unmediated

Microsoft has demo'd a PC constructed from a mobile phone, a TV and a keyboard, intended to provide cheap computers for developing nations. The prototype showed "word processing, multimedia playback and Web browsing using scaled-down versions of Internet Explorer, Word and Windows Media Player". This is still in the conception phase, MS is still looking at whether it's a viable option. The fact that it’s even possible shows how far phones have come, and it's only a matter of time before some people use them as a portable computer — connected to the keyboard and TV via bluetooth.

Father of the web Tim Berners-Lee is working on a new project called Tabulator: “the generic data browser which lets you do useful things with your RDF data the moment it’s on the web.” In his post this week Slicing and dicing web data with Tabulator he includes some screen shots including data browsing and an auto-generated Google Maps mashup. It can essentially get you code-free mashups.

It works by exploring the web of relationship between things, loading more data from the web as you go. Then, if you find a pattern of information you are interested in, it will search for all occurrences of that pattern and display them in tables, maps, calendars, and so on.

Think of all the different mash-ups people have made for putting things like friends houses, photos, or coffee shops on the web. Each a different mash-up for a different data source.

For data in RDF (or any XML with a GRDDL profile), though, then you don’t have to program anything. You can just explore it and map it. And you can map many different data sources at the same time.

With EdgeBomber, players can use tape, stickers and scissors to create their own playground on a wall. The system grabs the scenery and creates a virtual level for a jump'n'run video game. The playground is extended with items and enemies and is projected back to the original scenery. Add or remove stickers to decide the levels of the game. In the mixed media environment, the hero "Oskar" has to resist the attacks of Hubert and the Evil Sausage.

Edgebomber is in constant evolution, the developers keep adding new characters, new features, animations and gameplays (levels to solve etc.) It has already been exhibited in Germany (in Karlsruhe and Cologne) with success.

"On edgebomber we worked for the first engine release for approximately 14-20 days together with three coders. I was working on the illustration/visual stuff and another guy was helping us to animating the trees and the backgrounds," explains Richard Gutleber, one of the creators of the game.

"The idea was simple," adds Richard. "I grew up collecting stickers and screenprinting and while i was playing i felt that the haptic thing you got to do in real life was missing. I was totally addicted to glueing stickers (the nice smell of the vinyls) so we decided to put the things together, so the people have to move their brains and bodies and make there own levels and not only to play readymade (prefabricated) levels..."

Edgebomber was developed by Susigames.

DigiBytes. A competition for 'little movies' to help celebrate:
Metro Screen Is 25 | we're celebrating | you're invited September 15–22

DigiBytes is an opportunity to encourage and reward creative work specifically made for mobile phones and the web.

DigiBytes is calling for both narrative and non-narrative entries and does not stipulate a theme.

Selected entries will be exhibited during Metro Screen's 25th Birthday celebrations September 15–22, 2006 and on the Metro Screen website.

Think bold striking images, stills, voice overs, music, less is more, the simpler the better.

Maximum duration 2.5 minutes.

1st prize: $500 voucher for Metro Screen [equivalent to a weekend hire of a production kit or around two days in an offline suite].
2nd prize: $300 voucher for Metro Screen
3rd prize: $100 voucher for Metro Screen

As this competition forms part of Metro Screen's 25th Birthday celebrations entry fees are waived. Multiple entries are accepted.

Mobile content development is a growth area with endless possibilities for the arts and technology to work together. As the functionality of mobile phones grows so too does its broad range of creative applications.

Entry deadline Friday August 25, 5pm.

For an entry form and information on how to enter contact David Opitz on
02 9361 5318 or d.opitz@metroscreen.org.au or metroscreen.org.au

Originally from Rhizome.org Raw at July 26, 2006, 17:24, published by Greg Smith

Type announcement, opportunity
Genre work
Keywords video, exhibition

"The Digg API (at the time this article was written) has not yet been released. This API allows developers to tap into the core power of Digg.com and integrate their own services with it."

Hollywood Reporter writes:

What's next for FIM is leveraging MySpace's online community and communication into a peer recommendations framework for leads on everything and anything: the best children's playgrounds in Los Angeles to the best concert seats in Madison Square Garden to the best steakhouse in Dallas. Such peer recommendations provide a gentle seaway into targeted, fine-tuned behavioral marketing for national and local advertisers wanting to reach MySpace's 15- to 34-year-old core user.

lenge is to utilize that viral marketing and communications to develop a host of next-generation media services in-house so as to keep the lion's share of the revenue they will generate. Most significantly, FIM is developing refined advertising tracking, pricing and sales tools that will cater to every new-media platform and device, and quantify the collective reach of content and services reaching consumers anywhere, anytime.

Robin Good's Latest News labels the main feature of blogging as 'Helping Others See Beyond The Surface.' According to Robin this 'Makes Blogs True Digital Weapons Of Mind Change.'

Changing other people's minds, launching small and large Calls To Action, influencing and persuading others, providing insightful tools and pointers to facilitate self-discovery and personal understanding: these are the most powerful applications that individuals, small online publishers and passionate researchers can make of blogs today. Helping others see things from new and unconventional viewpoints.

Also read at Shore Content Nation, a commentary of John Blossom on 'A World of Personal Publishers Declares Their Influential Citizenship'

This RFID in Japan post says "Shelly is a card for protecting RFID cards from skimming attacks. You just cover your RFID train pass (e.g., SUICA) or payment card (e.g., Edy) with this Shelly card and it disables the RFID's wireless communication".

Hello Kitty Protects You from Skimming Attacks

Nokia has created a prototype of a cell phone that dissembles itself in two seconds. [From TreeHugger via SciFi Tech Blog]

"Today, most cell phones and other small electronics are shredded instead of taken apart for recycling, because the disassembly time is too expensive for the amount of material reclaimed. In contrast, a process called "active disassembly" is all about creating gadgets that can break into their component parts just by being exposed to heat or magnetism. It saves money, and the materials can be recovered more efficiently.

Here is Nokia's outline of the disassembly processes they are working on":

Nokia Research Center, together with a student group from Helsinki University of Technology, the Finnish School of Watchmaking and the University of Art and Design Helsinki have developed a process for heat disassembly of portable devices.

a is to disassemble a mobile phone by a heat-activated mechanism without any contact. By using a centralized heat source like laser heating, the shape memory alloy (SMA) actuator is activated, and the mobile phone covers are opened.

The battery, display, printed wiring board (PWB) and mechanical parts are separated and can then be recycled in their material specific recycling processes. The required temperature for the disassembly is 60-150 ºC. If it were lower the phone could dismantle by itself, for instance in a hot car, and if it were higher the plastics would melt.

Laser heating is a feasible method due to its speed and precision. However, it requires investment in a proper disassembly line.

(click for bigger, or see the original here)

The first thing that struck me was how well ToonTown is doing (it's not that far off Eve or SWG for user numbers)! Also, how badly Star Wars Galaxies is now doing, but that was less of a surprise.

Also, do you think there's room for more genres in the market.. or what?

(via sexingames)

pronounced 'tel-har-mon-i-um"

"Can't make it to Europe for the current tour by the Rolling Stones? No problem.

Dial a toll-free number and listen to them perform all down the line in real time for $1.99 per seven minutes.

The British rockers are the first to use a new technology called Listen Live Now, which is backed by Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency, tour promoter Live Nation, and veteran artist manager Marty Erlichman.

The technology will debut Friday when the band takes the stage at the Stade de France in Paris from noon to 2:15 p.m. Pacific time.

According to a statement, U.S. fans can buy in by calling (877) 784-2777 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time. At the six-minute mark, a voice will warn them that the time is almost up, which makes bootlegging the concerts a challenge. Additionally, the shows will not be taped, Erlichman told Reuters.

RST is intended to describe texts, rather than the processes of creating or reading and understanding them. It posits various sorts of "building blocks" which can be observed to occur in texts.

Annalee Newitz has a fun suggestion:

I mean, it's no accident that a horror movie like "The Ring" came out during the heyday of file sharing. Let's think about it -- the flick is about a haunted videocassette that will kill you unless you make a duplicate copy and show it to somebody else. It's like a nightmare analog version of BitTorrent. If you do not share your media, you will die. Creative Commons really should do a cartoon parody of "The Ring."

I've never heard of this movie though Wikipedia confirms the plotline. Clearly a multiple-plotline parody is in order:

• Character one must copy DRM media or die. Circumvents DRM, goes to jail, attacked by gang, dies.
• Character two must copy DRM media or die. Atttempts to circumvent DRM, fails, dies.
• Character three must copy DRM media or die. Realizes circumventing DRM is criminal, has moral crisis but in the end does the right thing, dies.
• Character four must copy CC licensed media or die. Makes copy, shares with friends and strangers, remixes, is remixed, lives long and prospers.

The Times of India
NEW DELHI: The HRD ministry has rejected the idea of 'one-laptop-per-child' (OLPC) being aggressively marketed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Laboratory. "India must not allow itself to be used for experimentation with children in this area," the ministry has said.

The ministry's detailed objection based on technical, social and financial grounds was sent to the Planning Commission two weeks ago.

Negroponte had made a presentation on OLPC at Yojna Bhavan on April 7 seeking to sell one million laptops at the rate of $100 per unit for children, the cost to be borne by the government.

What is Mobile Web 2.0?

Thus, the characteristics(distinguishing principles) of mobile Web 2.0 are:

a) Harnessing collective intelligence through restricted devices i.e. a two way flow where people carrying devices become reporters rather than mere consumers
b) Driven by the web backbone – but not necessarily based on the web protocols end to end
c) Use of the PC as a local cache/configuration mechanism where the service will be selected and configured

Another way to look at this idea is to consider what is NOT mobile Web 2.0. ‘Broadcast’ content generated by the media industry which users are passively expected to consume: is not mobile Web 2.0. That includes most ringtones, most games, movie clips etc. Anything which does not have a user generated component.

This definition seems mostly applicable for western countries, I see however a different approach in most asian or african countries.

PS: Ajit, if you read this. Thank you for the two books. I am still reading. I very much like Tomi's book.

In a historic moment, the US had agreed to hand over control of Net by releasing its stranglehold of the technical co-ordination and management of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS).

The announcement came last night at a meeting of Internet governance experts in Washington, and sees the US government return to its original stance over the Net, undoing some of the confusion caused by the announcement of a series of “principles” released by the Bush administration last year.

However there remains some debate over how and when the US government should relinquish control of the private, non-profit overseeing organization ICANN that is in effective charge of the DNS. Those in favor of completing a transition which began in 1998, said the political price of having the US involved in DNS management has become too high and holds back the international development of the Internet.

ICANN recently was a hotbed of controversy over the proposed .xxx domain with the US putting significant pressure on ICANN to deny that extension. The US commerce department, who has final approval on everything ICANN does, threatened to reject the .xxx domain if ICANN didn’t, allowing the US to flex it muscle when approving all TLD extensions.

With the privatization of ICANN, the US no longer will have veto power over any actions that ICANN takes which will be a major step to help foster the growth of the internet in a healthy manner.

Read More

a pretty slick new servide allowing u to imbed text and hyperlinks in a vlog post... interface a bit geeky, but nice features...works efficiently.

web 2 p2p service allwoing you to keep your files on your desktop...no uploading, no ftp, etc...

Pheeder



"Pheeder is a whole new way of using your cellphone: it lets you communicate with all of your friends simultaneously, with a single phone call. To use it, you just call Pheeder, leave a message and hang up. Seconds later all of your friends, or anyone you want, receives the message at the very same instant. And if they want, they can send a reply to your message."

Yesterday, the US House of Representatives unexpectedly moved forward in voting on the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA. This legislation, proposed on May 9 of this year, would require all schools and libraries receiving federal Internet subsidies known as the E-Rate to filter out all interactive websites under the mere possibility that they may lead to contact with online predators.

The vote wasn't even close.

Canon has released their first line up of HDV camcorders, the XH G1 and XH A1 and many feel that Canon took its own sweet time on this. Well as they say, better late than never! The imaging system of the these new camcorders is similar to the Canon' XL H1 and has the same three 1/3-inch 16:9 CCDs. The new camcorders have the ability to record 1080i video in both 60 interlaced and 24 frame rate modes. However unlike the XL-H1, the new camcorders are cheaper and sleeker.

The new HDV camcorders are almost identical and the only thing that sets the camcorders apart is the I/O ports and $3000 price difference! These entry level prosumer camcorders will appeal to the independent film makers who couldn’t afford the exorbitant XL H1 and Canon hopes to capture this growing demographic. The new XH G1 and XH A1 do not support interchangeable lenses and the three 1/3-inch CCD sensors offer native 16:9 with a resolution of 1440 x 1080. The camcorders feature 24 fields per second shooting mode and the frame rates are available in either 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 pull-down apart from the standard scan rates of 30f and 60i.

(Continued at MobileWhack)

"It's quite difficult for me to describe the perimeter of the blog. I talk about interaction design for example, but not everything I see there really excites me. I like edgy, brain-challenging, experiemental projects and yawn when i'm in front of sleek and perfect designs of new mobile phone interfaces. Same goes for art, I've seen so many "wave your hand and see how the projected images are modified" projects. What i'm looking for are projects that and as time passes, i'm becoming more and more choosy"

Harmonic Inc. extended its family of market-leading digital video compression solutions with the new DiviCom® Electra™ 7000 high definition (HD) MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encoder. The world's first multi-channel, multi-service HD H.264 encoder, the Electra 7000 supports up to four full resolution HD channels and can simultaneously create low resolution services for picture-in-picture (PiP) or multi-channel mosaic applications. An ideal solution for satellite, telco/IPTV and cable operators, the Electra 7000 sets a radically improved benchmark for HD H.264 compression performance and video quality. Customers have confirmed bit-rates 20 to 30 percent lower than any currently deployed HD H.264 encoder, and the system has already been selected by five satellite and telco operators in North America and Europe to power their forthcoming HD services.

---

[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

Client bashing is popular among designers, programmers, and consultants, but I’m curious: When was the last time you were a client? How did you feel about trusting the end product to someone else? Maybe you hired a contractor to build something in your house, or a landscaper to fix up your yard, or an interior decorator, or a caterer for an event, or… How would you rate yourself as a client? What was the most difficult thing for you? Be honest!

Via randomwalks/dj

Some interesting thoughts from Tim O’Reilly and Jon Udell on the idea of Open Infrastructure. Tim recently had a conversation with Debra Chrapaty, VP of Operations for Microsoft’s Windows Live, where she noted that “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.”

Jon has followed-up:

The desktop isn’t the battleground it once was. I float like a butterfly from Windows to OS X to Linux. My home is in the cloud, and that’s the next frontier for the champions of free and open commodity infrastructure…We’ve already seen how open source software projects harness collective effort to produce quality results. We’re now seeing how open content projects such as Wikipedia do the same. Can open infrastructure be far behind?

Jon cites the Coral open content distribution network (CDN) as an interesting early case. Certainly a significant topic in the world of APIs and mashups: how can independent developers not become captive within an ecosystem dominated by the major players like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and Microsoft.

Friendster may finally have found an advantage in the increasingly competitive social media sector — the one dominated by other companies as pioneer Friendster flailed. Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Friendster a patent on “a method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon relationships in a social network” and the company says it’s been told to expect a patent covering the uploading of content onto a friend’s page. Those two and a number of others pending could make Friendster worth more as a patent farm than a social network.
Friendster president Kent Lindstrom told the WSJ the company’s lawyers are encouraging him to consider “taking people out from a litigation standpoint.” He’s also considering asking patent-licensing fees — or could skip legal action altogether. (Can we start a pool on that last one?) While Lindstorm says he’s been assured the patent is strong, others are not so sure. EFF lawyer Jason Schultz is among the skeptics; then again, EFF is waging war against what it is sees as illegitimate patents.
– The best part of the piece is not about patents, though; it’s when Lindstrom calls the effort to sell Friendster last year “poorly timed.” That’s one way to describe it.
Related: Friendster’s Money Raise: $3.1 Million
– Friendster Was Its Own Worst Enemy; MySpace Faces External Threats
– Friendster Sales Saga Continues; Viacom Takes A Pass

Re-blogged from Redcouch.Typepad.com:

Shel Israel outlines Global Neighbourhoods, asks for comments:

To paraphrase Weinberger, I have several small pieces loosely joined.  Some of this has been written previously. Right now the assembly is whats important:

1. In some ways, Global Neighborhoods will be a sequel to Naked Conversations. I have great pride in the last book, but was never completely happy with the last section in which we attempted to paint a big picture that went beyond blogging into something called a Conversational Era. While accurate, the term has not caught on, nor do I think it is suited to describe the enormous fundamental change being created by a connected world. Global will attempt to paint a bigger picture of what the world, and large organizations will look like a few years down the line from today.  Naked Conversations examines the cause of the change.  This time I am more concerned with the effects of the change.

2.  Ultimately, what I see is a world forming in which powerful companies and even governments will have little choice but to yield the power they have to communities.  Communities will be the fundamental shapers of new products and services, of the meaning of brands and a good deal more.  The individuals who are most generous to these communities, who help the members most with matters of community interest, will be the most influential and powerful members of these communities. Some of these new influencers will be employed by large companies. But these spokespeople will not be one way conduits of sales and marketing from corp to customer, but will bring back to companies very accurate assessments of what the community wants most and is willing to pay most to obtain.

3.  Geography becomes irrelevant as people use the internet to interact with people who share common interests.  If two governments cannot get along, people start finding each other and ways to interact through social media.  The most passionate members of these communities become the leaders.  This works both globally and in the macrocosm.  If a neighborhood wants speed bumps on its street and the elected city officials ignore this demand, the neighborhood can use its blog to ally with an opposing candidate. It can start conducting marketplace voting block barters with other neighborhoods who may want a Stop Sign. 

4. Not only does the connected world make geography irrelevant, it also allows us to dwell in neighborhoods that are built on shared interests. People generally feel safest in neighborhoods where they share commonality with others. Even a gang member feels more safe in his own crime and poverty infested neighborhood because he knows the rules there.  He knows not only how to survive there, but others people like himself will support him in a great many ways. Because of the irrelevance of geography, we can each choose to join a multitude of neighborhoods on local, national and global levels. For example bloggers, hummingbird fanciers, pornography, religious organizations, political groups etc.  We may share greater passion in one over another and may be more active in one over the other.

5. The technology that has enabled all this connection and community empowerment s pretty much in place.  The costs are going down and the current number of quality teams with innovative ideas is rising. The entry barriers are as low as at any point in history. Tech, historically has clustered in a very few number of geographic locations such as Silicon Valley.  But with these diminished barriers, companies are forming all over the place, new entrepreneurial tech clusters are forming in new places such as Toronto, Cork and others TBD by the world tour are forming and growing in strength. If Silicon Valley remains the center of the universe, then the universe is rapidly expanding and the opportunities for small talented teams to get started is unprecedented. (This are will be the central focus of the world tour for me and is likely to be the longest portion of the book)

6. While the barriers to entry are low, the barriers to exit are higher than people realize. There are currently over 1600 so-called Web 2.0 companies. Most of them seem to have ideas that strengthen communities. Nearly all offer services online for free. A majority expect to make revenue and someday profits through contextual advertising.  There are questions as to how effective online advertising is even when they have extremely low CPM. Extremely few companies expect to remain standalones or endure to the point of an IPO. Instead they all aspire to be acquired, and in a great many cases by just three companies Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. This makes a buyer’s market and this leads to a good number of speculations that the current boom is in fact another bubble–one less spectacular than the last time around in terms of dollars, but one which will result in the entrepreneurial graveyards will be filled with good ideas that could benefit communities but can not adequately be monetized. (This section will look at the business models of several companies both pro and con). Of greater interest is what happens to large traditional companies like Microsoft, who see the end to their traditional business models and need to undergo a huge period of change to survive.  Will they be able to make the change or or will they succumb to Google’s more modern model and ability to execute faster.  In turn, with dozens of new Web 2.0 search companies rapidly emerging, will Google themselves be nipped to death by tiny new niche search companies forming all over the globe with amazing speed?

7.  Down the line, perhaps five and ten years from now, what will the world look like for end users who are organized along community lines?  What about the company of the future?  Will most products and services be delivered on line and if so how much of it will be free?  How will the evolution of communities impact diverse human rights and access to information across the borders of nations with diverse laws. How will this massive decentralization of tech startups impact the world’s economic imbalances?

Anyway, this is a first draft.  Robert and I had about 15 drafts of what would become the Publisher’s proposal.  The chapters themselves will come alive with the use of case studies, lots of case studies, as we used in Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

This is the overview component to a critical document called the Publisher’s Proposal. There are many more pieces to it, including a TOC, a marketing section where we define the target audience, a Table of Contents, a sample chapter, and oh yes, the request  for an advance in lieu of royalties, which is my favorite part.

Please tell me what you think of this so far.  Is it a book that interests you? How can I make it stronger, tighter, more useful? Give me all the tough advice you can.  My skin is pretty thick and I want to write a very interesting useful book.

Exciting news coming out of Latin America & the Caribbean — I expect to see great things coming out of WILAC:

Deployment and Strengthening of Community based Wireless Networks in Latin America and the Caribbean

The WiLAC portal, the Latin American Networks School Foundation (EsLaRed), the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) and the Institute for the Connectivity of the Americas (ICA) announce a call for proposals to participate in the deployment and strengthening of community based wireless networks in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This project will facilitate the deployment of 15 wireless networks in rural and urban-marginal regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. The selection and administration of these pilot wireless networks will take place through an open and competitive process, where the wireless connectivity equipment will be given to local institutions that meet the established requirements. The new networks should offer information and communication services that reflect local interests at the community level. The administrators of these networks, as well as other wireless community based network entrepreneurs, will be part of a learning network o­n wireless technologies and its applications. By taking advantage of scheduled events in the region and the exchange and systematization of lessons learned, the learning network will consolidate a community of wireless network entrepreneurs in our region.

Selected candidates will receive an equipment package that allows establishing the connection between a central station and 4 remote points located at a maximum of 5 km (with line of sight). This number can be exceeded in special cases.

(Continued at Muniwireless)

Call for Submissions

Transubstantiate: a peer-reviewed, online journal for performance technologies praxis :: Call for submissions :: Deadline: November 1, 2006 :: Transubstantiate welcomes submissions for its inaugural issue on the theme of Disruptive Innovation. We seek examples of new thinking and practice that overturn and / or reassess existing performance technology praxis. Submissions may be presented as papers, reviews, audio, visuals (stills / video) and code. Authors may use multiple formats in a single submission.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Networked performance * Disruptive innovations & discourse * Pedagogy, ontologies and epistemologies * Choreography for iPod. Choreographies for iPod must be specifically devised works and may take the form of: * Video / stills * Audio description / instructions * Text description / instructions * Soundscore with text description / instructions.

Transubstantiate encourages submissions that take an alternative stance on established modes of mediated performance. Submissions should be equivalent to 3000 - 8000 words in .doc, mp3, .jpg or .mp4 (video) format.

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2006. For more information or to submit please contact the editorial & curatorial board via curators [at] transubstantiate [dot] org.

The liminal is limited; transubstantiate.

Deep underneath the blogosphere lies a network that's just as big and powerful. It has a lots of participants, yet it's completely invisible to those who do not blog. It's the Underground Blogosphere.

The Underground Blogosphere is an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of emails that bloggers send to each other every day. In essence, they are "pitching" their latest posts in hopes of getting a link. Sometimes, bloggers are genuinely looking for good feedback, but more often than not all they are just looking for traffic.

There's a lot of irony in the Underground Blogosphere! For starters, I get more email pitches from bloggers whom I have never met than I do from PR professionals. Many of these same bloggers probably hate PR pitches, yet they're happy to dish it out themselves. What's even more interesting is that the Underground Blogosphere carries lots of emails from reporters. They too send links to their stories/blog posts. Now that's role reversal only a psychologist could love!

Some high profile bloggers (who I won't name) absolutely love the Underground Blogosphere. They find lots of links that are relevant to them. Others, are not fond of it at all. I sit in the middle. I find some gems in there that I might not normally see. However, I still prefer and thank those who continue to feed me links through del.icio.us. I never miss those. (To be completely honest, when I started this blog I was one of the most prolific members of the Underground Blogosphere. I sent my links to everyone. However, over a year ago I kicked this habit. Today I use it sparingly.)

I'm not sure what to do with the Underground Blogosphere. However, as bloggers, I do think it's important we start a conversation about it. Sometimes I wish I could expose my Underground Blogosphere to the world by publishing these emails to a digg-like site where you can tell me what's interesting. This might lead to all kinds of new things to blog about. Other days I want to set up a great filter that moves them all to a spam folder.

I am eager to hear how you feel about the Underground Blogosphere. Maybe there's a way we can pool all of our emails together into a new site that creates value.

Technorati Tags: Email, Underground Blogosphere

Kevin Nalty of Cubebreak and Will Video For Food is an evangelist for Revver and their advertising model of video distribution. Both Revver and Kevin believe that video hosting sites should share advertising dollars with content makers by placing ads in videos that, when clicked on by viewers, turns into a small profit for both the hosting site and the videomaker.

Naturally, Kevin is interested in the money making prospects of viral video under this model and his blog/vlog Will Video For Food is rife with tips and tricks for producing potentially viral products.

This morning, he sent me this great video he made in which he plays the role of "Viral Video Broker" and shouts out  to multiple content makers who’s videos have hit the big time….without financial compensation. He’d like to see video makers from sites like YouTube migrate to sites like Revver to rectify what he sees as a financial injustice.

(It wouldn’t hurt  Revver affiliates either. Revver has an affiliate program which gives a 20% commission on all clicks for Revver videos shown on their sites. Cubebreak, I’m sure, is an affiliate.)

As an aside, advertisers are getting free ads, in my opinion, by using click-per-ad tactics. Their commercials are still being viewed (and, as any advertiser knows, internalized by the viewer) without the costs associated with every other advertising scheme. Magazine ads, televsion spots and even the guy on the corner holding up a pizza sign get money for providing visibility, not bringing customers in the door.

I wonder how long this model will continue before internet content providers get wise?

- Anne

As fast as an ethernet connection. (via Robot Wisdom)

What's even more interesting is what happens when those signals get to the striate cortex - all kinds of space-time FFT goodness! --MM

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 27, 2006 at 11:08 AM

Via a seekrit submittor, news that Microsoft Flight Sim and Navteq are teaming up for the next in the series of Flight Simulator. This is beyond awesome:

Microsoft is using data from NAVTEQ to create much of the world in "Flight Simulator X". NAVTEQ data such as road network information, ferry landings, railroads, detailed water information (e.g. oceans, rivers, lakes, harbors, etc.), parks, golf courses, and recreational areas, enhances the "Flight Simulator X" user experience.

...

Appropriate for a Superman game, perhaps? --MM

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 27, 2006 at 11:15 AM

The fourth season of the animated series Odd Job Jack (featuring stars like Jason Alexander, John Goodman, Christian Slater, Molly Parker, and Jerry Stiller) began airing recently on Canada's Comedy Network. The show is a riot - each episode follows a temp worker through a different employment misadventure (i.e. mortuary worker, security guard, "rodent wrangler"). This week, we heard the supremely cool news that the show's creators are launching Free Jack, in which the master Flash files and bitmaps of every piece of art used in this season of the show are being released sunder the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Share, use, and remix the files to your heart's content!

animation and we just know you do too. We're proud of Odd Job Jack and we've put lots of work into our show. Our art deserves to live beyond broadcast and who better to give a free gift to than the entire planet?

Hi everyone! I¹m Laura Ling of Current's Vanguard Journalism team and I will be blogging regularly to keep you informed about how you can participate in the Current Journalism (CJ) program along with other members of the Vanguard team. The hope is that, with your help, we¹ll be able to build a network of people who are reporting on situations and issues that are affecting our world.

Over the past couple of weeks, we¹ve received pod submissions covering what¹s going on in the Middle East. Just take a look at some of the pods we¹ve recently aired: Hezbollah Youth Leaders, Coming Home to Tel Aviv, Dodging Katyushas, Beirut 101. The range of access to different areas, unique perspectives and storytelling styles has been incredible.

Please keep your submissions coming. This is a situation with global implications that isn¹t going away anytime soon. Also, Current Correspondent Mariana van Zeller is on her way to Damascus, Syria, so keep an eye out for her reports in the coming weeks.

