traffic." Even if P2P has grown in the past 18 months to consume 99.99% of internet traffic, CacheLogic's own studies show that eDonkey surpassed BitTorrent in P2P traffic in August 2005. If CacheLogic's numbers are correct, there's no way that BitTorrent has more than 50% of internet traffic.

But that's the real issue here-are CacheLogic's numbers correct? Look at what CacheLogic sells: P2P caching appliances. Their entire business is built around reducing the amount of bandwith P2P applications use. And they are also the sole source of numbers saying that P2P applications are using lots of bandwidth.

I'm not saying that their numbers are all wrong, I'm saying that I don't know what the truth is. A press release from a company that has a direct and obvious profit motive from over-hyping shouldn't be treated as a solid fact. Unfortunately a highly-suspect number is far more attractive to a writer than saying "I don't know what the truth is."

CacheLogic seem to have been pretty successful at getting their numbers into the collective consciousness. Traditional media like Wired Magazine, BBC and Reuters trumpet the numbers as if they were a fundamental rule of the internet (like Rule #34: There is porn of it. No exceptions.). Then, the numbers are repeated ad nauseam until sites like Slyck News can pepper a story with them without even needing to cite the source, since everyone knows it's true.

Let's stop pretending we know things that we don't. There's nothing wrong with saying "I don't know," there is something wrong with pretending you know what you really don't. Let's get our numbers from someone who isn't trying to sell us a solution to the problem the numbers describe.

(For more skepticism about CacheLogic's numbers, check out Peter Sevcik's piece at Business Communications Review)

Tags: bittorrent pseudoscience lies damnedlies statistics skepticism

Oh, decisions, decisions. What belt shall I wear tonight to set off my new outfit? Hmm, the traditional leather? The one with the clamp fastener or the metal buckle? I guess I'll just settle on the one with the 3" video display where I can insert an SD card and play movies just below my belly button. Perfect. This bizarre new product from Egokast is just that, a 3" screen mounted in a stainless steel case that can be attached to a belt or armband to display either full motion video or a slideshow of photos. You can insert an SD card of up to 2GB in size and put an entire movie on there if you so desire. You certainly won't have to worry about getting noticed when you're out clubbing, but you will have to worry about your video selection. My choice? Footloose.

Limited to an initial run of 100, the Egokast One (without memory card or belt) goes for $279.

What kinds of videos are people watching online? It's sure not Lost or Desperate Housewives, even if downloads of traditional TV shows command most of the media's attention, thanks to Apple's bottom line.

At Supernova on Friday, Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, said she'd list the different varieties or genres of grassroots video her company is seeing on the Web, and here it is:

1.  Mini tv show-style  -- It's Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja
2.  Videobloggers:  telling their own life stories like Ryanne Hodson
3.  Genre guys:  snowboarding or car videos
4.  Commentary: Rocketboom or the Bush Blair video.
5.  Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Monsters
6.  Random.. silly.. funny.. ridiculous... ephemeral Tag: momwalksin  tag: lipsync
7.  How-to's that actually show you how to do something in detail or teach:  French Pod Class
8.  Remixs and mashups:  The Presidency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Brokeback to the Future.
9.  Interviews like those at GETV.
10.  Parodies like the 8up commercial.
11.  AMV or anime music videos:  Loveless
12. music videos - lipsync sitting at the computer, dancing around with music playing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into ones the users like, that stars themselves. Here is Hips Don't Lie.

Mary forgot at least one:

13. Citizen journalism, like you see at Real People Network or Minnesota Stories.

Mike writes - "Sketching in Hardware ended yesterday, and it was awesome. We had folks from all over the DIY electronics spectrum talking bout creating tools for easy development of DIY electronics: David Mellis, of Arduino, Bjoern Hartmann and Scott Klemmer of Stanford, Nathan Seidle of Spark Fun, Tom Igoe of NYU, David Zicarelli, author of MaxMSP, and 20 other amazing people. We held it in Greenfield Village, and spent a long time thinking, talking about, and looking at the history of innovation as practiced by Edison, the Wright brothers, and Buckminster Fuller.

ed with a frantic makeathon where groups of folks (who had never worked together) were given two hours to invent new technologies. One group hacked a USB thumb drive, another group reinvented the telegraph using Flash and Teleo, another group made a smart train set of historical objects, where each piece in the set could call up its original location on Google Earth when put into the train set, another group made an RFID-enabled street lamp (as portrayed in the photos by Scott Minneman, of Onomy labs), and another group used our beloved Roomba to create a museum rover, using a controller made of foam rubber and bend sensors." - Link.

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MYSQ: My Style So Qute

Combine an interactive video booth with QR Codes. Perform before the camera and then download the 30 seconds video via QR Code to your mobile phone.

See MYSQ movie

An Interesting hybrid and surely the ultimate social killer app;)


Also via We-Make-Money-Not-Art

Btw what does the "L" stand for in MySQL?

Filed under: Culture, PC, Online, MMO

Young Chinese gamers won't have to worry about Fel Orcs, Forest Trolls, and Warp Stalkers when playing the Burning Crusade, so much as they will the newly appointed security guards patrolling the aisles at their local Internet cafe. It's campaign time again in China, and from July 1 through the end of September, the Ministry of Culture will be stepping up efforts to keep minors out of the nation's cyber cafes. In Beijing alone, 107 additional security guards, as well as newly trained middle school teachers will be supervising 71 such hangouts. Talk about a cruel summer.

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/feeds.joystiq.com/weblogsinc/joystiq?g=296"/>

News organizations might find a good model for online citizen journalism in this unlikely place: The Joke Project.

This unique video joke site -- launched recently by a Web editor with whom I've been working, along with a couple of documentarians -- captures short clips of ordinary folks telling their favorite jokes on the street or in other simple settings.

The jokes are rated from "squeaky clean" to "extremely naughty" and are fairly timeless, although they occasionally dip into current news. They held a "DaVinci Code" joke day, and they're scheduling a Bush joke day for July 4.

If you're in the mood for a laugh, check out the site's archive and index. They also blog their jokes.

All in all, it's a creative approach to a universal subject, with viral potential and a sensible business model (video syndication).

So where does the citizen journalism come in? It's in the fascinating underlying motivation for the project, which refers to itself as a "joke-u-mentary." The creators clearly are not just having fun. They're also exploring the folkloric quality of humor, and compiling intriguing statistical findings.

Furthermore, they're also trying to to capture something inimitable about the joke-telling process -- for instance, by dwelling on the teller's own reaction in the seconds after the joke ends. Perhaps that's what's most compelling about this site: the nicely affecting way it puts a face to a story.

Imagine now if news organizations were to try to capture the same feeling for local coverage. They could gather short, thematically organized video clips of residents talking about anything from favorite pet tales to local history, from gardening tips to hometown heroics. That could make for compelling content, even if captured not by professional cameramen or journalists, but rather by the residents themselves using fixed video recording facilities (a la StoryCorps's idea for recording "outposts" -- see their FAQ).

These video outposts could be in a location(s) anywhere in town, such as in a local community center, a library, or perhaps in the lobby of the news organization's headquarters itself, all with nice promotional opportunities. I'm no video technician, but I'm thinking it could be housed in a compact, phone-booth sized space: a simple digital camera setup, posted guidelines or theme suggestions, a single push button to start the tape rolling, and a countdown clock for the finishing point.

I think a local news audience would love it. Perhaps someone out there could give it a try and let the rest of us know!

Meanwhile, this guy walks into a bar ...

"So if you aren't really into citJ, try viewing it as a way to learn what's news to people on a real-life level, from the daily grind to watershed events. Look at it as context for a community. Don't expect it to mirror mainstream news, because that's not the point. It doesn't need to aspire to the same goals."

In Cannes, advertising and media executives have seen the death of paid media advertising:

All week at Cannes, advertising and media executives have grappled with the implications of virals which have reached millions of people via the internet, often by-passing traditional media. A few have involved no spend on media, offline or online.

With the success of viral video content, courtesy of YouTube — in some case with millions of views — it’s starting to dawn on advertising and media companies that brands no longer need them to reach and interact with consumers on a large scale:

One of the world’s biggest advertising agencies has urged marketers to learn from consumer-created content on websites such as YouTube.com, which now has greater reach among some US audiences than MTV, the music broadcaster.

But not only are ad agencies and media companies being cut out of the loop — the brand owners themselves can’t even get between consumers and their direct experience with the brand:

Consumers are hijacking top global brands using blogs and online communities but advertising companies are trying to find ways to embrace the revolution rather than fight against it.

The Internet has turned the traditional world of advertising on its head with a growing shift of spending to online from print and TV. The Web is giving millions of consumers an outlet for their views on products and brands, bypassing traditional media.

“Our audience has gone from watching commercials to making them,” said Mark Tutssel, the chief creative officer for Leo Burnett Worldwide, a division of Publicis.

“We’ve gone from monologue to dialogue in a nanosecond,” he added. “Marketers are no longer in control. The consumer is.”

So what does it mean to “embrace the revolution”?

“Citizen media and consumer generated content are here to stay, so marketers must learn to let go of the control they think they have over their brand in the open marketplace of ideas,” Tutssel said.

I think that companies need to forget about advertising as “persuasion” — in fact, they “let go” of marketing entirely.

In a post-advertising era, when the consumers are in complete control of brand perceptions, there’s only one effective way to “advertise” — create REALLY great products and services that people love and that offer an unrivaled experience, i.e. make stuff that people REALLY want to buy.

The product is marketing and marketing is the product.

Interesting use of small tagclouds for comparing: Topics | Dries Buytaert

Dabbish, L., Kraut, R. (2004). Controlling Interruptions: Awareness Displays and Social Motivation for Coordination, in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2004, ACM Press: Chicago, IL. p. 182-191.

The paper addresses the notion of awareness with an interesting angle: how would awareness displays might interrupt and then impact people’s activity (leading to performance problems. The authors used a very simple game to investigate whether “team membership influences interrupters’ motivation to use awareness displays and whether the informational-intensity of a display influences its utility and cost“.

Results indicate interrupters use awareness displays to time communication only when they and their partners are rewarded as a team and that this timing improves the target’s performance on a continuous attention task. Eye-tracking data shows that monitoring an information-rich display imposes a substantial attentional cost on the interrupters, and that an abstract display provides similar benefit with less distraction.

This study has direct implications for design:

To balance the tradeoff between the amount of information presented and the incentive to use that information, electronic communications systems could regulate the awareness information they provide based on an interrupter’s inferred motivation to use that information. For example, in designing a corporate instant messaging client, one could apply these results by presenting a workload awareness display of a target’s activities only to people
internal to the user’s project or company, and no such display to people outside the company.

y, the “away” and “busy” messages which various instant messaging clients use are too temporally coarse to provide sufficient information for synchronizing interruptions.
(…)
Displaying information about a remote collaborator’s workload helps both parties if that information is in an easy to process format and the potential interrupter has incentive to be polite.

Why do I blog this? because my research is about studying how certain awareness tools (bringing mutual-location awareness) influence collaboration in terms of producing a mutual intelligibility. Taking into account interruptability might be an issue, however, in the activities I studies, it’s less continuous so interruptions are less important.

Toewie by Jelle Husson (postgraduate in eMedia in Belgium)

Toewie is about a 3d game for pre-school children. Most 3d games are being navigated by means of the arrow keys for movement, and the mouse for looking/direction. Because this is quite complicated, especially for very young children, Toewie will be controlled differently. The idea is to build a real life puppet and put some movement sensors in it. When the child interacts with the puppet, the 3d character on screen will perform a similar movement.

Why do I blog this? I am following lately how tangible interface can be used as innovative game controllers, this is a relevant example.

Omidyar Network led a $1.5 million round for non-profit social network YouthNoise, which started in 2001 as a global online community for Save The Children. Other investors include a consortium of the Surdna Foundation, the Rappaport Family Foundation and Virgin Mobile USA. YouthNoise spun off in 2004, creating a network for ages 16-22. YouthNoise.com carries only youth-generated content and focuses on social action. It has 113,000 registered users from across the U.S. and more than 170 countries worldwide; the site averages about three million page views per month. (via SiliconBeat)
Update: An earlier piece, actually, from the SF Business Times (via MSNBC.com) says the company plans to raise another $3 million this year; a third round, possibly in 18 months, would go toward international expansion. Omidyar invested $500,000 this round and will add $1 million if YouthNoise raises $2 million. Other first-round investors and amounts: Surdna Foundation $400,000; Rappaport Family Foundation, $100,000; Virgin Mobile USA $100,000.
Dena Jones Trujillo, an Omidyar investment manager, suggested the plan to make the non-profit self-sustaining and set up the first-round pitch for funds. Trujillo: “Without capital upfront to build those revenue streams, they’re never going to get to the point of self-sufficiency because they’ll spend all their time fundraising.” The article by Sarah Duxbury includes some good detail on the non-profit search for investment capital.

We’ve been writing about this for quite some time so it’s fun to see the NYT’s Richard Siklos wrangle with an essential reality (and find a way to work in Sumner Redstone’s fish): for all the fuss and the double-digit, sometimes triple-digit growth in online revenues, new media revenue isn’t close to material for traditional media companies. That doesn’t mean the gains and the revenues aren’t real. In fact, the inclusion of online revenue has helped some “print” units show a profit. So what does this say about the future financial impact of broadband, mobile and the like? Siklos: “The optimist’s view is that the spoils from this new frontier are still very much up for grabs. … The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits.”
I’ll opt for the pragmatic view: without their current investments, experiments and full-force efforts, traditional media companies wouldn’t have much of a long-term future. Period.
Still, I really liked reading about the fish.

At my session today at Supernova, with JD Lasica (Ourmedia) as our moderator, and Jeremy Allaire (BrightCove), Jonathan Taplin (USC Annenberg Center), and Robert Levitan (Pando), I mentioned some stats and ideas, and I said I would blog those items. The are below. The first two sets of stats focus on video hosting sites (places where users can upload video) and their use, as far as uploads and user visits or traffic. The third set of data reflects trends in the types of video we see users making and posting online, with an example or two of that kind of video. 1. Users per day/Uploads per day on a few sites we have seen info about: ClipShack : 2200 users per day. (source: AdBright). Google Video: 12.5 million users in month of April. (source: 089.html">Washington Post). Grouper: 8 million users per month (source: PR News but on Alexa, that traffic appears to be a one time spike, where their traffic seems to hover around 3 million users per month) and 500,000 registered users (source: Alexa). Ourmedia: 28,000 users per day (source: AdBright). Vidiac: Streaming 2 million videos per day and 3 million users per month (source: Silicon Beat Comment by Adam Beat) Vimeo: 20 thousand users per day (source: USA Today, 11/21/05) and 50,000 registered users (source: Vimeo's about pages) YouTube: 50,000 uploads per day, serving 50 million videos per day, with 6 million users per day (source: You Tube Fact Sheet). 2. There is a list ranking the top ten video sites by market share or traffic, published by Hitwise), May 24, 2006. (Several of the traffic stats found in articles, press releases, advertising, etc., also credited Hitwise for the numbers): 1. YouTube 42.94% 2. MySpace Videos 24.22% 3. Yahoo! Video Search 9.58% 4. MSN Video Search 9.21% 5. Google Video Search 6.48% 6. AOL Video 4.28% 7. iFilm 2.28% 8. Grouper 0.69% 9. Daily Motion 0.22% 10. vSocial 0.09% 3. At Dabble, we are seeing different video genres coming up over and over. Users, as opposed to top down TV video producers, seem to work in areas that are accessible and interesting to them. They are not just copying mainstream production styles. The list below is in no particular order as far as prevalence or audience viewing. We just see them a lot: 1. Mini tv show-style -- It's Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja 2. Videobloggers: telling their own life stories like Ryanne Hodson 3. Genre guys: snowboarding or car videos 4. Commentary: Rocketboom or the Bush Blair video. 5. Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Monsters 6. Random.. silly.. funny.. ridiculous... ephemeral Tag: momwalksin tag: lipsync 7. How-to's that actually show you how to do something in detail or teach: French Pod Class 8. Remixs and mashups: The Presidency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Brokeback to the Future. 9. Interviews like those at GETV. 10. Parodies like the 8up commercial. 11. AMV or anime music videos: Loveless 12. music videos - lipsync sitting at the computer, dancing around with music playing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into ones the users like, that stars themselves. Here is Hips Don't Lie.

It's called "Screens," a new blog about the convergence of television and the internet. Rex jokingly calls it a "Lost Remote killer."

Mark Glaser at Mediashift has a solid wrapup of this past weekend's Bloggercon IV, held in San Francisco. Glaser writes he was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of topics this year. Rather than ignoring new advances in podcasting, tech, social networks and the like, Glaser writes: "BloggerCon has embraced (those new technologies) and tried to go beyond the rudimentary arguments of bloggers vs. journalists or even just defining who a blogger is." Our dear LR friend Terry Heaton was there discussing how writing about his wife's sudden and shocking death helped him cope with tragedy. He also shares his always insightful and amusing thoughts on the session about making money online.

MP3s of all the Bloggercon sessions, free to download

Clay asked me, what my working definition of Participatory Media is. Since I didn't think he would like my riff on his jello and nails comment, I came up with this:

Broad definition:
A participatory medium is one which encourages audience participation in the creation, distribution and consumption of itself.

My specific spin:
A medium with similar properties to mass media (audio and video) with the addition of social interaction interwoven into the creation, distribution and consumption of it.

Even better might be how Wikipedia defines it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_Media

I suppose that after having taught a course called "Producing Participatory Media" a couple of times, a definition should just roll off of my tongue. Fortunately, the concept itself has changed and grown quite a bit since then (ahh, the sweet pace of change in this interwebbed world).

Perhaps one of my former students would be better at answering this question?

makeTV
Despite that I absolutely loathe people calling webcasting, streaming and the like "TV" this site is interesting.

From the site:
MakeTV to Watch TV: MakeTV is a live broadcast channel open to both viewers and producers. (Wish I could copy & paste but they used Flash for the site so I can't. Oh well..)

Essentially, anyone can plugin and stream to anyone watching the content from this site.

Strange that the stats show 0 Total Broadcasts and 0 Viewable Archives.. Wonder what the deal is..

Split Screen
I love this (v)blog. All split screen video art. Now complete w/RSS and Enclosures..

From the site:
Split Screen is a weblog dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals, as seen in movies, music videos, commercials and other media based on moving images

This RFID in Japan post says "less than two weeks ago,NEC announced that they developed a system that combines rfid and surveillance camera.The system can continuously track people or vehicles.The system uses a camera and RFID in a complementary fashion.When a camera recognizes a moving entity,the system reads information from an RFID tag (carried by a person or a vehicle).Also,it uses RFID to track rough positions of moving entities when they cannot be detected by a camera.The system automatically switches between camera-based and RFID-based tracking".

NEC developed system that combines rfid and surveillance camera

The Zypad WL 1000, a new wrist-worn PC has been demonstrated to the military forces. This device, which can run Linux or Windows CE, is a hands-free computer which handles wireless networking and GPS tracking. It should be available in July for about $2,500 and could be used by healthcare or law enforcement personnel.

Links: Primidi, ZDNet

What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?, asks the New York Times.

WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. Access to WiFly's wireless network, built with Nortel's wireless mesh nodes, costs about $12.50 a month.

Despite WiFly's ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.

That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.

"Content is really key," said Darrell M. West, a professor of public policy at Brown University who conducted a survey of how well governments use the Internet. "It's not enough just to have the infrastructure. You have to give people a reason to use the technology."

To that end, Q-Ware has developed P-Walker, a service that will let subscribers with Sony PSP portable game machines log on to WiFly to play online games and download songs and other material.

The company has also developed a low-priced Internet phone service. The handsets cost about $200 and allow users to call other mobile phones for just over a penny a minute; calling a traditional phone costs less than half a penny.

Ultimately, Q-Ware expects its network to communicate with more devices, including MP3 players and digital cameras.

Taipei claims to be among the world’s top three cities for broadband infrastructure, with PC penetration of 88% and an 83.6% household penetration rate of Internet usage, of which 79.3% are connected to ADSL broadband.

By July 2006, wireless broadband Internet access will reach 90% coverage of the entire city through 4,200 access points, making it the world’s number one wireless networked city. Nortel has built Asia’s largest Internet Data Center in the Neihu Technology Park. This center will facilitate smooth broadband communications between Taipei and the rest of the world.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Big City WiFi Clouds, Taipei's Cellular Hotspots The World Largest WiFi Cloud, Taipei Unwired, The Global Hub, Transnational Media Production and City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup.

 

The New York Times' TV critic, Virginia Heffernan, has started a blog about online video. ...

Charlie Stross is sharing some notes from his latest project. They're a nice glimpse into how one really smart writer thinks about the future:

6. History inserts itself into our lives, seamlessly. When did you last get through a day without hearing some kind of off-hand reference to 9/11 or the Iraq war? Kids these days are learning about Margaret Thatcher in history lessons at school. In ten years time there'll be some other iceberg-like intrusion of History into the zeitgeist: the question is, what? (My money's on something energy or environment related, and big.)

g to get into the head of a 28-year-old British professional circa 2016... "You were one year old when the Cold War ended. You were thirteen when the war on terror broke out, and eighteen or nineteen when Tony Blair was forced to resign as Prime Minister. You graduated university owing £35,000 in student loans, at a time when the price of entry into the housing market in the UK was over £150,000 (about 4-5 times annual income; the typical age of first time buyers was 35 and rising by more than 12 months per year). Unless you picked the right career (and a high-earning one at that) you can't expect to ever own your own home unless your parents die and leave you one. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect to work until you're 70-75, because the pension system is a broken mess. The one ray of hope was that your health and life expectancy are superior to any previous generation — you can reasonably expect to live to over a hundred years, if you manage to avoid succumbing to diseases of affluence."

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 09:59 AM)

That's what I call them. Recently I received this statement.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this..

(Continued at PressThink)

The Improbable Orchestra (IO) is an interactive audio installation designed to make digital music accessable to anyone. This page describes our third, much improved version of it that we built in 2004.

What a neat idea! I would love to try it. --L.N.R.

Originally posted by tasmo from del.icio.us/tag/art, ReBlogged by LNR on Jun 26, 2006 at 01:14 PM

WinFS cops it

Microsoft's most ambitious software plan - to base Windows on a native database - has died again. The feature was originally touted in 1991 for 'Cairo', which Microsoft then described as an object-oriented operating system, built on top of Windows NT. Cairo was sidelined as a result of Microsoft's focus on the internet, and the evaporation of the Apple/IBM Taligent OS. But the idea, reborn as WinFS, was revived in 2001 as one of the "three pillars" of Longhorn, now Windows Vista.…

[A file system completely based on metadata is the wave of the future... but like fusion power, it always appears to be 10 years away. /t]

Originally from The Register, ReBlogged by Tom Ritchford on Jun 26, 2006 at 04:53 PM

sigh. "UDE has announced that certain cards will enable you to get in-game World of Warcraft items. The cards will have a scratch-off section, similar to a lottery ticket, that contains a unique code. After scratching off the foil and revealing the code, you'll be able to enter the code into a website. Your online World of Warcraft game character will then receive a special in-game item. So far Blizzard is planning on all the in-game items to be purely cosmetic."

"While in Barcelona, i visited Plagiarismo, an exhibition about the appropriation and re-formulation of other artists' ideas. The idea is not to criticize the practice but to demonstrate that plagiarism is an essential component of culture.

The show tackles an important issue: the limits of copyright. As curator Jordi Costa says: "The current legal limit is so restricitve that it doesn't allow other artists to elaborate provocative proposals of cultural critics.""

Mexican-born Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Homographies combines twisted modernist aesthetics and surveillance technology.

The huge installation features 144 robotic fluorescent light fixtures controlled by 7 computerized surveillance systems. As people walk under the piece, the light tubes rotate to create labyrinthine patterns of light that are "paths" or "corridors" between them.

The presence of a single person in the space is detected by the light fixtures as a magnetic frield of influence. When two or more people are detected, the system rotates the fixtures so that "light corridors" are created between them. As many people walk in the court, the light reflect the influence of all of them creating complex patterns similar to isobars.

Every few minutes, the system enters an "interlude mode" showing random orthogonal arrangements.

Plasma screens on the gallery walls show the tracking systems with an overlay of data.

In Homographies the "vanishing point" is not architectural, but rather connective, i.e. it is determined by who is there at any given time and varies accordingly. This gives a reconfigurable light-space that is based on flow, on motion, on lines of sight, —an intended contrast to the modernist grid that currently organizes the court.

Video.

The installation was premiered at this year's Sydney Biennale, Zones of Contact, which runs until August 27.

See also another very similar work by Lozano-Hemmer: Standards and Double Standards (except that this time, belt buckles are following visitors) and Marie Sester's spotlight beam that tracks gallery visitors.

Another surveillance-inspired installation (via information aesthetics and rhizome): Invisible Sphere, a 5.5 foot diameter sphere covered with video monitors and surveillance cameras. Each monitor displays live video feed from a camera placed on the opposite side of the sphere. The sphere can be rolled around in its environment.

Graduation show of the IDII in Milan, project number 8.

Ana Camila Amorim's uni.me project is a mobile communication service that supports the user in the management of their social network and the definition of who, how and how much others can access to them and their information.

