June 11, 2006
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.)
Originally posted by bracken from Media SITREP, remediated by yatta on Jun 11, 2006 at 11:20 AM
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
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