Current Journalism is an experiment and we need your help to make it a success. Let us know what issues are important to you or what stories aren¹t being covered by the mainstream news media on our message board. Better yet, make a pod yourself and become a part of the CJ community.

"Prodigio peruano en Nueva York". I met Gerardo a few weeks ago. He’s videoblogging for El Diario, a Spanish newspaper in New York. His videoblogs are fantastic, a great insight in daily life of Spanish New York.

He’s a pioneer. He must be one of the first paid videobloggers in the world.

Watch movie (Quicktime, 1.7 min, 13.7 MB)

Original post, from gerardo romo z.:

(Via Mefeedia)

Since Ryanne and I now live in San Francisco, we thought we'd make a community videoblog.
Introducing Ryanishungry.com.

(Yeah, the name is weird and that's how we like it. The fun is you making sense of it.)

We take our inspiration from Minnesota Stories by Chuck Olsen and his friends.
The idea is, of course, very simple. Post video about your city on a specific blog. Interview cool people. Attend events. Make announcements. In this way, your community videoblog could become a real source of info for people who live near you.

For our community videoblog, we plan to cover what is appropriate to San Francisco and our interests:
interview with tech geeks and green geeks, cool happenings, and more.
People can even "suggest a story".

You want to be locally famous? Post videos about other people. You know how excited people get when they are on the local news? (which usually only includes them when something bad happens)
You can do the same on a videoblog. Start documenting the people who are doing cool things. It makes people feel appreciated and important. You also begin to create an archive, a memory, of where you live which will be gold to the future.

So keep your own personal videoblog, but make one for your city. What balls you'll have. Maybe you'll even collaborate with others. Maybe you'll even get ocal advertising? But, in the end, don't stress about schedules and deadlines. Just record and post videos as they happen. Unlike ephemeral TV shows, these videoblogs are here to stay.

Another communication patent find from wonderful Barry Fox for NewScientist.

"The layer of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere, at an altitude of 50 kilometres, is already used as a radio reflector, bouncing low frequency radio signals from one side of the world to the other.

Researchers at Samsung in Korea are now working on a way to turn the ionosphere into an antenna and have filed a patent.

Samsung sees the system as a cheap way to broadcast signals, or communicate over long distances, without needing to launch expensive satellites."

Bangladesh's top mobile phone operator GrameenPhone, and USA-based CellBazaar have introduced a service connecting buyers and sellers in an electronic marketplace over the mobile phone.

"It's like a more direct, more primitive e-Bay, a phone-based equivalent of newspaper classified advertisements. The concept was developed at the MIT Media Lab.

The service will enable sellers to list details of their products, produce or even services in a database while buyers can look for any of this information through SMS. It will not handle transactions, but will simply put buyers and sellers in contact with each other via mobile phone.

... For countries like bangladesh, where the transport infrastructure is often poor, electronic commerce could prove to have even greater appeal, than in developed ones. "

[via Rajputro, Reuters and digg]

Technosocial Screens

I'll be giving a keynote address at next month's BNMI Interactive Screen - Margins: Media: Migrations workshop & summit.

Technosocial Screens: Mobilities, Communities, Citizenships: screen, v. to show, or hide from view; to sift or separate; to shelter or protect

New interactive technologies promise to reconfigure relations between producers and consumers, public and private, physical and digital, local and global - and in these shifting scenarios the screen takes on a multitude of roles. Not only are screens changing size and resolution, some are becoming softer and more flexible, and others are disappearing entirely. Some screens offer a bird's-eye view of the world that we can hold in our hands, and others tell us where we are - or could be - at any given moment. Whatever the type of screen, we can be sure of one thing: people, places, objects and ideas are being screened at the same time.

Together we will explore some of the critical ways in which new media technologies shape, and are shaped by, our changing experiences and understandings of community and citizenship. What kind of shelter and hope can we expect from a world of everywhere and anywhere media? From what, and whom, are we protecting ourselves? How are these technological practices sorting our everyday social, cultural and creative relationships? What, and whom, gets hidden - or cannot hide? How can new media technologies explore different ways of belonging and being together? How can they encourage diverse and lively participation and representation around shared matters of concern?" [...] [blogged by Anne on Purse Lips Square Jaw]

Mary Hodder and CC Chapman invited me to try out Dabble.

So I did.

Here's my first playlist:
My Playlist 'Vlog Soup 16' | Dabble.

This is pretty sweet. It brings up a framed page that lets you watch each of videos I highlighted in yesterday's Vlog Soup.

Really sweet!

CNN.com - Send an I-Report:

"Is news happening in front of your eyes? Pull out your camera and I-Report it for CNN. Use the form on this page to send files from your computer."

via [ LP ]

Lee Gomes at WSJ and Chris Anderson have gotten into an interesting debate about the validity of Chris’ thesis that the “long tail” represents a significant economic paradigm shift. Unless I’m missing something, there is one element missing from the debate that anyone conversant with Umair Haque should recognize.

The debate between Lee and Chris focuses on whether sales in the long tail for any category can and will make up a significant percentage of total sales.

The long tail theory is often misconstrued to mean the end of the hit/blockbuster. But in fact the hit/blockbuster is still a significant aspect of long tail economics.

What changes — and this is the missing piece — is that in a long tail market hits can more easily emerge from the long tail through the power of network effects, or what Umair calls the “Snowball Effect.”

When you combine deep online catalogues with sharing/online social tools/viral marketing/etc., it becomes easier for any given item to become a sales “hit.”

Just look at Chris’ book, The Long Tail. It’s currently #16 at Amazon (up from #17 earlier today before the debate hit Techmeme). It may well have been a best seller without the network effect, but Chris’ long tail blog and the conversation he has fostered during the period when he was writing the book and all of the conversation that has ensued post publication virtually ensured it would be a sales hit.

Fifteen years ago, it would have taken a large marketing budget to achieve the same effect.

Now Chris was able to create a best seller for the cost of a Typepad account.

So for me, the radical long tail notion is that it’s no longer necessary to “buy” a hit — you can leverage the socialization of the web — combined with the web’s unlimited shelf space — to generate a hit from the bottom up, virtually for free.

If the Internet levels the playing field for hit making, and dramatically increases the economic efficiency of hit making, that would indeed be a HUGE sea change.

Arnseth A.C., Ludvigsen S., Mørch A., Wasson B. (2004). Managing Intersubjectivity in Distributed Collaboration. PsychNology Journal, 2(2), 189 – 204.

The paper describes a very interesting criticism of a specific approach to the study of technologically mediated social interaction. The critique is about the notion of “share knowledge” (mostly Clark’s (1996) notion of grounding):

According to Clark (1996) grounding is the process through which shared knowledge is established in interaction. This process is dependent on the participant’s prior beliefs, their previous
knowledge, and the material artifacts that are available in any communicative encounter. The main assumption in the studies by Baker et al. (1999) and Dillenbourg & Traum (1999), is that different technological tools provide different constraints and affordances for the grounding process.
(…)
According to such a view, communication is conceived as a process of coordinating knowledge that the participants already possess. However, the efforts involved in arriving at a shared interpretation might require a reorganization of the knowledge that an individual brings to the situation. Nevertheless, social interaction is mainly the site where participants’ mental states are articulated and coordinated. However, the main problem with such an analytical practice from a situated perspective, is that it implies a disregard for the participants’ interpretative work (Ludvigsen & Mørch, 2003). Moreover, the management of intersubjectivity is treated as independent of the situation in which it occurs, the activity in which participants are engaged and the goals that they are trying to achieve.

In another paper “Making Sense of Shared Knowledge“, Hans Christian Arnseth and Ivar Solheim also give other critiques:

Our main criticism of Clark and Brennan’s model is that it retains a communication-as-transfer-between-minds view of language. Secondly that it treats intentions and goals as pre-existing psychological entities that are later somehow formulated in language.

Why do I blog this? using Clark’s theory as a framework for my research, I am curious of the critiscm towards it. However, I rather used his theory of coordination (coordination devices/keys) than the whole shared knowledge issue.

AsiaMedia reports "Japan's No. 2 telecom operator KDDI Corp said yesterday that it had developed a server which keeps an electronic record of the smallest events in a person's life and lets others sift through them.The Lifelog Pod jots down every activity made through a cellphone or computer, including taking photographs, searching for a restaurant, listening to music and managing money.While some may loathe the thought of an omniscient network, the company said it could provide a way to make friends."Users can learn who else their friends chat with or delve through their companions" data -- minus areas protected by passwords -- to gauge their interests," a KDDI spokesman said."Your information is connected to that of your friend, and that of his friend, and so on."In this country of cellphone aficionados, cellphone users can also put their blogs on the common server. Only people who have a common connection -- such as a mutual friend -- will be able to access each other's data."This isn't a violation of privacy rights," the KDDI official said. "It is simply that everyone is connected."

Japan:A mobile network that keeps track of everything you do

"Every time myspace is mentioned on slashdot, we same exactly the same thing. ... You know what? Pretty much all true. I can't argue with it. And for exactly these reasons, I used to preach anti-myspace rants in exactly the same vein as this comment. ... But that's not quite the whole story. Things are a bit different for music accounts."

If you believe the manufacturers, RFID is the technology that will make identity theft a thing of the past. Two hackers at the HOPE conference in New York this week have demonstrated that this may not be the case, by successfully cloning a VeriChip tag implanted in human flesh, live on stage in front of an audience. Back to the drawing board, perhaps?

a concise description of his earlier experiments, now with an official site  

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online.

Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous people, gangsters, soldiers.

Neat experiments on clickstreams. --MM

Originally from Waxy.org Links, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:39 AM

No matter how hard we try to shove the square peg into the round hole, audio and video files, by themselves, are not two-way mediums. In fact, the best we can do, is surround them with other audio or video files, text, SMS, toll-free numbers and other forms of media to attempt to make it a communication medium

It’s one way. Period. And it’s not time-shifted, either. PODCASTING is not time-shifted, like a DVD is not time-shifted. Things that can be time-shifted (like Live TV on the Tivo) are able to because there is an element of real time, passing right now. Podcasting is on-demand, because the audio or video file is always there. We can tell people to talk back, and if they do, it’s later.

I spent nearly 10 hours running a live concert and broadcasting and interacting with the listeners in real time. I say something, they say something back, I respond. The content of my live broadcast was affected by the interaction of the audience at that specific moment in time. Our podcast on the other hand, can’t do that, other than the interaction with the co-hosts.

Another discovery… the vibe is totally different when I’m live. Some folks have a tougher time at live than others– for me, it’s infinitely more natural than to pre-record.

So, portable wifi-enabled audio and video players and phones. Appointment based consumption and participation. Podcasting, the on-demand medium. If you add those together, you make better content and get better content. And it might be possible that MORE people would participate in the conversation.

Cuz now? It’s one-way dialogue. That bugs.

US-based IC design house Alereon, which specializes in Wireless USB and WiMedia Ultra Wideband (UWB) chipsets for portable devices, on July 25 introduced a Wireless USB device tool suite designed to help speed the creation of applications and products using Wireless USB chipset technology from the company. The key component of the developers kit is a CompactFlash (CF) evaluation board based on Certified Wireless USB.

SCANDAL! I have a hard time believing Digg manipulates the homepage because that would imply Digg's staff actually endorses all the stuff that makes it up. And some pretty stupid stuff makes it up.

If there is one push-and-pull balancing act that defines news in the age of Web 2.0, it’s the question of how much power to give the audience, the masses, the collective mind, and how much control remains centralized. That balancing act has played a crucial role in the development of community-generated sites such as Wikipedia, Slashdot and even Google, where search results and PageRank depend on people linking to the most authoritative sources on a subject.

This is the so-called Wisdom of Crowds as described by James Surowiecki in his book by that name, but how do you motivate people to join these crowds online and spend countless hours working on the sites without pay? That question has come into sharp focus, after entrepreneur-provocateur Jason Calacanis made his indecent proposal to users of rival crowdsourced news sites such as Digg and Reddit: “We will pay you $1,000 a month for your social bookmarking” work, he wrote on his blog.

Calacanis (pictured here), who started the Silicon Alley Reporter magazine and blog publisher Weblogs Inc. (later sold to AOL), was very publicly offering to pay volunteer bookmarkers on these sites to leave the sites and come to work for him — for pay — at Netscape. Calacanis is now general manager of Netscape.com, the old home page for the old browser that’s trying on a new life as a group-edited news site a la Digg, but with an editorial layer. The idea behind these sites is that the users pick out news stories or blog posts from around the Net and submit them. People then vote on them — or “Digg” them — pushing the hottest ones onto the home page for the most exposure. If a particular news story gets enough Diggs, and gets promoted, it’s likely to get an avalanche of web traffic.

Digg is already in Version 3, is ranked at #100 in web traffic by Alexa, and is trying to move beyond its roots as a technology news site. Digg CEO and co-founder Jay Adelson (pictured below) was unmoved by the Calacanis offer to steal away Top Diggers by paying them. Adelson told me the offer would not affect Digg — though it might help spark the new Netscape.

“It’s not something where there’s a short list of characters, like a team, that if you buy them, you’ll win the World Series,” Adelson said. “It doesn’t quite work that way, but it could help with the submission quality at Netscape. It doesn’t affect us in any way.”

When I brought up the possibility of Digg compensating its top users monetarily, Adelson drew a sharp line in the sand.

“Oh no, that would be a complete destruction of what we consider to be the principles of Digg,” he said. “There will be recognition for the people who do a lot of work on the site, not just for being ranked a Top Digger. In the future, you’ll see other forms of recognition that are purely, you know, things that exist within the community. Certainly no monetary compensation or things like that, because what we don’t want to do is create this artificial hierarchy.

“I’ve thought about what to do with the real power Diggers, the ones who spend their whole day on Digg and really work hard, is there a way that I could show my appreciation. The way I would show my appreciation would be to never give them more power, more features than another user has. It might be something like a T-shirt, it might be a rating that they can show other users, but it has to be a level playing field.”

Hmmmm, $1,000 of cold, hard cash from Netscape per month… or a Digg T-shirt? Doesn’t sound like a level playing field to me. But Digg power users were split over the monetary offer. While many loyal Digg users were put off by the offer, some of them were still considering the money.

Derek van Vliet, a Toronto-based programmer who goes by the moniker BloodJunkie on Digg (and was ranked #2 among users recently), told me how he has wavered over the offer — ultimately deciding to take up Calacanis on it. Here’s part of van Vliet’s email to me, describing his thought process:

I love Digg. I believe Digg has the potential to change the way all media is aggregated. Through Digg I have met a large number of kind, bright people. I can’t put a price on those contacts. That being said, after taking a day to let it sink in, I am at the point where I am considering pursuing the offer. I really appreciate that someone is recognizing the value we Diggers, Flickrers and Redditers add to the online world. And that potential for more networking opportunities is very appealing to me.

I must admit, until now I haven’t given that much credit to myself for what I am doing on Digg. I give all credit to the authors of the content I link to. Obviously whatever value I have added to the online world would be nothing without them.

I have been aware for a while that sites like Digg and Flickr are making millions off of users like me, so I have been considering possible ways to share that wealth among contributors. I think of all the ways you could go (pay per post, ad revenue share, etc.), Jason may have the best idea with the monthly flat rate. If he is convinced that he will get a return on that investment, then it is a win-win.

An Uphill Battle for Netscape

While these 12 lucky people Calacanis and Netscape pluck out and pay might now have income where they were previously doing bookmarking work for free, the Netscape site itself won’t necessarily become a slam-dunk proposition for web visitors. So far, stories on Netscape’s home page have a scant number of “votes,” with some in the single digits; on Digg’s home page, the top stories have hundreds, and in some cases 1,000-plus Diggs.

Calacanis has hit some bumps in trying to change Netscape from a general news portal, similar to Yahoo or MSN, into a social news aggregator. A group of users set up an online petition complaining about the change in format, and the New York Times even filed a story about “sour responses” to the New Netscape.

Calacanis told me he expected some rough sledding with a revamp of the old Netscape.

“A small percentage of users preferred the old version, which we expected since we are making a significant change,” he said. “However, the old Netscape site lost one third of its users over the past year, so we had to turn that around and this is the best way to do that…Right now this is an experiment and in three to six months we will figure it out. My guess is most of the services will wind up paying the top users — including MySpace and Wikipedia.”

In a nod to the problems users have had with the redesign, the Netscape site has plenty of disclaimers such as this: “If the new Netcape.com isn’t for you, make sure to check out the free AOL.com [portal].”

Reactions to Calacanis’ offer to pay community members from other sites has varied around the web and blogosphere. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington called the offer a “sign of desperation more than anything” in a post titled “Huge Red Flag at Netscape.”

Aaron Swartz (pictured here), a co-founder of community-edited news site Reddit, had a hard time taking the offer seriously.

“When we first all saw it at the office, the first reaction was laughter,” Swartz told me. “It was so funny to see this guy who just a couple weeks ago said his site was going to take off and do some great things, to see him begging for users and fighting for users. We thought that was pretty funny. We’ve gotten emails from users saying that Calacanis seems to be missing the point, saying to leave the sites just for cash.”

So what motivates the users of Reddit to put in so much work for the love of the site?

“Part of it is a selfish motivation, that it’s useful,” Swartz said. “You vote up the stories you like because other people do it, and you want the best stories on the top. It’s a fun thing to do. I got addicted to it, to find things on the Internet, submit it, vote on things and watch the impact to get something on the front page and have everyone read what you submitted. Plus there’s a whole community that’s built around it, they know each other’s names and get a sense of who each other are. It’s a group of friends you share links with.”

Vulnerabilities, Strengths of the ‘Hive Mind’

In the middle of wading through the debate on paying social bookmarkers, I came upon an essay from virtual-reality pioneer, composer, author and tech guru Jaron Lanier titled “Digital Maoism.” In it, Lanier argues that there is a fallacy to the wisdom of crowds on sites such as Wikipedia and Digg, because the collective can be stupid too. “Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles,” Lanier writes. “Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.” Plus, the Wikipedia community had stubbornly referred to Lanier as a film director in its bio of him, despite his objections.

Lanier rants against news aggregation sites for trying to get “more meta” than each other, with Digg and Reddit and Popurls — an aggregator of the aggregators — all taking heat from him for burying original authorship without someone taking responsibility for what’s coming up to the top. His conclusion is that collectives can succeed online, but require the guidance of some individuals.

“Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals,” Lanier writes. “These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There’s a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind.”

While Lanier’s expertise and background is in computer systems and human interaction within those systems, I was impressed with his awareness of the changing media landscape as well. When I queried Lanier to expound on his thoughts vis a vis Digg and news aggregators, he told me via email that he wasn’t as concerned with the question of whether social automation filters or human editors were needed to best filter the news flow. Instead, he worried that sites such as Digg and Reddit were signs of a deeper problem surrounding newsgathering — that we have more news analysts than people on the ground doing hard-nosed reporting.

“It’s true we have a surplus of interpreters of news, as from bloggers, so in a sense we have a gigantic staff of volunteer public analysts, but we are starved for raw data,” he said. “We can read what a blogger on the ground in Israel or Lebanon is experiencing this week, and that is important, but there are almost no unbiased investigative reporters of consequence helping us understand what is going on from a perspective other than that of an ‘ordinary’ person on the ground. This lack is in part a failure of the Internet to serve humanity.”

Lanier then goes a step further, blaming these aggregators for shooting out traffic to silly stories and news of the weird, and ultimately hurting the funding of important, investigative reports.

“There’s also the problem that professional authors need financial sustenance,” he said. “So the overall ecosystem suggested by the popularity of approaches like Digg ultimately starves out the sources of content it is intended to help you find. You or I might post an item that will become an overnight sensation on Digg, but that won’t finance a dangerous reporting mission in the Middle East.”

Fair enough, but the aggregators also play a role by bringing up stories at smaller publications or blogs that might not have seen the light of day under traditional media oversight. As for the problems with the “hive mind” and its fallacies, the folks at Digg realize their non-hierarchical approach has its drawbacks.

“The people behind Digg, we definitely see the limitations of the wisdom of the crowds and mob mentality issues,” Digg CEO Adelson told me. “The thing we think we’ll do better than anyone else is provide the tools to counter those limitations. It’ll be an interesting experiment and we’re really excited about where it’s going to go.”

What do you think? Should social bookmarkers and other community volunteers around the web be paid if the site is making money? What’s a fair compensation for them? Which social news sites do you like and what motivates you to participate? Or do you prefer professionally edited news sites? Where would you draw the line between an open editing system and one with paid editors?

(Note that MediaShift readers have already answered the Your Take question about why you work for free online. The answer: A sense of community motivates many of you.)

UPDATE: The debate took a nastier turn when Digg co-founder Kevin Rose made some personal attacks on Netscape general manager Jason Calacanis on the Diggnation podcast and on his blog. From Rose’s blog post:

Jason,
bq. Clever PR stunt, but man, in the end I believe it’s going to do more damage for Netscape than good. Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations… Jason, I know AOL has given you access to their war-chest, but honestly, take that money and invest it into site development.

Calacanis has tried to make the debate less personal and says many social bookmarking news sites can succeed — it’s not a winner-take-all situation. But still, Calacanis takes a stab right back at Rose and Digg:

Kevin Rose is going to make millions of dollars (perhaps tens of millions) when he sells Digg to Yahoo (my best guess). When he does sell Digg — and trust me it will be sold before in the next 12 months — he will have done it on the backs of those top 50 members. Those top 50 members will get exactly… ummm….. nothing. If I was running Netscape as a startup I would create a bonus pool for these users in case the site gets bought. I can’t do that given our structure, so we’re gonna just pay folks. Kevin should do something similar.

While Digg’s Adelson says that I took his quote about paying with T-shirts out of context, I believe I included the full context of the quote. Yes, Adelson does want to show he cares about the top users who spend all day on Digg — but how he would do that is unclear when he categorically dismisses paying them.

Aside from the personal attacks, I think this has been a healthy debate about a subject that has interested me for years — stemming from the old AOL chat room moderators, who eventually sued the company for back pay for all their volunteer work. I don’t think there is necessarily a “right answer” about paying or not paying, and as one commenter notes, we are in the early days of social bookmarking.

But perhaps there’s a middle ground or hybrid model that could work, some sort of payment mechanism similar to the South Korean citizen journalism site, Ohmynews, where submitters are paid a small fee if their story rises to the top. Rather than dismiss every new idea as a crock, let’s keep an open mind and see what transpires.

Dierdre Malloy has synopsized my speech I gave in London - pretty dam well and there's a podcast (gosh I hate that term) - AUDIO RECORDING of the speech - as well.

I actually had a pretty good time giving that speech, though I wish my voice had been in better shape - so I could have serenaded folks more - to the tunes of Gilbert & Sullivan (who’s home was about 100 yards from where we were meeting.)

Anyway - just about everything in this speech - given on 06/06/06 - rings true and still bears the fruit of my insights and observations.

Enjoy.

Now I hate to say I told you, but the forces of greed and stupidity are winning at MySpace. It was only a matter of time.

Wanna watch them fuck totally up a good thing? Just watch...

This latest blockage is the latest in a series of moves to keep MySpace "to themselves".

Even the best intentions of Dan Gould and his Newroosters doens't seem to be giving these people a clue.

And just to show that stupidity is no solo act, YouTube is also starting to do stupid things saying they own end-user submitted content! Just as YouTibe has surpassed the 100M video a day mark. They're the fastest growing site on the web right now.

CNN’s citizen journalism project, I-Report, is being hosted by blip.tv. It’s a good gig for blip but I’m not so sure it’s a good deal for videobloggers.

I-Report is asking for photos, audio and video of newsworthy events and the good news is that your content may be featured on the television channel. The bad news is that any content you upload will forever belong to CNN and you won’t get a dime for your troubles.

By submitting your material, for good and valuable consideration, the sufficiency and receipt of which you hereby acknowledge, you hereby grant to CNN a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide  license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print,  sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of CNN’s  programming or the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party. You represent and warrant to CNN that you have the full legal right, power and authority to grant to CNN the license provided for herein, that you own or control the complete exhibition and other rights to the materials you submitted for the purposes contemplated in this license and that neither the materials nor the exercise of the rights granted herein shall infringe upon or violate the right of privacy or right of publicity of, or constitute a libel or slander against, or violate any common law or any other right of, any person or entity. This license shall be governed by the laws of the State of Georgia.

to edit and/or alter any submission. CNN reserves the right not to use the material you submit at all and/or as little of the material as it chooses.

The terms of service on Blip’s own site is much more generous. I guess that’s the difference between networks and independent publishing. Of course, your chances of getting on tv are somewhat smaller when self-publishing so it’s a question of what is more important to you.

forget to read the fine print!

- Anne

Device uses waves to “print” on water surface.

Researchers at Akishima Laboratories (Mitsui Zosen), working in conjunction with professor Shigeru Naito of Osaka University, have developed a device that uses waves to draw text and pictures on the surface of water.

The device, called AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), consists of 50 water wave generators encircling a cylindrical tank 1.6 meters in diameter and 30 cm deep (about the size of a backyard kiddie pool). The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number of cylindrical waves that act as pixels. The pixels, which measure 10 cm in diameter and 4 cm in height, are combined to form lines and shapes. AMOEBA is capable of spelling out the entire roman alphabet, as well as some simple kanji characters. Each letter or picture remains on the water surface only for a moment, but they can be produced in succession on the surface every 3 seconds.

Researchers at Akishima Laboratories have developed similar devices in the past that used waves to draw pictures on the surface of water, but those devices had trouble producing letters with straight lines (such as the letter K). Additionally, it took the previous devices up to 15 minutes of data input time to produce each letter.

The newly developed technology uses improved calculation methods for controlling the wave generators, relying on formulas known as Bessel functions. In addition to being able to draw letters consisting of straight lines, the input time has been drastically reduced to between 15 and 30 seconds for each letter.

Akishima Laboratories expects the technology to be incorporated into amusement devices that combine acoustics, lighting and fountain technology, which they hope to see installed at theme parks and hotels.

[Source: Fuji Sankei]

Switch is a DIY show for teaching young women about electronics through fashion and design.

A Five day Flashmob programming party is underway in Portland in conjunction with OSCON.

When - Monday, July 24th to Friday, July 28th - Drop by anytime: 7AM until Midnight or later

Where - Equator Cafe, 510 SE Morrison, Portland OR (15 blocks south of OSCON 2006) (Google Maps directions from Convention Center)

What - Be a part of a programming flashmob experiment in conjunction with OSCON 2006. The Equator Cafe is hosting a five day open source programming flashmob and we have chosen the GPL'd Democracy TV (http://www.getdemocracy.org) as our project.

The event will be filmed and compiled into a short video to be broadcast on Democracy TV at the end of the week. Folks at the codejam and other Democracy developers will be on IRC at #dtv on irc.freenode.net

The source code, wiki, and bug tracker for Democracy can be found here. Democracy Player can be downloaded for Linux, Mac, and Windows here.

TechCrunch says Limelight Networks, the content delivery technology behind such Web 2.0 leaders as MySpace, Facebook and XBoxLive, has received a new round of funding. Limelight is also widely believed to be the content delivery provider for YouTube.

They are the number two content delivery network, behind Akamai, the service provider for Apple’s iTunes. Panther Express, another content delivery network, also received funding this week.

O'Reilly's Open Source Convention 2006 (OSCON) runs July 24-28, 2006, in Portland, Oregon. Hundreds of sessions, tutorials, activities, and events, are scheduled for this year's OSCON. The $1200 conference is throughly blogged. Here's the Schedule.

OSCAMP is a grassroots cooperative effort with O'Reilly. It seeks to organize the fringe of activity that has grown up around OSCON during the last several years and is incorporated into the main conference at the Oregon Convention Center.

FOSCON is the free and fun gathering of Ruby on Rails fans held in the evening and hosted by Portland-based Free Geek, about a mile away.

FOSCON is sponsored by CD Baby: a CD store with new independent music and Planet Argon, a Ruby on Rails Development firm. The speakers will be discussing a wide range of topics of interest to the Ruby community.

The Ruby programming language allows for extensive metaprogramming. This results in a syntax that many of its users find to be very readable. Rails is primarily distributed through RubyGems, which is the official packaging format and distribution channel for Ruby libraries and applications.

Ruby on Rails was extracted by David Hansson from his work on Basecamp for 37signals (podcast). It was first released to the public in July 2004.