The main touch point of the service is the so-called "Presence Phone". Each element on the screen corresponds to a contact and its size represents the amount of communication shared between him/her and the device’s owner. Contacts are organized around tags.

Other people availability to you is visible by the color change of the bubbles. In case a contact is not on the visible area of the screen, you can search for it based on name or related tag. Several tags can be combined in order to reduce the number of results. Once you've found the contact, you can open the contextual menu where one of the options is ‘see details’.

The notification of missed communication appears in a pop-up window listing the missed events by chronological order. Events are identified in relation to the current time (e.g. 5 minutes. ago).

Incoming calls will be notified in full screen with clear information: name, photo, company logo, most recent tags (personal, automatic, local and communication) and last communication event.

Text messages can be responded through the dedicated inbox on the contact detail, by adding a field on top of the previews message. Other people can be added to this message and copies of it also appear on their inboxes.

uni.me comprises of:

1. Personal card

Each user is issued with a single ‘identifier’ that responds to all of his/her digital communication needs (voice, text). When initiating communication the caller/ sender uses a single ID and a distribution engine diverts it to the most convenient device according to the callee’s preferences.

Contact initiation can be done either by online invitation or card swapping. By accepting a uni.me card and approaching it to the phone, the receiver allows the link to be created. Each uni.me card has a RFID tag, that when in proximity to a NFC enabled device, validates the user in the card owner’s contact list.

2. Hot spots

uni.me also allows you to communicate their level of availability to different people according to your context and willingness to be reached. This definition can be done manually or automatically by defining different profiles that are activated during specific periods of the day, or by location awareness or other day to day events. RFID tags placed in different locations (working place, home, cinema, church, etc.) allow the phone to be aware of its environment and adjust accordingly.

Video scenarios.

DONE!
Click HERE for the Video Archives!

Hey all!

are eager to see what they missed at Vloggercon, that’s why I'm working dilegently to get all the tapes digitized, compressed, (looking good!) and uploaded. They'll be up soon!

More Later,

Ryanne

I need this:



[Thanks Boris...]

Just looking up something else, I stumbled across this quote from Ted Nelson. From ‘Ted’s ComParadigm in OneLiners’:

“A frying-pan is technology. All human artifacts are technology. But beware anybody who uses this term. Like “maturity” and “reality” and “progress”, the word “technology” has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as “technology” is something that somebody wants you to submit to. “Technology” often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to “the guys who understand it.”

This is actually almost always a political move. Somebody wants you to give certain things to them to design and decide. Perhaps you should, but perhaps not.”

Perhaps not, indeed.

Use Pipdipchip writes: "Early this year, Linksys stopping using Linux on its popular WRT54G models. Users were unable to upgrade to third-party firmware, one of the best points for buying a WRT54G. A way was found to get Linux in a WRT54G but it required adding a JTAG interface which was too difficult for most users. However, now a way has been found that only requires upgrading your bootloader via TFTP. A huge upgrade for those with a WRT54G version 5." This is also being discussed in our Linksys forum.

Ex-AT&T Broadband CEO Leo Hindery lamented this week that portals were leeching money from ISPs and mega-corps (Disney, etc.), and that of AOL, eBay, Google, MSN, and Yahoo - four would either fold or be bought off. Of course despite the problems with Excite@Home, Hindery still sees a world where the incumbent ISPs (perhaps hand in hand with mega-partners like Disney or Time Warner) run and offer everything themselves: the portals, the content, and the VoIP, TV, and data services.

Warner Bros. began selling its movies and TV shows over the Internet video site Guba.com Monday, marking the second deal the studio has made to distribute content over Web sites that have offered pirated video in the past.

Guba.com has featured mainly user-generated video clips for free or as part of a subscription, some of which were unauthorized clips from TV shows or movies.

I think this has to be be one of the oddest pairings since the Roxio and Napster deal. I find the video quality TERRIBLE (Use this link, and then click trailer), and the movies are extremely over priced. Does anyone think this will work?

Read More

SL machinima-maker Pierce Portocarrero caught some footage of a protest in the virtual world of Second Life today, held to coincide with the world’s third birthday. The protest was being held to voice some residents’ dissatisfaction with the new registration requirements (or lack thereof) we mentioned earlier today. I haven’t heard the narration on this yet, as I’m still at the Supernova conference, but the footage is engaging, and gives a good idea of what it’s like when a bunch of SL avatars get together for a protest — which is not an unusual thing in itself.

avatars, governance, kids, Second Life, security

CNet’s Daniel Terdiman has been on a bit of a 3pointD-style road trip lately, visiting five states with a carload of travel gadgets that help connect him to the rest of the world. Fun, interesting reading, including a few good 3pointD insights: “While I would reach my destination exactly as planned, I had absolutely no idea how I got there. I couldn’t even have begun to tell you what roads I took, or how to get back from there without this digital helper.”

3pointD, earth, GPS, Technology

Have any thoughts about “integrating cartographic data with geo-tagged knowledge repositories” and how “the emerging Geospatial Web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products”? If so, you may want to be in touch with Austria’s Know-Center project, which is seeking chapter submissions for an upcoming book on the geospatial Web. There’s a whole list of possible topics in the submission guidelines, including:

• State-of-the-art and emerging trends of geo-browsing platforms
• Knowledge acquisition and management in a geospatial context
• Knowledge relationship discovery and management (e.g. matching geospatial relationships with semantic or temporal relationships)
• Knowledge-intensive, location-based services
• Marketing of products and services via the Geospatial Web
• Content, annotation and ontology services as enablers of the Geospatial Web

Submissions are due by October 10, 2006 — so get to work.

3pointD, earth, GPS, mapping, Tagging

WHAT IS THE 1 SECOND FILM?
THE 1 SECOND FILM is a 70mm non-profit collaborative film bringing thousands of diverse people around the world together to create film history: 'The biggest shortest film ever made.' Virtually anyone can help produce this film by donating $1 or more. Our end-credits are estimated to last 90-minutes and will include a feature-length 'making of' documentary.All profits raised by our finished film will benefit the Global Fund for Women.

"When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA"

good numbers for global markets

Xiph QuickTime Components (XiphQT) is, in short, the solution for Mac and Windows users who want to use Xiph formats in any QuickTime-based application, e.g. playing Ogg Vorbis in iTunes.

eWeek, Chris Preimesberger : "A group of bloggers meet to discuss citizen journalism, the need for better blogging tools and more."

something to read, later...

James Powderly, GRL, Eyebeam in NYTimes Video. hot!

Like the ailing—but much alive—character prematurely tossed onto the meat wagon in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, newspapers are right to shout, "I'm not dead!" In their dying, the best newspapers are plotting—and experiencing—rebirths as multip

Is narrative storytelling a harbinger of things to come? "It can be," Weldon responds. Some people say reliance on narratives represents little more than dumbing down to readers and is part of "a last-ditch effort to save the industry." Others, however, "say this is what's going to save newspapers," she notes. "Some people contend that it's a good thing. It will [give] people a reason to read newspapers because they can't get this content" anywhere else. And a good narrative can hold a reader's attention regardless of whether the medium used is newsprint, a website or podcasting. Says Weldon: "We've got to stop worrying about how the news is delivered."

Glitchy sends along a link to an interesting technology I hadn’t heard of before: 3D shape search. Apparently, a company called UGS Corp. has just bought a 3D shape search technology from German IT services firm software design & managment. UGS’s new Geolus Search product (formerly geolus SHAPE) “allows manufacturers to quickly locate 3D models of digitally defined parts from large heterogeneous data sources on the basis of geometric similarity,” according to a press release.

The technology, which seems to have current application in the manufacture of machine and automobile parts, could serve to enhance content creation through existing 3D model markets like Google’s SketchUp Warehouse, the third-party SketchUp models marketplace, and things like TurboSquid — open markets for 3D models of various kinds. It’s hard to envision the situations in which people will actually need to search for something based on its 3D geometry rather than some metadata, but I’m sure those situations will emerge. Interesting, in any case, to see the emergence of a new 3pointD technology like shape search.

3D Web, architecture, design, Google, Search

DALSA announced today that it has successfully fabricated and delivered the world’s highest resolution image sensor chip.

The new ITU-T Recommendation T.851 offers better (and faster) compression by introducing a new (backward incompatible) alternative Q15 arithmetic coding. Color precision is increased to maximum 16 bits per color component.

The change is only in the final lossless entropy coding stage. Thus current JPEGs can be losslessly encoded to use new algorithm and the lossiness of this new variant (the blockiness etc…) will be same as that of existing JPEGs.

Work on the new compression algorithm was started in 2004 by ITU-T Study Group 16. An alpha open source implementation is available.

Official results claim around 10% improvement in ratio over old JPEG. StuffIt’s JPEG recompression technology deserves a mention here, they claim a 30% better ratio by taking a similar approach. Thomas Ritcher posted some comparison results with both JPEG and JPEG2000.

What happens when someone using a new technology finds it to be so enticing that they feel compelled to indulge to an excessive degree, disrupting their lives and fracturing relationships?

Design For the Computer Obsessive, a project by Joe Malia graduating student in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, centers on the role design can play in guiding these individuals through their turbulent affair with the technology.

For example, Private Public is a series of objects that highlight the privacy we sacrifice when using mobile technological devices in public spaces.

By wearing the mobile phone scarf, you can venture into public spaces confident that if the need to compose a private text message were to arise the object could be pulled over the face to create an isolated environment.

Meanwhile, devoted PSP players can explore their passion in complete privacy (though i can’t garantee they’ll be unnoticed) by using a similar model specifically designed for the gaming console.

See also: Crispin Jones’s Electrophile, Christain Palino’s Peripheral Needs.

Originally from we make money not art at June 21, 2006, 10:31, published by Marisa S. Olson

Just how much more can we do with less?

I recently read an article which discussed a company which went to a 32 hour work week with no drop in productivity. (the story is taken from The Time Bind by Arlie Hochschild)

While this example would not scale over an entire economy - a steel mill, for example, is unlikely to be able to replicate it - it fascinates me that a company could cut 20% of one of it's most critical and expensive inputs (human time) and not change its outputs. While not in the same category as Factor Four it is in an unexpected domain. How much more slack is there in the system?

Is it possible that the inefficiencies in our economy are so large that, in fact, we could tighten 80% of our resource use right out of the loop over a period of fifty years, without developing any radical new technologies (although, of course, we will!). The poster child for this idea in my own understanding is a roll of kitchen plastic wrap a friend bought at a warehouse store. This roll is a two thousand square feet and was purchased for around six dollars, replacing 20 rolls of 100 square feet each, with correspondingly larger purchase, packaging and transportation costs. It is an identical product, of identical utility, simply bought in a larger size.

This might seem like a trivial example compared to green buildings and zero emissions polyester factories and so forth. But what would be the net environmental impact if all products simply dropped the two smallest sizes they were available in? The social impact might hit the poor quite hard at first, but lower long term prices might restabilize them in unexpected ways. Could we really cut 5% or 10% of our national environmental impact simply by never buying anything except in the Super size? It sounds silly, but when you start counting trips to the store, and packaging, and use of temporary alternatives when basics run out. If such huge savings are possible from small changes, what kinds of savings would be possible from big changes?

The more I look at the world around me, the more I realize that a relatively small set of behaviors would have to change to solve nearly all of our environmental problems. From the current status-quo those changes look untenable, but they are not: insulate what is heated or cooled, streamline what is pumped, buy the efficient model. These basic truths are repeated over and over again in different environmental frameworks - everybody has their own way of saying "do the right thing."

If one does not look at demand side reduction, it is easy to assume that we are really in trouble. "Use less" has become contaminated with a thrifty penny pinching mindset. But "use smarter so you get equivalent or better service for less energy" - and we need a catchy mantra for that - might be a very simlar world to the one we live in now, just with the waste taken out.

Diesel hybrids, high performance buildings and pervasive industrial efficiency efforts could reasonably half our nation's energy use. Studies at different times estimate the benefit and potential at different levels, but the savings are huge. But somehow the concept of the "negawatt" - a unit of energy saved replacing a unit of energy generated - seems to have failed to penetrate far enough into the environmental discourse to becoming the defining goal of our movement. New wind capacity is many times more expensive than energy efficiency, but because it is a "more" solution, rather than a "less" solution, somehow it gets higher billing than green home construction.

I feel like the concept of "doing more or the same with less" needs a new brand, a new word, a new identity. Efficiency is too cold and doesn't capture the "picking gold up off the sidewalk" quality of doing the same work in 32 hours as forty, and being happy with it, or cutting your heating bills by 75% and being warmer.

I feel like this may be a quirk of human evolution: we are well programmed at the deep levels to be able to identify "more" - more food, more land, more water, more cattle. But identifying an invisible entity like "better insulated" is more subtle. A windmill pumping out electricity is a "tangible more" but a lot full of well insulated houses is an "intangible less." The low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency simply garners less press, less attention, less buzz.

Can we change that by branding? Can we change that with new tools and new markets which trade "less" as "more?" as Amory Lovins and others have suggested? How do we make it as good business to save power as generate power, given that the environmental benefits are as large or larger? These are not new questions.

What I see in my minds eye is a garbage bag full of waste and two gallons of gasoline attached to two thousand feet of plastic wrap, divided up into 20 small tubes. Every day customers buy that product, over and over again, unthinking and unknowing. And we wonder why the waste continues!

(Posted by Vinay Gupta in WorldChanging Essays at 08:18 AM)

Workshop: Near field interactions
This is a call for proposals for a workshop on user-centred interactions with the internet of things at Nordichi 2006, October 14 and 15, 2006 in Oslo, Norway.
http://nordichi.net.dynamicweb.dk/

The user-centred Internet of Things
The so-called ‘Internet of Things’ is a vision of the future of networked things that share a record of their interactions with context, people and other objects. The evolution of networking to include objects occupying space and moving within the physical world presents an urgent design challenge for new kinds of networked social practice. The challenge for design is to overcome the current overarching emphasis on business and technology that has largely ignored practices that fall outside of operational efficiency scenarios.

What is imminently needed is a user-centred approach to understand the physical, contextual and social relationships between people and the networked things they interact with.

The mobile device as early enabler
The mobile phone is likely to play a key role in the early adoption of the internet of things. Mobile devices offer ubiquitous networks and interfaces, enabling otherwise offline objects at the edges of the network. Near Field Communication (NFC: http://www.nfc-forum.org/aboutnfc/) is a mobile technology that has been designed to integrate networked services into physical space and objects. NFC introduces a sense of ‘touch’, where interactions between devices are initiated by physical proximity.

In use, the mobile phone brings with it a history of personal and social activities and contexts. It is in this evolution that we see user-agency and social motivation emerging as an interesting area within the internet of things.

Workshop goals
In this workshop we intend to build knowledge around the hands-on problems and opportunities of designing user-centred interactions with networked objects. Through a process of ‘making things’ we will look closely at the kinds of interactions we may want to design with networked objects, and what roles the mobile phone may play in this.

We will focus on the design of simple, effective and innovative interactions between mobile phones and physical objects, rather than focusing on technical or network issues.

The primary questions for the workshop are:

What kinds of common interactions will emerge as networked objects become everyday?
What role will the mobile phone have to play in these interactions?
How do we encourage playful, experimental and exploratory use of networked things?

Some secondary questions are:

What interaction models can we bring to the internet of things? Do the fields of embodied interaction, tangible, social, ubiquitous or pervasive computing cover the required ground for designers?

What new kinds of social practices could emerge out of the possibilities presented by networked things?

How will the physical form of everyday objects and spaces be transformed by networks and near field interactions? How this would be reflected in users’ behavior?

How can the design of physical objects help in overcoming potential information or interaction overload, and how does search or findability change when in a physical context?

How can we move beyond commonsensical features such as object activation or findability?

What kind of user-communities will co-opt the technology and how will they hack, adjust and re-form it for their needs?

Workshop structure
Each workshop day will begin with a keynote presentation from invited experts. On the first day, participants will each give a short presentation of their position paper, no longer than 5 minutes.

Then groups of 3-4 people, each with different skills and backgrounds will then work on concepts, scenarios and prototypes. Prototypes may take the form of physical models, scenarios or enactments. We encourage the use of our wood, plastic and rapid prototyping workshops to create physical prototypes of selected concepts. We will provide workshop assistants for the creation of physical models.

Outcomes
The outcomes should be in a range of implementation styles allowing for a variety of outputs that speaks to a wide audience. A report will be written on the workshop, and published on the Touch project website and in other relevant channels.

Call for participation
The workshop is open to participants from human factors, mobile technology, social science, interaction and industrial design. Practitioners and those with industrial experience are strongly encouraged. Prior research work on embodied interaction, social and tangible computing would be particularly relevant. Participants will be selected based on their relevance to the workshop, and the overall balance of the group. Space is limited to 25 participants.

Call for short position papers
Application is by position paper no longer than two pages. The position paper can be visual or experimental in design and content. The themes should cover an issue that is relevant to the design of interactions with everyday objects.

Deadline for papers is 1 August, selected participants will be notified on the 9 August. The workshop itself is October 14 and 15, 2006.

Papers and any questions should be submitted to timo (at) elasticspace (dot) com before 1 August.

Organisers
Timo Arnall is a designer and researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design (AHO). Timo’s research looks at practices around ubiquitous computing in urban space. At the moment his work focuses on the personal and social use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies, looking for potential interactions with objects and city spaces through mobile devices. Previously his research looked at flyposting and stickering in public space, suggesting possible design strategies for combining physical marking and digital spatial annotation. Timo leads the research project Touch at AHO, looking at the use of mobile technology and Near Field Communication.

Julian Bleecker is a Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division, part of the USC School of Cinema-Television. Bleecker’s work focuses on emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, particularly in the areas of pervasive media, mobile media, social networks and entertainment. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in computer-human interaction. His doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Santa Cruz is on technology, entertainment and culture.

Nicolas Nova is a Ph.D. student at the CRAFT (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) working on the CatchBob! project. His current research is directed towards the understanding of how people use location-awareness information when collaborating in mobile settings, with a peculiar focus on pervasive games. After an undergraduate degree in cognitive sciences, he completed a master in human-computer interaction and educational technologies at TECFA (University of Geneva, Switzerland). His work is at the crossroads of cognitive psychology/ergonomics and human-computer interaction; relying on those disciplines to gain better understanding of how people use technology such as mobile and ubiquitous computing.

Technorati Tags: blogjects, conference, design, innovation, mobile, motility, RFID, sensors, spimes, transdisciplinary

Futurist in Residence Jerry Paffendorf from Electric Sheep Company a Second Life content/consultant company was part of a panel session at SuperNova2006’s Wharton West Workshop titled Massively Multi-layered Learning from Virtual Worlds today.

The MMOG’s of today like Wow is very expensive to create and maintain because of the time spend by game designers to create content for the users. The general consensus among the panelist was that hardcore gaming MMOG’s like Wow will blend more with user generated worlds like Second Life for a hybrid format of MMOG’s in the future. The hybrid MMOG’s will benefit both game producers and users by lowering the cost of development but also by adding more sustainability for the users by allowing them to create their own content and hence creating an army of game designers.

And how can the real world learn from what’s going on in the virtual world? Some of the issues raised were increased gaming type of leveling in workplaces with reward systems and quest solving that are going to be modeled after your favorite online game.

Another issues raised would have more social benefits with virtual quests with real world problem solving capabilities like having players do scans for certain patterns to complete a quest and that those patterns actually were x-ray images and the quest was helping doctors diagnose cancer patients. I like the idea of problem solving in the virtual world is directly linked with real world benefits but given what level of training it takes to help doctors scan x-way images that idea might have long prespectives.

An interesting project developed by Michael Frumin at Eyebeam Research and Development but not mentioned in the session that I'll bring up since I didn’t blog the story from Jerry’s speak at Where 2.0 is the idea of creating a metaverse by merging a Google Earth like application with a Second Life universe of user generated content.

The Second Life Future Salon posted about the first successful implementation in Google Earth of a Second Life avatar and how that avatar was printed from virtual world bits and bytes into real world atoms and physics.

"http://feeds.we-make-money-not-art.com/~a/wmmna?a=5brUt0">

The latest fad in P2P isn't P2P at all. Some clever soul has created a simple interface that allows the layperson to search using Google for Mp3's. 

Something tells me this won't last long. "Quick and dirty website allowing you to search Google for MP3s. No need to remember all those funny codes and parameters."

Funny codes and parameters indeed. A few quick tests with the G2P interface show that it does find files containing the artist name, and with an extension of "mp3". The trick uses a default behavior of the Apache webserver to identify pages that have been indexed in Google containing the standard Apache boilerplate that is generated when a published directory has no index file.

While Google, quite obviously, passes the "substantial non-infringing uses" test layed out in U.S. court decisions, the G2P interface does not.

[via Digg]

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ion solo (experimental) is one of the most exciting developments in videoblogging. It’s an open source java app that plays rss feeds with videos in a beautiful, full screen UI. Check it out!

By Robert Niles: OJR talks with Plagiarism Today editor Jonathan Bailey about what's happening with scraper sites, the DMCA and the battle to protect content online.

My suegra left her first comment on a blog yesterday. In a voice mail thanking her, I encouraged her to start her blog:afterall, she's a bright, witty woman with a lot to say about the state of the world. But will she? Will blogging become the next email, as some predict– an Internet activity that everyone does? Or is merely a geek activity more appropriate to debates about the validity of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 conclusion than to mainstream discussions?

These questions are coming to the fore a bit more. Can those of us like Ethan , who are "who are enthusiastic about the read/write web" take heart in the recent Pew Iternet Study that found that 57% of adult respondents have created and shared something online? Are we sobered by the release of research like Eszter Hargittai's that shows the number of folks actually engaging with blogs and read-write web devices is astonishingly low? Jakob Nielsen makes similar points in a discussion with Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine:

You are extrapolating from your personal experience. This is invalid. You are not an average user….

Jeff responded,

Who would have thought even a year ago that the BBC, The Guardian, CNN, CBS, and other major media would need to run to catch up with this wacky thing called the podcast — and that once they did catch up, they’d serve them to large and devoted audiences.

And who says we need to create for the average anymore? Who the hell is average? No one is. The beauty of this new world is that we can create and serve in many ways for many people and needs and interests.

And Jakob responds in a comment :

That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction.

[UPDATED: I meant to add: with RSS' spread into mainstream products like IE7, the New York Times' MyTimes, and Yahoo, won't that tiny fraction grow exponentially?]

Relatedly, John Dickerson, in his article on Lieberman challenger Ned Lamont, asks whether blog-driven challenger Lamont has

tapped into a winning political movement, or does he just have a bunch of supporters who can type quickly?

Like Ethan and Jeff, I'm an optimist– I think the blogosphere is certainly more than quick typers. But, per Eszter and Nielsen's challenges, where's the data, Pew phone studies notwithstanding? In a similar vein, see the comments left by Eszter and Pat Aufterheide in response to my post about Saul Hansell's optimism that MySpace is a media literacy tool:

Eszter: "I am not sure who are all these people he is talking about who are or will be participating actively enough to learn. But it will be interesting to follow and find out."
Pat: "The evidence at the outset of this phenomenon gives us no guide."

HBR writes:

Second Life is just one of a growing number of three-dimensional virtual worlds, accessible via the Internet, in which users, through an avatar, are able to play games or simply interact socially with thousands of people simultaneously. By some estimates, more than 10 million people spend $10 to $15 a month to subscribe to online role-playing environments, with the number of subscribers doubling every year. Millions more enter free sites, some of them sponsored by companies as brand-building initiatives. Many users spend upward of 40 hours a week in these worlds. And as the technology improves over the next decade, virtual worlds may well eclipse film, TV, and non–role-playing computer games as a form of entertainment. That’s because, instead of watching someone else’s story unfold in front of them on a screen, users in these worlds create and live out their own stories.

line, “you want sustained engagement with the brand rather than just a click-through” to a purchase or product information, says Bonita Stewart, responsible for interactive marketing for DaimlerChrysler’s Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge brands. “Avatars create an opportunity for just this type of engagement.”

Fast Company Blog writes about a talk given by John Hagel:

The challenge he posed is: The new scarcity = attention; there has been a profound shift in busienss economics from shelf space as the key scarce resource to people's time and attention and the key scarce resource.

do to/for (because there's opportunity as well as challenge) to branding, marketing, metrics?

According to John, marketing was formerly based on the three I's -- Intercept, isolate, inhibit -- and instead it should be based on the three A's: attract, assist (develop understandingn of context both pre and post purchase); affiliate (mobilize people to help deliver value)

This, says John, is an inexorable move from product and vendor centric promises (buy from me because I have great products or because I am a great vendor) to a customer-centric promise (buy from me because I know you as an individual customer beter than any one else and you can trust me to confiugure the right bundle of products and services to fill your needs as they evolve over time).

Yahoo News, one of the world’s most popular news aggregation sites, plans to launch a citizen video-journalist news service at the end of June that will act as a collection and publication site for news videos generated by the public.

CNN is trying to be hip. Take from a guy with a gray beard: There’s nothing more pathetically cringeworthy than an old fart trying to be with it. (Just ask for my son’s reaction when I play hiphop in the car.)

But that is what CNN is dying to do with its new video podcast called The Grist. They announce that “this isn’t news, people, and it certainly isn’t important” as they show wacky clips and try to deliver wacky lines from a would-be-wacky host (Jarrett Bellini, a media operations feeds coordinator, according to MediaWeek).

I’ll tell you what would be a lot cooler: Take all those wacky, unused clips and put them up online so anyone can download and remix them and put the results up on YouTube et al. Go ahead and put the CNN bug in the corner; by all means, take credit for providing the grist for the bigger mill that is the creative community on the internet. If you do that, your stuff will be everywhere and you’ll be cool for helping to make it happen.

And since I’m giving unsolicited advice to CNN, I wish they would also put up Howie Kurtz’s Reliable Sources online so I don’t have to skip church to watch it, thereby going straight to hell, and also don’t have to bother recording it — and also could link to what’s said in it. I want to subscribe to the show and every week I’ll watch it, together with commercials — I promise — on my iPod. And if there were a particularly great clip, I’d even put it on my site (with CNN’s brand and advertising) if you’d let me. I’d help promote and distribute the content that is never seen again once it’s on and off the air. Wouldn’t that be ever so hip?

Media owners must find ways to attract and retain talent and create stand-alone digital divisions in order to compete in the era of internet blogs, open access and online communities, Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, has warned.

(Tonight we're going to party like it's 1999. -kc.)

The Google AdSense team would like to invite you to test a feature that provides you with a new way to earn revenue from your website by hosting ads that are compensated based on a Cost-Per-Action [CPA] basis.

Similar to Shelly Palmer's "Television Disrupted" -- any web site, from business to personal, can offer any kind of content now.

"a surreal survey on the effects of nanotechnology on urban play"

List of movies that have fallen out of copyright, with links to where they are hosted.

>they wanted to use the real surveillance camera footage as stage set-up for their game. The fictional elements are then interlaced with the camera footage to create the narrative that leads the player through the game.

"Early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles," The New York Times reports about Wikipedia.

The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.

Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on Bill Gates was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair and sex.

To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of the "anyone can edit" notion....

Creative Commons has announced the release of an add-in to Microsoft Office that allows the easy addition of a CC license to files created with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.

the technology behind SNV is rebuilt from the ground up in order to allow future user-submitted work as well as the customization of the software.

"An enriching form of individual creativity and technology is inventing a new global space: the digital commons. Elizabeth Stark introduces a debate that explores the possibilities and challenges of a culture without borders - or owners."

Ten years ago, just after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nation published a special issue on the National Entertainment State. The issue featured a centerfold chart depicting the tentacles of four colossal conglomerates that were increasingly responsible for determining how Americans got their news--Time Warner, General Electric, Disney/Cap Cities and Westinghouse. And essays by Norman Lear, Walter Cronkite and Mark Crispin Miller, among others, looked ahead to a period of no-holds-barred consolidation green-lighted by the new legislation. Today, after a decade of strategic mergers, impulsive couplings and messy divorces--not to mention the birth of "new media" as well as a vigorous media reform movement--the landscape is considerably more complex, though it still bears the oversized footprints of a few giants. This is reflected not only in the detailed fold-out map that appears in this issue but in the range of contributions to this year's forum.

webscraper for Proce55ing.

"What happens when you share? Your friend has a cookie and a toy, while you have nothing"

Herein lies the tale of one Eyebeam researcher’s futile attempt to exhume a relevant and interesting data set from the depths of a public administration. The story is brief, the details are in the documents, feel free to read between the lines.

The Globe and Mail writes about an assistive technology that is allowing blind users to "see" by sound".

"The technology is part of a wave of software and hardware which has evolved as laptops, mobile phones and PDAs converge into powerful handheld computers.

They're having a profound impact, allowing the blind to navigate streets in unfamiliar cities, to having e-mails read from their mobiles and identifying colours.

The "Seing with Sound" technology was developed by Peter Meijer, a Dutch scientist, and is available as a free download on his website. "

"VisualHub bridges the gap between numerous complicated video formatting standards, and people that just want to get the job done - just what you would expect from the Mac."

Apparently generates sufficiently legit addresses, phone numbers.

"On Wednesday, the Spokesman-Review began broadcasting its twice-daily editorial meetings over the Internet."

• American Apparel Opens Outpost in Second Life
  (tags: marketing games secondlife virtual_worlds)

10 Commandments for Java Developers

Good rules.. Unfortunately, for me, I don't follow them ;-)

"There are many standards and best practices for Java Developers out there. This article outlines ten most basic rules that every developer must adhere to and the disastrous outcomes that can follow if these rules are not followed.

Amazon.com: Videoblogging: Books: Jay Dedman,Joshua Kinberg,Joshua Paul
Jay, Josh and Josh's book, up on Amazon..

From the description:
Amazing, isn't it? You're on equal footing with multibillion-dollar TVand movie producers. Videoblogging lets your audience see your cause,your story, or your personal creations—and you can distribute your showto anyone with Internet access. And since the videobloggingcommunity is all about sharing, more than 20 expertshave kicked in tips and ideasto make this book the ultimatevideoblogging crash course. So head for the checkout, grabfresh batteries for your videocamera, and let's get started!

I increasing believe that in order to survive and grow in a digital, networked, social, participatory world, media companies need to evolve into marketing services companies. Here’s what’s driving me to that conclusion.

Advertising took another significant step yesterday towards graduating from paid media placements (i.e. traditional ads). Ironically, it starts with a paid media placement on The Huffington Post:

HUFFINGTONPOST.COM THIS WEEKEND LAUNCHED A video ad promotion featuring seven TV ads, all selected for their high “viral” potential–meaning some quality that makes them likely candidates for e-mail forwarding. So far the ads, produced by agency JWT, are purely voluntary viewing; visitors have to click on a small video screen on the site’s right-hand side to see them.

JWT, formerly J. Walter Thompson, purchased the ad space for this pilot initiative, which will offer TV ads for Ford, JetBlue, Levi’s, the Partnership for a Drug Free America, Scruffs, and Billy Collins–all chosen for humor or novelty value.

This is the future — advertising that is worth watching not because you are forced to do so through interruption, but because the marketing message itself is entertaining or useful.

And thanks to the fully networked Web 2.0, viral marketing is no longer just a buzzword. Sharing has gone mainstream.

(Continued at Publishing 2.0.)

(AP) -- Microsoft Corp.'s latest instant messaging program is ready for prime time, the company said Monday. Windows Live Messenger, which had been available in test form, will officially launch Tuesday.

When I think of standards I think of the Stephenson gauge. Two pieces of steel laid at 4' 8.5" apart carries rail traffic for 60% of the world's railroads. The standard has been around for centuries, allowing easy interoperability between rail lines from different companies and countries, creating new and cheaper opportunities for commerce around the world. Railroad companies did not always believe in the power of standards but eventually came together for big contracts and their rewards.

Next Friday I will lead a discussion at Bloggercon IV about the affects of standards on the lives of users. How can cooperation and interoperability lead to happy users, increased profits, and more participation online?

In the world of railroads companies varied the width of their rails to force a transfer of goods from Company A using the trains and workers of Company B. These increased costs meant more direct control over commerce by the companies laying the lines, but ultimately made travel by rail unreliable and costly, forcing customers to utilize other methods of transport such as a river barge. The arrival of cross-country travel and military contracts in the United States eventually forced standardization and better options for users.

In the online world we rely on a few standards to make life easy for users. The W3C activity around HTML provides a common base for implementors and authors. We still have to tweak our pages for optimal use in each browser, but a common baseline reduces some of the work involved in deploying all over the world.

The world of feed aggregators interoperates using the OPML file format for subscription portability. Users can post to their blog and backup their entries using the application of their choice thanks to standards such as the MetaWeblog API and the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Open standards create open competition, eliminating lock-in and allowing users to pick the best services for their wants and needs. The door remains open, but companies focused on their users believe you are happy enough within their walls you'll never want to head for the doors.

What are your experiences with standards or the lack thereof? What new standards and interoperability would you like to see companies develop to thrill their users? Bloggercon is part of the user-centered summer of love. Let's chat about the things you love and hate about your experiences online and how collaboration and standards can help.

Two Sites, Two Cities

FurtherNoise.org Presents: Month Of Sundays Live A/V Internet Mixing. Featuring John Kannenberg & Glenn Bach. Open Mix led by Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett (Furtherfield & HTTP). Post performance soundscapes by Alex Young (Furthernoise). Date & Time: 16.00 - 18.00 hrs BST; Where: E:vent - 96 Teesdale Street, London E2 6PU.

As part of the Month Of Sundays series of live A/V internet performances Furthernoise.org is hosting this unique event featuring a cross continent A/V performance by Chicago based John Kannenberg mixing in real time with Glenn Bach who will be performing from his home in Long Beach, California. The performance is based on their Two Cities project, which began in 2003 using sounds, photos, objects and data collected on Glenn and John's daily walking commutes to compare and contrast the environments of their respective hometowns.

It will take place in the online file mixing platform Visitors Studio
and projected, amplified into the gallery space from www.visitorsstudio.org

Come and join us at E:vent: Bring your laptops and media files and collaborate. Following the performance, Furtherfield artists Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett will lead an open mix where audiences both online and in the gallery can join in by uploading and mixing their own audio & visual files in an open collaborative mix. Files can be mp3, swf, flv and jpg and must be a maximum of 2OOK.

There will also be free refreshments and post performance Soundcapes by Alex Young who's album 'Helicoids' is the new net release on Furthernoise.org.

As well as being shown at E:vent, the afternoons performances will be also broadcast, in real-time, online:- at The Watershed Media Centre, Bristol. The Point CDC Theatre, New York.

Curated by Roger Mills. Furthernoise & Visitors Studio are Furtherfield.org projects, supported by Arts Council England.

BIOGRAPHIES

Chicago-based sonic and visual artist John Kannenberg works with a variety of themes including primal natural forces, spirituality and mindful contemplation, melancholy and nostalgia, abstracted narrative tales, and the confluence of sonic and visual art. His major appearances include the Spark Festival 2006 (Minneapolis), so.cal.sonic 2005 (Long Beach), ISEA 2004 (Tallinn), and the Placard Festival 2003 (New York). John is the creator and curator of Stasisfield.com, an experimental music label and digital art space presenting works by a diverse collection of artists from around the globe.

Based in Long Beach, California, Glenn Bach is an active multidisiciplinary artist influenced by the act of mindful walking and environmental sound, Bach has performed at Field Effects (San Francisco), the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, and the Schick Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, NY) and has curated a house concert series, Quiet (2003), the week-long so.cal.sonic festival (2005) and is the founder of the research group Pedestrian Culture. His current project is a poem sequence, Atlas Peripatetic, inspired by an extensive mapping of sounds on his morning walk.

Ruth Catlow is an artist and works as co director of Furtherfield, formed and run in partnership with artist, Marc Garrett since 1997. Ruth works with networked media in public physical spaces and on the Internet. exploring net art with new communities (of artists and audiences) with less reliance on existing, traditional art world hierarchies, developing independent grass-roots expression and representation. She is exploring the potential of current network technology for promoting distributed creativity which raises a whole series of issues by giving rise to a more permeable boundary between established arbiters of culture, artists and audiences radically changing the life of the artwork in the world, and the ways in which people come across it.

Marc Garrett is an Internet artist, writer, street artist, activist, curator, educationalist and musician. In a constant state of being renascent. He share's no allegiance to any one form of art or expression. 'For me, art, or rather creativity, is an intuitive strategy that involves learning, questioning, progressive thought and putting playful explorations into action'. Emerging in the late 80's from the streets exploring creativity via agit-art tactics, Marc declares his own and humanity's seemingly perpetual dysfunction. Consciously using unofficial platforms such as the streets, pirate radio, net broadcasts, BBS systems, performance, intervention, events, pamphlets, warehouses and gallery spaces. In the early nineties he was co-sysop with Heath Bunting for Cybercafe BBS.

Locative Media, Perspective, Flight

The primary concern in locative media has been, understandably, location. This has been a great new leap in terms of art, technology, science and narrative. Locative Media Art consists of artworks utilizing locative technology to trigger artworks in a specific physical space.

Locative media art goes back to early experiments such as Telepresent by Steven Wilson in 1997 that was an object equipped with GPS left to be communally interacted with and moved while continually sending images via the Internet.

Another key development was the GPS drawings of Jeremy Wood in 2000 in which he discovered that by tracing his movements as he drove or walked with GPS that he could form shapes formed by the sequence of plotted movements. Other projects worked with Geo-Annotation which placed a comment or reflection on a physical location (similar to what hikers for years would do at posted signs on certain trails). Then came the project 34 North 118 West that was the first locative narrative.

34 North 118 West was a mapping of a four block area of Los Angeles where the primary non-passenger rail yard and related infrastructure at the turn of the last century and the original grand passenger station of Los Angeles (La Grande station) once stood. The majority of the buildings are the same but have changed in usage in time, state of disrepair and who has come to live and work in them in waves of development and housing.

Other buildings were destroyed over the years and only the ghosts of historical information and personal accounts remain. The project created a "narrative archaeology" as the layers in time were to be agitated into being. In one place would be narrativized data from 1936 a few hundred feet from a spot before a building that triggered something from 1910.

Now groups such as the C5 collective are doing work such as the GPS mapping of the entire great wall of china and then placing the coordinates in another location. This type of work creates a layered commentary and plays with form and semiotics as well as referencing the Situationists who developed absurd commentaries like a walk through the streets of Paris following a map of another city..." Continue reading Floating Points: Locative Media, Perspective, Flight and the International Space Station by Jeremy Hight with Alexander van Dijk, Hz Journal, #8, June 2006.

For recent grads, Linden Lab, operators of Second Life, has a ton of job listings posted on their web site. Some do not require relocation. Commute to work via the Information Superhighway!
http://lindenlab.com/employment

With the internet evolving as a business tool, browsers are overhauling their designs to make browsing both more efficient and secure. Expect big changes across the board.

New Jersey has instituted a complete ban on news media interviews with prison inmates, The Star-Ledger reports. "The press still has the option of writing to inmates if they have questions," a prison spokesman said.

Star-Ledger reporter William Kleinknecht writes:

"For decades, the jailhouse interview has been a staple of American journalism, the fodder for books like 'In Cold Blood' and 'The Executioner's Song' and movies like 'The Thin Blue Line.'

"Inmates have long used such interviews to protest their innocence, decry prison conditions or just tell their life stories, not always a welcome prospect for law enforcement officials and victims of crime."

The New Jersey Press Association said it would seek to have the policy overturned.

Stewart Butterfield must be proud of himself!  He deserves a good nights rest after this on-slaught - attacking his integrity, best intentions and strategy.  Brad Horowitz must be proud of him - as well.

Reading over the comments (I posted the #112 one) on Michael Arrington’s original, slanderous post - it seems to me that Stewart’s so-called ‘change of heart’ is exactly the right answer. 

Reciprocation.

Of course  Its somethiing I completely assumed, but was pointed out to me (thanks Tara and Chris) was not necessarily being granted by Zoomr.  Many debated this issue and I think we’ll go over it at Bloggercon IV - as well.

So lets be clear.

Open APIs are a two-way street and Stewart and Flickr have set a precedent - as they’ve done so many times before - on demanding that any commercial vendor who wants a commercial key, MUST also provide clean, clear, open APIs - going in BOTH directions - from their system.

That seems not only fair but smart.

Now regarding WHERE a user’s data is stored, this is the old ‘data storage in the clouds debate’ - rehashed.  Antonio Rodrieguez points out that it’s completely reasonable to leave an end-user’s photos in Flickr, [via Doc] while accompalishing the tasks (in Tabblo’s case - hard copy printing) - at hand.

But let me point out a simple thing. 

Its really hard to create a compelling end-user experience when you’re linking to external sources.  We’ve been trying it for over a year now - with some sucess, but in general if you want to include (let’s say) your external blog in some other service - its far from satisfactory experience.

DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators) like the PeopleAggregator can easily handle data being stored - wherever.  We’ll eventually even have a formal VFS (virtual file system) to keep track of where the hell all your stuff is.

But all data stored from some remote web service needs to be cached - as no end-user is gonna be happy waiting for their pages to update - while pulling in data from that remote web service.  This is a crucial UI issue.

So as the dashboard category grows (Pageflakes, NetVibes, Superglu, etc.) expect to see further and further sophisticated caching of data coming from web services - just to make these dashboards usable.

Now where does that put us in the Open APIs debate?

Right smack dab in the middle of it.

Cause once we have Open APIs moving in both directions, and we’ve given our end-users the ability to move their stuff around - we ALSO need to give them the ability to cache this data - so they’re not waiting for their remotely linked pages - to update.

This is where Tucows comes in.

They have launched a ‘Feedcache’ service - which I believe can be expanded to become a personalized ‘web services’ cache service - for ALL to use. I had a great conversation with Ross Rader about this - a couple of months back - and like all good ideas- this idea’s day has come.

:-)

 BTW I have pitched Antonio’s service to several of our cleints and they all say “sign me up!” So congrats to Antonio!

The international symposium on wikis is taking place in Denmark in August this year.

The invited talk lineup is excellent: there will be talks by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Angela Beesley (“How and Why Wikipedia Works”), Doug Engelbart and Eugene Eric Kim (“The Augmented Wiki”), Mark Bernstein (“Intimate Information”) and Ward Cunningham (“Design Principles of Wikis”).

Like the first year, there’s a research paper track, panels (“Wikis in Education” and “The Future of Wikis”), and workshops. There will also be an Open Space track throughout the meeting.

Today (June 19) is the last day for early registration. The chair, Dirk Riehle, informs me that “you can register but don’t have to pay right away. So even if you are waiting for travel permission from your boss, you can already register and pay later (or cancel with no hassles).” Which I’m going to do right away, as a matter of fact. :) The registration page is here.

National Public Radio, which wholeheartedly embraced podcasting early, is seeing a nice return on its investment. According to Advertising Age, NPR's revenues from new-media operations is 10% of its total. Podvertising is playing a key role. Acura was a founding sponsor of NPR's podcasts and just renewed for another six months. No wonder then that CNN is set to expand its podcast play today.

Technorati Tags: CNN, NPR, Podvertising

Hiroyuki Nakano and his team posted some video messages from him for the iCommons Summit. I added the English subtitles and now they've been translated into Italian, Romanian and partially in Arabic in less than 24 hours. Pretty amazing.

Videos on dotSUB.

Comment - TrackBack

Well, as long as they display them in Sony's ad-supported player, which bloggers can soon embed on their sites. It's part of a new Sony site called MusicBox Video, powered by Brightcove. Very slick presentation. And I'm a little surprised other media sites haven't picked up on the powerful YouTube idea of letting anyone copy-and-paste their player on their sites.

Analyzing the NYT's latest Wikipedia article, ZDNet's Donna Bogatin pulls the stats that The Church of the Consumer have known for some time: The One Percent Rule. Only about one percent of visitors contribute content to sites that invite them to do so. Lost Remote doesn't even do that much - on our comments we get 3,000 page views a day but only maybe 3-5 regulars contribute. And that's fine. We don't expect (and can't handle) 3,000 comments a day. So I'm troubled by Bogatin's analysis, even if it's just trying to be a little wordplay-ish: Perhaps the social Web will come to be known for its freeloaders, rather than its uploaders. There is nothing freeloading about visiting Wikipedia and not posting to it. Ditto LR, YouTube, Flickr, etc. This is not about "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." (Origin: PaidContent)

BBC Worldwide is planning to provide a commercial version of the BBC iPlayer to allow people to download television and radio programmes over the internet. The news follows the appointment of a new director of digital media by the distribution and publishing arm of the BBC.

a visualization tool set that represents the evolution of 3D virtual environments, the distribution of their virtual inhabitants over time & space, & the formation or diffusion of user groups inside them. the visualizations are particularly valuable for analyzing events that are spread out in time or space, or events that involve a very large number of participants.
a chat log bar graph provides an overview about how many citizens & visitors participated in an event. a spatial distribution visualization traces & aggregates trails of groups on an automatically generated 2D map.
see also pedestrian levitation & mobile phone trace map & micro-fashion network.
[indiana.edu(pdf)]

Variety is reporting that Apple is working on a movie download component for iTunes, which already sells television shows.

Studios have resisted Jobs' initial insistence that feature films be priced at the easy-to-remember $9.99. After all, library titles are typically sold to Wal-Mart and Best Buy significantly cheaper than new releases. Studios now are trying to convince Apple to sell similar content at multiple price points, something the company has never done.

Also complicating the deals: The studios are working out terms with a host of other distributors, including Amazon, Movielink and BitTorrent, in part to make sure that one company does not dominate. It seems that none of the studios wants to be first in making a deal with Apple. Disney would be the logical leader, but even they are cautious, fearing it will look like in-house synergy rather than a business decision.

ref="http://feeds.tuaw.com/weblogsinc/tuaw?m=525">TUAW.com.

A few of my friends have been making the OS X/Intel transition, and I have been kicking around some notes while I learn what works and what doesn't. Here's a brain dump of some of the advice I've been giving people.

• If you have more than one Mac, .Mac is the best $80 a year you can spend. The syncing alone is worth it over and over and over.
• Jumpcut, Steve Cook's clipboard management app, is really hitting it's stride.
• TextWrangler is still free, but I always end the day with both SubethaEdit and Textmate both open. For smaller text files, Yojimbo works the way you always wanted stickies to work. I love the .Mac syncing - my notes and PDFs are always where I want them to be. It's also very smart about encrypting passwords, serial numbers and notes you want to keep private.
• Fence is still a work in progress, but it's a very slick Cocoa/Atom uploader that works best with Typepad and Vox.
• This is a little exorbitant, but I also check a lot of configuration files into an svn repository, which TextDrive makes very easy.
• If you do any perl at all, it's worth it to blow away /System/Library/Perl and just reinstall all your XML modules. I install Plagger and Catalyst and all the good ones get picked up along the way.
• Lightroom Beta 3 is Universal (from Adobe).
• Macsaber (of course).
• I also have my Activity Log on all the time, so that when a PowerPC app pops up I can upgrade or replace it immediately. I notice a performance hit when Rosetta comes on.

The Economist writes about the "Babel Fish" dream:

Within the next few years there will be an explosion in translation technologies, says Alex Waibel, director of the International Centre for Advanced Communication Technology, which is based jointly at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and at CMU. He predicts there will be real-time automatic dubbing, which will let people watch foreign films or television programmes in their native languages, and search engines that will enable users to trawl through multilingual archives of documents, videos and audio files. And, eventually, there may even be electronic devices that work like Babel fish, whispering translations in your ear as someone speaks to you in a foreign tongue.

Only the legit need apply

Applicants to the University of Abertay's new Ethical Hacking course will be subject to stringent background checks before being offered a place, to make sure they are not likely to abuse the knowledge they will gain.…

Hacking in the interest of business, is that a little contradictory? --L.N.R.

Originally from The Register, ReBlogged by LNR on Jun 19, 2006 at 10:51 AM

List of collaborative meta news sites

social networking is a micro-phenomenon of a much larger macro-trend that the Internet has spawned since its birth… digital self-expression. Today’s social networks (along with other forms of social media, like blogging and online video-sharing) are j

"I spent a bunch of time on the Netscape music channel and the Digg music category yesterday and even though Digg had way more users voting and submiting stories, Netscape's stories were more interesting to me. They were about music instead of music gadgets and technology issues. So that kind of proves that Netscape has the opportunity to create a less geeky, possibly more mainstream audience."

We are proud to release TextMachine 3D Version 6.

With Text Machine 3D you can render on Screen Words and Phrases from customizable Dictionaries using all Fonts you have installed on your PC.

Text Machine 3D Includes the functionality to Render Random Counters and Alphanumeric Strings. Combined with a Barcode Font you can get very cool effects

Images and Video Loops can be loaded and live color filtered.

Every Parameter can be controlled via MIDI - up to 3 MIDI Devices can be used simultaneously

Work Live with Text Machine 3D or Record your output to numbered Files.

Creativity does not like to be fenced in.

(Or maybe a precursor towards new sales. -kc.)

The first annual Digital IP Summit was held at the BEAUTIFUL new Cable Center at DU, with high-ups from HBO, Turner, Time Warner, Cox, and others in attendance, I was ready to be enlightened. The audience was likewise full of old-school industry folks, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that the main focus of the attendees (and many of the panelists) was how to resist the wave.

The few academics who spoke about approaches for "riding the wave" were dismissed in large part, because most of the audience wasn't there to learn how to "share" or how to find revenue-models that accommodated the digital revolution, they were simply looking for tech tools to make the changing world fit into their old paradigms of rights management and Intellectual Property.

CellJournalist is a new website that pays you for photos uploaded to their servers, and then sells the photos to media outlets all over the world.

O'Reilly's Media Where 2.0 conference is where it's at for location-based developments. Check out the Schedule, Speakers, Events, Wiki, Blogs and Sponsors.

Announcements this week include Skyhook Wireless which announced the launch of their Skyhook Developer's Network. The Developer's Network will allow solution providers to build location-based products without the need of additional hardware such as a GPS.

WiFiPlanet says the software developer's kit will target applications written in the C programming language to run on Windows operating systems, including Windows Mobile handhelds.