Join hosts Chris DiBona (of Google) and Leo Laporte (This Week in Tech), as they talk with the most interesting and important people in the Open Source and Free Software community.

Their FLOSS Weekly Podcasts are all about Free Libre Open Source Software. Here's a podcast with Perl developer Randal Schwartz.

"In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds....," the Washington Post reports.

"Dozens of TV news reports from the Middle East are offered alongside those from the BBC and CNN. Some of the commentary is serious but slightly detached from day-to-day events."

(Video "dumpster" he says. -kc.)

The entertainment industry legal campaign against broadband file-traders isn't designed to litigate every p2p user into the ground - it's designed to instill fear of p2p use in the general public via ample media coverage. What the press frequently forgets to mention is that not one of the thousands of defendants has actually been found guilty of a crime in a court of law, as the RIAA and MPAA frighten most individuals into settling out of court.

This sometimes (though not always) works well for the industry, as the recipients of the lawsuits frequently don't understand their legal rights, nor can they afford to fight the lawsuits. That's not the case with Shawn Hogan, CEO of Digital Point Solutions, who has decided to fight the MPAA (see Wired report).

"A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined."

Hogan expects to pay some $100,000 in legal costs but says he would spend "well into the millions on this," as he believes the entertainment industry is "abusing the system." Hogan also operates a blog here.

Good news from Brian Conley of the Alive in Baghdad video blog. His Baghdad team member has been released after being kidnapped three days ago. Brian writes:

It is with great happiness that I can tell you our correspondent was released this afternoon in Baghdad, after approximately 72 hours in detention.

We still cannot provide his name or any more specific information, as we have not been able to reach him for permission and the specific details baout his detention.

His brother contacted our correspondent, Omar Abdullah, to tell him the good news.

As soon as we have more information, we will update the site immediately.

I would like to thank all of you who made an effort to send the word out about our correspondent and for all the support we've been provided in the last 24 hours.

Alive in Baghdad will continue producing media from Iraq, despite these recent events, and we hope to say the same about our recently released colleague, but only time will tell.

f... -andy

For anyone hesitant to download the unsupported release that made its way on to digg, Skype officially launched Skype 1.5. Make Skype Video calls to any other Skype user for free. Mac users note that this version of Skype with Video is indeed a preview release so do expect a few bumps a long the way.

On a personal note, I have yet to overcome the video shyness hurdle when it comes to online communications. Anyone else still hesitant?

The title says it all:

A high school in Nebraska, USA is suing over entries posted on Wikipedia - the website that “anyone can edit” that’s popular with teenagers and the unemployed. Wikipedia itself isn’t the target of the lawsuit from Skutt High School, nor are many of the sites that legally or illegally scrape Wikipedia’s content.

The school has filed a John and Joe Doe lawsuit to identify the perps behind edits which, AP reports, “… include sharp criticism of Skutt principal Patrick Slattery, obscene language and a note about drug use by students.”

“These particular edits were really harmful and mean-spirited,” said Patrick Flood, a lawyer for Skutt told AP.

Isn’t the Wikipedia very clear that their site should not be used as a point of reference, rather then a bunch of editorials?

Read More

ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex

permalink
Keynote talk delivered at the 2006 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 14-16 June 2006, Hollywood, California.
Slightly modified from the original Keynote presentation, available here:
http://research.techkwondo.com/files/presentations/ACE2006Talk_TheMilitaryIndustrialLightAndMagicComplex.pdf

trackback
Tim Lenoir. 2000. All But War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex. Configurations, 8(3), Fall, 2000: 289-335.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/TimLenoir/MilitaryEntertainmentComplex.htm

Bruce Sterling. 1993. War Is Virtual Hell. Wired, Mar/Apr 1993.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/virthell.html

Julian Bleecker. Coherent Light: The Cultural Politics of Virtual Reality. Master’s of Engineering Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. June 1992.
http://research.techkwondo.com/files/CoherentLightTheCulturalPoliticsOfVirtualRealityMastersThesis.pdf

tag cloud
military, entertainment, simulation, virtual reality, telepresence, electronic games, electronic entertainment, virtual worlds, ender’s game, orson scott card, ivan sutherland, katamari damacy, fan culture, 1st Life, 2nd Life, computer graphics, world of warcraft, play, playground, alternative games, social impact games, social practice, embodying social practice

abstraction
The relationship between military and entertainment is well-known and scarcely misunderstood. How has this relationship shaped the production and circulation of entertainment cultures in the early 21st century, wherein digital networked, massively multiparticipatory online games have become social life simulations? Is it possible to learn from the military’s eminence in translating 2nd Life experiences (training simulations) into 1st Life action (deployments and operations) so that we breech the 2nd Life/1st Life barrier so as to create tangible actions that mitigate 1st Life catastrophic failure? How can 2nd Life experiences offer productive couplings to 1st Life actions in a way that avoids the dramatic folly of the character Ender from the Orson Scott Card novel “Ender’s Game”?

ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex

HelloDS is a simple VoIP application for Nintendo DS, created by Alias-Zero It makes use of Stephen Stair's Wifi Lib

Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t. They raise the money too. Q and A explains. There's $10,000 to test it, courtesy of Craig Newmark.

(Continued at PressThink)

Socialtext just released their wiki code under the OSI-compliant Mozilla Public 1.1 license. You can downloaded it here. The package is called Socialtext Open, and according to the press release, it is "the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance." I'm on the board of Socialtext and we've been talking about doing this for a long time. Socialtext has always been an open source contributor, but this is a fairly important step forward and a shift in the business model. I think this puts Socialtext solidly on the right side of the open source movement.

Congratulations Ross et all.

Steven Clift linked me to an article in the Gainesville Sun out of Florida on a community's failed attempts to get a public access channel on their local TV. The paper reported that Alachua County commissioners in June joined the Gainesville City Commission in declining to create a public station.

What is interesting / dangerous is the reasoning used by the Commissioners to deny the request. According to the article, several commissioners said they believe the growth of the Internet - particularly sites such as YouTube.com that allow people to post homemade movies - eliminates the need for public access television.

Sony’s PSP team used some of its face time at Comic-Con to remind people that UMDs are still for sale. The memory-stick format for PSP has had some rocky times since the launch rush as some studios and retailers pulled back but Sony says more than 350 UMD titles are available. Also, according to Ars Technica, both Sony and Fox have titles in the pipeline. But UMD isn't the real priority anymore as Sony Connect looks for secure online-to-PSP distribution options. Other PSP bits:
– Sony is working on a PSP-TV connection and next week plans to add support for video delivery via RSS.
– PSPs will be able to function as "remotes" for PlayStation 3, raising the potential of delivering Blu-Ray DVDs via PSP although not sure how this would work.
– IGN: Sony is negotiating with wireless providers to create more PSP hotspots.

For quite some time there have been rumors about Amazon's plans for video or audio downloads. Now, just a week after Apple's movie download plans are leaked, Amazon's own similar plans are leaked as well. Apparently, Amazon decided to skip completely by a music download store (something they've also talked about for years) since Apple remains so dominant in the space. So, it's unlikely they're thrilled about Apple's plans in the video space as well. However, again, it'll be interesting to see how the market shakes out. The article is a bit vague and still leaves a lot up in the air, while ignoring how things like BitTorrent or YouTube could end up competing in the market. Just because Amazon is entering the space, it doesn't mean it's a slam dunk that enough people will care.

The web service formerly known as Prodigem (previous SmartMobs post) is now known
as MoveDigital. http://www.movedigital.com

The focus of the service is centered on moving your digital data (hence the name). So beyond just publishing BitTorrents, the service also does direct download publishing as well as mobile phone video and audio publishing (just like our publishing of torrents, we convert your video and audio to mobile phone format for you, and then also take care of the streaming to your 3G cell phone).

All Prodigem user accounts and content have been transferred over. Your usernames are still the same, and all Prodigem users also get a free 1 year membership. We're pleased also to announce that Senator John Edwards is our first official customer, not only using MoveDigital to distribute his videos for the mobile phone, but also to be distributed for the first time via BitTorrent.

Reclaiming Media: Doing Culture Work in These Weird Times
Brenda Laurel, 2002

"We can obviously no longer duck and cover. These times require designers and content-creators to become involved in the economic context of our work. Of course economics turns out to implicate culture and politics as well. Poisonous ideas can be found lurking in the mightiest global institution of all - consumerism.

Here's what I want to say. Consumerism demeans us. Nobody wants to be a consumer. The power relationship implied by the term should be unacceptable to everyone, if they were able to understand it. I picture a 'consumer' as something like a giant slug, a simple tube through which stuff passes from retail to landfill.

[...]

But back to business. Obviously, an all-out revolution against consumerism would be, shall we say, resisted. But a serious head-change is definitely in order. I propose that each of us actively redefine the success criteria for business to include the cultural and material costs and benefits of the product, as well as what we currently think of as 'the bottom line.' I'm suggesting that we find ways to help both kids and adults have access to this material and the means to understand it. I want every person in this country to know the unauthorized biography of every single thing they buy.

[...]

Design gives voice to values. Design suggests what is useful or beautiful or pleasurable or good or true. The affordances of a design suggest desirable actions. A design that has not engaged the designer's values may speak, but with a hollow voice. We know the rules of good design. But it often comes as a delightful revelation to young designers that brilliant design not only permits but requires the designer's personal voice.

And so we arrive at the happy confluence of responsibility and power. We are only the victims and servants of business as usual if we choose to be. This work of transformation - which I have come to think of as 'culture work' - must be approached mindfully and with great conviction and effort. The strategy of culture work is not straight-ahead revolution; rather it is to inject new genetic material into the culture without activating its immune system. By intervening in the present, we are designing the future.

I wish us all a great deal of courage, self-discipline, and clear-eyed hope."

See also:

Brenda Laurel's website

Reviews of Laurel's _Utopian Entrepreneur_ - especially Geert Lovink on the limits of her capitalist/consumerist critique

Review of Laurel's _Design Research: Methods and Perspectives_

Laurel will also be giving the closing keynote at Ubicomp 2006

Chris Weagel's American King is now opened to the public!

It's a documentary of sorts posted twice a week over a period of weeks.
The true story of a young man who has a pretty interesting view on life.
Chris has told me to be as non-specific as possible so I dont taint anyone's expectations.

American King is also the first successfully funded project from HaveMoneyWillVlog.com.
In 4 days, The community raised $1000. This money gives Chris time to get a bunch of videos in the can so he can release videos in a timely fashion. It hopefully also gives Chris a show of support for his great work.

Let me tell you why I like American King:
Daily shows are becoming very popular in the Videoblogging world. I think the TV industry really gets into the idea of short, daily content. I'm personally not so interested because it reminds me of "distraction entertainment". It's the "i'm bored at work. Make me laugh."  There is certainly a place for this kind of video. Topical. Breezy. Light. Fun. It's here and then forgotten. Next thing.

Chris has made a name for himself creating the universe of Human Dog. Like an HBO series,  the story is told in parts. Each part informs the later videos. A rich, complex world is formed. The stortelling of Amercian King assumes that the viewer will follow along and learn the world. Like an HBO show, the story begins and will eventually end. Complexties and subtleties are the highlights.

In my mind, Chris is using videoblogging to create new archetypes. He's making examples of what this new generation believes. Garrett, the star of AK, is not a nice guy. He's likeable if you have a sick sense of humor...which more than a few of us do. We are not always pretty and PC. Will the future look to Dawson's Creek to see how the young kids relate? I hope not, but if we don't make our own visions...Dawson's Creek will be all they have to look at.

Chris Weagel is only 24. Like any young artist, he's just discovering his voice and refining his craft. As a community we can support people who are telling the stories we know to be true. (God knows he will have trouble getting support from traditional outlets.) And in this way, we can help record a different history for the future so they remember us for who we really are.

American King comes out every Tuesday. Subscribe with this RSS feed.

The Community Music Project is a community of songwriters, musicians, and recording engineers publishing local music with minimal amounts of money. Instead of complaining about, or attempting to change, the music recording industry, we offer an alternati

What happens when you take cinema out of the confines of the movie theater, wrench the film reel off the projector, and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? Live cinema.

/facet is a generic browser for heterogeneous semantic web repositories.

The objective of this project is the development of a set of e-culture demonstrators providing multimedia access to distributed collections of cultural heritage objects. The demonstrators are intended to show various levels of syntactic and semantic interoperability between collections and various types of personalized and context--dependent presentation generation.

O'Reilly's Open Source Convention 2006 (OSCON) runs July 24-28, 2006, in Portland, Oregon. Hundreds of sessions, tutorials, activities, and events, are scheduled for this year's OSCON. Here's the Schedule.

This year's conference is dedicated to extending the dialogue between the creative open source community and the "traditional" software development industry.

More than 2,000 open source developers from around the world will gather at the Oregon Convention Center, reports The Oregonian.

"This is sort of the alumni party for open source," said Nathan Torkington, who is jointly chairing the conference's program lineup. Diverse programming communities come together, Torkington said, to share war stories and pool hard-won knowledge. This is OSCON's fourth year in Portland, with developers lured back by the city's vibrant open source community, said Torkington, who flew in from New Zealand to help organize this week's conference.

"Portland has made a great effort to attract what I guess you call the creative class," he said. "Open source definitely falls into that. There is a huge community of developers here."

Oregon is home to several open source initiatives, including the Open Source Development Labs in Beaverton, which promotes adoption of the open source Linux computer operating system. OSDL developers will be among those leading OSCON sessions this week.

IBM and Intel both base their Linux development work in Oregon, as well. Linux was created by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer programmer who moved to the Portland area in 2004 and oversees the operating system's development from a computer in his basement.

On Tuesday, the latest draft of the "General Public License" -- a free software license widely used to govern uses of open source software -- is due to be released. The GPL's new draft is being coordinated by the Free Software Foundation; its general counsel, Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, will address the conference Friday afternoon.

New to OSCON this year is the O'Reilly Radar: The Executive Briefing, where Tim O'Reilly and Matt Asay will give a limited number of attendees an exclusive opportunity to hear from and meet with innovators, entrepreneurs, and companies that are currently on the O'Reilly Radar.

FOSCON is a free and fun gathering of Ruby fans held in the evening during O'Reilly's Open Source Convention. The speakers will be discussing a wide range of topics of interest to the Ruby community. And in case that wasn't enough, pizza will be provided!

FOSCON is sponsored by CD Baby: a little CD store with the best new independent music and Planet Argon: Ruby on Rails Development, Consulting & Hosting. It will be hosted by Portland-based Free Geek.

Blue Oregon adds:

In May, CNN International visited Oregon to film a special segment on the global emergence of open source and proclaimed "Portland, Oregon is the unlikely capital of a global software revolution. The revolution is called Open Source."

The piece, which aired in Asia just weeks before Governor Kulongoski's recent economic development mission to Japan, featured interviews with Oregon open source luminaries, including Dan Fry of IBM, Stuart Cohen of OSDL and Linux creator Linus Torvalds. (The transcript of the Torvalds interview is available here.) CNN also spotlighted some of the many area open source community groups, including the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs (POSSE) and Free Geek.

Many of Oregon's open source companies and organizations will be on display at OSCON. In addition to speakers from Beaverton's Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), representatives from POSSE, the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL), Portland State's computer science department and the Software Association of Oregon (SAO) will man booths on the exhibit floor. The Beaverton-based incubator Open Technology Business Center (OTBC) and many of its growing roster of resident companies will also be exhibiting. (That list includes the new U.S. offices of Headwest and Innoopract, which came to Oregon from Singapore and Germany, respectively.) The O'Reilly event also includes among its sponsors the industry analyst firm The 451 Group, which recently relocated its open source practice head to Portland.

Among the annoucements; Socialtext, the first Wiki company, released Socialtext Open at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention today. Available for immediate download, Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance. It's available for immediate download on SourceForge.

The New York Times looks at several journalists who are now running thriving blog/news sites and getting funding for them: Om Malik, a former writer for Business 2.0, has received backing for GigaOM.com, a technology news Web site that has broken a number of stories; Rafat Ali, the former managing editor of The Silicon Alley Reporter, recently received funding for his company, which publishes PaidContent.org, a site that covers digital media news; and Nina Munk, a former writer for Fortune, is now expanding her site urbanhound.com to San Francisco and Chicago.

Not surprisingly, the rollout of services over high-speed 3G High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and CDMA2000 1x Evolution-Data Only (EV-DO) infrastructure is driving wireless providers to upgrade the weak link in the chain: the backhaul. According to Light Reading, the industry's long term goal is to migrate all cellular transmissions to IP/Ethernet networks, but they must also "migrate more than a decade’s worth of installed time-division multiplexing (TDM) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) infrastructure."

The Sony HDR-SR1 represents a huge shift in the camcorder industry, drawing on not one but two of the most important and emerging trends of the last several years: high definition and hard disk drive storage. The HDR-SR1 utilizes the new AVCHD standard, a derivative of MPEG-4 H.264 codec, jointly developed by Panasonic and Sony. No longer confined to tape-based media, Sony quickly put this HD format to use after releasing its first hard disk drive camcorder only seven months ago. We had a chance to handle the camcorder at a premiere event in New York. Our early findings: with 30GB storage and prosumer features like a mic input, headphone jack, and remote control input, the HDR-SR1 is one of the most refreshing and exciting developments we've seen in the industry in a long time.

found on xeep:

Named after the sci-fi hero, Johnny Mnemonic, Guba's new copyright protector aims to block illegal uploads of movies and television shows on it's site.

The system, a joint project with the MPAA, works by generating unique fingerprints for content filtered through Johnny

“Johnny can identify a video, even if that video has been modified, cropped, reformatted, re-encoded or reposted,” said Thomas McInerney, CEO and founder of GUBA.

ious as to whether video from independent creators that have uploaded to the site will be protected by Johnny as well or if content producers will pay a fee in order to have their videos "fingerprinted".

Link to the PDF press release by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

- Anne

Psst! Pass It On... "is a series of short animated films created in collaboration by a select group of motion graphics artists from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Berlin."

participation as activism

Suzana Milevska's essay Participatory Art: A Paradigm Shift from Objects to Subjects in the 2/06 issue of the journal springerin is a dense, theoretical discourse that raises questions regarding the intersubjectivity of the collective and challenges to the idealization and realization of "community" in participatory art.

springerin is a quarterly magazine dedicated to the theory and critique of contemporary art and culture addressing a public that perceives cultural phenomena as socially and politically determined. A special section of every issue (Netzteil) examines the potentials of new technologies and media.

Originally posted by michelle from networked_performance, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 23, 2006 at 08:18 PM

In the NYT, there is a good article by Clive Thompson about serious games or the inherent potential of games to be learning platform. Some excerpts:

Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.
(…)
“What everyone’s realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations,” said Suzanne Seggerman
(…)
Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. “The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate,” he added. “If games are going to be a mature medium, they’re going to serve a variety of functions. It’s like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff.”
(…)
This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work.
(…)
But do these games actually work? Even proponents admit that it’s still difficult to say. “These things are just at the prototype level,” Professor Jenkins said. “We’ve just got one classroom here, one classroom there, where we’ve documented some benefits.” And without more studies documenting the effectiveness of the games, he said, “oxygen’s going to be sucked out of this.”
(…)
“Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression,” he concluded. “Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games, why not learn something important in the process?”

The article is also full of examples of this types of games.

Here is my Guardian column this week (and here’s a nonregistration version). Snippets:

Witness the toppling of the TV tower: this month in the US, primetime viewing of broadcast networks sunk to the lowest level in ratings history: 20.8 million on average. At the same time, the open video-sharing service YouTube revealed that it is delivering 100m shows a day. No wonder BBC director general Mark Thompson just announced a major restructuring, tearing down walls between broadcast and digital for a “360-degree, multiplatform” world. “Much of what we call new media,” he said, “is really present media.” Yes, thanks to the internet, we are watching the end of linear television.

does more than destroy. It forces the media to redefine themselves, to discover their essence. Broadcast networks thought their value was in controlling precious distribution and content. But in this post-scarcity media economy, the real job of a network is to find us the good stuff. Doing that no longer requires owning studios or transmitter towers. Today, a network is born with every link. When you recommend shows to friends, you’re a channel. When your blog links to good reading online, you’re a magazine. When you share your iTunes playlist, you’re a DJ. Today, everybody’s a network. . . .

Simply put, a good network today will find the right stuff for you: no longer one size fits all, but one size fits me; no longer a prisoner of a 24-hour schedule, but primetime as my time.

As Amazon helps you find the right book, so the new network will be built on experience, trust and relevance to help you find the shows you’ll like. And in a world with unlimited content, there is an unlimited demand for such networks that filter and recommend. . . .

So the old networks - including newspapers, which should start acting more like networks - must transform themselves from closed to open, centralised to distributed, one-way to two-way. They need to learn to find and recommend not just their own good stuff but good stuff from the world, from fellow creators (who need not be competitors). This is a new and valuable service. And they need to learn to support these new creators by sending them both audience and revenue in distributed promotional and advertising networks. Consultant and blogger John Hagel puts it this way: “Audience-relationship businesses take these proliferating content options as an opportunity, rather than a challenge. The more options there are, the more value that can be created by organising, packaging, presenting and adding to these options for specific audiences.” So the big guys need to see themselves not as the owners of a network but as members of networks. For networks are no longer about controlling but sharing. They are not about broadcasting but about finding and being found. They are no longer static. Networks are fluid.

There's a video on YouTube simply called, "war." is a home video of a trip down the stairs and into the street with alarm sirens blaring.  Perhaps it was made in Israel (as the descriptive tag "16.7.06 war in haifa. hisbllah attak haifa" suggests), perhaps it was made somewhere else --we cannot be sure.

Is this news?  The comments posted by users suggest that it is purely an opinion piece.  Is this how news will be ultimately be aggregated in a post-YouTube world?

A very different community of interest can be found at http://www.bloggingbeirut.com.  This blog leads with the death toll from the conflict on the left side of the page above the scroll.  Is this how news will ultimately be aggregated in a post-blogging world?

The thought experiment here has nothing to do with the war or politics, it has to do with the aggregation of thousands of posts, blogs, video and audio clips--and how one might sort them out. 

Forget about technology for a second and just think about how you might accomplish this task by hand.  Would you organize items by type?  Good guys/Bad guys?  How would you know which was which?  Is there a civilian mother on any side of any conflict any where on earth who deserves to hold her dead five-year-old in her arms?  Maybe you could simply organize the content by "us and them," or by category or geography.  Could you imagine a linear stream of video content 24/7 from a war zone without pundits or talking heads sorting out the images for viewers?  How would people react?  It would not be like "C-span for war" because you would not be able to verify the authenticity or accuracy of the content.

If you spend a few minutes online this week, you will find literally thousands of items directly related to the current crisis in the Middle East.  What's new about them is how they are starting to be organized, how easy they are to find and how unfiltered they are.  Is this an inefficient system that represents an opportunity for smart businesspeople and technologists, or is this a glimpse of a possible future for the information age?

Perhaps it is neither.  It may turn out that people need to be told what the news is and what they are supposed to think about it.  The opportunity may simply be for existing news-gathering organizations to conscript the millions of people with home video cameras and camera phones and use their content in their existing news programming. 

This is not a new thought, but this week the world witnessed a "real time" up-close and personal view of a conflict unlike any other news presentation it has ever seen.  Maybe it was not organized the way we are used to seeing content organized, but, if you knew where to look, the view was prophetic.

Liquid Fridge presents two workshops on mash-ups of art forms with each other and technology, with presenters Chris Csikszentmihályi from MIT (USA), Ralph Borland, Charles Lee-Thorp, Blaise Janichon and Martin Sims.

The NKDPS program is launching a series of funding opportunities to help increase the production, use and capacity for research to serve public-interest advocacy and organizing around media and communications.

At RiffTrax, you can download Mike's running commentaries and listen to them along with your favorite, and not so favorite DVDs.

Although components may appear very complex, they are really just fancy movie clips.

Frame 1 contains a bounding box or any graphics that serve as placeholders for the final art. Frame 2 contains all other assets, including graphics and base classes, used by the component.

The Guardian has an interview with Richard Masters, of the British Library’s digital objects management programme looking at the impact of technology on archiving. The usual worries about file formats, media incompatability and how to select what to preserve and what not to are discussed, but:

“The biggest issue is digital rights management. At the moment, acting as an honest broker between the public interest and the individual rights holders is incredibly difficult. Much more so than with printed material that is physically deposited on your site. Many electronic property holders lease material and specifically prohibit copying for preservation purposes. The law, as it stands, is on their side. The rights holders are terrified - rightly so in my view - that once it’s in the public domain it can be copied any number of times illicitly without any redress.”

Masters makes the “rightly so in my view” comment, but doesn’t make the point that if the same attitude had been taken to preserving books in the first place (”we can’t put them in a public library, someone might copy them!”), there would be no public libraries and no British Library.*

As I see it, as a member of the public, if my tax money is going to be spent in any way upholding copyright, I want that benefit for rightsholders to come with a benefit for the public interest, i.e. that the rightsholders must permit copies to be made for the public interest, with no DRM or other technical restrictions in place.

* In the UK, as far as I know, it is an obligation for all publishers to send copies of anything they publish to the ‘legal deposit libraries’ (British Library, University of Cambridge, Bodleian, Aberystwyth, Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin). I’ve done it; I don’t think I was permitted to send the books with the pages glued shut, so why should electronic media creators be allowed to submit DRM’d material?

Composing, nurturing, collecting, maintaining, and making associations within information; the environments and related tools in which these activities take place; and the theory behind these activities and environments.

An indie director talks about how movie piracy affects him (NSFW audio)

(Well, it's not real but it's still funny.)

WiFi Planet reports that Freescale Semiconductor and Wavesat today announced a joint reference design for WiMax-enabled CPEs targeted at both residential customers and small to medium sized businesses.

Fawzi Behman, director of Strategic Marketing at Freescale, says the aim is to enable service providers to extend their portfolio of services. Instead of reinventing the wheel to do so, Behman says, it made sense to partner with a company like Wavesat.

The Residential Gateway includes a Freescale MPC8323E PowerQUICC II Pro processor, a DSP for VoIP capabilities, and interfaces including a four-port Ethernet switch and two Mini PCI slots – one for a Wi-Fi LAN and the other for WAN over WiMax.

The board ships with Linux 2.6.x with Samba on Flash. The mini-ITX form factor makes it easy to design compact WiMAX CPE systems. Combined with Wavesat's Mini-PCI card and MAC software, it is said to enable a cost-effective, compact solution for WiMAX-enabled residential gateways.

The reference design adds wireless, voice and video to a media server and allows a service provider to consolidate all their services into one solution. “This enables both wired and wireless solutions for residential gateways,” Behman says.

Recently, Wavesat announced it is developing a 5.8 GHz Mini-PCI module and reference design with Texas Instruments that will be commercially available by Q4 of 2006 from Wavesat.

A $200 WiFi gateway providing both voice and WiFi for $40-$50/month could be a killer product. A licensed 2.5 GHz backbone from Clearwire or Sprint might be one option but a 5.8GHz unlicensed solution could keep the duopolies in check. Satellite tv optional.

Perhaps $5,000, 5.8 GHz WiMAX basestations will take root on the rooftops of community centers.

According to In-Stat, the number of fixed WiMAX subscribers is projected to reach 16 million by 2010, while mobile WiMAX subscribers will range from 15 million to 25 million.

Members of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on June 28, rejected a network neutrality amendment to a wide-ranging broadband bill but it turns out that’s not the last they’re hearing of the issue, says CIO blog.

Since that vote, a group of organizations supporting a net neutrality law have cranked up a pressure campaign on the 11 Republican senators who voted against the net neutrality amendment, which sponsors wanted to add to the broadband bill.

Organizations including the liberal MoveOn.org and the conservative Christian Coalition of America and others involved in the SavetheInternet.com coalition have urged members to contact senators and express their displeasure over the net neutrality vote.

“Thousands” of people have contacted their senators, said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org.

Nora Miller, a freelance writer and editor from Arizona, is one of them. Miller has contacted two Republican lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

“My biggest concern is that this law … minus any protection of net neutrality, amounts to a giant giveaway to telecom companies that do not have my best interests at heart,” she said in an e-mail. “My federal dollars created the Internet specifically to provide free and equal access to all users.”