The cornerstone for the Skyhook Developer's Network is the Developer's Dashboard, a web-based support infrastructure that will give LBS developer's access to the Skyhook software-only positioning APIs and software code, documentation, release notes, community forums and technical support.

Their applications include a Skype E911 Plug-in, Location-Based Search, Navigation and Sharing, Location-based sticky notes, Photo tagging with EyeFi and area/code Big Games.

Skyhook's service can act as a virtual GPS, providing latitude and longitude in standard NMEA format. That allows developers to leverage location interfaces that they have already developed. Skyhook says it gives developers the ability to add auto-location query functionality and incorporate a complete location profile -- latitude, longitude, full street address -- through a simple API.

Skyhook's main competitor is probably Navizon, which uses a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular towers.

Related DailyWireless articles include; City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup.

The Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Art and Media takes place annually in Sheffield, UK, during March/April, bringing together leading computer programmers, graphic designers, film-makers and musicians from all over the world.

Subsonic is a free, web-based media streamer, providing access to your entire music collection wherever you are.

Red Herring: There are rumors that Yahoo plans to introduce a citizen video journalist news service. Sources say that "inspired by the amateur video that chronicled the London bombings, the portal firm is seeking more."

The official version of my peer reviewed paper Constructing a Framework to Enable an Open Source Reinvention of Journalism is now posted at First Monday, one of the first peered reviewed online journals. It's where Eric Raymond first published his paradigm changing paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar. So I am feeling pretty good about it.

Here is the abstract from my paper:

This article builds upon open source/open content literature and applications to develop a framework from which academics, citizens, critics, journalists and the media industry can collectively develop a sustainable model or models to save quality journalism -- possibly by reinventing journalism as it has traditionally been defined. This article provides that framework, not so much as a theoretical construct, but rather as an annotated checklist to guide those interested in reinventing journalism.

The paper contains 14 steps that each individual or news organization should consider before making the open content leap. After reading an earlier edition of the paper, when I was talking about 15 steps, Mark Hamilton at Notes from a Teacher wrote:

If this piece doesn't kickstart your thinking about media, nothing will.

Bryan Murley at Reinventing College Media did an online interview with me that should be running soon. I'll let you know when that is posted.

The paper is long and a bit academic, so what I will be doing in the next few weeks is breaking out each individual step as more of a manual for reorganizing a news organization, if not totally reinventing journalism.

Web 2.0 startups that deliver the goods don't need ad agencies' brand-building hype machines. Instead, they harness the power of the new buzz builders. By Bruce Sterling from Wired magazine.

Google Earth has released an update, in essence, jazzier and more hi-res, with a better UI. Or some such. But this bit particularly caught my eye:

"Google is trying to make all these tools more accessible to ordinary people and get them engaged in content," Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence said, adding that "the idea of a geobrowser is fascinating, as is the eventual merger of gaming and mapping."

Now, if only they'd make an actual announcement on a partnership between gaming and mapping. Really - can you imagine a MMOG that had the earth as the default map?

The mind boggles.

Next week, the FCC may revisit the issue of whether cable providers will be required to carry every channel of programming transmitted by over the air broadcasters. “Must-carry” itself is not a new idea — for years cable systems have been forced to carry broadcast signals over their networks. When broadcasters switch to digital transmission, however, each will be able to transmit multiple channels over the same bit of spectrum. So, should cable firms be required to carry each and every one of these channels? The FCC said “no” to such multicast must-carry rules a few years ago. But that was under Chairman Michael Powell. Current chairman Kevin Martin feels differently about “multi-cast must-carry,” and may now have the votes to reverse the prior decision. (More on the issue here.)

This week, he got support for this expanded regulation from an unlikely source: AT&T. AT&T, you may remember, has in recent months been exhaustively making the case against another set of rules — neutrality regulation. The federal government should keep its paws off private networks, they (rightly) argued, warning that they would discourage needed investment in private networks. However, this week a spokesman said that, regarding must-carry, it had no objection to federal paws. “We’re more than happy to put this programming on our network,” he said. “We support multicast must-carry.”

AT&T of course, has every right to put these channels on their new video systems. In fact, the architecture of their IPTV systems makes this easy. But AT&T did more than just agree to carry these signals itself — it endorsed mandating it. This means that AT&T video rivals — traditional cable firms — would also have to carry multiple signals. For these companies, must-carry would cause more pain, since their bandwidth is more limited.

This unfortunate impact on its rivals could not have escaped AT&T’s notice. (In fact, since AT&T argues its video system isn’t technically “cable TV” at all, the rules may only hurt its rivals). And its certainly not uncommon for any company to use regulation to gain a fair advantage over its rivals. Yet, such strategies may backfire. As I wrote last year, that time criticizing the cable industry for similar behavior:

As anyone who’s followed telecom lobbying for more than a week or so knows, industry lobbyists routinely argue for policies that help them gain a “fair advantage” over their rivals. It’s probably too much to expect industries to support free-markets policies (however rational) when it conflicts with their self-interest. But it is puzzling to see them supporting policies that will end up hurting them.

And, I should have added, hurting consumers.

Mobile devices are becoming more and more intelligent – allowing users to watch movies on a mobile phone or laptop, or navigate with a PDA – but at the same time they require increasing amounts of power.

The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (the largest labs for applied sciences in Germany) has rolled out a prototype sun powered mobile phone. 21 talks reports.

Under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, scientists from various institutes are working on technologies that will make it possible to achieve greater power densities and, when combined with batteries in hybrid energy systems, extend operating times.

At the Hanover Trade Fair, the researchers will be displaying new energy storage technologies, micro-fuel cells, and information on the opportunities offered by "energy harvesting," or drawing power from multiple energy sources available in the environment of the device."

Other solar powered ideas ...

More on future phones from London’s Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design on T3 with a slide show. Check it out! Below are a gaming phone concept (left) and a surveillance phone (right). More photos of future phone concepts on T3 and on the BBC.

More on "The Future of Mobile Design"

DirectShow Java Wrapper: humatic - dsj

Very Nice..
From the site:
Need to play Windows Media files and streams, DivX video or DVDs in java? Access WDM capture devices? Control a firewire DVCam? Then maybe this can help you. dsj is an ongoing project to provide a java wrapper around Microsoft's DirectShow API. It offers a set of high level classes that give java easy access to functionality widely missed by java programmers and also lets you dive deeper into the interiors of Windows' core api for 2D media. On the java side dsj tries to keep things open as possible - you may use it standalone or let it feed data into JMF or other APIs.

They also point to a bunch of Open Source projects that are of interest:
Related projects (dsj does not use OpenSource, GPL or LGPL licensed code, but - as you are here - these projects may be of interest, too) :

JMDS - DirectShow Capture api Java wrapper: jmds.dev.java.net - fobs4jmf - ffmpeg c++ & java bindings: http://fobs.sourceforge.net

java VLC - VideoLan java bindings: http://jvlc.ihack.it - DXInput - DirectInput Java wrapper: www.hardcode.de

jARToolkit - ARToolkit java bindings: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jartoolkit/ - jFFmpeg - JMF codec pack: http://jffmpeg.sourceforge.net/

People With Ideas >> Blog Archive >> YouTube: ALL YOUR VIDEOS ARE BELONG TO US
"YouTube: ALL YOUR VIDEOS ARE BELONG TO US"

Got picked up by The Register as well:
YouTube owns YourStuff | The Register

TechCrunch >> Blog Archive >> Click.tv Moves Video Ideas Forward
Had an interesting experience at Vloggercon this past weekend. Although Josh pointed this out to me in the past, I was surprised to find a company pitching similar video commenting concepts that we have been working on.

So.. Perhaps my focus should now shift to getting start-up funding ;-) Any takers?

Nokia 770 Linux tablet firmware update beta draws praise, fire
I am particularly impressed by the "Good" list:
VoIP capabilities
IM and Google Talk messaging client
Integrated addressbook with presence information
Better performance, as well as a control-panel option for setting up a swap partition on the rs-mmc card
Better memory recovery when applications are closed
Google search bar available in home screen
Browser URL input field has partial matching
Home screen items now can be rearranged
Thumb keyboard is "input method of choice"
Package manager handles package feeds, and allows custom menu placement

In-side Video Comments
Josh Paul demonstrated his Video Comments system at Vloggercon right after I demonstrated ITP's. His is a system for stringing together videos that are direct responses to the original.

Pretty interesting.. The vloggers love the idea!

Filed under: Culture, Online, MMO, Business

The Guardian has produced an excellent column that addresses the problem of "griefers", people that abuse, team-kill and cheat other players of online games, particularly MMOs. Griefing has always been a problem where real players compete against their peers, although with massively multiplayer online games the problem has become much more serious. Earning a battleship in Eve Online or crafting a special item in World of Warcraft can take weeks if not months of game time. On top of that, the recent trend for people to sell items on auction sites like eBay has meant that rare online items have a monetary value.

The article cites several high profile situations where griefers have bent moral codes with the Guiding Hand Social Club's ruination of Ubiqua Seraph in Eve Online and the funeral crash in WoW being the two main examples. Solutions that companies have come up with to limit these types of situations for happening are also looked at with the Xbox Live points system and strong community measures (like guilds and friend lists) being top on the list of letting player self-govern the problem. Effective community governance is essential if companies want to keep players inside the game and so that the owners don't have to resort to more drastic measures, like Blizzard does with its periodic account banning binges.

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Respondents in a fascinating new study said viewing "media content" on TV is just as desireable as viewing it on a PC. But not the same kind of content. Web users want shorter, on-demand clips that aren't repurposed from TV. "Simply moving a TV show over to the web is the 1950's equivalent of offering a radio show on TV," said Gary A. Williams, executive director of the Kanbay Research Institute. The study mapped out which mainstream media brands rate the highest and lowest on different platforms. For example, HGTV -- which has done a terrific job creating web-friendly video content -- ranks as the most desireable media content on a PC. Of course, the study has its flaws, but it makes a very important point: TV is not superior to the web when it comes to video, despite what most TV execs today will say. TV is superior to the web when it comes to watching TV. But the web is better than TV when it comes to short, on-demand, unique video that fulfills an endless array of niches. (Which is my point in the Nielsen post above.) By the way, respondents said TV and PCs still are a better experience than wireless devices, but as technology improves, I imagine that gap will be bridged as well. (Download the full study for free here.)

In a major shift, Nielsen announced today it will "follow the video" beyond television to computers, cell phones, iPods and other devices. (Actually, the press release says Nielsen will measure "the new ways consumers are watching television" -- which makes me wonder if they realize that it's really video, not television.) The new effort, called Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement or A2/M2, will track streaming video consumption and even measure viewing on video iPods. Nielsen also promises to merge internet statistics with people meter TV ratings. "As more and more streaming video content, including traditional television programming, becomes available online, content providers need to measure this viewing and understands how it complements their traditional television programming," reads the press release. Finally, a headline announcement for TV folks: Nielsen promises to abolish all handwritten diaries in all markets by 2011. (About fricking time.) Of course, all these goals are very noble, but as everyone knows, measuring new forms of media consumption is always a very challenging affair. So stay tuned...

Miyagawa has released a hack to allow the Thinkpad's accelerometer to control Google Maps. You can check the source out of his svn repository.

Miyagawa writes:

My recommendation is to choose Satellite mode, with the 3rd Zoom level. It makes me feel like flying in the sky, just as birds. Because of Google Maps JS library prefetching images, sometimes you have a delay (latency) moving, but other than that, it is quite fantastic.

When thinking about the performance of any computer system or network, the first question to ask is “Where is the bottleneck?” As demand grows, one part of the system reaches its capacity first, and limits performance. That’s the bottleneck. If you want to improve performance, often the only real options are to use the bottleneck more efficiently or to increase the bottleneck’s capacity. Fiddling around with the rest of the system won’t make much difference.

For a typical home broadband user, the bottleneck for Internet access today is the “last mile” wire or fiber connecting their home to their Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) network. This is true today, and I’m going to assume from here on that it will continue to be true in the future. I should admit up front that this assumption could turn out to be wrong — but if it’s right, it has interesting implications for the network neutrality debate.

Two of the arguments against net neutrality regulation are that (a) ISPs need to manage their networks to optimize performance, and (b) ISPs need to monetize their networks in every way possible so they can get enough revenue to upgrade the last mile connections. Let’s consider how the last mile bottleneck affects each of these arguments.

The first argument says that customers can get better performance if ISPs (and not just customers) have more freedom to manage their networks. If the last mile is the bottleneck, then the most important management question is which packets get to use the last mile link. But this is something that each customer can feasibly manage. What the customer sends is, of course, under the customer’s control — and software on the customer’s computer or in the customer’s router can prioritize outgoing traffic in whatever way best serves that customer. Although it’s less obvious to nonexperts, the customer’s equipment can also control how the link is allocated among incoming data flows. (For network geeks: the customer’s equipment can control the TCP window size on connections that have incoming data.) And of course the customer knows better than the ISP which packets can best serve the customer’s needs.

Another way to look at this is that every customer has their own last mile link, and if that link is not shared then different customers’ links can be optimized separately. The kind of global optimization that only an ISP can do — and that might be required to ensure fairness among customers — just won’t matter much if the last mile is the bottleneck. No matter which way you look at it, there isn’t much ISPs can do to optimize performance, so we should be skeptical of ISPs’ claims that their network management will make a big difference for users. (All of this assumes, remember, that the last mile will continue to be the bottleneck.)

The second argument against net neutrality regulation is that ISPs need to be able to charge everybody fees for everything, so there is maximum incentive for ISPs to build their next-generation networks. If the last mile is the bottleneck, then building new last-mile infrastructure is one of the most important steps that can be taken to improve the Net, and so paying off the ISPs to build that infrastructure might seem like a good deal. Giving them monopoly rents could be good policy, if that’s what it takes to get a faster Net built — or so the argument goes.

It seems to me, though, that if we accept this last argument then we have decided that the residential ISP business is naturally not very competitive. (Otherwise competition will erode those monopoly rents.) And if the market is not going to be competitive, then our policy discussion will have to go beyond the simple “let the market decide” arguments that we hear from some quarters. Naturally noncompetitive communications markets have long posed difficult policy questions, and this one looks like no exception. We can only hope that we have learned from the regulatory mistakes of the past.

Lets hope that the residential ISP business turns out instead to be competitive. If technologies like WiMax or powerline networking turn out to be practical, this could happen. A competitive market is the best outcome for everybody, letting the government safely keeps its hands off the Internet, if it can.

Chris Anderson talks about his concept of "scaling down" in a provocative post this morning. He rightly states (he's always right) that digital businesses can be efficient enough to deal at very small levels, and he adds, "a small percentage of a very large number can still be a big number."

I call this "scaling down", and it's a core Long Tail competency. Traditional businesses target the top end of the market--the biggest hits and the richest customers--for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: because they think that's where the money is. If you have only so many salespeople and only so many marketing dollars, such a discriminating approach makes sense. But the lesson of the Long Tail is that, as Nobel physicist Richard Feynman predicted, "there's a lot of room at the bottom."

This is why all this "web stuff" is so counterintuitive to broadcasters and other forms of mass media. They're Willie Suttons all! The web's a very different marketplace, and he who gets this will find business success downstream.

(Good to see other folks thinking about scaling down. -kc.)

(courtesy of suchit nanda)

I’m a notoriously bad note-taker, so as usual, no full report on this conference, but just a few notes and references.

Some conferences have a real magic, and the Asia Commons conference really had it. It is probably the first time that people from all across Asia, especially South Asia, but unfortunately only a rare smattering of Thais, though the conference took place in Bangkok. The magic came from several factors:
1) the ability to witness the emergence of a movement towards the Commons all across Asia and to see how easily and warmly the people there interconnected;
2) the meticulous organization of a very motivated staff, which chose to include a large part of Open Space processes so that participants really got to know each other; I discovered the method of ‘speed sharing‘ where every participant has 3 minutes to explain himself while everyone rotates so that he can here a maximum of contributions;
3) an integrated use of collaborative tools, both before and during the conference. And of course after the conference as well, as there is still a very active mailing list. See the overall wiki with the resource page for example.
So, without further ado, here are some links for those who weren’t there, but would like to know what was said. Here’s a record of the open space discussion, with lots of info on local Asian intiatives, and the topics that local activists care about.

Frederick Noronha, the tireless promoter of Bytes for All, which monitors ‘IT for development initiatives’, created an extra page for summaries in the Wikipedia. Frederick’s report is quite complete with details on the organizers and participants, the issues discussed, etc… The pictures are located here. Another way to follow what was being said is to monitor the blog, starting with the older blog entries at the beginning of the conference, where participants have posted reports on the keynote and other interventions. The most recent entries will lead you to the podcasts which were taped at the conference, including a short one by myself, on the collaborative aspects of working at the P2P Foundation.
Finally, I was of course very pleased with the profile of my own work, written by Fredrick Noronha and posted at the iCommons blog (this is the international initiative by Lawrence Lessig and crew to internationalise the Creative Commons licenses).

A very clear quote from Adam Arvidsson:

“Informational capitalism is characterized by a growing separation between production and valorization. The production of immaterial values like knowledge, affect and sociality increasingly takes place in autonomous processes of technologically empowered communication that unfolds among users themselves. Their valorization occurs through the ability to appropriate a share of the global surplus, which is distributed on financial markets. The ability to accumulate an ethical surplus therefore becomes a necessary condition for the ability to appropriate surplus value. Therefore recent forms of brand management, that intervene directly on social communication without relying primarily on advertising and other forms of propaganda are becoming a central managerial technique for the information economy in general.”

If you take a look at some of the comment threads that have taken place on this blog, you’re bound to find some posts by readers talking about “open source” software. For example, Tom Hoffmann recently posted comments on the need for an education-friendly, open source blogging tool. But what exactly is open source, and why should you care about it? This week, I’ll be exploring the issue in two blog posts, with a little assistance from edtech guru David Thornburg, who’s just published a book on the subject. Today’s post will focus on the basics of free and open source software (FOSS).

You know, the kind of cable TV where big entertainment companies pay off cable companies to get their channels on your set top box? Congress didn't accept it, so net neutrality lost. So we are keeping the system that started a year ago. It's the one that will make the internet like Cable TV. It's critical to innovation, our companies (mine is Dabble.com) and to freedom of speech that we have a neutral net, where anything can move across it, where there is no fee to get some piece of information through to someone who wants to see it. This isn't about tiered pricing. This is about who's packets paid the telco's fees. This is about Hollywood keeping us from speaking, because if I'm watching my friend's video, I'm not watching Disney. Hollywood stands to benefit the most, after the telco's who charge the fees. And Disney can afford to pay off the telcos to pass through their info, but my friends can't.

ITP Research >> Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin

Keeping the conversation alive in media blogs

Video Blogging, Vlogging or what ever you want to call it was born into a tradition of self publishing on the internet and benefits greatly from the infrastructure developed for blogging. The tools to create media and now to distribute media online are accessible and affordable. Furthermore, video blogging is often considered participatory and socially interactive. Much of this is due to what blogs have done, enabled true two-way conversation through comments and loose networking through trackbacks.

Unfortunately, while video blogging benefits from these, it doesn't really do much to improve or enhance this capability with video.

At ITP Research, myself and a couple of others have been working to change this or at least push commenting and trackbacks a bit further. We have created a Video Commenting plugin for WordPress that allows people to leave comments in-time with a video. This, we believe is one of the first steps to allowing conversation to happen around video and furthermore enable richer conversation with video.

Check it out, download it, modify it, use it... Video Comments, WordPress Plugin

From the site:
It’s really exciting to see the number of blogs that exist today, thousands of voices are talking about every possible topic. Blog syndication and commenting allows readers to subscribe, discuss and carry the conversation further, however, with the different forms of media becoming a normal part of many blogs there’s a need to keep this open communication open. Audio and video blogs are forming communities and to encourage conversation the viewers must be able to respond, so we developed a plug-in for WordPress called Video Comments.

(Don't sleep on this one. This is one of those tools videobloggers have been asking for for years. Nice work, ITP -kc.)

My Name is Madison
Artist - Matthew Slaats

Taking Madison, WI as its subject, My Name is Madison is an Augmented Reality Game that allows users to explore and interact with the urban landscape from a multitude of perspectives. This project approachs the city as a layered environment. Players understand the development of place through the eyes of history, culture and fantasy.

Using GPS enabled hand held computers, participants take on the roles of both recipient and creator, performance in context. While walking about the streets, they are provided with information that enhances their understanding of the environment and then gives them the tools to create their own interpretations of place. Documentation of these events will be posted to www.mynameismadison.blogspot.com.

The project opens as a part of the Games, Learning and Society Conference taking place in Madison, WI June 15-16. www.glsconference.org

Originally from Rhizome.org Raw at June 13, 2006, 06:05, published by nicholas economos

Type announcement
Genre participatory, telepresence, event
Keywords game, conference

"TXTual healing uses a cell phone a computer and a projector to create a mobile public performance by posting a person's text messages into speech bubbles that are strategically placed on the facades of buildings."

There are now a lot of video hosting sites. The best known of these sites is YouTube. All of these sites are patterned after Flickr. Flickr is a community where members upload files to their own accounts.

There are also a lot of blog aggregators. Sample aggregators are Memeorandum and Technorati. All of them spider and mine RSS feeds to identify hot hot stories and topics.

With Flickr-like sites, the uploading is motivated by the presence of the community, because this creates a built-in audience. The more popular the site, the bigger the potential audience, the more incentive there is to upload.

With Flickr-like sites, both the hosting and the viewing happen on the same site. If you make a video and you want to maximize its popularity, you need to upload it to any site where there is an audience. You can't host it yourself because then there will be few potential viewers.

Blog aggregators don't suffer from this pattern. There are a lot of blog aggregators, in the hundreds is my guess, but there are many more hosts, and all the aggregators share the same pool of potential hosts. Independent hosts depend on the aggregators for viewers, aggregators depend on independent hosts for content.

Aggregators are more efficient in that a creator only has to upload each file once in order to reach all of their audience.

This issue is really common, and I figured it needed a URL. So that's what this blog entry is: a single URL that any aggregator can take advantage of. Needless to say it's not worth the trouble for me to upload this text to a bunch of different sites, and anyway that would defeat the purpose by giving the same item a bunch of different URLs.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to gather my thoughts, and some data points, before Thursday's Silverdocs panel on producing for multiple platforms. Four of my questions:

• How will mobile video content be different from wired video?
• What do audiences want– and how much money and time will they commit?
• How will the act of creating for the mini-screen alter a filmmaker's approach to larger, stationary, screens?
• How big of a role will user-generated/participatory content (such as Bus Uncle and the like) assume?

Here's where I'm looking for help:

Way back in the early days of mobile video (fall of 2005), iMedia's Roger Park laid out 4 questions, three of which still seem to be open:

• How do marketers track the mobile TV audience?
• Will consumers be willing to pay for content that is front loaded with sponsors?
• Will other networks and studios jump on the mobile TV bandwagon?
• How might the networks charge for commercial time within this mobile channel?

Informa issued a report last week projecting demand for mobile video: From Reuters:

The soccer World Cup in Germany will provide the catalyst for TV services on mobile phones to start taking off, but real growth will occur over the next five years, an industry report said on Wednesday.

Informa Telecoms & Media predicted some 210 million mobile TV subscribers worldwide by 2011, with the Asia-Pacific region leading the way with 95.1 million subscribers followed by Europe at 68.7 million.

"(By) the 2008 Olympics, we'll all be much more prepared to watch TV on our phones and by the 2010 World Cup the infrastructure will be mature and one in 13 mobile phone users worldwide will own a mobile TV handset," said David McQueen, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.

McQueen goes deeper on his own site:

the soccer World Cup has provided the spark for the launch of a number of broadcast services in Europe, led by 3 in Italy and Debitel in Germany, across DVB-H and T-DMB networks respectively, which it is hoped will ignite a raft of further launches and subscriber uptake..

Informa Telecoms & Media's new released "Mobile TV: Broadcast and Mobile Multimedia" 2006 Strategic Report, handsets built with mobile-broadcast-receiver technologies are expected to find their way into 10% of handsets sales by 2011, representing an expected market of 120 million phones.…Informa Telecoms & Media expects DVB-H to take the largest share of that market…

McQueen asks some of the questions I would like to explore on Thursday;

But ultimately will anyone actually use a mobile TV service and who is it to be targeted at? There are some major issues underlying the success of mobile TV: how, when and for how long will content be consumed whilst on the move and, moreover, how much will users be willing to pay?

and reminds us of the limits of physics:

An initial cause for concern about the viability of the mobile TV service is over the length of battery life achieved on a mobile broadcast device. Trials have shown devices to have up to 4 hours continuous TV play on one battery charge, which should be enough to satiate most consumers' TV viewing in a single day. Indeed, some trials have shown an average viewing time of around 3 hours a week, well within current battery limitations.

So, what kind of programming does the average viewer want to watch during those 3 hours? For that matter, even high consumption urban nomads will "only" be able to view 4 hours at a shot. Thus, long form video is possible but unlikely.

…the success of mobile TV is also reliant on the availability of desirable, popular content to the end user which will determine, to a large extent, how fast consumers adopt the services and devices.

On DLMag, Aaron Azerad explores the alphabet soup of DVB-H, MBMS, and DMB:

A technology which is currently up at the plate for testing is DVB-H (Digital Video Broadband-Handheld), which skips by mobile networks and is broadcasted right to mobile hand-sets. Another alternative which is up for consideration is MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service), which instead of bypassing uses the mobile network to transmit television signals. Yet a third choice is also added into the factor of using DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) which would serve as a modified version of digital radio currently being used in South Korea, with Germany and Britain looking in… The United States has even jumped in offering their own solution to Mobile TV offering a broadcasted technology called MediaFlo.

PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said she created the new position, filled by John Boland, to take a fresh multi-platform view of content.

The upcoming Skype version 2.5, seen at the eBay Developer's Conference, apparently will let you send or request money to other users directly from the client software. Since eBay, Paypal, and Skype are all one big happy family, you'll be able to Paypal money easily while chatting with the person you're talking to. Camwhores: Paypal $3 for another 5 minutes of show?

If they integrate this with the WiFi Skype phones, you could possibly be able to send money to people wherever you have a WiFi connection. Then again, if you have a cellphone, you could use Paypal Mobile and do that right now. – Jason Chen

Skype 2.5 Integrates Paypal [Golem.de via Random Good Stuff]

 
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Chat with your friends while watching movies together, with MST3k effects thrown in for good measure.

Samsung's interactive movie maker--drag icons onto a grid to determine the plot, style, mood, and content.

On monetizing Rocketboom, Scoble and more.

Geelix Desktop GX enables you to record in-game action and upload it to share with your friends and other gamers.

The Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards are a celebration of the very best in citizen journalism in the UK over the last 12 months.

Here are a series of tips from top bloggers on how they keep up with all the information coming at them from every direction.

In April we belatedly blogged license adoption estimates for December 2005, which had been published elsewhere in December. That estimate, based on Google queries restricted to CC-licensed content, came to 45 million web pages under a Creative Commons license.

What a difference six months make. Our current aggregate estimate, also based on Google queries for CC content, comes to 140 million pages. Impressive, though it must be noted that this much higher number is probably the result of both increasing use of CC licenses and overall growth of Google's index.

In April we also gave a current breakdown of license use by license property. Here is an updated breakdown:

The increased use of more liberal licenses noted in April seems to have accelerated, though again it must be noted that some of the change may be due to search index variability (Yahoo!'s in this case, as Yahoo! facilitates searching for specific license URLs with link: queries).

Look for another update in December, hopefully with some indications of adoption across jurisdictions and languages (again with many caveats).

Om Malik is making the big step of staking his life online. And the master of the scoop is quite gracious about being scooped himself by Valleywag.
More great talent breaks out from big media to make it big on their own.

: Speaking of great talent making it big, I told Om on the phone last night as he told me about his big move that I was most amused by Rafat Ali’s recollection of why he started PaidContent.org, now :

It was a hot and muggy summer in NYC, and not sure what I was thinking. Well, there was some thought to it: to raise my profile as journalist and get a job at WSJ or CNET News.com.

e a hundred places that would die to hire Rafat right now. But he’s too smart to take their jobs.

: And, yes, I’m smugly proud of myself for that headline.

: LATER: On the blogging phenom as a follow-on to big media,Scott Karp says, and I agree:

All the brand value accrues to the individual. As Google continues to destroy the value of branded content, individual media brands may be the last line of defense. Individual talent as media destination may be the only viable alternative to search and social networking as portals to the web.

eally not a lot different from the way things were. For reporters, as Jay Rosen points out, the value of the brand accrues to the work of the individual, but for newspaper columnists and network anchors and writers whose bylines appear on the covers of magazines, some of their brand value accrues to the bigger media property. That was the way it had to be; people couldn’t be media properties. But now we can be.

Since temporarily being taken down by a Swedish Police raid fueled by entertainment industry concerns, Torrent tracker the Pirate Bay has nearly doubled their traffic, reports Slyck. After the raid, the tracker's operators moved the operation from Sweden to the Netherlands.

RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol tells USAToday that illegal song-swapping has been "contained" (It has?). "The problem has not been eliminated," observes Bainwol, "but we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat."

Download File

Reporting live on tape from my hotel room atop the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco, here's my encapsulated edit of the best parts from CNN's interview with Amanda Congdon from Rocketboom.

I'm in Philadelphia, excited to attend the Hyperlinked Society at my old haunt, the Annenberg School. I chatted with some good folks last night, many of whom are likely to blog the conference during the course of the day. I may be sharing Joe Turow's nervous energy, and woke too early this morning.

Meanwhile, I am beginning to prepare for my own conference responsibilites at next week's Silverdocs, where I will be chairing a panel entitled "THE FUTURE OF REAL: E-MEDIA, I-MEDIA, WHAT MEDIA, WHOSE MEDIA?" on Thursday morning. The organizers describe it thusly:

Why should documentary filmmakers care about pod-casting, video i-Pods, mobile phone content delivery, VOD, broadband, cross-platform distribution? Are digital distribution technologies opening up new audiences and new sources of production funding? Or are they simply asking media artists to provide more versions of their content for the same-or less-amount of money?

The panelists are to include:

Linda Good Bryant, Multi Media Artist and Activist
Albie Hecht, President, World Wide Biggies/Shine Global Foundation
Debra May Hughes, President and Chief Operating Officer, Public Interactive
Clint Stinchcomb, Senior Vice President of New Media, Discovery Communications

My goal for the panel is to get beyond the hype of mobile and multiple platform distribution. I'd like the panel to paint a picture of what audiences and filmmakers are doing in this chaotic new world and am particularly interested in actual data. To wit, Nokia reports on how 18-35 year olds in 11 countries are using their mobiles:

Two thirds of people globally say a music-enabled mobile phone will replace their dedicated MP3 player, according to research from Nokia.

What's more, one in two people are already using a mobile phone as their main camera, while a third are using it for surfing the web.

Specifically, 44 per cent of respondents use a mobile phone as their primary camera…With Nokia optimistically asserting that 67 per cent of people globally now download a percentage of their music,… 36 per cent of respondents claim they are browsing the web on their mobile devices at least once a month.

The CEA reported last month that:

the most common activity for portable entertainment devices is listening to music (94 percent); however, this may be due to the lack of video capability and content. CEA estimates that only 15 percent of total digital media players shipping in 2005 were video capable, but that tide is quickly turning. This year, the percentage is expected to double. Owners of devices that do include video capability are twice as likely to engage in watching activities, choosing music videos (37 percent), movies (37 percent) and TV programming (21 percent). …Seventy-one percent of online portable digital media device owners plan to purchase entertainment content that can be played back on their device, spending close to $68 on content in the coming year.

I'm curious to learn just want kinds of programming people are watching? Will this apparrent even split between short (music videos) and long form (movies) continue? Will long form become more popular as batter life increases? Are audiences interested in serious non-fiction content, which is the concern of my day job, or will the preference be for user-generated content with a social commentary spin, like Bus Uncle? (Rowland Soong uses the phrase "spontaneous media exposures" in his summation of all things Bus Uncle.)

Ourmedia is proud to announce the unveiling of the Personal Media Learning Center as well as the Open Media Directory.

The Learning Center is an ongoing project with a simple aim: to help people engage in the participatory media movement by showing them how to create videoblogs, podcasts, screencasts, digital stories and other emerging media forms.

There are sections on Video, Audio, Multimedia, Images and Text. In addition, we have what will undoubtedly become a deep Topics section. We're starting out with the subjects of Personal media - Getting started, Citizen journalism, and Copyright & the law.

We have a lot of needs in fillng out these sections, so if you'd like to write a tutorial, share an article, or create a screencast, video or podcast that would be helpful to people, see our guidelines and contact me. This is media training of the people by the people.

The Open Media Directory is a clearinghouse of dozens of different sites where you can find legal, podsafe music, audio and video clips. For anyone who wants to add a music soundtrack to their online video or add music to a podcast, the Open Media Directory is a treasure. Thanks to the UK's David Holmes, the directory's editor, for pulling it together for us.

These projects represent a significant step forward for Ourmedia. We've been promised new servers this month, so look for more improvements in the site in the weeks ahead.

The last issue of Ambidextrous has been released. Among the different articles, there is a relevant interview of Dr. Mizuko Ito (the interviewer is Danah Boyd). Some excerpts I like:

DANAH: Fabulous! Can you tell me more about what how you see anthropology being relevant to design?

think there is a role for anthropology along all of the steps of the design process. But of course I would say that. Anthropology can help inspire new designs by providing profiles of users and stories about contexts of use. Anthropologists can play on design teams as designs get developed to sensitive designers to culturally and context specific issues. And finally, anthropologists can evaluate the effectiveness of designs through studies of actual use in context, either prototype, pilot, or after product roll-out.

DANAH: So what advice would you have to young aspiring anthropologists who want to study socio-technical practice and get involved in designing new technologies?

This one is tough. Be prepared for some blank looks from people in your discipline - but a lively audience of practitioners and technology designers who are eager to hear stories from the field. The challenge is to be multilingual and interdisciplinary while also maintaining commitment to ethnographic perspectives and methods.

Why do I blog this? that’s sometimes a feeling I have while working with a social science perspective with designers. Though, I am wondering whether going beyond telling stories because I feel there s much more to do.

Originally posted by Jason from Signal vs. Noise, reBlogged by ts

Amnesty International launched a new ad campaign that is incredibly creative and powerful. The tagline is "It's not happening here but it's happening now" which is hammered home with these transparent ads. The ads "transport" issues in countries like Iraq, China, and Sudan to your local landscape. This is one of the best awareness campaigns I've ever seen. [Thanks jk]

People into baseball cap like me could be interested into cap-mounted display such as the one designed by Lars Johansson and Niklas Andersson. One of their MSc student (Fredrik Nilbrink) designed a prototype:

This project’s purpose was to investigate the truck operators needs and to see how modern digital technology can help to reduce the paper work and increase the productivity and make the operator’s working situation better.

I: Cap Mounted Display
A monocular display unit is mounted on an ordinary cap. The unit also contains microphone, earphones, camera and Bluetooth units. The device is voice activated.
(…)
He [Fredrik]] took apart a pair of Sony Glasstron VGA-glasses to get the monocular Head Up Display we wanted for this project. On top of the cap a web camera was mounted.

Why do I blog this? a cool hack here but I am wondering about its usage in a real-world setting.

virtual vloggercon in Second Life by Tao Takashi, uploaded from flickr.

This shot of me at Vloggercon, being streamed live into Second Life, is cool.

For many of you this is old news, but I just wanted to make sure everything's seen it…

The week before last, we at Technorati launched an experimental Microformats Search tool in our "kitchen" (where you can taste the products before they're fully "baked").

This is an early stage release, but we wanted to get it out in the world for you to try.

In addition to the search tool, we’ve also started Pingerati.net, a ping system for microformated pages. We're treating this as a community project, too, in which others can recieve the stream of pings for indexing. If you’d like to start recieving pings, just let us know!

Steve writes in about the Sparkfun GPS data loggers, he built a waterproof version - "That unit from SFE is excellent! I packaged one in a waterproof case and use it for recording kayak and boat jaunts... I just nestled the hardware into a carved foam insert inside a SealLine Electronic Case. The wee antenna is lost in the glare; below that is the board, which carries the Lassen iQ GPS, an LPC2138 ARM processor, and a socket on the back with a 256 megabyte SD card. The software strips the NMEA sentences to just the basics, and stuffs them into the card... which has enough space for 440 hours of logging! I haven't checked the power drain yet, but the four 2300 mAH AA NiMH cells should keep it going for quite a while... Photo and the track from a sailboat sea trial are" - Link.

Previous:
GPS data loggers, projects and more - Link.

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Michael Meiser posted a photo:

I'm posting this here because blogger.com has gone to pot.

24 hours till vloggercon!

Hopping on the plane tomorrow morning.

I wanted to share my thoughts on meeting over 400 vloggers and vlog fans for the first time.

In a word.

Vlogebrity!

Vlogebrity is the term.

We have a little saying amongst vloggers, "We are the media".

And so by proxy we are also our own celebrities.

What does vlogerbrity mean?

It's the long tail of celebrity.

It is more niche than blogebrity, and yet far more powerful a celebrity.

It's about strong bonds.


Imagine if you will.

Tomorrow and Saturday I will meet for the first time 150 or 250+ people I've never met in person, but whom I've gotten to know intimately through video blogging over the last 2 years.

They are from all over the world, Norway to Australia, and pretty much every continent.

I know their names like I know the names of old friends.

I know their faces, their personalities, their mannerisms, their humor, their interests and passions.

When we meet we will recognize each other. We may shake hands, but like old friends our introductions will be very brief and we'll dive into specific topics and detailed subjects based on our shared interests.

There won't be silly icebreaking questions. No, "So what do you do?" or "Where are you from"... No idle "get to know you" chat. Just diving into the common subjects we share.

Vlogebrities have known backgrounds.

Vlogebrities have shared history.

The shock of meeting all my vlogebrity friends at once face to face. This is the thing I'm most looking forward to at vloggercon at this moment.

This is on the surface what I want to capture and understand. Because in studying vloebrity it will tell us something about the future.

A future where we're all the media, where we're all celebrities to someone, mentor's, peers, and friends of people the world over.

Regardless of geography.

Another step in the progression of the global village.

I relish this idea.

Vloggercon is going to be a completely unique, great and erie sort of culture shock that is probably completely unique to video blogging. I'm expecting a powerful sort of deja vu.

With Introductions a side (almost unnecessary) vloggercon will be about getting right down to business.

It may sound like a preposterous thing to say, but I ask you to consider, that never before has such a large group of people whom know each other so well met for the very first time.

Actors may meet and they know each others faces and characters, but they don't know each other for who they really are.

Intellectuals, writers, scientists and infinite professional groups may know each other by reputation, by exchanges of writing, even by photos, but again they don't know each other as intimately as vloggers. They don't know each others voices, facial expressions.

Vlogebrity is powerful voodoo.

Unlike hollywood celebrity, which gives a powerful false sense of knowing people, vlogebrity gives a true and powerful sense of knowing. But how true is this celebrity? How much do we really know each other? We shall see.

Needless to say vlogebrity is a very unique type of celebrity. An intensely personal sort of celebrity.

Vlogebrity creates powerful bonds and friendships.

...and I expect since we all know each other so well while never having met, that the conversation will be so furious at vloggercon I seriously hope I don't loose my voice. ;)

So soak up and take note of the power of vlogebrity. Breath it in, think about it. What is the truth of it, what is false. As McLuhan famously said the medium is the message. If we are the media, then what does it say about the future, what does vlogebrity say about the future of a truly global culture of closely bonded niche communities.

To me this says one thing. This new world that is evolving that is bonded by a democratic, open, participatory media system, a property fundamental to the internet. It is fundamentally going to make the world a much more human/humane place then a world shaped by cars, and TV, radio and newspaper. The world is becoming more human.

We are truly living in the future in many respects.

And yet we're living very far in the future.

7000 video blogs is nothing.

The massive popularity of a Youtube, (which I've never seen anything like in all my .com years) is impressive, but really it is nothing in the big picture

This is not about a 2.0 .boom. We've barely entered an era that's going to play out over the course of generations, perhaps this whole century.

What happens in the first 7000 video blogs is fun and very interesting, (not to discount the very much related and very important blogging, podcasting and photocasting)... but in order to understand the true power of open acess media / new media, it's impact on the world, we have to listen carefully and study carefully, because the majority of it's power, of the possibilities for change lie below the surface. They have yet to be discovered.

The question we must ask, is what happens when the other 99.99% of the world has access to not just rich media, not just blogs, videos, photo, and VOIP communications... but the tools and applications, the project management tools, the wiki-collaborative writing tools, the processing power, the connectivity?

The reason I like vlogging, is not because I'm a videographer, it's because I'm a student of media. It's not because vlogging IS the future. Who knows where we'll be in 5 years. Who knows if vlogging as we know it will even exist. The reason why I am fascinated by this thing is because it is an opportunity to look into a window of a *possible future*, to understand something about how media shapes our culture and our identities now and how it will like the inventions of the printing press, the radio and the television before it.

If mass media nationalized and mobilized the world, what will internet mediated media do?

And therefore the reason why I'm going to vloggercon is two-fold. Both to understand, study and interpret this fundamental change in the way the world is connected and how it will change the world.

And secondly and just as important to collaborate and discuss with others to distributing this future. TO make it available to as many people as possible.

This initial success, this web 2.0 boom is a a misnomer, a distraction to what is truly significant to what is going on here. Myspace and Youtube the current media darlings of this space are but short sited mischaracterizations of this era, false gods at best. Who is going to bring this evolution to the other 99.99% of the planet? The majority of the planet that doesn't speak english, or one of the five more popular languages. Proprietary, walled garden systems fundamentally lack this capacity. I suspect it will evolve as has open access media out of open source software as it is the only model flexible enough to bring these technologies to the rest of the world.

And don't even talk to me about "big media"... they lack the vision to see beyond delivering plastic disks and DRM laden content to .0001% of the world. That's some sever myopia.

Oh, and here's a random but very cool vloggercon promo from the vlog, The Memeing of Life.

Watch it: Vloggercon Promo from Mark Raheja, The Memeing of Life (Quicktime, .mov)

So! I'll see you all at vloggercon!

:)

-Mike

Keywords: vloggercon, vloggercon2006, vlogebrity



Photo From: laughingsquid.com/2006/06/03/vloggercon-2006/

laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/vloggercon_flyer.gif

Vloggercon will be broadcast on the free-to-air satellite ( NessunoTV, Hot Bird 3, Freq 12.149, Pol Vert, FEC ¾, Sym 27500) for all European vloggers and individuals.

A generation is about to learn the hard way about the downside of posting your entire life online. An article in the Times shows the tip of the iceberg:

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

Young people may be naive but they are not stupid.

The generation just hitting puberty will watch the class ahead of them get screwed out of college admissions and job offers as a result of too much online social networking.

And they won’t make the same mistake.

(Backlash? Sounds more like a course correction to me. MY question is "how long will it be until the RECRUITERS adjust?" -kc.)

Missed this one earlier this week…Three major public TV broadcasters have reached an agreement with Writers Guild of America on a new three-year contract, which includes digital media in major part. Educational Broadcasting Corp. (WNET/New York), WGBH Educational Foundation (WGBH/Boston) and Community Television of Southern California (KCET/Los Angeles) were the public stations in the deal.
Negotiators said the contract, which was finalized May 25, would be retroactive to Nov. 13 and bring increases in writers’ program rates on June 1, Nov. 13 and Nov. 13, 2007.
Under the pact, writers would receive payments from the stations’ new business ventures, such as Internet downloads, licensing audio portions of programs to satellite radio subscribers and licensing or selling excerpts of programs to schools and universities.
The two sides also agreed to hold annual meetings to address emerging technologies, programming innovations and the future of public broadcasting.
Some more details on the release here.

Anyone, the filmmakers say, can hold a public screening or television broadcast of the film, redub it with new dialogue or even change the look of the characters (the latter option requires some knowledge of graphics and digital film).

Sure Rocketboom has become a poster child. And Amanda Congdon got an exclusive with George Soros. But there is a tremendous diversity to the voices, production values and subject matter. The future of this movement (it is one) is not simply in a proving ground for TV programming. Not that vloggers would turn down TV distribution, They just wouldn't see it as the endgame. And they (first lesson - they are not a homogenuous group that one can accurately generalize about, so forgive my use of the word "they") are are deeply suspicious of being co-opted by big media while at the same time being conscious of the fact that they are onto something that big media is struggling to understand.

application takes environment data and applies filters on camphones in real time.. VERY COOL

As Jordan Nealy blows out four candles on her birthday cake in South Carolina, Irina Slutsky interviews a technology executive in Texas, and Helene Cardona recites a poem from a train platform in Los Angeles.

What's the common thread between these seemingly unrelated acts? They're all early April entries on three different video blogs, and together they illustrate the diversity emerging from the flourishing world of video blogging, which will take center stage this weekend in San Francisco at the Vloggercon conference.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers.

The VlogTheory wiki is a work in progress (aren't they all?) to support research into the theory and practice of videoblogging.

What is jQuery?

I consider it the Swiss Army knife of javascript - it's small, versatile, and has almost zero learning curve.

Why should I care?

If your project calls for AJAX or DOM scripting and you need it done quickly, with minimal fuss, and you believe in keeping things simple, then jQuery might be perfect for you. And what's "15 Days of jQuery" got for me?

Fantastic tutorials and example code that takes you from zero to hero in no time flat. If you're not a black belt in advanced javascript code by the end of these tutorials then you get 110% of your money back.

What: Two days of discussion and hands-on learning focused on improving audio, video and Flash storytelling skills.

Who: Journalists charged with producing multimedia content for online news publications. Whether you are a complete newbie, somewhat trained, or pretty good and want to get better – this workshop will have something for
you.

When: August 11-12, 2006

Where: Minneapolis, University of Minnesota School of Journalism

Why: If you don’t know that, you probably don’t need to come!

How: Mornings, we'll talk about how to get things done. Topics include what we know about digital storytelling use and usability, online storytelling concepts, tools and training, working with your newsroom. Afternoons, there
will be 3 hands-on learning tracks: Audio slide shows, video and Flash. Each participant can follow 2 of 3 tracks (one per afternoon).

Faculty: Joe Weiss – Raleigh News and Observer Online, Mindy McAdams – University of Florida, Nora Paul – University of Minnesota, Regina McCombs – StarTribune.com

Hosted by: University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Institute for New Media Studies and Minnesota Journalism Center, StarTribune.com, and NPPA Region

Cost: $90 including continental breakfast and lunch both days. (Optional third day, if there is enough interest, will be an additional $50.00)

Limited to the first 50 completed applications

If you’d like to join us in August, get your application in now…sign up at:
www.multimediaproducers.org

Developers from Google's research laboratory presented a paper (PDF) about interactive television applications that leverage ambient audio analysis at the Euro Interactive Television conference last week. The research paper, which describes a system for providing contextually relevant web content for television consumers, received the best paper award. The described system uses a computer microphone to analyze the audio being emitted by a television, and uses that data to determine what show the user is watching. The system can then provide the user with web content that relates to the show

June 3, 2006 Nikon this week upgraded its 12.4 megapixel D2X digital SLR to become the D2xs and though the raw numbers remain the same apart from the larger 2.5” LCD screen, the release of two software packages to create and enhance camera usage were the real story. New Camera Control Pro software enables the remote control of Nikon digital SLRs from a personal computer which is cool but not nearly as groundbreaking as Nikon’s Image Authentication Software which can legally verify image authenticity for the media, insurance companies ad infinitum. Although the software only works with the D2xs, it’s a significant move forward for the digital photography business in general and we suspect that unless other manufacturers follow suit quickly, the D2xs will become a raging top seller due to this unique ability to determine whether an image has been processed or edited after being shot...

The quality of projectors gets better and better as they shrink, and the Casio XJ-S35 DLP projector is a prime example of that. This 1024x768 hotshot has 2000 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 1800:1, and although it's not exactly pocketable, it's nice and small at just 10 inches wide by 8 inches long. Looks like it would fit into just about any briefcase, no matter how overstuffed.

Another of its conveniences is its ability to directly play back MPEG-4 video and JPEG graphics via USB, allowing you to put a series of JPEG stills on the thumb drive and play back your presentation even if you don't have a PC handy. Pricing or availability wasn't announced. – Charlie White

Casio pocket video projecteur, the XJ-S35 [Akihabara News]

 
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Mashing Up a Commons is new essay I just put up over at Linux Journal. It's a pretty big one: almost 3,000 words. But asks a big question: Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet?

The short answer, I think, is no.

Creative Commons and related efforts have gone a long way toward building out the kind of infrastructure we need before the Net is a truly public space, rather than a vast collection of private ones. But we need more.

I have some ideas about that, which I think are good to bring up ten days in advance of the Identity Mashup, which the Berkman Center is putting on at Harvard Law School. I'll be participating in that, and in Cambridge that whole week (although I'm mighty tempted to head West for Bloggercon). And I thought, given the speed at which things are moving toward Identity 2.0, the Identity Metasystem — or whatever else we end up calling it — that it would be good to start talking ahead of time about some of the ideas that we'll bring up there. Talking, that is, out here in The Commons. Or whateve we have that passes for one.

Hey, let's get a bunch of these for the ZML:

Jack PC from Jade Integration - a computer in your wall!

The Jack PC is a revolutionary new 'thin client' computer made by Chip PC Technologies. Thin clients are effectively desktop computers designed to connect to a 'terminal server' or Citrix based environment where processing is handled by servers instead of PCs. Thin clients have been getting smaller and smaller over the years however this is the world's first Windows-based thin client small enough to fit in a network wall port. The benefits to business are massive since there's no longer a need for desktop PCs at all - your monitor, keyboard and mouse just plug into the wall!

via adlab

Another day, another absurd software patent: Ars reports that Nintendo has patented the concept of instant messaging in games:

In the claims section, the patent describes a chat system that uses a remotely stored buddy list, supports multiple statuses, broadcasts information about active gaming activities, displays notification of events including the arrival of new e-mail messages, facilitates transmission of player preferences, and enables users to communicate with each other either with voice or text messages. Keep in mind that this patent does not cover game-oriented chat in general; it specifically describes a console gaming chat mechanism that displays game information and uses a buddy list.