Opponents of a net neutrality law, including large broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast, say a law isn’t needed because they do not plan to block or degrade Web content.

Chairman Ted Stevens could be right, the internet is a series of tubes. John Hodgman explains.

During the week which ended on July 16, YouTube, the popular online video-sharing site's unique audience soar by a whopping 75 percent to 12.8 million users, up from 7.3 million during the previous week, according to new data released by Nielsen//NetRatings.

That traffic jump follows a six-month period of exponential growth for the site, as its audience size skyrocketed by nearly 300 percent since the beginning of the year.

Broadband Reports points out that Former Congressman turned Verizon PR man Tom Tauke speaks to Business Week about Verizon's position on net-neutrality, municipal broadband, and other topics.

Tauke states: "We don't necessarily think it's a wise investment, but we aren't out fighting these things."

Note that Tauke was central in lobbying Pennsylvania and other state lawmakers into passing laws that make such projects either illegal, or considerably more difficult.

Skype and Kazaa creators Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are developing new software to aid in the distribution of television shows and other video over the web. The "Venice Project", unlike the original Kazaa, seeks to gain approval from content producers to avoid costly legal conflict, Business Week scoops. This is also the direction being taken by Bit Torrent's Bram Cohen, who has been snuggling up to the entertainment industry in an effort to better monetize his creation. Whether any of them can compete with cable (or piracy) is yet to be seen.

The All Points Blog flags this InformationWeek article about the wireless crisis alert system that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is building. As All Points points out, one of the technologies under consideration is especially interesting because it doesn’t need to track users’ locations to tell whether they should receive a message. Instead, an application on the device simply filters out messages that don’t apply.

Most location-based messaging systems track users’ locations and then send messages only to the users in the target area. The SquareLoop technology the DHS is considering does things slightly differently.

[SquareLoop] doesn’t track a person’s location. Instead, it relies on an application downloaded on the phone and the phone’s wireless receiver to filter messages, which contain a target location and time frame. The phone then determines if the message applies. “We don’t need to know where someone is because we’re pushing all that out to the edge of the network, really out to the cell phone,” [SquareLoop COO Joe] Walsh says. In response to a traffic accident or a biological agent release, SquareLoop can send messages only to those people in the vicinity of the affected area, even days afterward. Emergency response teams can designate, on mapping software, the area in which a given message applies. For those outside that location, the message is archived in case they enter it later.

It’s an interesting way to manage location-based messaging, mostly because it does an end run around a lot of privacy concerns that people have with such applications. It also doesn’t require a database to store users’ current locations, and should be able to broadcast the data quite narrowly. From the article: “People who live in Chicago wouldn’t receive alerts about an evacuation of the Sears Tower, for example, if they were out of town for some reason.” But if they returned while evacuation conditions still prevailed, they’d receive the message then.

So is this a “push” technology or a “pull” technology? A “push-pull” technology? Whatever it is, it’s potentially very interesting, and presents a nice model for one-way mobile communication. We’ll see how broadly it catches on.

3pointD, mobile computing, Politics, Privacy, security, Technology

The4thScreen: a global fest of art & innovation for mobile phones focuses on the emerging cultural, technological and social phenomenon of mobile phones.

"We are at the moment when everybody, from the media moguls to Vietnamese peasants - artists, hackers, activists, businesses and governments are trying to grasp the impact, the power, of this new phenomenon.... trying to claim a part of it. There is still a lot of space for great ideas, to fulfill dreams and real needs. I hope the Festival will serve as a catalyst and influence this process... "

Tamas Banovich, festival director

Connecting over 2 billion users, more than twice as many as the Internet, covering every country of the world, the mobile network is bridging the digital divide.

With the mobile phone, the power is in your hands. From concept to creation you can share your visions, impact your world and reach millions.

Artists, designers, technologists, and all creative thinkers are invited to submit their creations, inventions and revolutionary ideas in one of two categories:

1/ Moving images - including videos, animations, and games made specifically for mobile delivery.
2/ Wise technologies - including SMS based projects, sound, software art, software and hardware projects proposing new or extended use of mobile devices.

The4thScreen is a platform where you can influence the future of this new medium, exchange your ideas over the boundaries of your culture and participate in the global village.

What will you bring to The4thScreen ?

anne and matt ward -- need to spend time with this (when ???)

" Perhaps the most enduring joke (or truism) of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series was that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 42. Obviously, it's a pretty shoddy answer without the right question (the scheming mice of the book try to pawn off "how many roads must a man walk down"). The same problem confronts designers every day. We are taught that design is about finding answers to question and solutions to problems. Fine, but without the right question or problem, these answers become useless, or even damaging."

(Continued at IDFuel)

Yesterday I had the honor of delivering the keynote at the ThinkBright Summer Digital Institute, hosted by WNED public television in Buffalo, New York. The speech, "Embracing Web 2.0 in an Education 1.0 Universe," was a variation of one I've done previously this year, but with a greater emphasis on education. For those of you who are interested, here's a podcast of the speech, along with the accompanying Powerpoint. -andy

After I blogged the location-tracker hacked up for use in Second Life by Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka the other day, Cory sent along a link to a similar service, SLStats [Cory also blogged it, I now see], that was started recently by SL resident Mark Barrett. I’ve also been meaning to look into the new blogHUD built by SL resident Koz Farina, which is currently in alpha. The cool thing about that is that it can be used as a kind of location-tracking device as well.

SLStats comes in the form of a wristwatch, available in Hill Valley Square [< -- SL link] in the Huin sim. Once you register with the service in-world, the watch "watches" where you go, tracking your location as you move around the world, as well as which other avatars you come into contact with. The information is used on the SLStats site to rank most popular regions (among SLStats users, of course), and to track how much time you've spent in-world, which you can view at a link like this one, which tracks Glitchy: http://slstats.com/users/view/Glitchy+Gumshoe.

nately, the service doesn’t let you extract a list of sims you’ve been to and who much time you spent in each (as Cory’s does), but I imagine that information is easily gotten and just a matter of building in the feature. What would be extra cool is if you could overlay lines on the SL Webmap API so you could see your path around the world. There are all kinds of other cool things that could be done with this information as well, I imagine, and I get the impression Mark is planning more in the near future. He wasn’t in-world when I was this morning, but Jerry spoke with him recently and at least found out that he’s a SecondCast fan. (Go us!)

SLStats is also associated with SLBuzz, which seems to be yet another MySpace-like social networking site for SL residents where you can add friends, blug stuff, etc. I love to see people adding functionality to Second Life, but I have to say, I’m sick to death of filling out online profiles, so I doubt I’ll be using this much. The explosion of social networking and Web 2.0 sites in general in recent months is creating a lot of work for very little return, as far as I can tell, and there’s going to have to be some kind of convergence or implosion fairly soon.

But back to our topic. The blogHUD is an unobtrusive heads-up display that lets you post a blog entry to the blogHUD site via either the chat line or a notecard. At the moment, you can browse recent entries, or see entries by a particular person on the “recent blogHUDers” list or from a place in the “recent places” list. A future version will let you browse blog entries by person, by place, or by person in place, and grab RSS feeds for most of those slices, or so I understand. (Remember, this is still in alpha.)

What I like about the blogHUD is the SLurlPane-like SL Webmap that shows up when you click on a blog entry. (That’s a SLurlPane at the top of the right-hand column here.) As you can see in the pic above, you end up with a close-up shot of the location from which the entry was posted, as was as an SL link that will launch you right there, should you find the entry intriguing enough.

Between this kind of stuff, Cory’s hack, SLurlMarkers and various other things that are in development for SL and the Web, we should see some pretty powerful location-based social software popping out of this primordial virtual ooze. Definitely looking forward to it.

blogging, design, mapping, MySpace, Second Life, Social software, virtual worlds, Web 2.0

Sony Vegas is great, but if you make movies witha small digital camera like the Canon Powershots, the videos are in avi format with a codec that Vegas doesn’t have. The result is that, when you add a video to the timeline, only the audio shows up.

A lot of places try to sell you codecs for like 20$.

It took my a while to find, but the first link on this page (morgan-multimedia) is free and works great and fixed the problem:

www.jetdv.com :: View topic - How do I open AVI files create by still cameras?

A couple of days ago I got FFMPEG working to automatically generate FLV video files for OpenVlog. Today I finally got thumbnails generating correctly. Here are the commands:

This creates a JPEG:
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -f mjpeg -s 320x240 outputfile.jpg

This creates a QT Movie that I am using as a reference movie (just one frame of video):
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -vcodec mpeg4 -an outputfile.mov

I got this working with lots of help from the following pages:
Converting Video Formats with FFmpeg
Extracting JPG Frames Using FFmpeg and mjpeg Parameter

The BBC has announced sweeping structural changes to meet its on-demand Creative Future vision, placing Future Media and Technology at the heart of its strategy. Old media words like television and radio are dropped, with all BBC content organised in three divisions: Journalism, BBC Vision, and Audio and Music.

A national phone survey of bloggers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology.

Perhaps more interestingly, one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Many say they check facts and cite original sources.

- 34% of bloggers consider their blog a form of journalism, and 65% of bloggers do not.
- 57% of bloggers include links to original sources either "sometimes" or "often."
- 56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either "sometimes" or "often."

More details:

Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

and...

Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite "my life and experiences" as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog. Entertainment-related topics were the next most popular blog-type, with 7% of bloggers, followed by sports (6%), general news and current events (5%), business (5%), technology (4%), religion, spirituality or faith (2%), a specific hobby or a health problem or illness (each comprising 1% of bloggers). Other topics mentioned include opinions, volunteering, education, photography, causes and passions, and organizations.

Full report

Samsung's rugged sports camcorder, the SC-X210L, is a rugged compact model that records video on SD cards. The original remote lens connected to a helmet or headband via a USB cable. It is now going wireless.

The new SC-X210WL ($599) feature an external lens with a wireless connection.

The new Samsung Sportcams, like the SC-X205WL and SC-X210WL, feature higher resolution and a wireless connection although whether it uses Bluetooth, WiFi, or something else, was not specified.

The camera uses MPEG4 ASP compression, Samsung's electronic image stabilizer, a 680K CCD with 10x optical/100x digital zoom.

With no cords on the camera, you don't have to worry about it snagging on anything. The SC-X210L also doubles as an MP3 player, voice recorder and data storage device. The unit also includes a carrying case and webcam module.

The SC-X205L, SC-X210L are currently available, the SC-X205WL provides 720p resolution, and the wireless version, the SC-X210WL, due in September 2006 at $479.99, $579.99, $579.99 and $679.99, respectively.

There has been so much talk about video hosting sites and business models and web2.0 downfalls that it’s been difficult to keep up.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable recently wrote about Blip.tv’s new funding and questioned the site’s focus:

For starters, Blip.tv’s terminology is questionable - the focus is on creating a “video blog”, and each video clip is referred to as a post. I’m not sure how wise this is: video blogging implies some kind of dedication, while most users of online video sites are quite happy to upload the occasional clip. What’s more, it implies that you actually appear in the video - that’s rarely the case with the most popular viral videos.

the comparison of social uploading sites like YouTube, Guba, Metacafe, etc, is deceptive. Cashmore complains about the use of terminology on the Blip.tv site (the use of the term videoblogging) as it implies dedication rather than one-off uploads.

Dedicated videobloggers are, indeed Blip’s target user and it’s a wise move. Videobloggers are notoriously loyal customers and Blip is a big part of the videoblogging community. Vloggers are looking for hosting sites that will not keep their content in walled gardens, releasing it only on branded flash players. We want to use the formats that work best for us and we don’t want our videos to be considered "Blip" videos. We want our videos to be Ours. Blip does this nicely by offering a flash version for those that want it and access to the files in the format we upload as for our own sites. That way, we can make our content available in RSS feeds. Want to have your vlog featured on itunes? With YouTube, it can’t happen. With Blip (and sites like it), it can.

A Blip user is not necessarily a YouTube user (although some people will upload to both places - YouTube to get the audience and Blip to get the control).  Blip users are interested in creating their own audience - pointing them back to their own sites - and Blip does this well.

Many people have been wondering about the precarious nature of video hosting sites such as YouTube who receive funding yet, seemingly, have no business model. Reliance on advertising is sketchy and has been the topic of recent articles asking just how long a site can sustain itself on advertising alone. This is a real problem for sites that rely on viewer numbers to sustain their financial growth. Add to the mix the growing number of hosting sites (240 at last count, according the San Francisco Chronicle), and the fight for audience attention is on.

How can these companies expect to compete for advertising dollars? The answer is, they can’t. There will be a lot of closed up shops in the near future and users who have uploaded their content to these sites will lose their content - unless you’re uploading to a site like Blip.tv.

Blip.tv offers back up of content by crossposting to the Internet Archive. The videos are available from Blip in formats that can be downloaded and saved to your hard drive (or anyone else’s). Users are not bound to the site.

Likewise, viewers are not bound to the site and this will be increasingly important as more consumers use RSS and mobile devices. Unlike sites which require viewers to go to a particular website to view content (sometimes, having to join up as well), video offered in RSS readable formats are available in one location (or on one device). While viewers now tend to choose YouTube as a primary viewing site for video to avoid searching multiple sites, hosting sites that use RSS readable formats will not be required destinations in order to view the content.

Blip does not rely on viewership but on content creators. This is a huge difference between Blip and YouTube and, I think, it’s a difference that will stand them in good stead as other hosters fall by the wayside. By placing the focus on the content makers rather than garnering large viewerships and social networks, they avoid the pitfalls of competing for eyes.

Not only relying on individual vloggers, Blip.tv also provides video hosting services to companies that wish to have their own video sites as well as providing website creation and maintainence. The newest of these ventures is the William Shatner DVD Club - a site for sci-fi fans.

You can probably tell that I both use and love Blip.tv. That’s not a disclaimer. It’s a fact.

- Anne

Filed under: Culture

The I Am More Than My Thumb thesis project by Kellee Santiago (founder of thatgamecompany) is an interface experiment using arms spread to fly while playing the game Cloud. Pixelsumo writes: "This project allows you to control the character using your body. Tilt your arms to turn and raise them to go faster or lower to slow down. It uses the PhaseSpace motion capture set-up, essentially cameras tracking LEDs on the wearers body."

Follow the link for a couple more games that aim to control in-game flight with your arms, if only to embrace that boy trapped in a man's body.

a AJAX widget for visualizing time-based events from a simple XML file, without the need for software installation, server-side or client-side. users can pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.
see also google trends & timeline of trends & history of programming languages.
[mit.edu (religion timeline example) & mit.edu (example list)]

Semiconductor circuits are pretty versatile, but you can't bend the ones in your computer without having to place an expensive parts order with your favourite tech supplier afterwards. Chips are set to become far more flexible in future, however, in both senses of the word - a team of engineers have discovered a way to remove the circuitry from a rigid substrate and place it on a pliable material. Flexible computing could revolutionise a number of technology spheres, medical apps and solar cells for instance.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of waiting for my wearable cybertech enhancements. It looks like some other folk are getting twitchy too, to the extent of getting on with it themselves - some futurist with sharp eyes and steady hands cheerfully went and built his own head-up display into a pair of innocuously normal-looking sunglasses. I wonder if he does custom orders?

The 2nd pictoplasma conference is just around the corner and for a second time, Berlin is about to mutate into the world’s capital of contemporary character design.

We look forward to welcoming you at the official conference exhibition openings on Wednesday the 11th of October. The “Character Walk” will take you through more than 20 galleries, project spaces and locations throughout the city centre of Berlin-Mitte. Scheduled high points include new work by Australian design collective Rinzen, exhibitions by Nathan Jurevicius and Derrick Hodgson, a two-man show by Gary Baseman and Tim Biskup and a birthday party for Emily the Strange given by Rob Reger himself. Leave your mark in the “Colour Me, Pictoplasma!” walk-through colouring room, meditate in front of the bunny mandala, enjoy selected “Characters in Motion” screenings on the big screen and dance your socks off to character visuals galore.

The conference per se kicks off first thing on Thursday and will keep you on your toes until late Saturday night. In the mornings, we’ll be celebrating the Pictoplasma Animation Festival with cinema screenings of the latest work by David Shrigley, Shynola, Trunk, Saiman Chow, Airside, Motomichi Nakamura and many more…

The marathon continues with lectures and presentations by international artists such as Tim Biskup (USA), eBoy (GER), Nathan Jurevicius (AUS), Akinori Oishi (JP), Pete Fowler (UK), Rob Reger (USA), Fons Schiedon (NL) and Ian Stevenson (UK), and some old friends such as Rinzen (AUS), Friends With You (USA) or Furi Furi (JP), who will update us on their latest activities.

In the early evenings - before character visuals and performances by Airside (UK) or Motomichi Nakamura (USA) start vying for your attention - we’ll be doing some serious talking with the speakers in open panel discussions. All this plus workshops, doodle seminars and a grand character Karaoke finale with the pictoOrphans will guarantee you some serious sleep deprivation.

Originally posted by exiledsurfer from del.icio.us/exiledsurfer, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 19, 2006 at 11:46 AM

The New York Times writes:

A new research paper seeks to answer a riddle for publishers, editors and even readers: when does new news become old news?

news article on the Internet, the answer is surprisingly long: 36 hours on average, according to the paper, “The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web,” which appeared in the June issue of Physical Review E, the journal of the American Physical Society.

More precisely, 36 hours is the amount of time it takes for half of the total readership of an article to have read it, the paper found. The physicist who led the research, Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame, said that the paper’s conclusion should give journalists hope, even in the era of instant news.

coComment now shows comments from people who don't use the service, making it about a million times more useful in tracking blog conversations

Something fishy is going on at Barnes and Nobles. I tell you, something fishy is going on there.

Archangel, but uses embedded RFIDs in the cards and a proprietary reader. Likely to fail, but dancing around the primary opp'ty.

Yahoo experimenting with non-DRMed music sales. If they do it their sales will skyrocket as the only other major label downloadable music store that works with iPods.

lots of open source flashiness, finally

Antimatter exists to provide a public platform for underground productions of film and video -- imaginative, volatile, entertaining and critical works that exist outside of the mainstream. It is a forum for innovative and radical ideas overlooked or margi

The first open-source, carrier-grade telephony switch will be introduced next month at the ClueCon conference in Chicago, reports Networking Pipeline. Dubbed the FreeSwitch, the open source project is highly scalable, can run on AMD, Intel, and PowerPC, uses the SIP, H.323, Asterisk's IAX2 and XMPP/Jingle protocols, and costs just $4-$5k per server. Carrier grade gear can frequently cost in excess of tens of thousands of dollars. More detail is available at the project website.

From the sunlight labs website:


Sen. Edward M. Kennedy

We've been promising to introduce our Sunlight Labs more formally and today we're doing that, along with the announcement of a really neat widget that we're calling "Popup Politicians." Before you imagine the worst, like, Representative J. Dennis Hastert or or Sen. John McCain or Representative John Boehner popping out of cake, take a look at what Greg Elin and Duncan Werner have developed -- a web page plug-in that links the reader to information about who's financing the lawmaker's campaign, the lawmaker's voting record, and their profile on Congresspedia. The widget appears as a small popup window when you mouse-over the little sun icon that appears at the end of the name.

We're experimenting with the Popup on our site today. Check out all the technical information on the Sunlight Labs page.

What is it? Popup Politicians is an AJAX-powered widget which contacts a remote database here at Sunlight to retrieve links we've selected for a politician. The single Javascript that powers the mouse-over "bubbles" is served from Sunlight Labs server along with the data. When you load the page, the Javascript looks for Technorati-styled link tags for Members of Congress on the web page and then dynamically modifies found links to add the rollover action and a mouse-over bubble.

Sunlight Labs is readying various flavors of the widget for increased scalability. The basic widget can be added to a web site or blog by simply adding the Javascript and style sheet to the page's headers and then manually adding a properly formed linked to each members of congress name where a popup is desired. Micah Sifry tried it last night on his personal blog and it worked. Other flavors include local server-side PHP code to automatically search and replace members of congress's names with the necessary links. Sunlight has built a Drupal plugin that does this for our own site, www. sunlightfoundation.com, and also built a WordPress 2.0 plugin as well. Plugins for the major blogging and CMS platforms are planned and SunlightLabs is eager to find open source developers to help accomplish this and extend the the plugin. 

That's beyond the extent of my knowledge. Check it out here. And email Greg Elin at gelin@sunlightfoundation.com for more information, particularly if I have left you thoroughly confused. And remember, we're still experimenting with this, so all is not perfect yet.

I've worked with greg elin on some other projects, and he's a great hacktivist...this is one of his best collaborations yet --by the way just click the little sun in this post next to the politician names and u can see how it works..ES

Memory Spot is a tiny radio chip that can contain small videos, audio and text files and then affixed to any object:

"A radio chip the size of a grain of rice that holds up to half a megabyte of video has been developed at Hewlett Packard’s research labs in the UK.

The chip, called a Memory Spot, is small enough to be attached to a postcard or a photograph and could be used to append video, audio or hundreds of pages of text to all sorts of everyday objects. In hospitals, for example, the chips could allow doctors to add detailed medical records to a patient’s plastic wristband…

Plans for the technology were hatched two years ago when HP was searching for a way to add audio data to photographs, Robson says. HP sees a future in which its colour printers will be able to add video, audio and text to a chip already embedded in a printed document."

from New Scientist Tech

When Amanda Congdon unceremoniously told the world July 5 she was leaving the popular Rocketboom video blog, it set off a frenzy the likes of which we've never seen in the social media universe. You would have thought that Teri Hatcher was announcing her departure from "Desperate Housewives."

Between July 5 and July 14 (when I am writing this column), Ms. Congdon's exit from Rocketboom generated a staggering 129 news articles plus personal appearances on several major TV news programs, including CNN's "Reliable Sources." Of course, this event was even more magnified in the blogosphere, where it generated some 2,000-plus conversations.

Since she announced her split with Rocketboom, Ms. Congdon has been coy about her future. She did confirm in an e-mail, however, that she signed with the Endeavor talent agency in May. Meanwhile, Rocketboom wasted no time in replacing their star with Joanne Colan, who at one time was with MTV Europe. Ms. Colan will surely see a boost from this smart career move.

Ms. Congdon's departure from Rocketboom and her move to Endeavor will go down as the shot heard round the entertainment world. She is poised to become the first personality to parlay her tremendous online fame into mega-celebrity in the offline world. I'm sure her phone is ringing off the hook and it won't be long before we see her pitching products on TV.

(Continued at MicroPersuasion.)

With all the 2.0 hype, I think it’s unfair to unanimously declare all new Internet startups as 100% junk. It can’t be much more than 95%. So I thought it would be an interesting diversion to switch the tone of my writing for a change. Here are some tips I have for these would-be entrepreneurs to thrive and survive the next 24 months.

In what may be the company's first lawsuit, YouTube has been sued by Bob Tur, owner of the Los Angeles News Service. Tur is well known in media circles for, well, suing for just about everything when it comes to his precious video of the 1992 LA riots. In this case, the video of the beating of Reginald Denny was posted on YouTube and viewed (gasp!) 1,000 times. Tur alleges that works out to $150,000, and he's suing under the MGM vs. Grokster umbrella. (The page is loading very slowly, be patient, or see the details here on PaidContent.)

Starting in August, Logitech will include a link in its webcam software that will allow users to record video directly to Grouper.com. The move will eliminate the time-consuming step of saving and uploading video -- a feature that Grouper will promote as the easiest way to post video on the web.

I’ve been critical of AdSense of late, but let’s give credit where credit is due — AdSense, i.e. a distributed, shared-revenue advertising platform, represents the new paradigm for monetizing content. That’s why I remain skeptical that MySpace, despite being the current center of gravity for social media and despite its current off-the-charts traffic growth, will necessarily be a boon for News Corp.

Robert Young has an interesting post on GigaOm which got me thinking about this — Robert argues that traditional media companies should focus on building “socially-integrated media empires,” with News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace being the touchstone example:

At the end of the day, the media conglomerates should view social media much like they did the rise of cable TV. Cable eventually took half the market away from traditional broadcast TV, so the media conglomerates vertically and horizontally integrated their way into cable in order to buy back market share. They should do the same with social media by pursuing a strategy of social integration. Rupert Murdoch already made his first move, and it looks like NBC is about to take their first baby steps. Welcome to the new world of socially-integrated media empires!

As I said to Robert in a back-and-forth in the comments of his post, the notion of a socially-integrated media company assumes that media companies can “own” social media in the old media sense.

As I’ve argued before, the reason why News Corp is struggling to monetize MySpace is that most people who visit MySpace are not visiting “MySpace,” the News Corp media property — they are visiting EACH OTHER.

Contrast what News Corp is trying to do by directly monetizing the content it “owns” on MySpace (with the issue of ownership leading to incidents like the Billy Bragg brouhaha) with what Google did with AdSense.

AdSense has been so successful because it does not attempt to own either the content platform or the content itself — note that Google does not run ads on Blogger per se — they provide bloggers with a distributed, self-serve, revenue-sharing ad platform to run the ads themselves, and then Google takes a (big) piece of the action. But they don’t have to own Blogger to do it — owning Blogger simply allows Google to provide the blogging platform for free and thus drive more content creation that feeds AdSense.

News Corp needs to stop thinking in terms of “owning” MySpace’s page views — advertisers don’t want to advertise on those pages because News Corp doesn’t control the content. And MySpace users don’t want the ads appearing on “their” pages uninvited.

It would seem the real opportunity is for someone, News Corp or a third party, to offer MySpace users a platform like AdSense to monetize their content. In this scenario, MySpace is merely a free host, like Blogger — it gives them no advantage in providing this distributed ad platform.

As Robert pointed out in response to this idea:

Currently, if users place those ads on their pages, they would be in technical violation of MySpace’s TOS. It would be very interesting to see how they deal with such a situation.

News Corp could simply buy the new ad network, of course. But that wouldn’t really resolve the core issue.

It would indeed be very interesting to see what would happen. There is a BIG opportunity to monetize MySpace and social media — just not in the old 1.0 way.

Ars Virtua is a new media center and gallery located entirely in a synthetic world. It was created to provide a venue for new genres of work, and as a platform to highlight working artists creating sculpture, architecture, or applying scripts to extend these and explore the interaction of avatars with in 3-D space. Our purpose is to bring the museum into "new media" as opposed to vice versa and provide a platform for work that would otherwise not be accessible.

Where is it? Located at the border of Butler and Dowden in Second Life's virtual environment, Ars Virtua's 3000 square meter two story building is divided into a main gallery space, a lounge and shop and residency space. In order to visit Ars Virtua you will need to create a free account at Second Life (http://secondlife.com/join) and need to be running the current client. Once you have this properly installed you should be able to follow this link directly to Ars Virtua secondlife://Dowden/20/40

Why is it? Ars Virtua is a new type of space that leverages the tension between the 3-D rendered game space and the what is referred to as reality, between the simulated and the simulation. It is one of a series of projects that explore synthetic worlds as the new real.

To these ends Ars Virtua is instituting several programs: the first is the creation of an artist in residence program and providing 400 prims for the use of the selected artist. The second is to host an Ars Virtua New Media Conference early in 2006.

Ars Virtua is an unprofitable volunteer run organization for more information please contact gallery@ArsVirtua.com.

Ars Virtua Mission Statement: •To enhance understanding of constructed worlds, to develop the medium as a force for art production and provide a platform for transvergence with the intersecting media and knowledge fields. •To provide a venue for development of work that cannot exist anywhere else and create a focal point for media and media industry. •To promote the development of a commons in networked space, a place where ideas can be exchanged across physical borders. •To stimulate economic interest in virtual work and create a foundation for the exchange of goods in a new economy.

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/lauren_cornell, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 19, 2006 at 05:30 AM

Eyebeam is now accepting applications for Fall 2006-07 Residents and for 2006-06 Fellows in the Production, R&D and Education labs. The application deadline for Fellowships is Aug. 14 with Residents applications due Aug. 21, 2006. Apply now!

The Graffiti Research Lab, the Eyebeam OpenLab and Paul Notzold have a fun Instructable on mobile outdoor projection - "Outdoor digital projection in urban environments is a great method for getting your content up big before the eyes and in the minds of your fellow city inhabitants. This tutorial comes out of trial and error and it works. But please be careful. Helpful comments on safety and alternative methods are encouraged. The majority of this tutorial is aimed toward using a 2500 lumen projector (or smaller)..." - Link.

Related:
DIY Backyard Theater - Link.

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My partner todd thille and i did some urban bombing of monuments last month in lisboa, u can check out a 4 min high quality mpeg4 video of it here or a lower quality flv on you tube: - exiledsurfer

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 18, 2006 at 04:48 PM

[More….]

Originally from Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - CULTURE AND POLITICS AFTER THE NET at July 18, 2006, 11:08, published by Marisa S. Olson

Cellular News reports that a new report from WDS Global has revealed that 63% of mobile devices returned as faulty are in perfect working order.

This 'No Fault Found' (NFF) returns rate exceeds the industry average for general consumer electronic devices by 13% and is costing the mobile industry US$4.5 billion globally.

Closer examination of the 'No Fault Found' returns calls revealed that 38% were from users abandoning devices after struggling to use a specific application".

"The industry needs to look at the causes behind this trend and take positive action to improve the general out of box experience for the mobile subscriber; a simple analysis of support call trends and records provides all the necessary intelligence to work upon", said Doug Overton, Head of Communications for WDS Global.

Last winter , Erik Sundelof, one of the Reuters Digital Visions Fellows at Stanford, talked to my Digital Journalism class about his project, which has now been the subject of a PBS interview:

While there are plenty of big news outlets such as the BBC that accept photo and video submissions from their audience, and phone services that let you send photos to moblogs or mobile blogs, the idea of one global service for submissions from every type of cell phone hasn’t caught on yet.

Sundelof has spent much of the past school year at Stanford developing a prototype of such a service, currently mocked up at InTheFieldOnline.net . I met him for lunch and he showed me how simple the system was. Take a photo or video with your camera phone. Send a text message with attachment to an email address, and voila! it’s posted to the site after just a brief delay. He’s tested it in rural villages in India, and with his parents in Sweden, where he grew up.

At the moment, he’s working on a “cooler version” of the service in the hopes of attracting Silicon Valley funding, or perhaps paying customers who run newspaper sites or other media outlets. His hope is to build an open source software platform — with programming code that can be improved and modified by anyone — to enable people to send in photos or video to central sites or to their blogs or websites of their choice.

This article from TV Week talks about a bunch of mass-participation television shows that are coming out. They are essentially television shows that are distributed via broadband and include creative social networking features.

This article from the LA Times explains that broadband television programs (like the ones mentioned above) will be able to compete for Emmys directly against primetime and cable television shows starting next year.

Looks like this was posted on most of the tech gadget blogs but missed it. Could be useful for mobile entertainment apps.

The Zypad™ WL 1000 is a wrist-wearable wireless computer flexibly designed to give the user instant access to computing capabilities while carrying out non-computer tasks in the field. Featuring hands-free operation, robust wireless capabilities, and built-in GPS tracking, this versatile wearable computer serves as an ideal tool for Emergency Search and Rescue, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Maintenance, Law Enforcement, Logistics, Transportation, and Defense applications.

Parvus Corporation

Earlier today I described the concept of network effects and analogized it to gains from trade. I suggested that public policy should encourage open systems in order to maximize the gains to interoperability.

But there’s an obvious objection to this line of argument, which is hinted at in the IEEE article I referenced yesterday:

Surely it would require a singularly obtuse management, to say nothing of stunningly inefficient financial markets, to fail to seize this obvious opportunity to double total network value by simply combining the two.

In other words, if there are gains to interoperability, it’s in the interests of the firms themselves to make their platforms interoperable in order to increase their value. Firms, therefore, have the necessary incentive to maximize the value of their platforms with or without a platform monopoly.

The problem with this response is that it ignores the question of who captures the gains to interoperability. In a closed platform controlled by a single firm, most of the surplus flows to the platform owner, who is able to raise prices to capture the increased value. Apple is currently reaping the financial rewards from sitting atop a closed platform as it grows to dominate its market. On the other hand, in an open platform, competition pushes down prices. As a result, most of the surplus flows to the consumer. Given that price-fixing agreements are difficult to enforce (not to mention illegal), companies may rationally opt to keep their platforms separate.

The free trade analogy applies perfectly here: from an economic perspective, the companies choosing not to interoperate are behaving like protectionist firms. Free trade simultaneously increases total wealth and reduces the profits of the formerly-protected industry. Likewise, interoperability increases societal wealth but it reduces the profits of the firm that previously had exclusive control over its platform.

Of course, this analysis ignores the possibility of inter-platform competition. If switching between platforms is inexpensive, then inter-platform competition will drive down prices the same way intra-platform competition does. Unfortunately, a lot of technological platforms have high switching costs. Moreover, switching costs tend to grow over time, as users make more and more platform-specific investments. Once one has spent $500 on iTunes music, one is unlikely to purchase a music player that will not play iTunes songs, no matter how superior it might otherwise be to the Apple-branded alternatives. So once a market has matured, so that most users have made large platform-specific investments, the owners of the respective platforms are likely to enjoy considerable market power.

Of course, my argument here doesn’t fully answer the argument I laid out on Sunday, because any discussion of how to divide the profits from a platform is academic if the platform is never created in the first place. It’s possible that the only way we’ll get certain types of platforms is if we give the firm that creates them a monopoly on platform access. I’ll explore that question next.

XPath4AS and XPath4AS2 are implementations of XPath for ActionScript

The XPathAPI class allows you to do simple XPath searches within Flash.

Responses to my "my name is..." posting, all sent via MyLID.net messaging:

Johannes Ernst, the creator of MyLID, said:

What about http://gonze.com/ as your "My name is ..." Would that be better? ;-)
If so, http://lid.netmesh.org/wiki/Turn_Your_Blog_Into_a_LID_URL

That's a good idea -- it bothers me to not own my identity -- so I followed the steps above and converted my personal about page into an LID URL. My name is now http://gonze.com/about.

I did that by adding this code to the HEAD section of the about page:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze" />
<meta http-equiv="X-YADIS-Location" content="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze?meta=capabilities">
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze?meta=capabilities">

VirtualFlavius said:

Nice concept, but how do you integrate this into websites and why would all these marketing monsters give up their favorite registration form?

To integrate it into websites, the website developer will have to go to some trouble to install and use an open source package from each of the URL identity systems they want to support. (There are more than one). Some reasons why they might bother:

1. To prevent potential new users from going away when they learn they have to create yet another account. For myself, I have a strong preference for not going through the signup process again and again, and site has to really show its stuff before I'll bother.
2. To save on the development and infrastructure costs of maintaining a user account system. This is a lot of work for developers and gives them no edge over their competitors.
3. To prevent the security problems that are associated with maintaining user accounts. Any time you have user accounts you have a honeypot to attract crackers.

Marco Raaphorst said:

mylid.net is interesting. Would be great if it would be multilingual.

I'm glad somebody brought up internationalization, because this problem shows the strength of URL-based identity schemes like LID, OpenID and Yadis. The reason for URL-based identity technologies is to decentralize identity. Anybody who can run a web server has the power to mint new URLs, and since an identity is simply a URL, all those people can also mint identities. These people have the power to write servers in the language of their choice; nobody can stop them, nobody can freeze out their language by failing to support it.

---

Overall, I think that URL-based identity is as politically correct as it gets, and I dig it a lot. Still, I'd like to see more immediate benefits from these systems. It would be fabulous to be able to tie together my Odeo voice messages with the spam resistance of MyLID email, for example. PeopleAggregator addresses the issue of open identity by emphasizing the tangible benefits -- what can you do with an open system that you can't do with a closed one? -- and that's the path to victory here as with all open systems.

---

P.S.: to people whose messages I quoted in this public document, I did it because I'm pretty sure it's in the spirit in which your comments were intended, as part of the blog conversation.

VoIPowering Your Office with Asterisk: Soothing the Savages with Hold Music
Some good little command line snippets for conversion to GSM..

Over at OpenVlog I have just finished implementing an automatic Flash conversion for video that is sent in. It was quite a task from getting FFMPEG running on Dreamhost with LAME and AMR support (you need to change your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable), understanding Ruby enough to get FLVTool2 installed and working (another environment variable issue) and building a fancy Flash video player..

I think it was worthwhile in the end..

A Sample: I love NY (click on the Flash Version link).

Next will be making thumbnails with FFMPEG so that I don't use the silly "Click Here" graphic anymore.. I suppose I should still say, "click here" as for some strange reason I can not get the mouse pointer to change over top of the QuickTime plugin. That is a story for another day but the gist is, use JavaScript instead of reference movies. The added benefit is that IE users don't have the extra alert.

Thanks to Cat and the FreeFormed.org crew for the impetus.

Via News.3yen, this incredible Muusocia developed by ATR and Systec Akazawa. Described by news.3yen as a “social communication robot”:

The website claims that its “purpose is to make the existence consciousness of the person reconfirm who touches the Muu” …whatever the hell that means. The eyeball robot is aimed for RESIDENTS in nursing facilities and the like. The Muu has a general-purpose design which can be used as a receptionist or companion to the autistic using its ability to recognize person’s faces and voices and answer questions.
(…)
“Muu Socia has voice recognition, voice synthesis, speech processing and face recognition capabilities. And it starts bouncing around when something obstructs its view

A video about it here (.WMV, 5Mb).

Why do I blog this? yet another curious non-anthromorphic robot-like device a la nabaztag. Occurences of such artifacts are interesting to me because it shows the convergence between pervasive computing and robots. What about the user experience of such devices?

Larges displays and how they are perceived, experienced and used by people is an interesting topic, especially when it comes to the gaming experience. A paper I ran across lately about this issue:

Tan, D.S., Gergle, D., Scupelli, P., Pausch, R. (2006): Physically Large Displays Improve Performance on Spatial Tasks, In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 13 (1), 71 - 99 .

The paper describes a series of experiments comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor. Results suggest that physically large displays, even at identical visual angles as small displays, increase performance on spatial tasks such as 3D navigation as well as mental map formation and memory.

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting to see how display features can impact cognitive processes for the users.

Hacktivism and Networking with a Low Budget Technology

"How does the concept of "new media" function when technology is difficult to find? Is it possible to talk about hacktivism in geographical, political and social spaces where the lack of technology prevents from developing practices and activities that involve exclusively the Internet? ...

[W]e need to construct networks within the people. Without a real internet ... working on the island (a basic internet connection costs 6 to 10 dollars an hour, about half the average Cuban salary...). For [OMNI] the network is the city, the streets; the relationship between the peoples ...

The use of digital media and their forcing are definitely hacker practices that bring communication and interactivity. The creative use of digital media, in the Island available only from the black market if you’re Cuban and have no official reason to buy it) make the work of OMNI an action of critical, conscious and highly ethic hacktivism, which brings together all the media you can use, to experiment without limits and conditions ... Naked from every superstructure, technology becomes one of the greatest ways to realize social action..." From Omni Zona Franca: Hacktivism and Networking with a Low Budget Technology by Lucrezia Cippitelli, newmediaFIX.

Playful Interaction and Goal-Oriented Gaming

Game/Play: Playful Interaction and Goal-oriented Gaming Explored Through Media Arts Practice ::
The exhibition opens at two different venues, in the UK and then joins, to tour as a single touring show. Game/Play is a networked national touring exhibition in the UK, focusing on the rhetorical constructs game and play. This collaboration between Q Arts, Derby and HTTP Gallery, London provides a basis for exchange and interaction between audiences, artists, curators and writers through the exhibitions and networked activity.

Enjoy the Ermajello performance of Plankton at Q Arts :: test drive Mary Flanagan's [giantJoystick] at HTTP :: view the works and connect and collaborate with visitors in both :: galleries in the online :: multiuser spaces of Furtherfield's VisitorsStudio and Endless Forest by Tale of Tales.

Projects fall under three main categories: installations, independent video games, and online (networked) artworks. Game/Play opens at two venues, HTTP Gallery and Q Arts. Curated by Giles Askham, Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow, Corrado Morgana & Louise Clements.

Game/Play Artists: Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, Jetro Lauha, Julian Oliver, Kenta Cho, Mary Flanagan, Low Brow Trash, Paul Granjon, Simon Poulter, Giles Askham, Jakub Dvorsky, Long Journey Home, PRU, Q Club, Furtherfield, Tale of Tales.

Game/Play Writers: Giles Askham / Jon Bird / Peter Bowcott / Javier Candeira / Rebecca Cannon / Ele Carpenter, Ruth Catlow, Louise Clements, Mary Flanagan, Marc Garrett, Keiron Gillen, Mark R Hancock, Martijn Hendriks, Pat Kane, Ana-Marija Koljanin, Maaike Lauwaert, Corrado Morgana, Patrick Lichty, Christiane Paul, Thomas Petersen, Andy Pollaine, Jonathan Willett.

HTTP Gallery
Saturday 22 July 7pm – 9pm.
Unit A2, Arena Business Centre,
71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY

Q Arts:
21 July 6.30pm – 8.30pm Q Arts – Gallery
35/36 Queen Street,
Derby, DE1 3DS

a continuously touring festival without beginnings or endings

In addition to putting audio and video files in your iTunes podcast feed, you can also feed an Adobe PDF file to your listeners.

No, it’s not a Arabic take on everyone’s favorite plumber. Super Serif Brothers is a Lode Runner style game that takes it’s visual cues from the old school RPG NetHack.

the horse bazaar has a 20m long video screen of 6 tiled projectors on a dataton system. Amazing place, which i was in australia, man

like rfid, but more processing power and memory. Hard to imagine how these will be adopted when rfid is still struggling, but interesting

>FullServ-ipsh! services include planning mobile media advertising opportunities; negotiating and buying; comprehensive measurement; optimising and reporting. The agency will also integrate mobile with all other media channels.

A short blogversation last week about virals has prompted my curiosity to dig into YouTube and to carry out a systematic content analysis of the most viewed videos in an attempt to get under the skin of the viral phenomena. Put differently, I wanted to get a better grasp of what makes people tick when it comes to viral content with a strong emphasis on user generated content.

that Halter thought to check is another sign of how plugged in he is. THe Hezbollah-produced videogame was taken down, unless it's just that the servers are among the Lebanese circuits that are fried.

The Consumerist notes that when Comcast broadband TV re-broadcast a recent edition of the TV show Nightline, they conveniently edited out the portion of the program that mentioned one of their techs getting humiliated Web-wide for falling asleep at a residential broadband install.

In a major announcement today in New York, Sony launched the first ever camcorders to utilize the new AVCHD format for recording video to DVD and non-tape media. The new HDR-UX1 is a DVD camcorder that will hit stores in September, and retail for about $1400. The HDR-SR1, also announced today, is the first hard disk drive camcorder to record high definition video. The HDR-SR1 will be available in October with an initial retail price of approximately $1500.

The Acceleration Studies Foundation is wrapping up its work on a first version of the Metaverse Roadmap, a document designed to look ahead at the next 10 years of the metaverse, and to be updated along the way. (I participated in the meetings that gathered thoughts for the Roadmap back in May.) To celebrate, the ASF is holding a pre-release party at EyeBeam in New York City on Thursday, August 10. The party is free and open to all, but space is limited, so RSVP on Jerry Paffendorf’s Sheep blog to reserve your ticket.

EyeBeam, of course, is the cool hacker’s collective (actually, it “engages cultural dialogue at the intersection of the arts and sciences,” but we know what they’re really up to over there) that produced the OpenGL Extractor, which let’s you export stuff from virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and even 3D-print your avatar — and which has caused a lot of agita among some SL residents concerned about its use as an IP-stealing device. Mike Frumin, who helps run the place, has been a great friend of various metaversal initiatives, and was kind enough to help Jerry secure the space for the party.

I’ll definitely be there — which is good, since part of the event involves an on-stage conversation between me and Prokofy Neva, who’s consistently been one of the most outspoken monitors of the metaverse, and who brings a unique and important viewpoint to the development of Second Life culture, technology and society. Let me know if there are any topics you’d like to see discussed during the event and I’ll see if I can get them in. See you there.

culture, events, metaverse, Second Life, virtual worlds, World of Warcraft

Let's say Lulu TV videos attracted 1M Viewers in one month. If you got 10,000 of those, that's 1%. So you get 1% of the cash pool.

I'm a huge fan of RSS feeds, in part because they're perfect for niche media. You don't have to publish every day to earn your way to my reading habits. Just make sure you've got a feed and if your focus intersects with my interests, I'll subscribe. When you publish I'll get it--no need for me to bookmark it and make a note to check it regularily. (I've written more about this here).

At this point virtually everything I read is via a feed, with one glaring exception--my Wikipedia watchlist. It's the only bookmark I still use. So I was delighted to discover this morning that finally Wikipedia has feeds! Thanks to Steve Rubel for the heads-up:

Wikipedia has added RSS feeds to the 1.25 million entries in the encyclopedia. This means you can now more easily track the revision history for important articles, such as those about people, brands or corporations. Simply click on the history link at the top of any entry page and you will see the RSS link on the left hand side

From -> alex galloway
Carnivore -- new Version 2.2 now available http://r-s-g.org/carnivore new features include the ability to log packets to a text file and the ability to record and playback capture sessions. questions/comments/suggestions always welcome.. + + + Version 2.2, July 2006 + moved java class files around so that there is a "core" engine responsible for all ... [more]

Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called "clients." These clients are designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients.

Originally posted by alex galloway from Rhizome.org Rare, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 13, 2006 at 09:12 AM

Who would have ever thought the networks would take sloppy seconds from cable? An interesting trend is emerging this summer in TV land. First-run cable shows are being immediately rerun on the networks. Project Runway we reair on Monday nights at 8pm on NBC after airing first on Bravo on Wednesday at 10pm. ABC has been rerunning ABC Family’s Kyle XY and Fox has rerun FX's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. To me this proves people watch shows, not networks. It’s basically low-tech TiVo.

new media art. emusic. hacktivism.

NEURAL N.25: new media art .Siegfried Zielinski interview. .Olia Lialina interview. Christophe Bruno interview. .Identity in the age of digital technologies. news: Ten-sided, ten identities in a blog, Emotion's Defibrillator, consciousness short circuit, Camera Obscura 2005/1-Inf, memetic photographic virus, Confess.or, one to many confessions, Difference Engine, extracting the metaphysics from the net. reviews: ..books / dvd / cd-rom: Satellite of Love; M.Eraso, A.Ludovico, S.Krekovic - The Mag.net reader; A. Cerveira Pinto - META.morfosis; M.Jahrmann, M.Moswitzer - Ludic Society Magazine #1 + #2; T.Corby - Network Art; V. Baroni - Postcarts; J.Juul - Half-Real.

emusic .Andrea Polli interview. Snog interview. Derek Holzer interview. news: 4'04" Sound not found, Pianolina, the interactive piano, Dewanatron, cranking electronics, eShofar, folk tradition and technology, Amy e Klara, machinic male - dicta. reviews: books / dvd / cd+: A.Hugill - 'Pataphysics; Microscope Session DVD 2.0; Live Cinema 01; G.Kiers+L. van der Velden - Sonic Acts XI; AGF.3 & Sue.C - Mini Movies; V.Moorefield - The Producer as Composer; Y.Kawamura - Slide. .cd reviews: Aphex Twin, Francisco Lopez, Luc Ferrari, John Hegre & Maja Ratkje, Autechre / The Hafler Trio, Doddodo, Howard Stelzer / Giuseppe Ielasi, Jarrod Fowler, Warren Burt, Hyper, Rf, Pure, Alvars Orkester, Miller + Fiam, Rlw, Crawling With Tarts, Scatole Sonore/Impro Ensemble, Product, Incidental Amplifications, Refractions.

hacktivism .Raqs Media Collective interview. Fernando Llamos interview. Hacking Biometrics. news: Monolith, copyright hacking, Un_wiki, Wikipedia radical polemic, Movie Mapper, The Brand Hype Database, Pneumatic Parliament, instant democracy, Zone Interdite, mapping secret territories. reviews: books / dvd / cd+:F.Stalder - Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks, B.Marenko - DiY Survival, M.Gerritzen - Beautiful World, M.Vishmidt + M.A.Francis + J.Walsh + L. Sykes - Media Mutandis.

I had the somewhat surreal experience last night of participating in a focus group on the California energy industry. My experience was odd because, about a quarter of the way through, the moderator was called out by the faceless folks behind the mirror, and when he returned, he asked that I, in essence, keep my mouth shut. I literally knew too much about the world of energy production, distribution and efficiency to make a good focus group participant. I was told that they'd love to hear what I had to say at the end, if there was enough time. I did manage to sneak a couple of comments in here and there, but I ended up being more an observer than anything else.

Some things about the focus group are worth noting, however. The primary California power company, Pacific Gas & Electric, is going all-out to make itself into a leading renewable/"green"/"clean" energy producer, with upcoming programs including state-wide smart meters, wave power, and a goal of 20% of California energy coming from wind and solar by 2010. More importantly, every one of the participants in the focus group (which included stay-at-home moms, retirees, pink collar workers, executives, and a few hard to categorize folks) wanted to see PG&E do more to drive to renewable energy. Even the one guy for whom lower energy prices was a top priority put increased renewable power as his number two. That the power company is trending green is heartening; that the citizenry is leading them that way is even more so.

• Phrase of the Week: "Aspirational Terrorists." David Stephenson notes the term in the coverage of the apparent plan to bomb tunnels between New York and New Jersey. The wording seems to encompass both those who talk tough but don't have realistic plans for carrying out their threats (so-called "jihadi bravado," a fascinating language mix used by the FBI) and those who may be a bit more capable, but have no direct links to existing groups and have yet to turn plans into action. This is an important piece of re-framing, as it is a sign the people engaged in counter-terrorism work are moving away from casting any possible terrorist cell as "al Qaida" (as if it were a structured organization with branch offices) and towards the "netwar" view articulated by John Robb (among others), in which "al Qaida" isn't an organization, it's a brand.

(By the way, if you haven't read The Advent of Netwar, by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, do so soon -- it's easily the best articulation of the changing nature of conflict I've ever read, and its observations about the role of guerrilla movements come across as prescient, given that Advent was published in 1996!)

• Of Red Suns and Ethnic Cleansing Online: Netwar of a different sort. Terra Nova links to reports of nationalist/ethnic conflict in Asian online games. One report tells of Korean Lineage players hunting down Chinese players, while the other discusses a virtual uprising in the Chinese game Netease over an in-game symbol looking something like the Japanese WW2 battle flag -- an uprising organized by a now-disbanded guild with a virulently anti-Japanese name.

It's probably a good thing that World of Warcraft doesn't allow the players who can speak to each other to kill each other (outside of easily-ignored duels). I could otherwise totally imagine "red state" and "blue state" players hunting each other in WoW as the 2006 and 2008 elections draw near.

• Participatory Panopticon goes Mainstream: Janet Kornblum of USA Today writes about the growing ubiquity of digital cameras and cameraphones, and the trend (primarily among young people) of posting images and videos of themselves for easy downloading by others. Kornblum's piece covers some of the same topics I've talked about in my various participatory panopticon explorations, and raises some new concerns, chiefly around young people telling too much about themselves, potentially ruining their own futures.

Most kids are posting for each other, but quickly are learning that the world also is watching.

Internet expert Nancy Willard has been warning parents about the possibly incriminating pictures their kids' friends may post online after graduation parties.

"Kids go to these parties, and everybody's going to have a camera," she says. "And when they finally wake up (the day after the party), they'll post all these really fun pictures on the Internet and maybe post names to go along with the pictures. Nobody has any ability to control what's going to happen with those images. And they can be damaging."

Such concerns strike me as artifacts of a pre-ubiquitous camera age ("ubicam?"). It's entirely possible that as we grow more accustomed to pervasive recording of ourselves and of others, and as more of the MySpace/YouTube/camerphone generation moves from school to the workplace, these worries will die down. There's a distinct scent of moral panic about these fears, as if stopping photos and videos of underage drinking or teen sexuality will somehow prevent the activities from taking place to begin with.

In a lovely twist on Sartre's notion that hell is other people, Paul Davies' Prayer Antenna project allows wearers to receive signals from god - "yes, your God."

As he explained to Regine:

"[T]he helmet works very simply. There are two radio transmitters out in the museum/gallery/whatever and they transmit the ambient sounds (people talking, etc) to the left and right channel of radio receivers hooked up to headphones inside the helmet (so each ear is a distinct source). The interactivity is the simple act of kneeling and putting your head into the helmet. What you hear is other people (what is god if not other people.) People mostly like it and they know right away without any prompting how they are suposed to interact with the sculpture."

This made me think of Elliott Malkin's work on religious technologies, like Crucifix NG and Modern Orthodox. And remember Soner Ozenc's Sajjadah 1426 prayer rug project? (Flash site, look under product design.) I also just searched Regine's site for a remote prayer project that I remembered because the interaction design equated (religious) ritual with "inefficiency": Kin. And I recalled Susana Ruiz, Kellee Santiago & Kurt MacDonald's Mobile Confessional and Louise Klinkers' Remote Confession Kit, but no doubt there are many other art/design projects I'm forgetting right now.

But back to this idea that god is other people. Alphonso Lingis says that "Today we understand 'the mind of God'—the origins and workings of the whole physical universe—but not the mind of another of our own species." (The whole lecture is well worth a listen.) Lingis writes and talks about how trust comes before belief, and before reason, and that has interesting implications for religion, technology and social interaction. But what if we took god and the universe to be other people? Isn't this precisely the kind of idea that compels us to trust others we don't know and don't understand, to become intimate with strangers?

In conversation with Mary Zournazi, Lingis also talks about the language of hospitality, the kind of communication that is "not really an exchange of messages" but rather "a kind of murmur, a kind of warmth, a kind of spreading and resonance across space." He relates this to the kind of communication that happens when we talk nonsense with our friends, the kind of interaction that relies on discontinuities, like laughing in the middle of a serious conversation or abruptly leaving one's location, that lends space for hope:

"[I] have found with friends when you actually start talking [a problem] out you are really fixing and solidifying the conflicts: marking them. But if you were to go away for a couple of weeks or couple of months, other things may have started in your life, and you are not quite the same person anymore. And maybe you could just put aside your quarrel without ever having resolved it, because you are now both somewhat different people...[Y]ou establish a discontinuity, in which something new gets born."

The key point Lingis is making here is that we trust not because we come to the truth of things, but because we become unknown or incomprehensible to ourselves and each other and we have to start again.

(This sense of discontinuity reminds me of the Quechua and Aymara concept of pachakuti, which refers to a cataclysm or reversal of space/time in which all social relations are re-formulated and life begins anew. The term also finds its way into recent Bolivian indigenous social and political movements that draw from both Andean culture history and Christian millenarianism.)

My point is that this matter of trust is fundamental to our experience of community and yet we often, in the name of efficiency, do everything we can to prevent discontinuities (glitches, resets) from happening in communication technologies. But I'm not sure that to design either with seamlessness or seamfulness in mind is enough - I think we need gaps instead of grooves: spaces and times and people that split apart, instead of being marked or joined by seams. We still need to create space for hope, space to become different people together.

Back to the question of religion and technology, Intel researchers are the only corporate folks I know specifically investigating their intersections. (They're currently looking for interns to study "love and spirituality and its intersection with computers and technology, in and around the home.") And I suspect all of this is directly related to Genevieve Bell's research interests and influence, which makes it not only ethnographically but anthropologically informed. For more of Genevieve's work on technology and religion, check out:

Mobile Phones and Spirituality, on BBC Radio 4 in 2005

Getting to God: Technology, Religion and the New Enlightenment, Alex Pang's notes on a talk at the IFTF in 2004

Does Jesus do SMS?: Religion, Technology and Ubiquitous Computing, Melissa Ho's notes on a lecture at SIMS in 2004

Hmmm. Maybe I should ask her about trust and hope and technology? We've talked before about intimacy and risk, and I think this is related.

More good stuff from Canada:

The Surveillance Project

"The Surveillance Project researches the ways in which personal data are processed. We explore why information about people has become so important in the 21st century and what are the social, political and economic consequences of this trend. Questions of 'privacy' and of 'social sorting' are central to our concerns.

Surveillance is 'any systematic attention to a person's life aimed at exerting influence over it' (James Rule). So The Surveillance Project studies everything from supermarket loyalty cards to police networks searching for suspects. We have a special interest in the surveillance aspects of post 9/11 quest for tightened security. While high-tech methods have become very significant, we also examine surveillance as face-to-face supervision or as mediated watching using video cameras.