Sure, instant messaging and computer games had been around for several years when Nintendo filed for this patent in 2000. But combining them was truly a stroke of genius!

Gaming environments like Quake and Unreal have become easy interactive 3D development environments. Modify the game maps and objects, and you can make the visual realm in these games whatever you want. But for digital musicians imagining a 3D environment for creating music and sound, they’re limited.

Enter the latest project from fijuu2 creator Julian Oliver, together with Steven Pickles. They wanted powerful synthesis capabilities, which is something you’re unlikely ever to get in a game like Quake III. So, they found a way to send network data from Quake into the free software Pd, using Pd’s netsend object to send UDP packets containing control data from the game. In other words, instead of using a MIDI controller, you can make the game your control instrument. netsend is in Max/MSP, too, so this should work for Max, as well.

You’ll need two machines for this to work right, but the objects are freely available from Julian and Steven; follow the download link on the project page:

q3apd

I’ve been following progress on Julian’s blog; it’s a good read. For more on the work, here’s our friend Chris at Pixelsumo:

q3apd (Quake-Pure Data)

. . . and to see it in action, Julian posts a video:

q3apd in gorgeous OGG video glory

For Pd fans, Steven has a goodie of his own: an abstraction that fakes poly~ from Max/MSP inside Pd, plus some other objects.

Given the ready availability of map editors and such (at least if you have access to Windows), I expect you’ll see more projects like this. We’ve seen work before, certainly, that creates art inside the game engines, but by linking to real synthesis libraries you can do more than just mix pre-rendered sound sources. Speaking of which, any other readers experimenting with game engines? Let us know. And feel free to share in our gaming forum.

3D, design, gaming, interactive, max msp, network, Pd, software

French citizen media blog Agoravox is launching - and to the best of my knowledge this is a real first - a sports themed citizen blog (in French) to get sport fans' input and photos - from tennis tournaments such as Roland Garros and Wimbledon, cycling events like The Tour de FRANCE and of course, with football frenzy kicking off tonight in Europe - the World Cup.

It's called Sport-Vox.

A new breed of screens for cell phones, now in development, is getting back to nature. News.com reports.

"Qualcomm and others are promoting new screen technology for handhelds and mobile devices that can stay on all day without sapping battery life, thanks to the sun or liquids. As a result, a cell phone equipped with such a screen could continually broadcast stock quotes, news stories or show a music video to go along with a built-in MP3 player. Currently, phone screens stay dark--mostly by necessity.

The difference is that the new screens don't need to be backlit, as do current screens. Instead, they are primarily illuminated by light from the sun or the movement by liquids inside the screen."

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, reBlogged by ts

Sites such as MySpace and Friendster could be the latest target of the US National Security Agency as it gathers personal data for counter-terrorism.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Another U.S. House bill that passed out of committee Thursday is causing some consternation … the EFF is among those warning that a proposed change to part of the current copyright law could result in additional licensing requirements for home digital media storage and use. The Section 115 Reform Act (SIRA) was proposed by U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., to make what most involved say is a much-needed fix that will smooth the way for music services, updating policy that dates back to ragtime and bringing it into the digital age. SIRA, passed Thursday by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property with bi-partisan support, would replace the current two-license for each recording to a blanket system operated by the Copyright Office.
But a number of organizations and companies argue that the bill’s language treats every digital performance or display as distribution requiring seperate licenses. That would seem to open the door to duplicate fees; licensing of material currently consider fair use — timeshifting like TiVo, for instance; and licensing for incidental audio or video. (The incidental licenses would be “royalty free” but it coukd set a precedent.) Their concerns are detailed here.
In a cryptic joint statement, the Digital Media Association, the RIAA and the National Music Publishers Association expressed “optimism” about the intent of the bill but said “we have not reached complete agreement on all aspects of this legislation.”
The vote doesn’t mean the bill will reach the House floor as is and changes are expected. Whether these concerns will be addressed in the end remains to be seen but, reports CNET, Smith is open to discussing changes that could exempt incidental use completely.

Plagued by a hysterical media and concerned parents, Fox Interactive Media is taking a step to build some standalone channels on MySpace they hope will be appealing to advertisers. FIM says the content will still be user-driven, but will be "controlled." We'll be interested in the outcome.

One of the more annoying things we've found when discussing how the entertainment industry needs to adapt and change and embrace new technologies in place of their old business model, is the repeated claim that it's impossible to make money if the content is given away for free. Impossible is a pretty absolute statement -- and all you need is one example to disprove it. However, as we've shown, there are many, many examples of entertainers who have learned how to make more money out of giving away their content -- which seems to disprove the whole "impossible" bit. However, the industry folks don't seem to know how to respond to that, so they just keep saying it's impossible.

Witness this bizarre exchange between John Perry Barlow and the MPAA's Dan Glickman debating the future of the entertainment industry. Barlow notes that he made an awful lot of money as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, which encouraged its fans to make tapes of its shows for free. Glickman immediately responds by saying: "It is ridiculous to believe that you can give product away for free and be more successful. I mean it defies the laws of nature." The problem, as always, is that Glickman has incorrectly defined his market -- which is a scary thought if he's supposed to be the leading spokesperson for that industry. He thinks they're in the business of selling content. That's not so. It's too narrowly defined. The entertainment business is in the business of entertaining -- and that can include many things that still involve giving content away for free for promotional value. We've discussed plenty of examples in the recording industry -- and Barlow's success helps prove that. In Glickman's own movie industry the examples are even more obvious. They should be selling the experience of seeing a movie, not just the content. However, when Glickman says things like the idea that giving away things for free is against "the laws of human nature," we wonder if this means he's never received anything for free in his life. Does he turn down the free soda offered with the slice of pizza in the corner shop? Free dessert with dinner? Why that's just crazy talk! Those restaurants must be run by anti-capitalist extremists. Their actions in giving away free food are against the laws of nature, and they must be on their way out of business.

From The Nation.

"The First Amendment of the Internet – the governing principle of Net neutrality, which prevents telecommunications corporations from rigging the web so it is easier to visit sites that pay for preferential treatment – took a blow from the House of Representatives Thursday.

Bowing to an intense lobbying campaign that spent tens of millions of dollars – and held out the promise of hefty campaign contributions for those members who did the bidding of interested firms – the House voted 321 to 101 for the disingenuously-named Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE). That bill, which does not include meaningful network-neutrality protections creates an opening that powerful telephone and cable companies hope to exploit by expanding their reach while doing away with requirements that they maintain a level playing field for access to Internet sites.

... The fight over net neutrality now moves to the Senate."

- Net Neutrality Advocates
- SaveTheInternet.com Coalition Statement

Originally posted by Emily from Smart Mobs, ReBlogged by eteam on Jun 9, 2006 at 01:58 PM

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, has a videoblog.

QUALCOMM today announced it has successfully demonstrated the full mobility of Internet protocol (VoIP) calls over 1xEV-DO Rev. A networks, including mobile, pedestrian and fixed. EVDO (Wikipedia), is a wireless radio broadband data standard adopted by many CDMA mobile phone service providers

The increased upstream capability of Rev A for EV-DO networks (used by Sprint and Verizon) enables them to migrate voice services to Internet protocol (IP)-based platforms for a common service platform.

Previously, an evolutionary strategy to EV-DV (Data + Voice) architecture was planned, but when EV-DO (Rev. A) was announced, Verizon and Sprint dropped their EV-DV technology plans. Now EV-DO Rev. A is the way Verizon and Sprint are expected to move forward.

Field tests involved 62 simultaneous calls in one sector within a single 1.25 MHz channel - in a fully mobile configuration. The test network demonstrated capacity gains approximately 30 times greater than mobile analog voice. Results from a fully loaded commercial network could be somewhat lower.

QUALCOMM says these field tests validate the quality and capacity of full mobility VoIP over EV-DO Rev. A and pave the way to large scale commercial trials by network operators.

“Operators globally have committed to the rapid deployment of CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. A. These tests prove EV-DO Rev. A's capability for delivering high-capacity, high-quality VoIP over 3G mobile broadband networks,” said Dr. Roberto Padovani, chief technology officer of QUALCOMM.

VoIP over EV-DO Rev. A leverages session initiation protocol, commonly referred to as SIP, in combination with a number of advanced techniques to achieve quality of service comparable to traditional landline voice.

QUALCOMM also helps bring IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) strategies to fruition. Operators will be able to efficiently merge their wireless and wireline networks based on IMS. By basing all communications services on an IP network, operators are able to use their network capacity in a much more flexible manner, through the dynamic allocation of capacity to an ever-increasing array of 3G services, such as:

• Push to talk, which is VoIP offered as walkie-talkie-like service;
• Packet-based video telephony, which combines realtime video with VoIP; and
• Simultaneous VoIP calls and data sessions.

While the downlink speed increases from 2.4Mb/s (in Rev. 0) to 3.1 Mb/s (in Rev. A), most of the improvement is in the uplink (reverse link) data rate, increasing dramatically from .15 Mb/s to 1.8 Mb/s in EV-DO Rev A. Low latency is also improved at 50ms compared to approximately 150ms for Rev. 0.

EVDOinfo.com, EVDOforums and 3G News have more.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Mobile WiMAX: The Attack Plan, Verizon Tests Rev A, Qualcomm Buys Flarion, T-Mobile's HSDPA Move, CDMA vs OFDM, Sprint Rolls Out EV-DO, 3G: HSDPA or Not?, HSDPA Tests, Sprint Commits to EV-DO and Cellular At The Races.

Direction Magazine has a great tutorial on GeoRSS that enables you to create map mashups with Google Earth.

If you know what RSS is, GeoRSS is a logical step forward.

But, since many people only vaguely know of RSS, let's start there. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Resource Description Framework (RDF) Site Summary or Rich Site Summary. RSS is a way to publish information out to an application. The feed is delivered in Extensible Markup Language (XML) that's typically published automatically by a blog or other software. The RSS feed itself looks a lot like HTML, with tags and values associated with those tags.

RSS and Geodata
The RSS feeds that Directions Media offers include text only since words are our stock in trade. But, what if you wanted to share content that was spatial in nature?

GeoRSS adds a few (or more) tags (think of HTML type tags) to RSS that hold spatial data. That data is associated with the text, numbers and images that are published in the feed.

So, within a typical RSS feed, you might want to consider adding spatial information such as a weather forecast. With GeoRSS, you could include that information and the coordinates of San Francisco in a standard form.

The Current State of GeoRSS
Alas, the current state of things includes three different but related ways to store spatial data:

• A World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) version
• A Simple GeoRSS
• A GML or Pro GeoRSS

Each is a bit different but none are yet a formal standard. They are just "out there" for folks to use. OGC was unable to provide a statement on the status of GeoRSS within that organization before press time.

So, what's the difference between these and how are they used? I'll keep this short since it's far more fun to play with these feeds than to understand their inner workings.

W3C Geo was first out of the gate, back in 2003. It's sometimes referred to as "geo:lat/geo:lon" since those are the names of the tags. W3C Geo supports just points. The current thinking is that all tools designed to work with GeoRSS should support all three versions. Here's what W3C Geo looks like:

Simple GeoRSS extends W3C Geo to include support not just for points, but lines, polygons, boxes and elevations. It's built on a profile (subset) of OGC's Geography Markup Language (GML) specifically chosen to make it easy for programmers to implement and for others to use. Simple GeoRSS lays down rules about which coordinate system is used: WGS84, latitude, longitude (in that order), using decimal degrees. It looks like this:

GML or Pro GeoRSS goes to the next level of complexity and allows different coordinate reference systems and all of Geography Markup Language (GML) for tagging content in the feed. This is most likely to be used by really "geeky" geospatial users and scientists and/or by specific communities that want to share specialized information.

Playtime!
With those basics, it's time to play with GeoRSS. To do that you need two things: someone publishing GeoRSS feeds and software that understands GeoRSS. Good news - both are freely available on the Web! And, for future reference, more and more companies are implementing readers and writers into their desktop and Web software.

Several Web applications allow regular people (non-programmers) to use GeoRSS to make maps. First up, ACME. You get a sense of the company from its tagline: " Graphics * Unix * Networks * Fun, Purveyors of fine freeware since 1972." They build all sorts of tools, including the ACME GeoRSS Map Viewer that uses the Google Maps and Yahoo's Maps APIs. So far as I know, it only knows how to read W3C GeoRSS at this time. To start, check out this link, a map of California State Parks fed by an RSS feed at http://mapnut.com/calstatepark.xml: http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=http://mapnut.com/calstatepark.xml

Did you look at that URL carefully? It's the ACME URL, then an equals sign, then the URL of a GeoRSS feed. So, you can pretty much put any feed in there and (if all goes right) make your own map...

Google Earth Blog and Google Maps Mania have more interesting mashups.

Need to chalk some of this up to novelty, as the experience doesn't deliver on the promise yet. But the stats are impressive. Can't help but also note that this is Yahoo's best-designed app.

Nokia's Sensor Planet proposal for NYC



"Operation Times Square is an urban game and a large-scale experiment on mobile sensing. The game will bridge global and local, physical and virtual worlds through a novel combination of an asynchronous web site-based access, GSM-based locationing and camera-phone based player inputs."

"This article provides a brief review of the Billed to Phone payment methods and addresses the need for additional academic research into consumer acceptance and effectiveness drivers of the Billed to Phone billing method."

This weekend, while biking in the glorious (but brief) Portland sun, I heard my name shouted out. I turned around to see a friend of mine sitting at a sidewalk cafe. He invited me over to chat. My friend, a media savvy (and law abiding) lawyer, is always easygoing, entertaining and fun to talk with.

But when we started talking about recent NSA wiretapping revelations, he began to act paranoid, looking around furtively, wondering if anyone was "spying" on us from nearby webcams.

As a fan of the movie "Enemy of the State", I knew the NSA utilizes commercial webcams, like those in ATMs and rooftops, as targets of opportunity. Airplanes and satellites, too.

Eyes in the sky may become more common. Take, for example, the FBI mistake on fingerprint identification in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The FBI's automated fingerprint system mistakenly fingered Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield. The FBI hired an airplane to circle a mosque that he attended.

Border Surveillence technology may bring the practice home.

Just for fun I mentioned Pyramid Vision, of Arlington, Virginia, which can "fuse" terrestrial cameras with aircraft or satellite images. It creates a continous 3D "fly-by" space, not unlike Google Earth. But live. RealityFlythrough has similar capability.

Combining different cameras into a single video panorama patchwork allows you to "fly" though a space utilizing a variety of cameras, all with different points of view. Computer processing adjusts perspective and fills in the data gaps. Microphone Arrays will be supported in Microsoft's Vista. They can track a moving target and attenuate background noise.

Watch for them on a utility pole near you.

Maybe what my friend needs is the $500 WCH DD9000 (right). The video Walkman-sized device scans the airwaves for wireless video transmissions in the 900MHz to 2.52GHz range.

It sports two antennae with a 2.5-inch TFT LCD and locks on any usable signals within 500 feet.

What's a little spying between friends and neighbors?

CBS RADIO, one of the largest major-market operators in the United States, and Vibes Media, a leading provider of interactive text message and mobile content marketing programs, today announced a nationwide partnership for Vibes' iRadio, an Instant Response Text Messaging Platform.

The agreement provides 25 CBS RADIO stations in New York, Los Angeles and 16 additional U.S. markets the ability to personally engage their listeners in real time and create a wide variety of locally customized radio promotions.

Listeners can participate in promotions and contests from anywhere via the text messaging function on their cell phone. Using iRadio, stations can customize these promotions and contests through Vibes' OptimumAnalysis Tools, effectively tailoring them according to listener response in real time.

Everyone who sends a message receives a response, regardless of service provider. Additionally, listeners can text requests, shout-outs and votes using the cell phone they already have in their hand.

Interactive text messaging programs also add a new dimension to radio sponsorships. Advertisers like the fact that each message to the listener can be tagged with a "powered by" message, making each communication brand-specific.

The partnership will offer premium messaging strategies, with CBS RADIO listeners being able to join mobile clubs that give them access to ringtone and wallpaper downloads.

Network comp/analysis/viz softwares in use at Columbia

A lot of bloggers are saying the excel/word replacment strategy of Google must have some secret purpose. Not. They forget about 1 simple thing.

First, of course, the majority of people who use excel and word don’t need any advanced features.

What they do need is an easy way to store everything in one place. Office hasn’t solved that problem. Almost every small organization I talk to has an unsatisfactory, frustrating solution to where they keep their files. Mostly stuff just gets emailed around a lot.

That is the problem GoogleOffice can solve in 1 stroke. A basic Word and Excel is enough. And if it’s stored in 1 place (no more duplicates! No more version control nightmares. No sotware to by and install.), that’s enough motivation for 50% of all Office users to switch in the next 5 years.

Central storage, no software to install, basic features. And of course compatibility with Office.

It’s really that simple. Which small group with limited means would *not* adopt this? I know all of the ones I know would. It’s cheap. It’s easy to maintain. And it solves a *real* problem that they *all* struggle with right now.

TiVo announced 'TiVoCasting' today which looks just like their existing Video Podcasting efforts but with a few content partners and a shiny new name. I guess the word "podcast" was too much of an homage to Apple so TiVo decided to try and make up a new word with their own branding.

It's cool to hear they have Cnet, NYT, and Rocketboom video downloads lined up -- I watch a lot of those small grainy videos and I'd much rather see them on the living room couch instead of a laptop or home office monitor. It'll really get interesting when TiVo eventually broadcasts content exclusively to customers. I'd love to see independent movies, unaired niche sporting events, or even popular lists from YouTube show up on a TiVo.

It appears the MPAA really has no clue how to look beyond a single step out from any of their actions. A week ago, they were crowing about how shutting down Pirate Bay was such a huge victory for the entertainment industry. Instead, the site was back up two days later, and only suffered additional outages because so many more people started using the site, thanks to the MPAA's inadvertent advertising for the site that, previously, was only known in select circles. Yesterday, we noted the entertainment industry was poised to do the same thing for AllofMP3.com, putting out official warnings telling people that it was illegal (something AllofMP3 denies), that effectively alerted an awful lot of people where they could get cheap, DRM-free music. Today comes the news that they're now going after yet another torrent tracker site to help it jump ranks from "known in certain circles" to "widely known." Step on up to the bigtime, Isohunt, the MPAA is coming after you. Once again, Isohunt has a reasonable defense in that they are simply a search engine, and host no infringing content. However, it's simply stunning that the industry continues to help promote these sites one after the other.

Volume of over Lumen is a rhythm communicator for several people.

Each participant wears a silicone collar which sends a rhythmically arranged sound. A particular sound is generated for each participant according to an analysis of their voice. LEDs in the collar create a halo of pulsating light that radiates around the wearer. If another partecipant comes within the range of the collar, he or she can hear the sound generated by the collar worn by the first person. But if he or she comes within the range of several collars, then it's a mix of the various sound compositions that will be heard.

By their own movement in the area participants can modulate their own sound experience, as well as the acoustic experience of the other collar wearers.

Electronics are visibly cast in the collar: resistances, transistors, diodes, conductive strips and other elements have a functional as well as an aesthetic role.

A work by Martin Bellardi and Anne-Christin Delakowitz.

Check the collar at Sonambiente in Berlin until July 16.

Via rhizome. Bottom image.

Cablevision said this afternoon that it will delay a trial planned for later this month and will postpone the launch of its network DVR at least until fall while the legal issues are being resolved. Cablevision is being sued by several studios and networks over the company’s plans for remote-storage DVR; they argue it’s really VOD and requires additional rights agreements. Cablevision countersued Wednesday, claiming that the plan is covered by “fair use” as defined in the 1984 Sony-Betamax decision. The two sides agreed to an expedited calendar in hopes of resolving the matter quickly. According to Multichannel News, discovery is supposed to completed by the end of July, briefs are to be filed in August and September with the hearing in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in late October.
Related:
– TV Networks Sue Cablevision
– Add Turner’s CNN, Cartoon Network To List Of Cablevision Remote DVR Foes
– Lawsuit Over Cablevision DVR Plans Could Change Copyright Law

Call for Participation

V1B3 is requesting submissions of short videos* that in the broadest terms possible, explore public space though human interaction, intervention and the mechanisms that influence and control the experience of the city.

V1B3 is an international curatorial project that aims to present video art that responds to the conditions of site specificity and a public viewer-ship. Urban planners and architects are used to shaping cities by means of infrastructure, zoning and buildings. However, other modes of intervention exist that are capable of influencing the development of a city. Communicative media interventions can transform public spaces.

V1B3 Summer06 will be presented in conjunction with the University Film and Video Association conference, sponsored by Chapman University in Orange, California. The US screening will occur during the UFVA conference [August 1ST-5th] in Orange, CA. The UK screening will be held at the London Study Center.

V1B3 Summer06 will have a companion DVD developed for publication and purchase.

July 7th DEADLINE: Application can be found at http://www.v1b3.com

US Contact:
Mat Rappaport
1511 North Astor St
Milwaukee, WI USA
info[at]v1b3.com

Sceenings Will be August 1st – 5th

* up to 2 minutes in duration. Works longer than 3 minutes will not be considered.

Movement / Mobility 2.0

Aula 2006 is an event (Wednesday, June 14) about the direction society, culture and technology are heading in. The theme Movement points to mobile 2.0 (mobility meets web 2.0), the overlapping of the physical and the virtual, and the social movement-like nature of new technologies. On a personal level, movement is about not staying still but taking action to shape the big global issues we face in the future.

We'll hear about movement from Clay Shirky the New York University professor who coined the term social software, Alastair Curtis the new Head of Design at Nokia, Martin Varsavsky founder of the global Wi-Fi network FON, and venture capitalist Joichi Ito who has invested in several successful second-generation Web companies including, SixApart and Technorati.

Movement also means a section of a piece of music, and the gathering will include interventions in music and dance. This event will be less of a conference, more an intimate gathering of people to discuss, detail and experience critical topics.

The event will take place at Bio Rex theatre in Helsinki. Attendance is free and open to the public - no advance registration is required. It is also possible to attend the dinner following the event at restaurant Via. Table reservations must be made in advance. After dinner, the event will continue with movement on the dance floor at Ahjo club in Hotel Klaus K to beats by Jukka Perko and Samuli Kosminen.

For enquiries, please contact Andreea Chelaru at andreea[at]fjord.fi.

Alex managed to take time off from gaming to write a book about the subject!

The spring of 2006 will go down as a curious moment in the annals of buzz. The mainstream-media steamroller caught up with a bona fide cultural phenomenon, then flattened it into a cliché before the average person knew what all the fuss was about. That's ironic, because the fuss was about the average person--that is, his or her participation in what's known variously as "social media," "social networking," "user-generated content," the "live Web" or the dreaded "Web 2.0." But don't worry, this isn't yet another story getting all up in MySpace or metaprofiling Friendster profiles. This is about how those sites, and their successors, are growing up--and about their impact on how business gets done. Companies, whether they sell software, movies, or dog food, are changing the way they communicate, make decisions, and develop and market products, all because of the exponential rise of new tools that allow people to express themselves more easily online--and on the streets."

By Robert Niles: We update OJR's reader wiki on news reporting to include information on open source and distributed reporting techniques.

Scripting News: 6/8/2006:

"New podcast. Dan Gillmor and I participated in a moderated discussion about the future of blogging. I think it came out pretty well."

Word of the Day - >Disintermediation.

comScore Media Metrix has published a breakdown of Technorati's visitors as well as inbound and outbound link traffic. comScore now tracks over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors to Technorati as of April 2006.

Of those people visiting Technorati.com in April, 29.6 percent arrived at the site via MySpace.com. Similarly, 26.6 percent of those leaving the site immediately went to MySpace.com. The high level of cross-visitation suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two sites.

Yahoo!, Wikipedia, eBay, and MSN are also high sources of traffic according to comScore. No mention of Google, or Technorati's media partners in the comScore analysis. Technorati's largest age demographic is 35-54 year olds (36%).

I've seen many instances of the "MySpace effect" on the growth of online startups. YouTube, Userplane, and Slide are just a few companies benefiting from easy integration with MySpace and its millions of users.

The Econ Tech Blog points to an interesting presentation by experts including economist Dr. John Rutledge, who sees broadband infrastructure "as the Central Nervous System of the economy." The piece claims that a one percent increase in phone lines results in a three percent increase in GDP. It also points out that while the US has 94 telephone lines per 100 people, developing countries may only have 5 lines per 100 people.

Though we wish we could accommodate everyone in person, we won’t be able to but that doesn’t mean you can’t be a part of the fun. We will be video streaming both rooms on Sat/Sun, including an IRC chat. You can also come to all our outside events and parties where most of the schmoozing happens anyway. Hell, make your own event and post it on the wiki. This is our conference to make.

Click.TV is a new user interface for web video that lets users click to discover what's inside a video instantly, and even share their thoughts about the action. It does this by enabling video producers and users to add comments to points inside a video.

TurnHere reports on VidMirror:

A new service launched this week, VidMirror, lets users upload the same video to as many 13 Web video host sites. Users can then embed multiple videos in a single player on their blog or Web site, so they won't have a blank space if a host sites deletes their video (or their account).

I guess some people might want to do something like this to get greater exposure, but what happens if you need to make a change on a video? Delete 13 videos then upload 13 revisions?