Surveillance is not simply about large organizations using sophisticated computer equipment. It is also about how ordinary people - citizens, workers, travelers, and consumers - interact with surveillance. Some comply, others negotiate, and yet others resist. The Surveillance Project explores how expanding flows of personal data affect and are affected by everyday life."

In addition to top-notch work by research director and sociology professor David Lyon, he and his colleagues are active participants in public forums. For June 2007 they're organising National ID Card Systems: an International Research Workshop (abstracts due next month) and a really interesting-sounding Surveillance Summer Seminar.

See also:

Location Technologies: Mobility, Surveillance and Privacy: A Report to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2005 (pdf)

Image by REGIERUNGonline Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, has been videoblogging for more than a month.

German chancellor Angela Merkel probably was the first high-level politician to start her own video podcast over a month ago. It's perfect public relations, although the first issues were still stiff and more like TV presentations. Her first show was ridiculed on YouTube.

ommitment to blogging perhaps is more serious than anybody thought at first. The popular videoblog Xolo.tv was able to get a long interview with her about videoblogging. You can watch it on their site today. Don't expect any tough questions, however.

No question -- no German chancellor (or perhaps any national leader anywhere) has ever before granted an interview to a videoblogger. It's fantastic. I can understand that it must be overwhelming for a blogger to be admitted into the Bundeskanzleramt (Germany's federal chancellery) and to be shown around by the chancellor herself.

Isn't it astonishing that a chancellor would consent to be interviewed by a blogger -- maybe even in preference to an interview by a traditional journalist? Is it possible that the German government's PR officials calculated that such a move would probably generate positive feedback?

In some ways the Xylo-TV interview is the perfect follow-up to the World Cup craze we recently experienced here in Germany. It's a continuation of the theme: "We're all wonderful, our guests are wonderful, let's party and forget about misfortunes that might exist anywhere."

I'm sorry, I don't want to be a killjoy. But that's too much naive enthusiasm for me. I think that bloggers -- like journalists, like everybody -- should remember that there is no free lunch. No chancellor invites anyone on the spur of the moment.

Therefore, I think that in a democracy anybody who gets the chance to interview the highest representative of a government is obliged to ask questions that others don't have the opportunity to ask.

Am I old fashioned? Perhaps. All I can say is that we'll never know what would have happened if the first blogger who interviewed our chancellor had dared to ask one tough question. Perhaps another blogger will get a chance and we'll find out how that works.

(Manufacturing citizen content. -kc.)

Just received a patch to the YouTube greasemonkey script I posted a long time ago.

This one should work with the updates YouTube has made to its website.

Right-click to install User Script

Downloaded files must be renamed with a .flv file extension and played back in a Flash Video capable media player.

"Port of Python 2.4.3 to the Nintendo DS, specifically, a port of the Stackless version of Python."

"WiFiMe is a special program sent to the DS using Wireless Multi Boot to trick the Nintendo DS into running unsigned code. This hack allows homebrew software to be run from a GBA flash cartridge. WiFiMe only works on DS versions 3 or below. It can also be used to install FlashMe."

"In order to build an asset, the Identity Provider has to stop giving its crown jewels - identity data - to its customers. It can do this simply by changing what it puts into the claims it hands out to Relying Parties. Instead of answering a Relying Party's query "How old is Bob?" with the claim "Bob is 45", it can answer "How old is Bob?" with the claim "Bob is over 18". Instead of answering the query "Is Bob a good credit risk?" with the claim "Bob's credit history is (fifty-page report goes here)", it can answer "Is Bob a good credit risk?" with the claim "97% of people with credit histories similar to Bob's repaid loans of under $200,000 on time."

"While these technical developments are important, Fader adds there's a particular technology -- the addition of video playback to Adobe System's ubiquitous Flash Player -- that has helped online video explode. The Flash software, bundled with all the major web browsers, allows rich media to be displayed on the web without requiring a separate media player. 'I don't think people fully appreciate the transformation Flash has created,' says Fader."

Newsreaders and RSS aggregators aren't known for being particularly flashy. But some mashups transform headlines, photos and other ephemeral nuggets into expressive exhibitions. The result? Bohemian RSS! By Eli Milchman.

If you haven't been following what's been going on in Lafayette Louisiana, they've been having quite a technology battle. The local telco and cable company (BellSouth and Cox) have been spending millions of dollars fighting a proposed muni-fiber offering that the residents of the city voted for. The people of the city voted for it, even after push polls (designed to influence the vote, not accurately predict it) and silly threats from the incumbents. Ever since it was approved, however, the incumbents have been able to hold up the deployment by fighting it in court. Cox and BellSouth, of course, claim that such a muni network would represent unfair competition -- something they should know an awful lot about, since Cox was recently accused of anti-competitive practices in blocking out competitors in certain new housing developments. Apparently, from their point of view, "unfair competition" is just about any competition. Competition, of course, might force them to do something like offer more competitive rates -- something studies have shown isn't really happening yet. With that in mind, is it really any surprise to hear that Cox is now raising their cable rates in the city, even as they try to convince the courts that the muni-fiber network would be bad for the people of the city?

Boardpusher is a site that is like Cafe Press, except you make skateboards. So, there’s a bit of fiddling going on with the Slackstreet Skateboard Store.

I learned about this from someone who sells virtual skateboards, and in her profile, links to her store on BP. And, if you want some good metaverse reading, check out this kick ass article (long) from the Boston Phoenix.

Which is not to imply that they've won any other cases, the rest have simply been settled.

My Second Life avatar, Abdi Kembla.

The latest issue of the Boston Phoenix has one of the best articles I've ever read about Second Life. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Second Life is an immersive, multiuser virtual environment where the entire world is created by the participants. More than 200,000 people have created virtual characters, or avatars, which they use to construct their own islands. What's on these islands? Everything you can imagine - surf shops, casinos, libraries, drive-in movie theatres, even refugee camps. If you've never tried it, Second Life is an extraordinary experience.

As it turns out, I was interviewed for the article, because my SL avatar, Abdi Kembla, is African. Most SL avatars tend to look like idealized versions of the people who created them, or bizarre fantasy characters straight out of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. So I decided to try something different and create an avatar modeled on a former child soldier from Somalia.

Here's my small contribution to the article:

Another real-world person experimenting with an entirely different SL persona is Boston-based blogger Andy Carvin. Last fall he joined SL as Andy Chowderhead, but he got “bored with it” and decided to create Abdi Kembla, an African refugee he modeled after photos he found online of former Somalian child soldiers.

“Previously, when I used my old Andy Chowderhead avatar, I found people were more likely to come over, say hello, and start a conversation. But with Abdi, people tended to just act as if I just weren’t even there,” says Carvin, who estimates that he spent between 20 and 30 hours in February and March exploring as Abdi. “The more I traveled through SL, the more I realized I seemed to be the only African-looking character around anywhere.” He adds, “I encountered gnomes, floating beams of light, characters that were shaped like boxes, elves, everything you can imagine — but no African-looking characters.”

"I think Second Life will be like the Web eventually," says Aimee Weber. "Almost everything cool will need to have a 3-d presence online."
In general, you can lump Second Life avatars into two categories: hot or fantastic. Women are mostly busty, hourglass-figured, and sexy. Men tend to be buff and handsome. “More often than not, people have a picture in their head of what they look like at their best: very few people want to have their avatar look like they just woke up, haven’t shaved, [have] bad breath, and gained a few pounds after the wedding,” theorizes Andy Carvin. Otherwise, avatars tend to be surreal — think Snoopy, dragons, and “furries.”

a very well-done, well-researched article, so please check it out. -andy

Wow, it is hard to hate GSM when you read news like this. Vodaphone, a leading foreign GSM provider, just launched their HSDPA wireless network at burst speeds of 1.8Mbps. Although the data card launched is a standard PC card, they also plan to offer a USB HSDPA modem as well as an ExpressCard version.

The cost of the USB and Card version is estimated at $399, but in turn the device will have scalability to be flashed to take advantage of the future 3.6Mbps network upgrade.

1.8 and 3.6Mb wireless networks, that really shows that the US is in the stone age when it come to wireless data.

Read More

USC’s Annenberg School for Communication — home of the Annenberg Studies on Computer Games team and the Center for Public Diplomacy (which we’ve blogged about before), as well as many other innovative programs — is “seeking to hire one or two scholars whose research illuminates the formation, functioning and impact of online communities.” More information after the jump.

New Position: Online Communities and Communication
USC Annenberg School for Communication

The USC Annenberg School for Communication is launching a major research and teaching initiative to study online communities. The initiative will investigate if and how communities that are supported by network technologies and the Internet are transforming our sense of community and our social, political and economic lives. It will explore how online communities are developed for and by diverse populations. It will teach students how to build and understand online communities. We are seeking to hire one or two scholars whose research illuminates the formation, functioning and impact of online communities. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in hand at time of application. Special consideration will be given to junior scholars with a track record of high quality published research on issues relevant to online communities and new technology. The appointment is tenure-track and open rank, although special consideration will be given to junior scholars. We encourage candidates who seek to work with colleagues from a broad range of specializations and methodological approaches. The School of Communication is a leader in the implementation of USC’s new strategic plan, which emphasizes innovation in interdisciplinary research that addresses societal needs, along with the Annenberg School’s particular emphasis on communication in the public interest, new communication technologies, globalization, and entertainment as communication and cultural content. Applicants should send their curriculum vita, three letters of recommendation, and samples of their work to Online Communities Search, Mr. Justin Acome, School of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0281, acome@usc.edu, (213) 740-0934. Inquiries can also be made to the Search Committee Chair, Professor Janet Fulk, fulk@usc.edu (213) 740-0941. Review of applications is continuing and we are targeting a December 2006 decision date for a July 1, 2007 start date. USC is an AA/EO employer and is seeking to create a diverse community.

education, games, governance, Politics, Social software

This is a cool idea: SL resident Spin Martin (aka media-maker Eric Rice) is starting a Second Life travel agency, tpTravel, and is seeking people to contribute content to its blog, for which they’ll be paid US$10 per (approved) post. VTOR linked the news, which came from the SLProfiles site.

We’ve created a new company called tpTravel, and it’s exactly what it sounds like… a travel agency within Second Life for Second Life, headquartered on the sim of Slackstreet. We are looking for well traveled residents to take snapshots, write descriptive posts, and create landmarks, SLurls, and machinima tours for posting on the blog that supports tpTravel.

As always, my question is: Will anyone actually use this? Could be. Especially if it were linked to a third-party portal to SL, it could be a great resource for new residents.

The other question it raises is paying for blog content. This is something I’ve been considering for 3pointD for a while now, though I’m not sure whether I have the budget for it at the moment. I’d love to hear from people with opinions on this. Is $10 a reasonable amount to pay for a post’s worth of content on a blog like tpTravel’s or 3pointD? How else could a blog like this (or like Spin’s) recruit authors? Ideas? And if you are interested in contributing to 3pointD, I’d love to hear from you. No guarantees that this kind of thing is going to start anytime soon, but I’d like to start talking to people, at any rate.

3pointD, blogging, Second Life, work

Some ten thousand Chinese game players stage an anti-Japanese protest inside an online game called The Fantasy of the Journey West, reports the The Sydney Morning Herald.

A reporter for the Beijing Evening News, reported that 10,000 game players "from around the nation gathered to express their dissatisfaction or anger". He later witnessed an area of the game known as the Summer Palace "filled with the IDs of all the dissatisfied game players".

the protests showed some among the crowd of avatar activists carrying posters condeming the use of the much-despised symbol.

Yahoo! and Microsoft's instant messaging networks are now able to exchange messages between users. A Windows Live Messenger user can IM with their Yahoo! buddies within the Windows Live application and without having a Yahoo! account. Same thing in reverse for Yahoo! users. These initial features are just the beginning of planned interoperability between Yahoo! and Microsoft's networks.

The interoperability should be especially popular in east Asia, where Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger are extremely popular. Desktop clients based on open-source libraries such as Gaim currently provide a single client for text-messaging access to multiple networks today, and the large networks mainly turn a blind eye to what could be considered rogue clients.

The original version of MSN Messenger, launched in 1999, included interoperability with AOL Instant Messenger that was shut off and turned on again through rapid patches on both sides. Although it is possible to bind to AOL's OSCAR servers and create custom clients, AOL's current developer terms of service prohibit clients "that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network." Apple Computer signed a deal with AOL in 2002 establishing iChat as an officially licensed product.

Any IM network could interoperate with Google Talk over XMPP and TLS. Google and AOL have announced plans for Google Talk and AIM interoperability "provided certain conditions are met" after Google's investment of $1 billion in AOL last year. Google previously offered the Trillian multi-protocol instant messenger as part of its Google Pack software package but has since removed the software from its bundled offering.

Instant messaging networks are the first step towards defining a broad social network across multiple networks and service providers. The more information a search company can collect about the preferences of you and your friends, the better targeted search results and advertisements they are able to serve back to the user (at a higher advertising fee of course). You can expect more interactions and data exchange between large networks as these companies try to learn more about you, your friends, and your favorite online activities.

Vlogger Josh Wolf Charged with Civil Contempt:

"After being excused by the Federal Grand Jury last month, the Assistant US Attorney is bringing civil contempt charges against vlogger Josh Wolf after all."

Josh is a friend, please support him.

Josh Wolf’s Grand Jury Resource Page.

I wrote about mobile manga earlier, now the article MANGA ON THE MOVE, Cellphone Comics Are Latest Commuter Pastime (May 30, 2006), offers some of the secrets of success:

Apart from the ever-increasing range of titles, two main factors appear to be behind the comics' success. One is their low prices of around ¥40 to ¥60 (40¢ to 60¢) per story, which makes them quite a bargain. The other is convenience. Readers can download only those comics that they want to read, as opposed to paying for a whole magazine with numerous comic strips in it. Not only that, but readers of electronic comics need not deal with the burden of carrying around bulky magazines.

When the comics were first offered, most were aimed at men, particularly office workers who commute on public transportation. But the number of female readers has since grown rapidly, now that reading from mobile phones is considered cool. In response, publishers are working on providing female-oriented comics for mobile-phone subscribers. This development may provide an additional boost to the market - from men who are fans of girls' comics but would be embarrassed to be seen buying such magazines in stores.

The IEEE has published a new book, "WirelessMAN : Inside the IEEE 802.16 Standard for Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks," an overview of WirelessMAN technology. It offers guidance in how to apply it to create broadband wireless components, systems and test equipment and was authored by the IEEE 802.16 Working Group's Chair, Dr. Roger B. Marks, its Vice Chair, Kenneth L. Stanwood, and three group participants -- Carl Eklund, Subbu Ponnuswamy and Dr. Nico J.M. van Waes.

"We created this volume as an essential companion to standards in the IEEE 802.16 family," says Roger Marks. "Its goal is to help designers, engineers, students and others rapidly understand the basics of IEEE 802.16 standards and how to work with them without having to devote extensive time in deciphering the dense text in the standards."

The book introduces metropolitan broadband wireless access networks and places them in context with respect to other wireless and wireline networks. It explains the rationale behind the choices made in creating IEEE 802.16 standards and reviews the technology they define, such as the medium access control and physical layers. It also explores the practical issues and options involved in creating WirelessMAN systems.

It can be purchased through the IEEE bookstore ($65) or Amazon. The book can also be obtained by e-mailing customer-service@ieee.org or by calling either +1 800-678-4333 in the U.S. and Canada or +1 732-981-0060 from other locales.

Frank Ohrtman of WMX Systems, also wrote a book on WiMAX, and says "the IEEE 802.20 committee has voted itself out of existence. That statement seems to be unsubstaniated. The IEEE did suspended 802.20 deliberations, but a move by the 802.20 to vote itself out of existance would be news.

It wouldn't be unpresidented, explains, says the EE Times. The 802.15.3a task group disbanded after failing to settle on an ultrawideband standard, and the 802.11n task group on next-generation wireless LANs, saw private companies launch a coalition outside the group in an attempt to muscle through a standard.

Related Dailywireless articles include; Clearwire's $900M Payday, IEEE Suspends 802.20 Deliberations, Mobile WiMAX: It Begins, WiMAX at Globecomm, WiMAX World Europe, Navini Mobilizes at 2 Dot 3, Intel's Mobile WiMAX Chip Due, Mobile WiMAX: The Attack Plan, Navini Ships Mobile WiMAX Ready Gear, XM Buys 2.3GHz, City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup and Mobile WiMax: It's Done.

AV Producer has an article comparing HDV vs. DV workflow on a Adobe OpenHD certified box.

Via DCN

I've known Katherine Isbister for quite a while now; she wrote the excellent piece on Becky Schaefer's Lara Croft-inspired needlepoint art a few years ago. Katherine has a background in the social sciences which served her well when she moved over into game design. She now has a book out -- Better Game Characters By Design: A Psychological Approach.

One of the first times I met her was when she was working at a lab in Kyoto developing an effective virtual tour guide to the city. We had interesting conversations over ramen about how information can be packaged in an emotionally charged character. She then went on to teach a course at Stanford University, where I helped judge a contest among her students for best game character design (Tim Schafer was co-judge, and that's where I met him for the first time.)

Then she moved away to upstate New York to teach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she founded a Games research Lab. Sounds like she is doing well!

If you thought the FCC's insipid indecency crackdown was out of control, just wait. Now the agency has asked the networks for tapes of recent live sports and news events to comb them for cuss words. "It looks like they want to end live broadcast TV," said one exec. "We already know that they aren't afraid to go after news." Says another exec, "They asked us for tapes with a specific emphasis on crowd noise. If some bozo in the crowd calls the ref an asshole, the commission is asking for a copy of the tape." Simply unbelievable.

blip.tv (beta)
Check it out!

Here are the 3 books:
Videoblogging by Jay Dedman and Joshua Paul.
Secrets of Videoblogging by Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand and Shirley Craig
Videoblogging For Dummies by S. C. Bryant

Here is the one that Peter didn't buy:
Hands-On Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting : Emerging Media Tools for Business Communication

There are a group of folks who just love to criticize Wikipedia -- usually because they want it to be something it's not. As long as people understand the methodology in creating Wikipedia entries, there's really no issue at all. That's why it seemed so bizarre last week, after reports of Ken Lay's death showed up, that Reuters ran what was a pretty useless article about how Ken Lay's Wikipedia changed rapidly after reports of his death came out -- and some of those changes were somewhat different than the eventual story that came out. There's nothing particularly newsworthy there. Like any breaking story, some of the details may get confused at the beginning, but as the details become clearer the story gets crafted. Plenty of mainstream news stories have experienced the same exact thing. In fact... it happened in this very Reuters article. Slashdot points to someone who noticed the irony over the fact that Reuters needed to issue its very own correction on the story after it got its sources confused. What's even more ironic is, of course, that there are still plenty of versions of the uncorrected Reuters piece out there, but over at Wikipedia you can easily look back at the history yourself and see the corrections. So, where's Reuters breathless article on how Reuters' mistake "underscores the challenges" facing a news agency like Reuters "which as the news was breaking offered a variety of [sources] for [its story]"?

While most of the attention paid to Ted Stevens' telco reform bill concerns network neutrality, when it was first announced the thing that stood out even more was the bizarre inclusion of the "audio flag" that the entertainment industry has been pushing for years. It serves no purpose in a telco bill, other than to reward the entertainment industry in their business negotiations with companies like XM, who are trying to provide perfectly legal tools to allow people to record the satellite radio they pay for. Now comes the news that Senator Bill Frist finds this particular issue so important that he won't let the telco reform bill move forward unless it contains the audio flag language. Apparently, Senator Frist doesn't think you should be able to record the satellite radio you paid for. Once again, this has nothing to do with telecom reform, but is simply a way to get technology and consumer electronics firms to first ask permission from the entertainment industry before they can innovate. And, since the entertainment industry is afraid of any innovation that doesn't keep their business model as is, there would be a lot less innovation. This might be a good time to re-read Gary Shapiro's history lesson about all of the technology innovations the entertainment industry tried to stop -- only to later discover (kicking and screaming the whole way), how they helped the industry grow tremendously.

I’m often asked to provide a business justification for pursuing the tools and rights frameworks to enable remix culture. I have various stock answers for this, usually focusing on the potential for improved search or cheaper ways of achieving mass customization of media. This evening, while reading the introduction to David Hesmondhalgh’s The Cultural Industries, I came across another concept that I think gets at why media companies ought to embrace the remixing of their content. Hesmondhalgh, citing Garnham, points out that the media and entertainment industry is very high risk. To manage that risk, media companies attempt to build a diverse “cultural repertoire” or range of cultural products. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad catalog of productions, at least one is likely to hit it big.

Allowing and encouraging remix is a way that media companies can expand their cultural repertoires not just at the level of individual works, but also at the level of the possible expressions of those works. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad set of variants of that production, at least one is likely to hit it big. Electronic music producers caught on to this a long time ago–witness the number of remixes (for the street, for the club, for headphones) that hot hip-hop or dance singles receive. But even they are only scratching the surface of what could be achieved by relinquishing control over the creation of derivative works to radically expand their cultural repertoires.

Icon, developed by Lopez Revol , is a wrist band and a pair of rings.

The wrist band has an duochromatic OLED Display wich shows SMS, incoming calls, and can also works as a watch or show some dynamic graphics. The rest of the band is rubber, this piece is interchangeable, with different colors and sizes.

The rings are made for the thumb, they´re made of rubber, are flexible and are opened, so they can fit to many sizes of thumbs. They have a line that glow in different colors (red or white) when you receive a message or a call. Both of the products connect to the 7280 phone (exclusively) via Bluetooth.

reBlogged from Yanko Design

Futuresonic celebrates this year its 10th anniversary with an amazing line-up of performances, exhibitions and events across Manchester city centre. This festival of electronic art and music will take place on July 20-23. That's very soon (only got my ticket yesterday!)

There will be the Social Technologies Summit, a series of conferences that explore "a whole new way of doing things in the air". I'm particularly thrilled at the idea of making a fool of myself at the Social Art panel. How will i not? I'll be speaking with two persons i admire a lot: super clever Jose Luis de Vicente, critic and curator of major new media art festivals (Sonar, Art Futura, OFFF, etc.) and Anthony Dunne (his name has been mentioned about 100 times in this blog, he's Head of Interaction Design, Royal College of Art and the author of Design Noir, the Secret Life of Electronic Objects (together with FIona Raby) and Hertzian Tales. i nevertheless think that he should be fined for having such an annoying website).

Other talks include:
- a keynote by Toshio Iwai himself;
- Collaborative, Creative and Commercial Digital Mapping with another favourite of mine, Masaki Fujihata, but also Richard Peckham, and Steve Coast.
- Contested Spaces and RFID with a talk by Professor Tim Cresswell followed by a discussion of one of the most contested technologies of modern times, RFID. A session featuring Inke Arns, Rob van Kranenburg and Drew Hemment.
- Iterative Architecture (Built On An Internet Of Things). With speakers like Tom Carden, Matt Webb and Stanislav Roudavski this session should be both fun and brain-challenging,
- Social Music with Atau Tanaka, Last.fm, Share NYC.

There's more: two Urban Play exhibition. One is dedicated to mobile, locative and mapping technologies, the other to Musical Instruments. Both run from July 20 to 29 at the Museum of Science and Industry.

"AgoraVox puts together one of the first large-scale European initiatives for a totally free of charge "citizen journalism". AgoraVox is a multimedia platform available to every citizen willing to spread new information. It is based on tree core principles..."

In tomorrow's edition of Nature a team of researchers will publish results of a clinical trial of the BrainGate Neural Interface System, a "neuromotor prosthesis" developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems.

During 57 sessions Nagle learned to open simulated e-mail, draw circular shapes using a paint program on the computer and play a simple video game, "neural Pong," using only his thoughts.

The Cyberkinetics BrainGate System consists of a 4x4 millimeter sensor with 100 tiny electrodes, each thinner than a human hair.

This is amazing news to actually have a brain-implant already working on humans. What we know from science fiction has become a reality.
More details in this press-release. I guess the best way to get all the details is to go out tomorrow and get a copy of Nature. See also the Cyberkinetics site.

In “Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology” by Du, H.S, Wagner C., explore weblog success from a technology perspective (weblog-building technology or blogging tool).

Based on an examination of 126 highly successful weblogs tracked over a period of 3 months, we categorized weblogs in terms of popularity rank and growth, and evaluated the relationship between weblog success (in terms of popularity) and technology use. Our analysis indicates that weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used. We argue that technology characteristics affect the presentation and organization of weblog content, as well as the social interaction between bloggers, and in turn, affect weblog success or popularity improvement.
(…)
weblog-building technology has a direct impact on blog content. Since blogging technology is designed for authors to reduce web publication and communication effort (Du and Wagner, 2005), authors can focus on writing while the technology takes care of publishing, storage, link creation, and so forth. The less time and effort authors have to spend on these ancillary tasks, the more time they should be able to devote to content, thus resulting eventually in better content. A similar argument can be made for social value. Blogging technology that automates link creation, that identifies recent visitors (possibly with clickable back links, such as in ModBlog), or maintains subscriber lists and syndicates their content, will help create and maintain the social circle of bloggers, by significantly lowering the effort to link to and visit other sites. Here, technology’s enabling character is reflected through its usability and sociability of supporting weblog success at both content and social levels.

Du, HS, Wagner C. (2006) Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 64, No. 9. (September 2006), pp. 789-798.

One of the linchpins of the new NYTimes.com design is slipping into place finally … personalization feature My Times is now in limited beta for 5,000 registered NYTimes.com users who showed early interest (Some screenshots here). Plans call for adding subscribers in the same small batches while the shake-down cruise continues. Unlike TimesSelect, which is subscription-only, My Times eventually will be open to all registered users.
In some respects, it’s a template personalized news page with the features we expect from any major site — drill-down to specific areas, add RSS feeds, move modules around, select from suggested news sources, etc. Users can even add widgets although there aren’t many and there’s no visible way to make your own.
But the NYT is also playing its ace card: beyond-the-headlines expertise from its own journalists. A small number of staffers (26 at last count) have set up their own pages and are sharing their “sources” with other MyTimes users, who can bookmark and keep track of “My Journalists’ Pages.” This is in keeping with the over-the-top tagline: “My Times: Where the best minds in journalism help you edit the Web.” Users also can add the staffer sources to their own page. This doesn’t seem to work both ways. I’m told these are just a sample of the personalized staff pages; more will be added.
First thoughts: Smart idea to start in very limited fashion. It’s sluggish right now and still very much a work in progress. Once the logistics are settled, integrating My Times with TimesSelect would be valuable. It also will be interesting to see if they take this a step further and make non-journalists pages shareable. It’s not a customized home page, though — the NYT isn’t relinquishing the role of front-page editor to the user.

Filed under: Culture, Business

David Edery, Associate Director for Special Projects at the MIT CMS Program, reports that his team's recent studies have revealed that college students are five times more likely to consider themselves "big fans" of television properties than video game properties.

While Edery admits, "[it's] hard to say with any conviction what this really means," he supposes that the 'best' TV franchises are better at controlling a fan's mindshare than the 'best' video game franchises. Gaming may be eating into the pockets of TV's bigwigs, but most game publishers still have a lot to learn about creating that addictive IP.

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/feeds.joystiq.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~4/513368"/>

Art Brodsky of SavetheInternet.com partner organization Public Knowledge deflates industry hot air about choice in America's broadband marketplace, citing a recent report by Kagan Research that reveals little real price or choice competition between cable and telephone ISPs. Brodsky writes:

"We've argued that broadband is a duopoly, with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) statistics showing that just about everyone who has broadband gets it from either the telephone company or the cable company. The FCC has affirmatively pursued the policy of creating this situation, and it’s one of the main reasons we need a Net Neutrality policy. There is no real choice."

Brodsky writes that the new Kagan study, "Cable Modem Vs. DSL: Rivals Side-Step Big Price Wars So Far," shows not only a lack of competition in choice of broadband provider, a lack of real competition in broadband prices:

"Kagan puts it fairly simply: 'Though the battle for broadband access subscribers is intense, there’s no screaming price war between cable TV and telcos, and Kagan Research doesn’t expect one in the foreseeable future.'"

Kagan surveyed five top cable operators and four telephone companies in the first quarter this year. The average price for cable modem and DSL services were essentially the same across the country.

"These figures are national in scope, encompassing all sorts of markets – some with competition between the two and some without," Brodsky writes.

Broadband costs in the United States remain very high by global standards, according to "Broadband Reality Check," a 2005 report by Free Press, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America.

The cost of broadband in other countries has dropped dramatically while speeds have increased.

Not true for the United States. According to the Free Press report, on a per megabit basis, U.S. consumers pay 10 to 25 times more than broadband users in Japan, for example, while residential broadband speeds in countries like France, and South Korea are 10 to 25 times faster than the U.S. average. (For more, read Thomas Bleha's insightful report in Foreign Affairs,"Down to the Wire").

Don't believe the telco hype. The "fierce competition" among broadband platforms is seriously overstated. The FCC's own report shows that satellite and wireless broadband continue to lose market share. Today, cable and DSL providers control almost 98 percent of the residential and small-business broadband market.

Moreover, the Free Press report shows how such market control and lack of real competition combine to result in higher broadband costs to consumer (by comparison to other developed countries) and bigger profit margins for the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

For these corporations, killing Net Neutrality is just icing on the cake of a U.S broadband market that's already in their grip. Clearly they don't want more competition, but more control of a broadband marketplace that's already lagging behind the rest of the world.

I've been toying with some concepts about tags, shared tags and the ability to uses tags as an engine for various things...trying to find any sort of emergent behaviour that may mesh well with my various interests. While it's easy through del.icio.us to see the crowd, I'm wondering how I can dig up the wisdom (see also, Clive's Slate article and his recent pong post).


So I tossed together an experiment in processing, using some of the parsing code I had from Shrunq, and a java library called Classifier4J. It grabs each and every URL available from my del.icio.us feed, and parses and classifies each. The result is a 3D representation of my tags, where their Z-location is based upon the "ranking" of the tag -- much like a tag cloud -- with the actual terms used for classification pulsing behind. Once it's loaded you can click to have it grab pages to test, to see how well random webpages match up to the classification that we've created.


I've already written about this, so I'll do an incredibly silly thing, and quote myself:

I've started to amass a bunch of links in my del.icio.us account. It's not just a bunch of random junk, but it's stuff that I made a point of noting that I had to remember -- at least enough to go to del.icio.us to post it. Tag clouds are cool, and it's a nice way to quickly see the tags, and thus, topics that are most interesting to me.

But I wanted to know more about each tag, to know more about what's under each: What makes that topic more important to me than that topic? How are my tags interrelated? Are there things that connect seemingly disperate topics -- such as "buddhism" and "J2ME" and "wifi"? That is, other than me?

There. I make a lousy quote. See the applet in action, read more, or watch the thrilling video. There are certainly some next steps to this -- just not sure exactly what.

If you'd like to check out a cloud brain based on your tags, let me know, I can build it from my laptop. I've thought about building it out so that people can request it online, and my server will automatically queue and create the necessary data files -- but I'll only write that if enough people are interested...

Originally from gravity monkey, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 12, 2006 at 02:40 AM

While privately well aware of the threat posed by thousands of companies suddenly entering the video space, cable executives and those with a vested interest in traditional video distribution are publicly putting on a brave face. "The Internet really isn’t built to distribute mass-market video," recently opined Cablevision's COO. "If you really want to do video you have to be partnered with the cable industry," he insisted. "It’s all about QOS," recently proclaimed Cox Communications president Pat Esser.

Hoping to strike lucrative deals with the MSOs, HDNet chief and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has been agreeing with this premise at every turn, apparently promising the cable giants his company won't use the "open internet" to distribute his company's high-def content. He's also been championing the incumbent position in the net-neutrality debate.

Cuban was sharply criticized for recent commentary on his blog last January that laughed at the concept of an open Internet. In it, he compared the open Internet to a traffic clogged Los Angeles freeway, while suggesting the incumbent two-tier approach would create a speedy "HOV lane." (Note this is the exact same misleading analogy used in this industry PR cartoon)

"Maybe, there are multiple-tiers of Mark Cuban, and maybe this blog posting came from one of the lower tiers," joked VoIP guru Jeff Pulver in response.

At an HDNet presentation yesterday to announce the signing of former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, Cuban continued chanting the incumbent mantra, downplaying the importance of broadband video, and scoffing at the idea of non-cable original programming. "Broadband is old news," Cuban told the gathered reporters.

"It'll be a little bit faster, a little bit prettier and there will be a few more features. But there's never going to be a hugely successful broadband program," predicts Cuban. We're going to guess that the dozens (if not hundreds) of companies cooking up new non-incumbent broadband video offerings would disagree.

Lodi News-Sentinel's publisher says the newspaper won't include paper in the future. But that's not all.

The real change that electronic information will bring is "interactivity" — the ability for the news reader to become a publisher. We've always had letters to the editor, but when your opinion or home video flows as easily out to others as our news, society will be transformed.

It's not just that newspaper news rooms will be run more like TV, turning out stories when they happen. It's not just that "talk radio" will become very, very local. Those who care about news will be able to be their own reporters; they will influence our news decisions and decide more directly what community news will be covered. In addition, it will be possible to include everyone in a news conference; polls and elections could be put together on the fly; reaction to public policy ideas and shifts will be instantaneous.

an interesting Flickr group focuses on how humans find, collect, evaluate & share information in the physical, everyday environment. the groups collects images that document personal design solutions for organizing & structuring everyday life & its environment, such as bookshelves, movie-collections, mind-maps, workplaces, toolboxes, garages, photoboxes, filing cabinets & so on.
see also hard drive visualization flickr pool
[flickr.com]

The Economist reviews Chris Anderson's book:

The niche, the obscure and the specialist, Mr Anderson argues, will gain ground at the expense of the hit.
...
The cover of Mr Anderson's book promises to answer the question: “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. But his book may alarm as well as help businessmen. Karl Marx once described a communist society in which “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes...to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.” Mr Anderson suggests that the long tail is bringing about something similar. The tools of media production—computers, desktop printers, video cameras—are now so widely and cheaply available that a generation of young people are becoming amateur journalists, commentators, film-makers and musicians in their spare time, rather as the philosopher imagined. Amateurs offering their work free of charge will contribute a significant portion of the long tail, so at the very end there will be a “non-monetary economy,” says Mr Anderson. If true, that could prove to be the most fascinating long-tail effect of all.

Wired has an excerpt from the book.

ROOMIKS CUBE is a multichannel panoramic A/V performance. Part of the ongoing MUX A/V series, this rare event is a collaborative effort between live video performance artists C-TRL Labs and NY based electronic composer Caural.

I see more and more work being done with screen scrapers, are people starting to treat HTML as a web service with a crappy API?

web app for capturing movies of user interaction.

Because the Internet has changed how people discover and share music, the rules of marketing it and the hierarchy of who determines what's hot have also changed.

a large-scale, sculptural media installation build as a 35 meter tunnel of newspapers, magazines & 66 television screens broadcasting global television programs.
looks like a perfect physical reincarnation of virtual reality's infotube.
[balticmill.com & balticmill.com(mp4,video)|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Beware: low flying web2.0 memes may strike at any time! We've been regaled relentlessly on 'social networking' and the 'wisdom of crowds', and there's certainly something to it - it wouldn't be raking in the investment cash otherwise. But will searches based on human recommendations ever knock the Googles and Yahoos of the world from their perches? Maybe eventually, but I'm not going to hold my breath just yet.

ccMixter maestro Victor Stone summarizes the good news:

The freesound project is a web site for collecting tiny audio snippets and samples and sharing them under a Creative Commons license for use in larger audio works such as soundtracks, original material and oh yea, remixes. In just over the first year of operation they accumulated almost 20,000 samples of every shape, size and variety.

ccMixter is a site sponsored by Creative Commons that specializes in hosting remixes all under CC license and has the special ability to track the sources of the remixes. In almost two years of operation, ccMixter has had nearly 5,000 uploads from producers using samples from their own libraries, ccMixter itself and of course the freesound project.

It was only a matter time the two sites work together. Remixers from ccMixter that use samples from the freesound project can now track the sources of the remix back to freesound (and soon viceversa). You can see this in action with teru's remix of "Ophelia's Song" which includes electric guitar parts and an a cappella from ccMixter as well as a sample of a train passing and a nylon guitar pluck all of which are linked to from teru's remix page.

On a technical note: The underlying technology is based on an open programmer's interface first published by Creative Commons via ccMixter called Sample Pools. CC is continuing to recruit other sites with CC licensed music to expand the pool. Every installation of ccHost (the open source code project that ccMixter runs on) is already enabled for Sample Pools.

BitTorrent’s library of licensed, copyrighted material is growing fast (disclosure: I am doing contract work for the company). Here’s a bit of yesterday’s news:

BitTorrent Inks Deals With Hart Sharp Video, Image’s Egami Media, Koch and The Orchard

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 10, 2006–BitTorrent, Inc., home to the world’s leading peer-assisted file distribution platform, announced today it has added more than 1,600 video titles to its library of content to be made available on BitTorrent.com. BitTorrent has signed video licensing agreements with entertainment distributors Hart Sharp Video, Egami Media (a subsidiary of Image Entertainment), Koch Entertainment and The Orchard. Consumers will be able to download and enjoy video from these publishers on a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and download to own (DTO) basis when the new BitTorrent.com service launches in late Fall…

There's some very interesting work going on with cellular technology includingLucent Technologies' Bell Labs "telesensing" technology that allows for reading cellphone signals bounced off the body. It sounds like very "science fiction-ish" stuff, but some of the potential applications are lifesaving.

According to the researchers, the technology can be used to develop monitors and/or sensors that could track fevers in people, to scan heart and breathing signals in order to figure out who would need treatment first in a disaster area and could be leveraged even in military or law enforcement operations.

Judging from the linked article, it seems that the research is going to mainly focus on health applications, and there is talk of having cellphones embedded with telesensing chips so that users can mointor their own vital signs.

Link: The Wireless Report

Keith Hampton has completed a new paper, e-Neighbors: Neighborhoods in the Network Society on the effects of Internet use on social networks and neighborhoods. It is under review for publication, so it isn't posted online yet, but Hampton will send preprints via email on request.

Abstract:

This study examines in detail the specific contexts where Internet use affords local interactions and facilitates community involvement at the neighborhood level. Studies of Internet and community have found that information and communication technologies provide new opportunities for social interaction, but that it may also increase privatism by isolating people in their homes. This paper argues that while the Internet may encourage both home-centeredness and communication across great distances, it may also facilitate interactions centered near the home. Unlike traditional community networking studies, which focus on bridging the digital divide, this study focuses on bridging the divide between the electronic and parochial realms. Detailed, longitudinal social network surveys were completed with the residents of four contrasting neighborhoods over a period of three years (suburb, apartment building, gated community). Three of the four neighborhoods were provided with a neighborhood email discussion list and a neighborhood website. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to model over time the number of neighbors recognized, emailed, met in-person, and talked to on the telephone. The neighborhood email lists were also analyzed for content. The results suggest that the Internet use has already been adopted into the maintenance of neighborhood social networks. However, neighborhood effects reduce the influence of everyday Internet use, as well as the experimental intervention, in communities that lack the context to support local tie formation. Early adopters of the Internet and active users of the neighborhood email list built larger weak tie networks over time.

Dario Solera's article on The CodeProject describes how to shrink those ASP.NET web pages.

Jose Gacia at the weblog Meme Therapy -- tagline, "Life from a Science Fiction Point of View" -- interviewed me recently on a variety of subjects. The first part of that interview is now up, covering a couple of questions on technology and politics.

The function of blogging, and other political social network tools, is simply this: to counter-balance the official narrative, and to find the holes -- the failings and falsehoods -- in the elite worldview. That is to say, blogs serve the purpose of hyper- aggressive fact-checking, digging out even the most minute lies and misdirections, making it far more difficult for the political elites to construct a narrative about the world that reinforces their own power.

There was much more to the interview, and I'll link to subsequent updates.

(Meme Therapy has interviewed some very interesting folks in the recent past, including Dale Carrico on Technoprogressive Politics, science blogger Jennifer Griffin on the love of molecules, and science fiction author Alistair Reynolds. Check 'em out.)

LA based MC THIS has a pretty intense set up for mobile audio and video DJing… From the MC THIS’s page - “MC This is the only artist in the world who has brought visual projection from the interior to the streets, rooftops, forests and deserts in one step. MC This can project live images from 4 or more video sources, mix them, add effects to them and project them anywhere he goes on a number of unique screen surfaces.” [via] - photos & site.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Originally from MAKE Magazine at July 10, 2006, 20:55, published by Marisa S. Olson

BloomBox is a white label user-generated content solution. It has been designed with the needs of the TV industry in mind.

A concept is suggested that allows building context and structure around the content and existing information organization, using trails, or paths, through the Wiki content.

Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.

The real opportunity with video on the Internet is what the New York Times has called slivercasting.

In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections.

resting -- and, arguably, more important -- are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It's a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.
...
Indeed, the Internet's ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don't sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop -- think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.

Another way is to look at it as serving the needs of the long tail. This is what Mark Cuban has to say:

The reality of TV viewing is that people watch the same 15 to 20 channels over and over. They arent going to sit in front of their computers and look for video to replicate the experience of sitting on the couch or laying in bed.

at Broadcast.com, is that people will search , even if it takes some work, to find things they are passionate about that arent on TV. If you are into bridge, you will find websites with videos pertaining to bridge. If you are into Tall Ships, Collecting coins, whatever. The beauty of the net is that you can find any and every kind of video. Its the definition of Long Tail.

And those viewers wont care if they are watching on their PC screen, a laptop screen or even an IPOD. Post it and they will find it.

It is now time to take a closer look at the underlying technology that is making video on the Internet happen.

Tomorrow: The Technology

I just released a new paper on net neutrality, called Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. It’s based on several of my earlier blog posts, with some new material.

"'NSA's surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.' The surveillance is, however, useful for monitoring political opposition"

Michael Geist, Toronto Star: "If the CBC can no longer claim to be a unique home to Canadian programming and perspectives, then perhaps its future lies in transforming itself from Canada's public broadcaster to the broadcaster of the Canadian public, telling our stories and providing our news from the bottom up, rather than the top down."

(People keep on mistaking "public" media for community and participatory media. They serve very different yet necessary purposes. Hopefully folks will realize this before deciding to raze the CBC's and PBS's of the world. -kc.)

You can also download this as a PDF.

Links:
http://reader.kaywa.com
http://qrcode.kaywa.com

My ID: http://id.kaywa.com/roger

The ID is very basic for now, but it has already one pay off. If you have a Kaywa or a moblog.ch (free), you just have to add your normal URL. If you scan your personal QR Code, you get then automagically the link to the mobile version of your blog.

Update: And most importantly, you get your own personal QR Code with it. We will soon provide a PDF solution, so that you can also print the code. Usage scenarios: business cards, personal stamps, etc.

iPod in Education
iPod in Education - A site dedicated to the use of iPod and iTunes in Education.

See also (found on the site):
MicroMemo's High-Fidelity Digital Audio Recorder for iPod with video

Connect to Art by Nokia
New Mobile Artworks from chinese artists Xu Bing, Feng Mengbo, Ai Weiwei.
See report from Shanghaiist

Connecting to mobile site (the third and easy way;)



PS: Get the Kaywa Reader to read this QR Code.
And encode your URLs yourself.

Via Emily

German Flash programmer and Web designer Alex Frank has created a really intriguing Web interface which, while not entirely new and not entirely 3pointD, is definitely worthy of note here as a technique that could be of use in future 3pointD applications. Frank’s site (which was flagged to me by a reader at the Kesser Technical Group) was a final project for a diploma in communication design at the University of Essen-Duisburg in Germany, and is called DONTCLICK.IT — and that’s exactly what you do there: not click. The entire site (once you get beyond a brief introduction) is navigated by mousing over site elements in different ways. While this is essentially what Flash is used for already, Frank has taken it to greater lengths than most sites do, so that DONTCLICK.IT becomes a neat experiment in interface design and site navigation. Worth checking out.

design, interface

There’s a nice post up on eightbar about Adam Greenfield’s new book, Everyware, which I’m hoping to crack soon, and some of the things they’re working on over at IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK, from which eightbar (as well as a virtual Wimbledon) emerges.

Adam’s vision of Everyware is one of almost effortless and unknowing interactions with our surroundings, surroundings that are actually networked devices receiving and broadcasting information, which is collated, distributed and presented to users (I prefer participants) in intuitive, helpful and appropriate ways. . . . The theme struck a chord with me simply for the fact that we use a lot of these technologies here in the Emerging Tech group in Hursley (well we are emerging tech after all) . Motes, Zigbee enabled devices, RFID and other funky Gizmos can usually be found spilling out from under Dave Conway-Jones office door.

Very 3pointD. I’m tentatively planning a trip to the UK in November. Perhaps a jaunt to Hursley is in order. A read of Everyware definitely is.

3pointD, IBM, metaverse, RFID, Technology

Matt Yglesias notes last week’s ruling that services like Clean Flicks, which buy Hollywood movies, take out the naughty parts, and resell them to parents, are infringing copyright. On a policy level, I agree with his general take:

Overwhelmingly, the impact of a service like CleanFlix is to make versions of works available to people who otherwise wouldn’t be consuming them at all. Even in a CleanFlix world, authors of “unclean” content will still enjoy extremely close to 100 percent of the pre-CleanFlix market. There’s no reason at all to think that the existence of this sort of service will seriously reduce future production of new things.

Artists and so forth who think their interests are being served by pushing a strong-IP doctrine on this front are essentially dupes. The people who control the existing distribution channels for film have a very serious interest in using the new-style super-strong IP rules to insulate themselves from the winds of technological change. So, in essence, they’re pushing forward on all fronts, stomping on various totally non-harmful cases of putative infringement and attempting to radically curtail people’s ability to do what they want to do with content they’ve purchased.

ts’ activities clearly had little or no negative financial impact on copyright holders. Arguably, in fact, services like Clean Flicks increase sales by widening the set of movies socially conservative parents are willing to purchase.

However, on the legal merits, this is hardly an easy case. I haven’t been able to find the actual decision so consider this wild speculation on my part, but it seems to me that a literal-minded interpretation of the four fair use factors very well might find this is not a fair use—the “effect of the use upon the potential market” is the only factor that clearly weighs in favor of a finding of fair use.

Conceptually, the stronger rationale for finding that such editing is legal is the first sale doctrine, which holds that once you’ve purchased a copy of a work, you have a right to do as you please with that copy, as long as you don’t make additional copies. No one would claim copyright infringement if I went into business buying books, blacking out naughty words, and reselling the edited books. Clean Flicks has already paid Hollywood full price for each copy of the movies it re-sells—what business is it of Hollywood’s if they alter the copy before selling it?

The problem is that the first sale doctrine only applies to the physical original copy. But with digital technologies, accessing and modifying content often requires copying it. You can’t modify a DVD—all you can do is burn a modified copy. That means that even if Clean Flicks’s business is analogous to actions that would have been perfectly legal with 20th Century technologies, that doesn’t mean it’s legal. What you’re buying when you buy a DVD is just a physical piece of plastic, not the right to own one copy of the movie stored in the disk. Such over-literalism, it seems to me, is a mistake that threatens to cause a lot of mischief as more and more of our culture is distributed in media where copying is an inseparable part of accessing.

For example, an over-literal interpretation of the no-copying rule was responsible for MP3.com’s loss in court. Even though MP3.com was simply helping users to consume content they had legally purchased in more convenient ways, the judge focused on the fact that MP3.com was copying and “retransmitting” the content without authorization from the copyright holder. That logic eviscerates the first sale principle in digital media, because all manipulations of digital content involve copying and transmitting content.

All of which is to say that Clean Flicks ought to be legal, but it’s far from obvious that it actually is. It would be a good thing if Congress clarified the first sale doctrine to make it clear that it gives consumers the right to consume and modify the content they purchase in the format of their choice, not simply the right to do as they please with a physical piece of plastic.

"Amazon Simple Queue Service (Beta) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components. Using the Simple Queue Service (SQS), developers can decouple components of their application so that they run independently. SQS provides the message management between the independent components. Any component of a distributed application can store any type of data in a reliable queue at Amazon.com. Another component or application can retrieve the data using queue semantics."

A long, rich, quote-spiced post by Trebor Scholz explains collective action theories in light of peer-based production methods (e.g. open source, Wikipedia) and social media (e.g. del.icio.ous). You'll learn a lot more from this than from the scattered and disingenuously titled "Digital Maoism" of a few weeks back:

The social bookmarking site del.icio.us is a suitable example for the debate over individual versus network value. On del.icio.us, contributors, myself included, save bookmarks not solely because they support an imagined "del.icio.us collective;" they don't primarily want to support the Yahoo-owned project: they contribute out of self-interest.

Adam Smith talked about individual action that benefits the collective as the "invisible hand;" every individual contribution to the general productiveness of society intends to foster individual gain and is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

While Smith is controversial, his notion of the invisible hand is useful here. A closer look at the invisible hand reveals that it does not exclude a simultaneous conscious support of a collective. The number of frequent contributors to Wikipedia, for example, is relatively small and their motivations for participation are not completely non-agonistic (pure sharing; higher goals; help humanity). Hanah Arendt argued that people have a keen interest in contributing to something larger than themselves but most contributors to this free encyclopedia are, however, driven by authorship pride -- and -- an urge to contribute to the public good.

An additional variant of motivation for participation is “agonistic giving,” which Benkler sums up with the sentence "I give therefore I'm great." Benkler adds other types of motivations: “individualist and solidaristic” (teams; assertion of my individuality) and “reciprocity” (p2p networks). In the context of sites like CiteUlike, del.icio.us, and others, I suggest that contributors are driven by a hybrid mix of motivations. They are not exclusively in it for themselves but they are also not completely driven by the idea of the greater good.

AntennaSearch offers detailed information on over 1.9 million towers and antennas in the US. Includes maps, ownership details, contact information... You can pinpoint existing and future towers and even small hidden antennas. digg

Too many TV programs look at blogs as the enemy. If people are blogging about you, they are passionate about you. Respond. This NY Times article looks at how the smart producers embrace criticism from their fans.

Inspired by the fact that mobile phone users are to be tracked to within 50 meters, as a result of the Federal Communications Commission’s E911 mandate (allowing authorities to locate the position of mobile phones that make emergency calls), Derek Lomas plans to develop Transparent City, a city modeled in 3D using only the positions of small orbs, representing individual mobile phones.

The functional forms of a city modeled entirely by human motion will emerge from the overall behavior of the data-points. Streets and highways will be identified through the collective action of orbs flying by at 50 miles an hour. Organic skyscrapers will be built by the thousands of stacked orbs, mostly motionless at their desks-- while some orbs show the subtle motions of humans walking through an office, or traveling up and down elevators. By speeding up the rate of time, one will observe these human towers rise and fall with the beginning and end of the work day.

I found that the concept was already extremely compelling. But it gets better (or worse): Transparent City will seek to create an interface that allows for the integration of multiple databases of information. As an example, users of the "Transparent City" may be able to set the brightness of the orbs to be proportionate to personal income (darkening Harlem and illuminating the financial district). More disturbingly, users will be able to tap any on-going phone call in real-time. Furthermore, using tracked call-logs, users will be able to display the interconnected networks of callers, which represent the de-facto social network of a city.

With this project Lomas seeks to show the future of surveillance and raise public consciousness at a time when we can still determine our own fate as a society.

Another surveillance-related project by Lomas was the The Backpack Project. In 2002, he gave artists clear backpacks --mandated in many high schools in the post-Columbine era as a way to screen for weapons, drugs and other prohibited items-- and let them fill them as they wished. His aim was to encourage artists to "explore the flip side of privacy: transparency" and "discover honesty and personal expression."

Sam Shahrani and Mario Gerosa have completed a Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architectural Heritage.

The document aims to lay a foundation for the conservation of our "virtual architecture", the environments and places that make up the synthetic worlds of video games. More commonly referred to as "levels", "maps" or "worlds", these environments are the stage for players' experiences in video games. Unfortunately, little has been done to protect, catalogue and analyze these game spaces, but such conservation is necessary in order to provide reference material for study. The goal of the Convention is to provide a framework for this vital preservation work, and to encourage further academic study of the principles of level design and the architecture of synthetic worlds.

Via videoludica and terra nova.

In the following paper, Edwin Hutchins (proponent of the Distributed Cognition approach/framework) discuss what he calls “the cognitive life of things”, attempting to place this in the context of rich multimodal interactions.

Hutchins, E. (2006) Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things, presented at the symposium:”The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the boundaries of Mind” organized by Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, UK 7-9 April, 2006.

Hutchins’s claim (which he developed in his book Cognition in the Wild) is that cognitive science was fundamentally flawed since its focus was to put cognitive properties inside the person and not in the social and material world. His book had been criticized about the very fact that he almost said nothing about the embodied practice of human in his examples (navigation). This paper tries to make distributed cognition less disembodied by showing how interaction are richly multimodal creating emergent cognitive effects. In this paper, the author also describes ths “cognitive ecology” concept:

By cognitive ecology I mean that all of the elements and relations potentially interact with one another and that each is part of the environment for all of the others
(…)
This rich cognitive ecology gives rise to some powerful cognitive processes. The embodied interaction with things creates mechanisms for reasoning, imagination, “Aha!” insight, and abstraction. Cultural things provide the mediational means to domesticate the embodied imagination.

Why do I blog this? this kind of argument is interesting to me especially when I think back about what I learn from my early cognitive psychology courses which were definitely disembodied (un-embodied at all I would say). I also like the development around the idea “Using the body to imagine the dynamics of things”, this connects to the things I’ve read about the affordance of space in socio-sognition.

Thanks Cyril for pointing me on Collectic: developed by Jonas Hielscher as a part of a graduation project for the Masters program Media Technology at Leiden University in 2006. I met Jonas in Utrecht few months ago (are you in Basel now? stil in game stuff as I see) and I am always intrigued by what this guy is doing.

he game is developed for the Sony PSP and uses the standard features of the console, especially scanning for wireless access points to the Internet.

cTic can be played anywhere, where WLAN access points can be found by a PSP. The objective of the game is to search for different access points, to collect them and to combine them in a puzzle in order to get points. In the game, the player has to move around in her/his local surrounding, using her/his PSP as a sensor device in order to find access points. By doing this, the player is able to discover the hidden infrastructure of wireless network coverage through auditive and visual feedback.The game is designed as a single player game, but it can be easily played competitive after each other or at the same time with two PSPs.

A video here.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of a game played with regular console features enhanced by some software components. Besides, the game concept is quite simple and funny and discovering network infrastructure that way seems to be a cool experience. I am looking forward to test this!

Eyebeam is now accepting applications for Production, R&D and Education Fellows during 2006-07. Application deadline is Aug. 14, 2006. Apply now!

the t-qualizer is a t-shirt with a built in graphic equalizer panel that is sound sensitive. as the music beats, the shirts equalizer lights up to the beat of the music. each frequency of music will activate a different equalizer bar, just like a normal equalizer.
the digital clock t-shirt assures that no one will ask you what time it is.
see also noise shirt & wearable display clothing.
[glowgadgets.co.uk & iwantoneofthose.com & uberreview.com]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, ReBlogged by Tom Ritchford on Jul 9, 2006 at 10:19 PM

Report claim: 9Gig HD vid costs ISP $39??. Widespread downloading of high-definition (HD) movies and other video could force providers to charge users extra, claims a new study explored by ZDNetUK. The report claims that, at least in the UK, it costs an ISP around £21.13 ($39) to stream a..

I had to come up with a three minute rant for the Alliance for Community Media workshop on "Evaluating the PEG (Public Access) Model of Community Media." This is the rant I decided not to use:

For years we talked about the coming media revolution. This revolution was going to put the power of mass media in the hands of The People. The People were the individuals and small (non-business) organizations who were ignored, marginalized, and disinfranchised. They were going to use television to allow people to take over the airwaves and make their voices heard. They were going to produce, organize, and take action. Most importantly, this revolution was going to happen because of us.

Well the revolution happened and we weren't there to broker it.

The revolution came in the form of blogs and iMacs and cameraphones and MySpaces and YouTubes and it had the full backing of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch, and the Fortune 500.