With this site you still have to upload your video 13 times. It would be nice if you could upload one version to the site and have the site then do the 13 uploads for you. That's assuming that you'd want to distribute your videos this way.

I might play around with posting my videos to some video sharing sites, but I still prefer having my videos live at home with me on my vlog where people can come visit and see my videos where they live and have a conversation with me.

If I started posting my videos to 13 other sites I'm not sure how I'd keep track of the conversations, and quite possibly my conversations and my videos would then be owned by someone else, ending up on the hottest DVD of the year, funniest video blogs. Buy now!

SimplyDV Techniques: Cameracraft Hints and Tips

Here's an introductory set of features written by SimplyDV's Colin Barrett and drawn from the many articles written for UK video-making magazines and also from the text of his book - Digital Video for Beginners (Ilex Press, March 2005).

via [ TurnHere ]

Introducing...Current Mobile, a brand new pod category just for videos shot on mobile phones. This is a very cool way for peeps who may not have cameras to get involved and start contributing to the network.

What exactly are we looking for? That's easy. We want compelling footage made with our audience of 18- to 34-yr olds in mind.

Check out the call outs, then watch a sample and you might just get inspired to take your phone out the next time you see something good. Oh yeah -- if it makes it on air, you'll get a hundred bucks.

Thanks to a new partnership with Sony Ericsson, Current is the first and only TV network to showcase your mobile videos. We're proud to be expanding the landscape of Viewer-Created Content (VC2) because, after all, you're still the heart of what we do.

Along with an upgraded player, YouTube now allows users to create video channels and share them with like-minded friends. "YouTube said that it aims to move beyond depending on the latest hit videos, which spread like wild fire across the Internet via e-mail. Instead, it wants to create a personalized programming experience akin to TV viewers surfing channels with a remote control," explains Reuters.

Last week, an Illinois school district adopted a new policy towards student online activities that’s already stirring up a lot of controversy. All students in the Libertyville-Vernon Hills Area High School District 128 participating in extracurricular activities will now have to sign a pledge saying they will not post inappropriate content on the Internet or they will face disciplinary action. The catch, though, is that the pledge also applies to online activities done outside of school. Will this decision stand up to legal scrutiny?

Interventions

[...] For an intervention on images, and in a sousveillance / surveillance context this time, Austrian activists Quintessenz created an anonymous surveillance system that uses a face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded (via Wired).

New Scientist reported today on a video surveillance system that scrambles people's faces to protect them from unwarranted monitoring. Developed by Swiss company EMITALL Surveillance, the algorithm of the technology singles out any people in a video feed, on the basis of their movement, and disguises them digitally while leaving the rest of the scene intact (Videos 1, 2 and 3). Only those in possession of the encryption key can unlock the scrambled regions and identify the people shown on-screen.

The system can even use different encryption keys to scramble the identity of particular people under surveillance, says Touradj Ebrahimi, founder of EMITALL Surveillance (thanks Emily!)

More broadcast disruption: SVEN - Surveillance Video Entertainment Network, a real-time video performance system that detects when people look like rock stars instead of criminals. Once a potential rock star is detected, music video effects are triggered so the surveillance stars get a treatment worthy of Cecil B himself; TV Predator, a picture frame that attacks the tv and prevent it from working properly; OiTV, a misbehaving attention-seeking TV. [blogged by Régine on we-make-money-not-art]

A landscape of bricoleurs

Peer to peer communication is every bit an act of bricolage - of tinkering, re-ordering, re-combining, de- and re-constructing existing elements into new and unforeseen forms, only to pass them along the chain to be further transformed. The participant in peer to peer culture, whom we might call a ‘bricoleur’, is ever part of an endless dialogue, an evolving process that reaches beyond and before their contribution.

This takes some adjusting to, and nowhere more so than in the world of media and the creative arts, where the spectre of authorship, and the draconian intellectual property rights that trail closely behind it, loom heavily over the most seemingly throw-away proceedings. But as consumers increasingly refuse to take a passive role and those in the communications industries gradually come to accept the full possibilities of participatory culture, or CGM (consumer generated material), the transition towards a peer to peer model, and thus a model made up of a fluid, mobile network of bricoleurs comes ever closer.

The Bricolab project

Bricolab.com is a group of interconnected sites designed to foster creative collaboration via Open Source Culture, social networking and web 2.0 technologies. Made up of a blog, set up for resource sharing and commentary on p2p creativity, a wiki for community collaboration and a Project Space for community forging, blogging and file sharing, Bricolab is a free, open space built on the back of the Open Source applications MediaWiki, Elgg and WordPress.

The PocketPacket project

While the project is ultimately an open culture jamming session, which will evolve in response to the community that will ultimately shape and reshape its function and form, the first community project to be launched from Bricolab is the PocketPacket project. The PocketPacket is an experiment in ‘p2p-brut’, which is to say p2p in the raw.

Essentially a means of taking p2p to the streets, the PocketPacket is a downloadable set of posters, stickers and postcards to attach to community dictated monthly projects, to be dropped off in public spaces. The first of these projects is that of the PocketPedia.

PocketPedia

The PocketPedia is a simple, street level project designed to make the gift of free GNU Wikipedia articles to strangers, delivered by means of the PocketPacket to trains, buses and other locations of extreme boredom. It is a small gesture that at once provides hand-selected, and personally endorsed reading material for commuters the world over and draws attention to peer to peer alternatives. All are welcome to get involved, and can do so via the PocketPacket website.

Future projects

Future PocketPacket and Bricolab efforts will arise from the community. Current suggestions include the distribution of home made original and derivative art, and creative commons licensed mp3 cds composed and remixed online.

(Image courtesy of atom.smasher)

Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media is back with his Media Chaos Theory, Round 2. Bloggers Jeff Jarvis and Terry Heaton are among those interviewed.

Yes, many of us have written about the disruptive effects of the new technologies, and the need for old media to reinvent their business models during the digital transformation.

One man's Chaos Theory is another man's opportunity -- it's called democratic media, or the personal media revolution. (mp3)

[via Social Synergy Weblog]

"http://slashdot.org/articles/06/06/06/1226236.shtml">Slashdot reports about Google’s launch of Google Spreadsheet. While this may be an attempt on Google’s part to try and insert advertising into new online realms, the core idea of co-editable spreadsheets and sharing data is definitely worthwhile.

Not many people are interested in putting their own personal data onto someone else’s servers. But, co-creating public or community data, and making that data open and shareable and re-useable adds a new dimension to knowledge commons.

Several similar efforts existed before the launch of Google’s online spread sheets, including:

• EditGrid
• NumSum
• iRows
• Numbler
• WikiCalc

The EditGrid developers weblog envisions co-editable web-based spreadsheets as a platform of “data democracy”:

A platform of data democracy In Wikipedia, users join the rest of the world to tie pieces together into a full picture. But there are many types of data which is not “wikipediable”, from comparing mobile phones to real-time tracking of where avian flu-infected birds are found dead.

Wiki data adds a quantitative dimension to wiki, which is an otherwise largely qualitative sphere of human collaboration.

For instance, communities can keep track of, and collaboratively create data bases on all sorts of data about their community, from environmental quality, to crime statistics, to termite or carpenter ant infestations per-household. This can allow people to collectively make facts about their communities transparent. It can also help them predict future trends together based on statistics.

Nicholas Negroponte once said: “In a digital age, data about money is worth more than money.”

The democratization of the tools needed to collaboratively collect and analyze data lower the barrier of entry for people to utilize and share data.

More resources: http://del.icio.us/srose/wikidata  http://del.icio.us/srose/opendata

tomorrow is our permanent address...

…McLuhan claimed some decades ago but nowadays we are simply already immersed and embedded …Arthur C. Kroker (editor of ctheory) states that we live in the electronic culture that he (McLuhan) prophesied. And since he wrote about it, technology has become more pervasive, but silent. It’s invisible. An elder article (written 2005 to remind McLuhan’s actuality 25 year after his death) gives..(an) overview on McLuhan’s opinions and as well both the enthusiasm and critique his thoughts evoked.

"For the first time, the central nervous system has been 'exteriorized," says Kroker, U Vic's Canada Research Chair in technology, culture and theory. "It is our plight to be processed through the technological simulacrum…in a "technostructure" which is nothing but a vast simulation and amplification of the bodily senses." McLuhan’s early (1960s) wake-up call about the extent to which people’s very identities are determined by the tools that they themselves invent can be listened to via these two links of the old recordings.

The Medium is the Massage; with Marshall McLuhan.
Long-Playing Record 1968.
Produced by John Simon.
Conceived and co-ordinated by Jerome Agel. Written by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel.
Columbia CS 9501, CL2701.

[posted on mind the_GAP*]

Where.com - WHERE Mobile 2.0 API
From the site:
The WHERE Mobile 2.0 API allows developers to add mobile pictures and mobile video clips to web sites with a few simple steps

Very similar to what I have been planning on doing with my Video and Image Moblogging with a (video enabled) Camera Phone Scripts

-Thanks Jenny!

This month CC is presenting a Remix Art event inspired by the Free Culture movement, in Second Life. Artists are encouraged to submit remixes based on the images from Sharing is Daring and Free Culture NYU, according to the appropriate CC licenses.

Be ready to discuss your art remixes and other work!
We want to know what you CC/FC/SL enthusiasts up to out there!

Date: Thursday, June 15
Time: 4pm PDT
Location: CC SL Art Gallery
Email submissions to jennifer@creativecommons.org by Tuesday, June 13.

It looks like government control of the airwaves is about to become a much harder prospect. The Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, is an open-source device that can do virtually anything that involves the reception and transmission of radio signals - which means not just radio like you have in the kitchen over breakfast, but all kinds of TV, cell-phone signal, radar...pretty much any broadcast technology at all. All thanks to the magic of general purpose computing and some hardware trickery.

A warning label mockup*

The BBC is reporting that the All Party Internet Group (APIG), a cross-party group of MPs, has made some intelligent - and interesting - recommendations about explaining DRM more fully to consumers:

“The MPs’ report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

This would ensure that it was “crystal clear” to consumers what freedom they have to use the content they are purchasing and what would happen if they do something outlawed by the protection system.

The same labelling systems would also spell out what happened in the event of a maker of DRM technology going bust, if a protection system became obsolete or if gadgets to play the content are replaced.

…

The report also called for the makers of DRM systems to be made aware of the consequences of using aggressive copy protection systems [e.g. the Sony-BMG nightmare].”

I wonder what the proposed labelling system will entail? Will it be very simple, or will it need to spell out to consumers the rights the law gives them in order to them point out how this particular DRM’d CD or download is restricting them?

In short, do we need a programme of educating consumers about their rights before a labelling system will be useful?

The Open Rights Group’s Suw Charman is quoted in the BBC story:

“”The technologies are extending beyond the law they are supposed to uphold.”

…

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

“We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought,” she said.”

APIG’s group secretary is the Earl of Erroll, an insightful quote of whose I blogged about a few months ago. It’s worth repeating in this context, as APIG’s work here goes some way to remedying the problem he highlights:

“If no members of either house know anything about IT, then bureaucrats will take control of our lives, or pretend they can do things they can’t.”

Hopefully APIG can continue their work in educating politicians, as well as the public, about the implications of restrictive technology.

*Not owning any DRM’d music, I used a recent CD purchase, the excellent Great Days of Sail (now Yo Zushi) album, for the mockup image. An alternative style of label might be those distributed by Downhill Battle and RIAA Radar:

Image from Downhill Battle.

Those looking for the FCC to impose net-neutrality or any other guidelines on Comcast, Time Warner, or AT&T as those companies seek approval to significantly increase their footprint shouldn't hold their breath, judging from comments by FCC chief Kevin Martin (MarketWatch). Martin seems to employ rhetoric that confuses the net-neutrality discussion with the right of incumbents to offer faster or slower speed tiers:

"Consumers need to be able to access all the content that's available over the Internet without being impeded by the access provider," Martin said. "But at the same time, we recognized that the people that are deploying these networks may offer differentiated speeds and differentiated products to the consumer. And if you offer different tiers of speeds, a consumer chooses the lowest tier, and he wants to access content that would require higher speeds than he has purchased, he's not being blocked from access. He just hasn't purchased the speed that's necessary."

We're not sure when anyone has ever suggested that incumbents should not be allowed to offer differentiated speed tiers. The folks at Techdirt are particularly unimpressed with Martin's latest commentary, and particularly his "regulation is evil" think tank mantra:

"Of course, all of this is double-speak. Martin loves regulation when it's politically useful, his idea of a level playing field means one that's slanted towards telcos and his idea of competition is a duopoly. He also remarked that the industry needs to deliver "more innovation" to consumers. Perhaps he should kick things off with some new thinking instead of rehashing these tired -- and ultimately ineffective -- ideas."

I had the scoop but couldn’t blab until now. But Jossip let the catty out of the bag, revealing the quiet launch of Lipstick.com as a Digg for the glamorous celebrity set instead of unglamorous geeks from Conde Nast.

First 10 headlines on Lipstick right now:

1. Brangelina’s sweet, sweet revenge on the tabloids (nypost.com)
2. Jen & Vince hang out in Sydney, acting more like friends than a couple (people.aol.com)
3. Lindsay, Scarlett, Jessica, Alicia Keys do serious couture at the 2006 CFDA Awards (style.com)
4. Is This For Real?! First Photo of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt! (dlisted.blogspot.com)
5. Brandon Davis’ grandma is a dirty liar (thesuperficial.com)
6. Aniston sees irony in her “Break-Up” role (montereyherald.com)
7. Lindsay Lohan Dating Everyone but Brandon Davis (jossip.com)
8. Keanu Reeves opens up: “I’m trying not to be alone so much, And man, it’s a struggle. I want to get married.” 9. Casey Affleck, Summer Phoenix Wed (people.aol.com)
10. A Diamond Binky For Shiloh Nouvel (shoppingblog.com)

First 10 headlines on Digg right now:

1. Dvorak: Our Modern World—Weirder by the Minute
2. Intel Core 2 Duo Blows Away AMD Athlon FX
3. AllofMp3.com Breaks Silence
4. Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router
5. Scientists resolve 60-year-old plutonium questions
6. It’s Hard Out Here For A Gamer
7. Cell-Phone Tracking Parents
8. 6Bone IPv6 Network Shutting Down
9. 24 Hours to stop new copyright law
10. RFID Gains Momentum In Pharmaceuticals

Hmmmmm. Worlds collide. Geeks v. glam. Rose v. Newhouse. This’ll be fun.

NTT DoCoMo yesterday announced that they developed the acoustic OFDM (Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) technology, which can be used to embed URLs and text data in broadcast music/audio. Consumers' mobile phones "listen" to the music/audio and extract the embedded URLs/data. About 100 characters can be transmitted in a second. (To deploy this technology, broadcast stations will need to install a dedicated encoder. Mobile phones need to be enhanced with a decoder mechanism as well.)

DoCoMo thinks this technology can also be used at shopping malls and supermarkets. Then, the sound from in-store speakers would probably be delivering information about specials, ads, discount coupons, etc. ITmedia describes this technology as "Sound QR Code" or "Sound Toruka" (Toruka allows wallet phones to receive information from RFID readers.)

A similar technology exists for ultrasonic sound, however, DoCoMo's technology uses audible sound that can be transmitted through regular speakers. Also, it sounds like the data transmission speed (1kbps) is pretty good.

via ITmedia

zork + voip + asterix + festival, if you can think it up, it's possible to execute

NodeBox allows you to create visual output with programming code.

Port of Apache and mod_python to Symbian, able to provide a webserver on a mobile phone with a global URL than can be accessed from any browser.

Hadoop is a collection of code libraries and programs useful for creating very large distributed systems.

Monitors someone's MySpace profile and lets you know when they become single. Part of the Super Happy money printing machine competition - via waxy links

Yahoo relaunched their video site last Thursday, offering "MyStudio," allowing content owners to upload their video, and paste them into web pages as well as view statistics on who is watching and see user ratings.

The very next day YouTube shot back by introducing new features of its own. Users can now create "channels," where they can aggregate either their own content, or that of others.

"Now all content creators and collectors, be it professional filmmakers, videobloggers or just people who love Chihuahuas can broadcast videos from their channel for all the world to see," YouTube's Maryrose Dunton said.

A new blogging feature will allow users to post YouTube videos directly to Blogger, BlogSpot and LiveJournal blogs from the Web site. Each video would include a clickable "blog it" link. Support for additional blogs is on the way, Dunton added.

The site also added a feature that allows the user to view a history of the last 100 videos watched on the service.

JuiceCaster, one of the first true application designed for high-end handsets and 3G networks, includes the ability to create new audio/video content directly within the web application and directly from the application on the cell phone.

An integrated audio and video recorder is embedded directly in to the JuiceCaster website and provides a way for users to capture audio. Uploaded audio content is available to other users immediately on the handset or the desktop.

Users can also capture multi-media content using their mobile phone with the JuiceCaster application and effortlessly upload the content to the web that can be viewed by other mobile phone users or friends and family.

Juice Wireless is working with Kyocera to showcase social networking via mobile phone with JuiceCaster2.1 for BREW.

Mobilcast has an audio client for cellphones and PDAs that enable people to do just that.

ComVu says it has the world's first live video broadcast solution from a mobile device to a global audience. Bloggers, citizen reporters, family members, friends and corporate professionals can broadcast live events - simply and cost-effectively.

Today at GLOBALCOMM in Chicago, ZyXEL announced a WiMAX CPE and WiMAX PCMCIA Notebook card that's ready to go with the new IEEE802.16e-2005 standard.

ZyXEL says it makes mobile Internet access a reality with the added benefit of guaranteed Quality of Service. Alcatel is launching their 802.16e-compatible CPE products in cooperation with Taiwan-based Zyxel.

Get a fleet of Segways and go live. NY-1 everywhere (with DVB-H).

Hot on the heels of Friday's revelation in the New York Times that the Department of Justice and the FBI want Internet service providers to retain our attention data just in case they need to take a look at it, Steve Gillmor sends a memo to Bill Gates (with a few thoughts for the Attorney General as well):

Not only does this move collide with the goals of major cloud aggregators–Google for one has made it clear they will resist such demands as they have to some extent in the past–but it comes into direct conflict with the most potent wave in today's technology landscape: the user in charge. In a world where we recoil from attempts by spamsters, spyware, and identity thieves to steal our most personal data and use it against us, here comes Big Brother to demand our attention metadata without offering any service in compensation. At least Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo offer us free storage, calendar, or email in return for this data, even if it does go in and doesn't come back out. There is some sort of voluntary contract between users and providers.

Here's where the government bait and switch package starts to tick ominously: First it's about child porn. Everybody's against that. Then it's about terrorism. Ditto. But then, while we've got that data, let's go in and help our friends down at the MPAA and RIAA with their business model problem and police Intellectual Property "theft." What about peer-to-peer communications filled with inappropriate political concepts? When we've got you by the bitstream, folks, we decide what's OK, not you.

Homegirl Sasha discovered a $150 USD Windows-based app "CrazyTalk" which normally would be too creepy to talk about when used on a real life picture. But it works like a charm for making SL avatars come to life, one of the biggest limitations for machinima filmmakers.

Watch her first lip-synch'd machinima test she did while videoblogging (videoslogging? heh) about the latest machinima classes put on by Alt-Zoom studios.

I'm sure Tao Takashi, the Steve Garfield of the metaverse, will be going nuts with his Ace Frehley Simpson-lookin self. ;-)

Glossary: Machinima is a genre of filmmaking using video game engines, (think Red vs. Blue for example)

Join Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer) from 1-5pm for a public workshop presenting and field-testing AIR (Area’s Immediate Reading), a work in progress being developed as the 2005 Social Sculpture Commission awarded by Eyebeam and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

"last updated 24 May, 2006. If you know anyone who should be added to the list - especially if she works outside North America or Europe - please let me know. And if you know any changes in affiliation, location or interests for the current list, please let me know that too."

"My daughter just gave me a DVD with iTunes videos of the entire first season of Lost. How can I watch these programs on my TV? Is there some way I can burn the episodes to DVD?"

Kiyoshi @ 1.08p
Originally uploaded by yatta.

Ken Ikeda from Youth Sounds came by the Eyebeam Education Lab on Friday. Youth Sounds is about to establish a youth-staffed R&D lab in the Bay Area where young folks are trained in open source software development before working on projects for real world clients.

Apparently they're just breaking ground on the new site. I'll have to see if I can schedule a quick visit to their BAVC office while I'm in SF for Vloggercon this week.

I'll be speaking on the 'User Generated Content' panel at the Culture, Commerce, and Public Media Symposium at WNET on Monday. With Mary Hodder, Sam Klein, and Dave Marvit also on board, the panel's already stacked. I'll have to limit my comments to three or four sound bites plus a joke or two. Oh yeah, and a short movie. I'm thinking of showing this clip from Vimeo:

The latest broadband report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project offers some tantalizing evidence that certain aspects of the digital divide are finally being bridged. For many years, high-speed Internet access was the realm of the elite - generally made up of white, well-off, well-educated suburban families. According to the Pew report, which surveyed respondents during the first quarter of 2006, broadband access is rising across the board. And who's using broadband for online publishing? You might be surprised. I certainly was.

As of March 2006, 42% of all American adults - 84 million people - had a high-speed Internet connection at home, up from 30% the previous year. Amazingly, the 24 million new broadband users surpass the total number of broadband users that were online a scant four years ago.

Home broadband access, 2000-2006. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

Whites continue to surpass African Americans on broadband access, with 42% of white households having access, compared to 31% of African Americans. At 41%, English-speaking Latinos have reached parity with white households, but the report does not account for the non-English speaking Latinos, who presumably go online much less. Income and education continue to be major barriers, though. While 68% of families earning more than $75,000 a year are online, only 21% of households making $30,000 or less had access. Similarly, (Interestingly, the strongest broadband growth rate occurred in middle-income households making $30,000-$50,000 a year.) 62% of households with someone completing a college degree had broadband, compared to only 17% of households in which no one achieved a high school diploma. So while progress is being made in terms of the racial digital divide, income and education remain enormous roadblocks.

Home broadband demographics. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

My first reaction to this data was that the jump in broadband access is a direct result of telephone companies lowering the cost of DSL. Many DSL companies have started to offer introductory rates of $15 a month, less than half the typical rate. Indeed, the average cost of DSL in December 2005 was $32, down from $38 in February 2004. (Cable Internet access remained steady at $41.) So it would seem that cost must have been a major factor in getting new customers to switch. But according to the Pew report, this isn't the case. A whopping 57% of respondents cited speed as their primary reason for getting broadband, while only three percent said their reason was the cost of broadband lowering to an affordable level. This suggests that more people are willing to pay for broadband because of the quality of the speed. Perhaps the reasoning behind this is that so many websites now require broadband to function properly, they're egging households into upgrading their Internet access.

The Pew report also takes a look at how broadband households are using the Internet to publish online content. Overall, 35% of Internet users - 48 million people - have posted content to the Internet. Broadband users are more likely to post online content than dialup users - 42% versus 27%. This is especially true of bloggers and people who manage their own websites. While an average of eight percent of Internet users publish their own blog, 11% of broadband users had blogs, compared to only four percent of dialup users. Similarly, while an average of 15% of Internet users published websites, 17% of broadband users did this compared to only 11% of dialup users. (I wonder, though, how many of the respondents said they published a website rather than a blog because they didn't know the term "blog," since some online journaling tools that are essentially blogs don't use that terminology.)

User generated online content. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

Demographics of online publishers. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

Perhaps the most interesting finding of the report suggests that user-generate content is being democratized. Historically, online publishing was the purview of the elite. "Demographically, the broadband elite fits a classic early adopter profile for technology users – heavily male, well educated, and comfortable financially," says the report. But even this is beginning to change. More women are posting content online. Among broadband users, 39% of women post online content, compared to 43% of men. And income is becoming less of a factor as well. Among users earning $50,000 or less, 46% of them had published some sort of content online, compared to only 46% of those making more than $50,000. Of course, this doesn't mean that most online content is being made by lower-income users. There are many higher-income users online than low-income users; it's just that there's a higher percentage of online publishers within the lower-income demographic.

Pew then asked respondents if they had ever done any of these specific activities: shared something they created themselves like a story or a video, created their own webpage, worked on others’ webpages, or created a blog. Not surprisingly, young people were much more likely to say yes. While 43% of respondents ages 18-29 said they had done one of these online publishing activities, only 29% of 50- to 64-year olds said yes, while just 18% of those 65 and older said yes. Meanwhile, race appeared to be a small factor, but in a rather counter-intuitive way: while 32 percent of whites said they had done one of these online publishing activities, 39% of African Americans and 42% of English-speaking Latinos had done so as well. So while whites may continue to use broadband in higher numbers, a higher percentage of African American and Latino broadband users are taking advantage of their access as content publishers. Similarly, income and education gaps are relatively minimal in terms of content production: 32% of users without a high school diploma versus 38% of those with a college degree, and 32% of users earning less than $30,000 a year versus 41% of those making $75,000 or more.

Does the Pew report suggest that the digital divide has been bridged? Hardly. The vast majority of low-income and low-skilled households lag behind, and gaps exist among racial groups, albeit less than before. But as we continue to work to give more people the skills and opportunities to go online, it would seem that more people of different racial, economic and educational backgrounds are taking advantage of those skills and opportunities to contribute online content. To me, this validates the whole notion of bridging the digital divide - democratizing cyberspace and giving people a voice.

It's not about access. It never was. It's about what people do with that access. And more people than ever are using that access to be creators of content, rather than mere consumers of it. -andy

Web design guru Jakob Nielsen says most visitors only read about 20 words on a home page, so editors should be very concise....

Mercury News has a good package of stories on the video sharing site..the first one is a long profile of YouTube, all of which you probably already know about. The second one is more interesting, contrasting how these upstart sites like YouTube, Guba and Grouper, which embrace the Silicon Valley culture, are trying to make inroads into Hollywood and making content deals with the biggies. Silicon Valley is a world of handshakes and business cards. Hollywood is a world of kisses on the cheek and late-night martinis, as the story says, and Guba CEO Tom McInerney, for one, is trying to adapt.
“He has learned to navigate Hollywood’s hierarchical strata, a pecking order that extends from the studio parking lot, where Bentleys occupy spots reserved for actors, directors and executives, to the club scene, in which expensive memberships are frequently required.”

This is ridiculous…Infront Sports, the media rights holding agents for the football/soccer World Cup, which is starting next week in Germany, has been sending out pre-emptive “threatening” letters to sites and ISPs which it thinks will/may be doing unauthorized streaming and downloading of the matches (and put up unauthorized images as well). BoingBoing, the most popular blog on the planet, got one letter from the law firm representing Infront…the letter states that the firm “anticipates the possibility of unauthorized streaming and downloading of FIFA World Cup matches.” The letter goes on to warn Boing Boing that Baker & McKenzie (the law firm) will be “actively monitoring your website … to identify unlawful activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to ensure the protection of Infront’s rights of those licenses.”
Earlier last month, a Canadian ISP got a similar letter; another Swisss ISP also got the letter; so did another Dutch ISP and probably this German ISP as well.
And to think that this is probably the first global sports event which has such extensive online streaming rights built in. And also, to send one to BoingBoing? Why? What were they thinking?

MySociety is one of the enduring examples of simple use of internet tools to support community and democracy in the UK. Now they've created a new tool, Travel-time Maps, which addresses some of the holes in other online trip-planning map services.

Essentially, rather than find travel routes based upon known destinations, you can find out how long it takes to get to certain places using various modes of transit, and choose your destination based upon that information (useful in making decisions about where to work, where to live, or where to enjoy leisure travel).

The colour scale is in hours of total travel time. Warm colours indicate short travel time—red for four hours or less, orange and yellow for four to eight hours—and cool colours longer journeys...Areas with no colour at all...cannot be reached at all by rail and a taxi journey of up to one hour.

The MySociety mappers would like to extend this service to gradations according to cost, in addition to travel time; a comparison of journey times to housing prices, which would aid prospective home buyers in choose where to live; better modal comparison maps for rail and road transit; and real-time capabilities for producing on-demand maps.

(Posted by Sarah Rich in The Tech Bloom – Collaborative and Emergent Technologies at 09:14 AM)

There's one way to be sure that you'll never get mugged, catch bird flu, or have any other calamities befall you: lock yourself in an underground bunker and wait out the rest of your life. Now, some are hoping to apply the same approach to internet security in a bid to avoid spam, viruses and any other lurking dangers. WebLOQ is a company trying to build its own private internet, with its own email system, and other web services such as access to banks. Their pitch is that instead of spending money on firewalls and spam filters, users will pay $9.95/month to ensure that they only come in contact with trusted contacts. The company uses the gated community metaphor as opposed to the underground bunker, but either way it would seem to ignore what makes the internet great, namely the ability to connect and communicate with the far-flung. Arguably what the company is building is a MySpace for grownups, though one that ideally has more functionality. But were it to hit a critical mass, enabling users to have a rich experience, it's likely that, as in MySpace, it would get harder and harder to secure its gates. Though one does take real risks being online, for the vast majority of people the benefits of the free internet are worth the costs.

"So what killed the cool hunting? Certainly, as Grossman pointed out, it didn't work. But, as we all know, not working has done nothing to discourage several consulting juggernauts. So that can't be it."

"Ok, time to go a bit more public. That image that should be showing above is the front cover of the public draft of my first book, Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics, which you can buy by following this link. You can also download the pdf for free. It's a public draft which means its far from done, filled with typos, and due to the magic of print on demand it should be updated frequently."

Yesterday in E-Media Tidbits, Steffen Fjaervik wrote about the view that competition is endemic to the profession and business of journalism.

I'm going to push back on that. In my view, the strongly competitive culture of the news business is an adaptation that helped journalism mature and thrive over the last century. But times change.

It seems to me that media (all media, not just online) are evolving to become more integrated, collaborative, interactive, customized, and conversational. Given that -- plus overwhelming business pressures -- maybe our competitive culture is becoming an albatross around the neck of journalism.

Here's what I mean: Huge chunks of the traditional business model of news organizations are crumbling. Advertisers and consumers are shifting -- they can now reach each other directly and constructively, without our help, and they're busy creating their own media, too. Consolidation in the industry continues, drastically altering our competitive landscape.

And let's not forget: No one -- NO ONE -- can scoop the Internet. Ever.

Seems to me that under such circumstances, news organizations might do better to hone their unique strengths and collaborate more with other news organizations that offer complementary strengths -- similar to how weblogs support and enhance each other through cross-blog conversation. Imagine: someday a Pulitzer Prize might be awarded jointly to an enterprise reporting team spread across several news organizations. 

Maybe it's time to recognize and start dismantling the silos where we've unwittingly cornered ourselves in the name of "competition." Collaboration might be a way to create a more robust and distributed base of operations for traditional journalism. Fortunately, online media is an easy an inexpensive place to experiment, so it might be a good way to start.

Ultimately, what's more important -- the survival of quality journalism or the survival of the business structures that have supported professional journalists so far?

What are your thoughts on this? Please comment below.

Mainstream economics is mired in assumptions divorced from any real life practice, and builds model on those flawed assumptions. Luckily, there has been a growing movement to bring back realism into economics, and that includes attention for sharing behaviours. The Post-Autistic Economics movement is one of its expressions, so the following book is very importat to peer to peer theory.

The PAE Network started in France and has spread first to Cambridge and then other parts of the world. The name derives from the fact that mainstream economics has been accused of institutional autism; i.e., qualitative impairment of social interaction, failure to develop peer relationships and lack of emotional and social reciprocity. In short, economics has lost touch with reality and has become way too abstract.

From time to time, disciplines need to be, and in fact are, shaken up and virtually reconstituted. This seems to be especially true of the social sciences, where Economics lives in a kind of halfway house haunted by spectres of its venerable bearded ancestors, which the parents pretend never existed. However, like third generation immigrants, the new students want to know more about their roots, especially with regard to the deeply humanistic ethos which informed the discipline in its earliest days.

This provocative book charts the impact the PAE Network has had so far and constitutes a manifesto for a different kind of economics - it features key contributions from all the major voices in heterodox economics including Tony Lawson, Deirdre McCloskey, Geoff Hodgson, Sheila Dow and Warren Samuels.

Ludica is seeking submissions for an exciting virtual exhibition showcasing artistic player-created content in Second Life for the ZeroOne Fesival at ISEA 2006, August 7-13 at the San Jose Museum of Art.

For information and submission guidelines, visit:
http://www.ludica.org.uk/NewWest/

(Ludica is...Tracy Fullerton, Celia Pearce, Jacki Morie and Janine Fron.)

Yahoo! Korea presented to Yahoo! Research Berkeley yesterday and showed us some of their work. I was completely blown away, and the meeting left a strange taste in my mouth, something akin to "I wish I lived in Korea."

Yahoo! provides a service called Site Explorer that allows webmasters to do research on how their site is being linked from the rest of the web. As Jeongeun Lee of Y! Korea put it, "we wanted to make this experience more fun." They took the metaphor of exploration quite literally, imagining the web to be a universe, putting the user on an interstellar expedition. The result is a service called Webzari, essentially a different interface on the same data. It looks something like this:

Essentially, it goes something like this: web sites are planets whose size is determined by the number of links they have. Planets are attracted to each other based on the links between them, and you are a little space ship that flies around the universe. Check out Webzari in action:

Webzari for overstated.net

Webzari for kottke.org

Webzari for Yahoo! Korea

Yellow planets denote websites in Korean while purple ones are "foreign" (and you'll notice that the flag next to your spaceship changes depending on the planet you're next to). If you click on a planet you'll get details about the local flora and fauna and the ability to navigate to this part of the solar system. It may not be as useful for research as Site Explorer, but I have to hand it to them, it is definitely more fun.

By the end of next year I expect that they'll probably have replicated the entire Spore game system, wherein when you start a blog your posts are little organisms fighting for control of the site. After for a while your links start to appear and suddenly you zoom out to this interface. Eventually your blog will take over the universe and Yahoo! Search will become artificially intelligent, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

I'm not going to get into a critique of Jaron Lanier's Digital Maoism -- indeed, I agree that new notions about collective intelligence and peer production should be viewed critically and not embraced in a spirit of magical thinking -- but I find it strange that someone as educated as Jaron should fall into the same simple fallacy the Cato Institute fell for: collective action is not the same as collectivism. Commons-based peer production in Wikipedia, open source software, open source biology, prediction markets is collective action, not collectivism. Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons). Hello? Can anybody spot the differences?

Jave ME Device Table
Sun has updated their Java ME (Jave ?) device listings.. Finally!

J2Me would be the key word here..

Dr. Lillian Reynolds: Can you see better if I move it a little closer?
Dr. Michael Anthony Brace: I can see something. It's parts of the grid, but it's still rotating. It's not locking up.
Hal Abramson: Maybe we all need a little break, Lillian.
Dr. Lillian Reynolds: Hal, you take a break.

- Brainstorm

For the first time, scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry have coupled living brain tissue to a chip equivalent, reports the Science Blog.

Before informational input perceived by the mammalian brain is stored in the long-term memory, it is temporarily memorised in the hippocampus (left). Understanding the function of the hippocampus as an important player in the memory process is a major topic of current brain research.

Methods commonly used in neurophysiology are invasive, restricted to a small number of cells or suffer from low spatial resolution. The scientists in Martinsried developed a revolutionary noninvasive technique that enables them to record neural communication between thousands of nerve cells in the tissue of a brain slice with high spatial resolution.

This technique involves culturing razor-thin slices of the hippocampus region on semiconductor chips. These chips were developed in collaboration with Infineon Technologies AG to record neural activity in the brain.

Recording the activity patterns of the united cell structure of an intact mammalian brain tissue represents a significant technological breakthrough. Employing the new technique, the biophysicists working under the direction of Peter Fromherz were able to visualize the influence of pharmaceutical compounds on the neural network. This makes the “brain-chip” from Martinsried a novel test system for brain and drug research.

The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - has been developed (right). Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.

A team of US researchers has shown that controlling devices with the brain is a step closer. A brain-computer interface (BCI) translates electrical signals detected from the scalp into a user's commands. Previous systems used electrodes surgically implanted in the brain.

Researchers at NY's Department of Health believe it could eventually allow control of complex movements, such as operating a word processing program or a motorized wheelchair by thought alone.

Maybe brain interfaces will become a killer app for gigabit fiber networks. The OptIPuter as a game machine. Cell processor game machines are just around the corner.

Infineon is also a development partner with Microsoft for prepaid and subscription computing with their FlexGo technology. Microsoft's got the server (with a terabyte of ram). Buy Vista.

Plug a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) headset into your settop box from the Cable Health Network. Watch the "test". Zap. Eliminate drug addiction, alcoholism and pesky political dissidents in a flash.

Here are some links to Psychophysiology-Related Companies.

DailyWireless has more on Brainstorm Programs. Zack Lynch edits the Brain Waves blog on Corante.

In Pictures has published 22 computer books under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. These books cover computer basics with several operating systems, productivity applications and basic web design and programming. These books make maximum use of images. A quote published at DesktopLinux and elsewhere explains:

Most computer books contain 50,000 to 100,000 words, but these contain only 5,000 or so. They're great for bringing newbies up to speed.

[CALL FOR PARTICIPATION]

MOBILE ASIA COMPETITION 2006: ORGANIZED BY ART CENTER NABI, SEOUL, KOREA :: The progress of mobile technology characterized by mobility, connectivity, and dispersion seems to resonate with the diasporic experiences of Asians who are mobile, dispersed yet connected with each other through socio-cultural dynamics and relations. With the mobile market and its culture expanding beyond Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan to the Southeast Asia, the need should be raised for reflecting upon the currency of culture and the urgency of new identities that are evolving with mobile technology in Asian region.

Mobile Asia Competition 2006 hosted by Art Center Nabi pays attention to the role of media makers and artists in articulating and expressing the Asian mobile cultures. Artists and media makers always appropriate and challenge the given technology through creative ideas and critical practices to broaden the space of possibilities. Especially, the recent emerging ubiquitous mobile environments requires both popular sentiment and critical thoughts. Mobile Asia competition 2006 investigates the new forms of Asian identities and cultures in the creative works of artists and designers who dare to experiment, play, and wrestle with the mobile technologies.

CATEGORY

1. Works made to be viewed and experienced on mobile devices
(1) Game, Interactive Art
(2) Screen-based arts : Animation, Motion Graphic, Documentary, Music Video, Narrative film, etc.

2. Works made by mobile phones such as camera phone, video phone.

3. Idea proposal for wireless art projects on the theme of ‘connectivity and social network’. Art project that expresses the theme of social network and connectivity while exploring new and artistic ways of using diverse personal media such as mobile phones, laptop, PDA and internet network.

PRIZE: The total award money is US $20.000 and the selected works will be exhibited in various on and offline venues.

Category 1 & 2 (Mobile content): US $10.000

- One winner from each category will be awarded with $5000.
- The works by winners and other selected works will be screened and exhibited at Art Center Nabi, ResFest Korea 2006 (digital film festival), and Korean mobile phone service including DMB channel.

Category 3 (Wireless art proposal): US $10.000

- One winner will be awarded with $5000.
- Additional $5000 and technical support will be offered for the realization of the proposal if the work is decided to be realized for the exhibition at Art Center Nabi.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

.Category 1 & 2 seek for completed works, and Category 3 for project proposal.
.Projects that are under development will also be considered for Category 3.
.Project proposal should relate to the theme and topics of the Award
.The works that are already presented or won in other competitions are not eligible for entry.

_HOW TO SUBMIT

.All submissions should be processed through the official online platform.
.Biography, project proposal, and other supporting materials (image, sound, movie files) should be uploaded in appropriate format indicated in each section.
.However, the works applying for Category 1 & 2 should be sent via registered mail in the format of CD-Rom, DVD, Mini DV tape with a copy of filled-out online registration form printed from the website.

Please go to http://www.nabi.or.kr/pages/submission.asp to complete your submission. (all submissions)

Mail address (Category 1 & 2 only):
Art Center Nabi [Att: Mobile Asia Competition 2006]
99 Seorin-dong, Jongro-ku, SK bldg. 4th fl.
Seoul, Korea
110-110

_IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for Submissions
.Category 1 & 2: August 31, 2006
.Category 3: July 31, 2006

Notification of winners September 15, 2006

CONTACT: For more information, please visit www.mobileasia.org.
Or contact at mobileasia[at]mobileasia.org

Art Center Nabi
99 Seorin-dong, Jongro-ku, SK bldg. 4th fl.
Seoul, Korea
110-110
www.nabi.or.kr

"mobotag" by Marta Lwin

mobotag reveals the hidden layers of a city through an active exchange of location based media and text messages via the cellphone. It's collaborative phone tagging of the city. Part virtual graffiti, part walking tour, "mobotag" creates a spontaneous and easy way for tagging a neighborhood via the cellphone. Send and view messages, images, videos and sounds. See art, read stories, and watch a hidden layer of the city reveal itself. Respond with your media and participate in the creative expression and mapping of your neighborhood. By sending a text message to "mobotag", with your city location, you begin an interactive tour of a neighborhood. Using a unique geocoding feature, "mobotag" tells you what other messages exist in your local area. In the near future "mobotag" will also feature art projects including "flyHere," a mobile phone audio installation featuring native bird calls; "bugBytes," collectible graphical bugs originating at major telecoms around NYC; and "lookHere," a written work in short form by a native NY writer.

"mobotag" is a 2006 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Marta Lwin is an artist, technologist, and researcher who recently completed her masters at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Her background is both in art and activism. In the early to late 90's she worked with Greenpeace, UNEP, and Women's Environmental Network and Reclaim the Streets (UK). After joining a loose network of artists at Backspace in London, Lwin became interested in the creative use of technology as it relates to biology. Currently, her work focuses on the intersection of art and technology and includes projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of the relationship between nature and technology. Her work has been shown at galleries in Europe and New York. Publications covering her work including networked_performance, Engadget, Core77, Treehugger, Cool Hunting, MocoLoco, WorldChanging, Rhizome and We Make Money Not Art.

Accessing the "Technosphere"

Interface and Society: Deadline call for works: July 1 - see call; Public Private Interface workshop: June 10-13; Mobile troops workshop: September 13-16; Conference: November 10-11 2006; Exhibition opening and performance: November 10, 2006.

In our everyday life we constantly have to cope more or less successfully with interfaces. We use the mobile phone, the mp3 player, and our laptop, in order to gain access to the digital part of our life. In recent years this situation has lead to the creation of new interdisciplinary subjects like “Interaction Design” or “Physical Computing”.

We live between two worlds, our physical environment and the digital space. Technology and its digital space are our second nature and the interfaces are our points of access to this technosphere.

Since artists started working with technology they have been developing interfaces and modes of interaction. The interface itself became an artistic thematic.

The project INTERFACE and SOCIETY investigates how artists deal with the transformation of our everyday life through technical interfaces. With the rapid technological development a thoroughly critique of the interface towards society is necessary.

The role of the artist is thereby crucial. S/he has the freedom to deal with technologies and interfaces beyond functionality and usability. The project INTERFACE and SOCIETY is looking at this development with a special focus on the artistic contribution.

INTERFACE and SOCIETY is an umbrella for a range of activities throughout 2006 at Ateleir Nord in Oslo.

A story out of Hong Kong talks about a new technology that allows users to stream video direct from their camcorder - even as they move around. The m-View system has two parts - one that sits on top of the camcorder and a receiver that gets the wireless signal and feeds it to a web-connected laptop. The product is from Momentum Technologies, but it's unclear if it will be available in the U.S.

I’ve had several conversations recently about the value of using contests to build long-term loyalty to a website. The most successful websites never used contests to build loyalty, they focused on building a really useful service. (Consider Google versus iwon.com) Relying on contests to build loyalty implies that your website is lame and there is no other reason to visit it. Seek out an underserved niche or go out of your way to engage your community to build loyalty. If you have information to convince me otherwise, I’m all ears!

Even Amazon is getting into TV. Go to Amazon.com's home page today and you'll see an embedded video player with a sponsored TV-like show, complete with a studio audience. And the talent isn't shabby either: Bill Maher, Ludacris, Dixie Chicks and Dean Koontz. "Fishbowl" debuted last night, and Amazon.com will feature a new episode every week for 12 weeks. The idea is to use original content to attract new customers. (Thanks, Don!)

All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

In an increasingly digitally-networked society, could airport screening tasks be integrated into a game available to the public?

From the microkernel to the upper layers NetKernel uses a generalization of REST, the basis for the successful operation of the World Wide Web, and applies it to the finest granularity of resource oriented software composition.

1060 NetKernel is a resource oriented microkernel and RESTful application server created from the convergence and unification of the powerful fundamental concepts found in the World Wide Web and Unix.

NKSE includes extensive functionality including transports (HTTP, SOAP 1.1 / 1.2, REST Web-Services, JMS, Cron, etc.) services (XML and image pipeline processing, RDBMS access, SMTP/POP client, etc), tools (debugger, unit testing, etc.) and a rich set of supported programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, Groovy, Beanshell, XRL, DPML, etc.).

NetKernel has been used to build a wide range of applications, from innovative, RESTful games (such as the bundled Ping Pong application), web sites, corporate information integration systems, digital libraries, and high-performance AJAX based systems.

As Andre, Mike, and of course Mena have already said more eloquently than I can, Vox is out and it's fantastic.

Without sounding overly grandiose, Vox is the natural progression of the Internet as a social platform. The friends and family features are perfect - you only share what you want with who you want to. And just as Livejournal and Flickr augment your Internet life instead of trying to replace it, Vox plays nice with other open publishing platforms and blogging services.

I don't want to venture too into the world of the negative, but it's not secret that today the majority of web projects and applications are shamelessly mediocre. Too often social websites just become a series of chores and obstacles. List your friends, check for comments, don't miss that "important" piece of news - it's basically furniture dusting. Vox is the exact opposite - of course it rewards you for participation and sharing but it also doesn't punish you if you're simply too busy to spend time blogging - it's always fun.

I can't wait to see what it's like when more of my family and friends (and enemies!) are on Vox - my only frustration to date has been wanting to shout from the mountaintops about how great it is. Now that frustration is gone. Vox rocks!

Right on the heels of my Vox post, I came across these words from Rebecca Mead, in an interview given by friend of Hello, Typead Jason Kottke:

Anyone who read my story in the New Yorker will probably understand that I am more interested in bloggers as characters than I am in blogging as a -- yawn -- phenomenon.

Jason linked to the interview in response to her follow up to the You've Got Blog. What's striking to me is how prescient this seems in retrospect. Good blogging, like good films and novels, is character driven. When people treat it like a phenomenom or set of buzzwords, it bombs. When people treat it as a platform for learning about their friends and themselves, it's beautiful.

This leads me to the Sixth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival, which officially launched yesterday. The festival is a project of MediaRights, where I worked for three years, two of those years as Director of Technology. I produced three festival web sites (in 2004 SxSW gave us the best non-profit website award), so naturally I have a special place in my heart for this project. This year's festival may be the best one yet, and it's been awesome to see the momentum build from year to year, especially since I remember when the site was a fraction of the size and importance it is today. Some of the characters you'll find this year - a hip-hop group from Minnesota bringing a hidden camera into an interview with an army recruiter, a community in Michigan fighting the rising costs of water and, also in Michigan, Asparagus farmers talking about why eating (and growing) local food is so important.

MediaRights and Vox are both going to be huge hits because they are character driven ideas made into websites, and they both solve real problems in our world. Vox and MediaRights both help people communicate with the world about the things that they feel passionate about. MediaRights puts these passions on DVD, streams them to millions of web visitors and tours them to six continents, and Vox helps you communicate not just with the world but also with those closest to you.

I just stumbled across a new book co-authored by SeattleWireless pioneer Rob Flickenger called Wireless Networking in the Developing World.

It's a veritable cookbook for communities and activists in developing countries to roll their own telcos using Wi-Fi and other unlicensed wireless networking technologies, and best of all its available free as a Creative Commons-licensed PDF download.

(It's such a good technical manual -- I only wish there was at least one mention of what I see as a tremendous issue for WiFi in developing world: telecom policy reform. In many parts of Africa, 802.11* is still licensed spectrum [pdf]. -kc.)

Sports Illustrated: The Internet is changing sports coverage. Columnists who seldom leave their couches hold forth. Athletes break their own "news" on their personal websites. Rumormongering is rampant. Don't like it? Get rowdy. Start your own blog.

ZDNet’s David Berlind has started to compile a Del.icio.us list of examples of ‘DRM train wrecks’, i.e. situations where the use of DRM has a distasteful corollary for consumers unaware of what they’re getting themselves into.

“Most people don’t realize how much they’re giving up when they consciously or sub-consciously use solutions that depend on [DRM]. I get a lot of email that accuses me of being a Chicken Little that overblows the situation by saying the sky is falling. Well, the sky is falling and if those folks want to live in denial, that’s their problem.”

Some of the examples are more straightforward cases of sloppily designed DRM implementations leading to security problems, such as the Sony Rootkit case; examples of ‘DRM switcheroo’ (what I’ve previously called feature deletion or external control on this blog) also abound.

Real-life anecdotes of users who have lost all their (legally acquired) music due to DRM errors or licensing changes - as I discussed in ‘Consumers’ reactions to DRM‘ - are perhaps one of the best ways of driving the message home to consumers (for example the examples discussed here).

The ‘DRM train wreck’ tag is a great initiative. I guess in time it would be good if DRM’d content acquired a stigma from consumers’ point of view, clearly seen as undesirable and worse than second-best, a format to avoid.

mp3 archives of the Economics of Open Content Symposium.

On January 23-24, 2006, Intelligent Television hosts the Economics of Open Content symposium at MIT to bring together representatives from media industries, cultural and educational institutions, and legal and business minds to discuss how to make open content happen better and faster.

From Sun Tzu to Xbox is a definitive history of the longstanding relationship between games and military culture, from wargaming's roots in ancient civilizations, to the Cold War development of computing for battle, to a recent crop of Pentagon-funded shoot-'em-ups, big-budget commercial titles and homemade hacks.

When Google recently launched the Google Foundation (google.org), I couldn't help but wonder if there ought to be a role for Google in supporting computer user groups. Should Google be supporting computer user groups? The answer is not entirely clear.