The revolution wasn't broadcast quality so we thought the revolution wasn't worth our time. The revolution was agnostic and equally exploitable by all so we said the revolution had no ideology. The revolution reduced all of our paperwork to one click agreements so we said it was too irresponsible. The revolution didn't route through us so we thought the revolution wasn't the real revolution.

The revolution was unorganized and we didn't know how to deal with it.

But now's the time to start dealing with it.

Because although more folks are talking, they still need models for organization and effective action.
Because although anyone can blog, the power laws still apply.
Because although everyones actions are becoming more explicit, no one's holding our institutions more accountable.

Most of all, because the revolution is here and it looks just like any other day.

CanWest has released the first video player for BlackBerry handheld devices.

The video player is free, powered by SONA and features video from CanWest MediaWorks. So far, all that is available are daily news, sports and business clips.

Right now the video player is in BETA release. As a result, users need to check for new video files available for download and click to download them. Once the product leaves BETA testing, then 'push' based delivery of content, where new content will be automatically sent to the device, will be available and users will not have to manually request new content.

New research shows that news stories online are barely read by anyone 36 hours after they are first posted, according to a team of statistical physicists from University of Notre Dame and colleagues in Hungary who have analyzed how people access information online.

Here's a summary of the research from PhysicsWeb.

And here's a PDF of the actual research.

I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? - Dirty Harry

State-wide television networks -- over broadband -- may be an idea whose time has come. With broadband penetration moving towards 70% in the United States you have to ask yourself...why not?

Nobody's tried it. Mobile tv can carry a dozen or more channels locally. Advertisers in big cities may lease channels on local DVB-H and MediaFLO broadcasts for targeted advertising. Localized content could follow.

Mobile Television and Mobile WiMAX could be synergtic. In Korea, WiBro handhelds also include Mobile TV (via DMB-T). Perhaps live, state-wide television networks could follow. With advertisers. Small screen broadcast news may be less successful than 5,000 time-shifted video blogs. Make your own schedule.

City TV channels already exist on cable. They vary from educational and public access shows to NY-1, a full-blown 24/7 news operation just for New Yorkers.

The broadcast center, located in a shopping mall, could plug in MPEG-4 AVC encoders (above) for broadcast-quality 1Mbps transmissions. Good to go.

Statewide. The Oregon Public Affairs Network covers the government. Oregon Education has broadband connections and a 2.5 GHz Wireless Network. Broadband wireless, using WiFi and WiMAX, can deliver the last mile. One-way Mobile TV is the billboard. Broadband is the transactional element. As seen on WiBro.

Regional networks like Northwest Cable News make money. That's the new reality television. Eyeballs. Giving away AOL would reduce revenue by about $2 billion, but it increases eyeballs and ad revenue, says the Washington Post. AOL saw advertising revenue rise 26 percent to $392 million in the first quarter of 2006.

Portland's Live Wire uses an entertainment format pioneered by Prarie Home Companion. Radio shows. Great Radio is where you find it. NW theatre companies include the Miracle Theatre Group (Hispanic), Triangle Productions (gay), Northwest Mystery Theater, Willamette Radio Workshop and others.

Add Event Coverage, Music, Public Forums, Antique Auctions and Plays. Don't forget to incorporate Bloggers, Video Blogs and PodCasters into your mix. Stir.

If you look at the growth in Gawker’s most successful sites, you’ll see that what sells in new media is what has always sold in media

a manual!!

There are so many changes to Rails that happen so quickly that it's hard to keep up with things like this.

Company that creates "community-driven online experiences," such as collaborative fanscripting of TV episodes.

Through its programme of presentation, debate and play WLT explores how technologies enable and enhance creative engagement.

">Further away are phones that will capture an image of an object, and then search the Net for more information about it." ... ah, the future... or is it just japan?

Research and Markets have a report on 2006 Global Mobile Data usage. Here are a few insights…

• Current mobile technologies are not well suited for economically viable business models for mobile data
• The lack of suitable infrastructure has hampered the growth of mobile data
• The business models that these (mobile) operators offer are hopelessly inadequate
• very few sustainable models are currently in operation
• The rest of the world is waiting on MVNO models that provide content providers with the freedom to distribute their own products and manage their own billing and customer service.

There are some real opportunities here for third parties (such as Yahoo, Google etc) and brands to take over where network operators have failed. However, one of the greatest barriers for them is payment. The only convenient way to pay is currently premium SMS which network operators control (and take a huge profit share). Maybe some large payment provider such as Visa, Mastercard or Paypal needs to create/invent a convenient, global and cost-effective mobile payment system. Only then will off-portal services become viable.

Super useful, totally easy (and completely free) application for Windows 2000/XP or Mac OS X that lets you send massive video files via email without compressing or transcoding them.

Henry Porter’s chilling Blair Laid Bare - which I implore you to read if you have the slightest interest in your future - contains an equally worrying quote from the LSE’s Simon Davies noting the encroachment of architectures of control in society itself:

“The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people.

“We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment,” he says. “That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

“That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They’ve bought the Government’s arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively. And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom.”"

My blood ran cold as I read the article; by the time I got to this bit I was just feeling sick, sick with anger at the destruction of freedom that’s happened within my own lifetime - in fact, within the last nine years, pretty much.

Regardless of actual party politics, it is the creeping erosion of norms which scares the hell out of me. Once a generation believes it’s normal to have every movement, every journey, every transaction tracked and monitored and used against them - thanks to effective propaganda that it’s necessary to ‘preserve our freedoms’* - then there is going to be no source of reaction, no possible legitimate way to criticise. If making a technical point about the effectiveness of a metal detector can already get you arrested, then the wedge is already well and truly inserted.

Biscuit packaging kind of pales into insignificance alongside this stuff. But, ultimately, much the same mindset is evident, I would argue: a desire to control, shape and restrict the behaviour of the public in ways not to the public’s benefit, and the use of technology, design and architecture to achieve that goal.

Heinlein said that “the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire”. I fear the emergence of a category who don’t know or care that they’re being controlled and so have no real opinion one way or the other. We’re walking, mostly blind, into a cynically designed, ruthlessly planned, end of freedom.

Related: SpyBlog | No2ID | Privacy International | Save Parliament | Areopagitica

*Personally, I have serious doubts about the whole concept of any government or organisation ‘giving’ its people rights or freedoms, as if they are a kind of reward for good behaviour. No-one, elected or otherwise, tells me what rights I have. The people should be telling the government its rights, not the other way round. And those rights should be extremely limited. The 1689 Bill of Rights was a bill limiting the rights of the monarch. That’s the right way round, except now we have a dictator pulling the strings rather than Williamanmary.

PDA + Studierstube 4.0

Handheld Augmented Reality: A standard, off-the-shelf Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) constitutes a cost-effective and lightweight hardware platform for Augmented Reality (AR). A PDA provides a simple, well-known user interface, and is fully equipped with a touch-screen and camera for providing a video see-through Magic Lens metaphor of interaction. In our Handheld AR framework, all interactive processing is done exclusively on the PDA without relying on a server infrastructure, which makes this solution highly scalable. Because of the low cost and suitable ergonomic properties of the PDA platform, massive multi-user AR application become possible for the first time.

It is the goal of this project to demonstrate the first multi-user AR applications with dozens of simultaneous users.

In our Handheld AR framework, all interactive processing is done exclusively on the PDA without relying on a server infrastructure, which makes this solution highly scalable. Because of the low cost and suitable ergonomic properties of the PDA platform, massive multi-user AR application become possible for the first time. It is the goal of this project to demonstrate the first multi-user AR applications with dozens of simultaneous users.

Our software framework Studierstube 4.0 represents the first attempt at creating a complete solution for AR on PDAs. It operates cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Windows.CE) and addresses graphics, video, tracking, multimedia playback, persistent storage, multi-user synchronisation and application authoring tools.

This morning Dan pointed me to an article in Today's NY Times about Nobody's Watching. Nobody's Watching is a sitcom in the form of a reality show about creating a sitcom. (A bit convoluted, no doubt).

Nobody's Watching is a pilot that hasn't yet been picked up by any networks but has been posted on YouTube. This online posting and the subsequent audience response that it has garnered has the networks rethinking their decisions. Taking a look at the YouTube page, we find that the show has had more than 300,000 views and more than 600 comments. While not huge numbers compared with television audiences, these are big big numbers for any online video.

Based on this, I am betting that the networks are about to learn something about the possibilities of online video. I am also betting that they get it wrong...

Stephen Speicher in Engadget's The Clicker: The Clicker: People are watching "Nobody's Watching" writes:

"Now, make no mistake, the likelihood of this show rising from the heaps and living to the tender age of two (err... episodes) is about as likely as Stephen Colbert replacing Tony Snow as the current administration's Press Secretary, but really that's not the point. This experiment shows that people will watch, comment on, and enjoy pilots on the web in a way that today's traditional broadcast systems won't allow. What's missing is the networks taking the next (obvious) step: instead of spending multiple years and countless dollars trying to determine what to show the viewing public, why not let the audience decide? Put the pilots on the internet before you make the decision. Not only does this give a more accurate assessment of what people might watch, it has the potential to dramatically speed up the decision process.

and

"Yet, despite their best efforts, the entrenched powers behind modern broadcasting just cannot get their heads around the potential of the internet. This is evident at every turn. Whether it be the pulling of the wildly-popular "Lazy Sunday" clip from YouTube (and then later re-releasing in a harder-to-find corner of the NBC site) or the treatment of the internet as a dumping ground for dead projects, the current regime views the internet as, at best, additional revenue. More often than not, the internet is considered a nuisance.

Exactly right, given the opportunity, people will tell you exactly what they like and what they don't. There is incredible value in this, should the networks decided to start paying attention.

YouTube is an incredible phenomenon. If you haven't yet explored it, I suggest you checkout my playlist: Interesting videos from YouTube. It shows a wide range of what YouTube has to offer (the good and the overwhelming bad), from Nobody's Watching to home videos about cats and everything in between.

Speaking of online video, "research" has brought me to: Where the Hell is Matt and Rocketboom's version. I personally respond to the freedom offered by "regular people" to just have fun with the medium. I also think there is power in how these folks are referencing each-other.

Last, I have to make plug for Ze Frank's The Show. Ze gets it, he truly engages his audience! He shows that the possibilities for audience participation and feedback are endless. On his wiki member's of his audience (now participants themselves) have taken it upon themselves to transcribe every single one of his daily shows. Ze even fits in time to play chess by vlog as well as inviting and showing audience member's doing their "Power Moves".

So.. Online video, starting to move forward? YouTube becoming more than just drivel?

Incredible..

Disturbing..

Perhaps both. And that is how it should be.

ITP Research >> Video Comments WordPress Plugin Version 1.2 Released

Here are some new features you can expect:

1: A GUI interface inside the WP administrative screens for posting.

2: Revised comment display on the main post page. Now the timecode is hyperlinked and will bring up the plugin and seek the appropriate place in the video.

3: The ability to put a thumbnail or your own text in the post for launching the player.

4: A couple of random bug fixes.. GREAT!

An excerpt from The Power Broker, Robert Caro's 1974 tombstone on Robert Moses:

Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. ... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons - just to make it a better public."

I'm reading this to fill in some backstory to Death And Life Of Great American Cities. Aside from being a dramatic account of urban renewal and destruction, the world of the 1920's and 1930's is a perfect context for similar "social architecture" taking place on the web, right now. Net Neutrality, User Generated Content, and Social Software all gain historical continuity from this story. Perkins's quote above throws an especially harsh light on the ink spilled over (Stamen client) Digg, which is one of a few examples used by writers like Nick Carr and Scott Karp to demean the quality of user-submitted Digg stories, MySpace profiles, and blog entries.

The interwar years are fast-becoming one of my favorite historical periods all-around, partially because so many of the lessons of that time are being forgotten as that generation passes on.

ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art)2006, an international conference held in conjunction with ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of art on the Edge, will be held in San Jose, CA, August 7-13 2006. Both events are “situated at the critical intersection of art and technology.” ISEA2006 re:mote is a symposium within ISEA2006 and is issuing a Call for Proposals.

ISEA2006 re:mote, August 10-12, 2006

International new media art discourse is stimulated by festivals and events like ISEA2006 which form temporary cultural centers to represent, present and discuss networked and digital technologies. However by forming temporary centers we also tacitly create a notion of a periphery - with temporary centers also come temporary peripheries. In new media culture this is a paradox as much new media art, theory, and discourse reflects on the network itself and the elusiveness and redundancy of centers and peripheries.

ISEA2006 re:mote attempts to dissuade us from imposing these distinctions by providing a platform for artists, commentators, curators, performers and theorists to participate in ISEA 2006 via online and pre-recorded media.

ISEA2006 re:mote Open Call

ISEA2006 re:mote is inviting media spaces and individual artists, theorists, and curators from around the world to speak or perform via remote technologies to the audience at ISEA. Presentations to be directed at the four themes of ISEA 2006. Participants are invited to present or perform on topics included within the ISEA symposium, and onsite audience interaction with the presenters is also encouraged. ISEA re:mote will focus on presenting media spaces and people that would otherwise be excluded from presenting their work at ISEA due to financial, political, or logistical reasons. [More….]

Originally by Helen Varley Jamieson from Rhizome.org Raw at July 5, 2006, 00:53, published by Marisa S. Olson

Type opportunity, announcement
Genre event
Keywords conference, broadcast, art world, access, globalization

Pixelsurgeon features a nice interview of Toshio Iwai.

A japanese media artist, building electronic/physical instruments (and designing games such as Elektroplankton), Iwai gives some hints about his activity: the importance of tangibility, the need for visual feedthrough, a need to design for play and everyone:

In projects like Tenori-On, how important is the physical interface - the thing you touch and hold? How does it affect the act of making music?

ruments are characterised by their physical interface, such as the key of a piano or the bow of a violin. And these physical interfaces give important direction to the way they are played and the sound itself. However, as long as electric instruments are concerned, this aspect is not emphasised very much. In the Tenori-On project, we started from thinking what is the reasonable interface for an electric instrument or digital instrument.
(…)
For the digital instrument, interface, exterior design, software, sound and so on are independent each other. I am examining the way all of them naturally unite, just like in the violin.
(…)
The design of the visual interface is very important. The flow of time is not visible and very difficult to handle, but by expressing it visually it can be understood and handled by everybody. Moreover, music can give different impressions when it is expressed visually. (…) Since it became possible to make sound electrically or electronically, the synthesizing of sound has been separated from the visual world. However with the senses we are borne with, we think it is more natural to experience sound and vision at the same time.
(…)
As everybody wants to touch instruments or toys which he or she hasn’t seen before, when I design something, I am trying to create it so that it is very attractive at first sight. And when players touch it, it can be instinctively understood and they can be pulled into it very strongly and start trying to create their own designs in many different ways.

Why do I blog this? because of current research about tangible interfaces I am interested in Iwai’s work; which I found great. Elektroplankton is fantastic (easy to handle and I discover new features everytime I play). What he is describing is very intriguing: how to create new musical instruments (new objects then) with simple affordances, linking sound and visual patterns to engage people in playful activities.

See also his blog about tenori-on, a brand new musical instrument / musical interface for the 21st century which I have been developing under the collaboration with YAMAHA Corp.

"But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?"

     —Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet

The idea that tomorrow is a destination, an "undiscovered country," is the lifeblood of classic futurism. We wish to see where we are headed; we want to know what hidden shoals to avoid, and which strong currents to follow. It's this idea of the future as a place just over the horizon that allows us to imagine the "end of history," to fear getting to the future as a race to be lost, to see tomorrow as a land we have yet to conquer.

But what if we instead imagine tomorrow in wholly different terms. What if tomorrow is a word we have yet to speak? The future can be an ongoing conversation, filled with phrases and pauses, debates and soliloquies, a conversation in which all of our voices can be heard. A conversation is larger than any single sentence, although each word is important. It has a narrative and flow, but can head off in surprising directions (although often quite predictable, in retrospect) as new ideas occur to us and new participants enter the scene. A conversation may have had a beginning, but it need not have an ending, as long as we have something to say.

If the future is an undiscovered country, it belongs to none of us (except, perhaps, those who we might displace when we take possession); if the future is an unfinished conversation, it belongs to all of us, as it only matters as long as there are voices to be heard.

The notion of tomorrow as a land just out of reach is an artifact of an age long past, when those who sought to change the world did so by seeking out its most distant edges, whether for trade, treasure or empire. The concept of the future as conversation, however, resonates with today's world, where changes come through mutual creation, collaborative innovation, and the growth of our networks. Inspiration is far more meaningful than exploration in today's world; anticipation -- of the next word, of the next moment -- far more powerful than expectation of what's over the horizon.

An undiscovered country could be found and given name by a lone explorer; conversations, by definition, require more than a single voice. Some speakers will stand out, to be sure, and individual voices may guide the course of the discussion, for a time. But a conversation is not owned by any single person, no matter how vocal; the words move on, the subjects shift, and in due course the conversation bears little resemblance to past debates.

This isn't simply philosophical mumbling. How we speak shapes how we think. As long as we speak of the future in geographic language, we'll continue to look at our choices for tomorrow in terms of ownership, demarcation and, ultimately, limits. Where is the future when there no more lands left to discover?

A conversational metaphor for tomorrow has neither the history nor the breadth of the geographical metaphor, and we will likely speak of horizon-scanning and frontiers and such for some time to come. But it is to our benefit to pay attention to the words we use, and what they truly mean, rather than allow the language of exploration and conquest to remain as unexamined jargon, words that unknowingly shape our vision. It's more important now than ever before that we as a civilization learn how to build an understanding of how the future is shaped into our present-day decisions. We shouldn't let that understanding be created through language with diminishing relevance to our lives, our ideas and our tomorrows.

I love NPR, and public radio, as much as anyone, but I have some qualms with the way its material is shared, or not, on the web. I understand (unlike some, apparrently) that public radio is operating with limited resources and that the shift from a broadcast to a My Time model is a complicated one. Furthermore, I understand that NPR’s web strategy is complicated by the question of how to integrate member stations and that many well-intentioned people much smarter than I are working hard to ensure that public radio’s values thrive in this new world. But there is something ridiculous about breaking a significant story while keeping in the dark the vast majority of the world that didn’t happen to be listening to the radio at the right moment.

Last month, I heard Scott Simon on Weekend Edition refer to an NPR report alleging, once again, that Lance Armstrong used performance enhancing drugs. He made the story the centerpiece of both his commentary as well as the sports segment of the show, but I missed the report itself. I visited NPR.org, and the Weekend Edition page, which informed me that “A listing of today’s stories will be posted at approx. 8:00 a.m. ET.” Two hours later, there was still no mention of the story. Isn’t there a way to share material, especially breaking news, so I don’t have to base my life around Scott Simon’s schedule?

While whining about NPR and its web strategy, I thought I should revisit Mixed Signals, the NPR blog. (It doesn’t mention the Armstrong story, either.) Most of the posts appear to have attracted no comments. (An exception is this story about the look for a new obbudsman in light of Jeffrey Dvorkin’s departure.) Speculation why the lack of participation:

• NPR maintains an oddly-crafted comments policy: “Comments are reviewed and edited by NPR prior to display. All comments will be read, but not all will be posted.” No, plenty of us review comments before they are posted, but this makes the blog sound more like letters to the editor than a two-way conversation.

 

• There’s an off-putting legalistic addendum at the end of the comments section with a link to a lengthy terms of use policy:

NPR reserves the right to read on the air and/or publish on its Web site or in any medium now known or unknown the e-mails and letters that we receive. We may edit them for clarity or brevity and identify authors by name and location. For additional information, please consult our Terms of Use.

• There is no clear way to imbed html in the comments– so we don’t really know who the commentators are, nor can they easily point to other places. Also, no trackbacks—shouldn’t every NPR story have a trackback?

• NPR seems to shift their blogger every few days. I understand group blogs, there are some good ones, but they require a sense of community that Mixed Signals has yet to develop.

Lucky for me and others concerned that public radio makes it in the digital era, NPR has convened the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC), a six-member working group tasked, says Jake Shapiro, to “think through digital distribution services that would benefit from a greater degree of coordination across the system.” As part of its transparent process, the DDC and has started a wiki, while Todd Mundt of Michigan Public Radio and Jake Shapiro of Public Radio Exchange are blogging the meetings. Jake describes the group’s first week of work:

We’ve decided to organize our efforts by writing a business plan for an ‘entity’ that would perform these services, describing the markets it would target, its products and services, revenue model, competitive position, strategic partners, risks, technology and operational needs, expenses and investment requirements — a full picture.

We’ve agreed that the character of the service is ‘enabling’: it should help a wide variety of stations, networks, producers, and other partners offer digital content to existing and new audiences across multiple platforms in innovative ways. It should leverage the collective assets of a more broadly defined public media field to create a significant presence online, increased relevance and engagement with audiences, and new sources of revenue.

 

 

an interesting research project which explores how one can make use of the real-time biological information of the human body. several wearers record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) (a simple indicator of emotional arousal) in conjunction with their geographical location. this is used to plot a map that highlights points of high & low arousal, & visualizes where people feel stressed or excited.
the Greenwich Emotion Map project attempts to invent new visualization strategies to represent this data in the context of neighborhoods & communities.
see also bio-responsive server & coca-cola world chill map & gps drawing.
[biomapping.net & emotionmap.net]

Recently I attended a very interesting conference about high-tech innovation and public policy, with experts in various fields. (Such a conference will be either boring or fascinating, depending on who exactly is invited. This one was great.)

One topic of discussion was how innovation clusters form. “Innovation cluster” is the rather awkward term for a place where high-tech companies are concentrated. Silicon Valley is the biggest and best-known example.

It’s easy to understand why innovative people and companies tend to cluster. Companies spin out of other companies. People who move to an area to work for one company can easily jump to another one that forms nearby. Support services develop, such as law firms that specialize in supporting start-up companies or certain industries. Nerds like to live near other nerds. So once a cluster gets going, it tends to grow.

But why do clusters form in certain places and not others? We can study existing clusters to see what makes them different. For example, we know that clusters have more patent lawyers and fewer bowling alleys, per capita, than other places. But that doesn’t answer the question. Thinking that patent lawyers cause innovation is like thinking that ants cause picnics. What we want to know is not how existing clusters look, but how the birth of a cluster looks.

So what causes clusters to be born? Various arguments have been advanced. Technical universities can be catalysts, like Stanford in Silicon Valley. Weather and quality of life matter. Cheap land helps. Some argue that goverment-funded technology companies can be a nucleus — and perhaps funding cuts force previously government-funded engineers to improvise. Cultural factors, such as a general tolerance for experimentation and failure, can make a difference.

Simple luck plays a role, too. Even if all else is equal, a cluster will start forming somewhere first. The feedback cycle will start there, pulling resources away from other places. And that one place will pull ahead, for no particular reason except that it happened to reach critical mass first.

We like to have explanations for everything that happens. So naturally we’ll find it easy to discount the role of luck, and give credit instead to other factors. But I suspect that luck is more important than most people think.

Narrator - Handy Mac app for reading out stories or scripts. Can give each script character a different voice, and leave a gap for you to say your lines.

nice database /archive of contemporary video artists

A new aproach of searching. Displays results with narrowing for tags, synonyms and translations. Toggle between results from Yahoo, Flickr, and YouTube as well.

Splitscreen is a blog dedicated to split, composite and multi-screen visuals.

Generator.x is a conference and exhibition examining the current role of software and generative strategies in art and design

generative.net is a collaborative collection of artworks, research and experiments by artists and academics interested in the possibilities of generative art. Much of this work manifests itself as digital artwork, or online interactive experiences.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is spoiling for a fight, and on Wednesday it named the top 10 patents it wants killed, or at least redefined. The EFF said all 10 patents are in some way illegitimate and are being used to limit free expression.

Technology Review: One volunteer has spent a lot of time contributing to the social media site Yahoo Answers. Why?

College students given free access to DRM-laden sites like Napster and Rhapsody, but download unencumbered MP3s instead.

I think a better term for what I’ve been calling “citizen journalism” might be “networked journalism.”

“Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.

I carry some of the blame for pushing “citizens’ media” and “citizen journalism” as terms to describe the phenomenon we are witnessing in this new era of news. Many of us were never satisfied with the terms, and for good reason. They imply that the actor defines the act and that’s not true in a time when anyone can make journalism. This also divides journalism into distinct camps, which only prolongs a problem of professional journalism — its separation from its public (as Jay Rosen points out). In addition, many professional journalists have objected that these terms imply that they are not acting as citizens themselves — and, indeed, I believe that the more that journalists behave like citizens, the stronger their journalism will be.

In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; we’ll see more and more of that, I trust. The journalists can and should link to other work on the same story, to source material, and perhaps blog posts from the sources (see: Mark Cuban). After the story is published — online, in print, wherever — the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts, and perspective … not to mention promotion via links. I hope this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as journalists realize that they are less the manufacturers of news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news.

This came to me on the drive back from Media Giraffe with Jay Rosen: the mobile master class. Somewhere in midConnecticut, we were talking about how journalism can, should, and will work when we can all join in and it hit me like a lightning bolt: this isn’t about citizens or amateurs vs. professionals. We’re all in this together. Journalism is a collaborative venture. Journalism is a network.

: LATER: Terry Heaton points us to earlier thinking in this vein. Just to be clear: I’m by no means trying to claim any provenance in this, only indicating a shift in my own thinking.

: LATER STILL: Chris Nolan adds in email:

Stand-alone journalism depends on an audience of people who understand that connection. The web is a flexible medium so readers come and go quickly. So there’s a contradiction: The newsroom has left the building but no one site can really stand alone and prosper by demanding that readers come to it. The business challenge is to make that flexibility part of how we do business if we’re going to grow and keep readers, Smart guys like WashPo’s Jim Brady and Yahoo’s Neil Budde know this; that’s why they’re not demanding exclusivity. That’s also why Spot-on’s pushing the syndication part of our business ahead of everything else. We want to go to our readers wherever they are, rather than wait for them to come to us.

ez of Reason said in email that he’s using “distributed journalism” and I agree with that. I use it, too, in certain company. Only problem is, when I say that in front of newspaper folks, they think trucks.

Google warned on Tuesday it will not hesitate to file anti-trust complaints in the United States if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they will receive in a new round of broadband laws. "If the legislators insist on neutrality, we will be happy. If they do not put it in, we will be less happy but then we will have to wait and see whether or not there actually is any abuse," says Google's Vint Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol.

Following on from the last post about the Neuros MPEG4 recorder, looking on the Neuros website reveals something pretty unusual for a company involved in consumer product design - a clear statement of design philosophy, ‘What do we stand for?’ that’s heavy on content and light on vague rhetoric:

“Your Digital Rights and Why They’re Important to You

Throughout the history of technology, Hollywood has fought innovation at every turn. Even technologies that benefit the studios, and that we take for granted, exist only because someone fought the studios for their very existence

…

The more such legislation [e.g. Analog Hole Bill] gets passed, the less innovation consumers will see, and the fewer options you will have for enjoying your content

….

There are two opposing forces at odds here. On the one hand, there are exciting new technologies that offer more and more choices for consumers to access and enjoy digital media when and where they want it. On the other, there is Big Media and a few of its powerful allies working behind the scenes to limit consumer choices to when and where they want it. How this all plays out will depend on how the rest of us respond in the coming days, weeks and months.”

The statement even exhorts customers to get involved with the EFF and to get in touch with their elected representatives, which is again a great initiative.

This is just the kind of intelligent engagement by product designers & engineers with the political implications of - and influences on - their work for which I’ve been looking throughout the ‘Architectures of Control’ project. Whether it meets the kind of criteria proposed by Jennie Winhall’s ‘Is Design Political?‘, I don’t know, but by standing up for users’ rights in such an open and frank way, and indeed structuring its business around that philosophy, Neuros seems a lot closer to real user-centred design than the vague waffle so often promulgated as such.

Impressive.

Amanda Congdon announces her departure from Rocketboom.

Yesterday, Amanda Congdon announced on her personal video blog that she is leaving Rocketboom. I am so sorry it has come to this. Amanda and Rocketboom producer Andrew Baron had spent the last two weeks struggling to repair their strained relationship. The rift had been growing for some time, and when it came to a head last month, I feared there was no way of repairing it. The two of them tried to solve their differences with the assistance of friends, family and colleagues mediating the conversation. Emails flew back and forth on the Rocketboom field correspondents list. They even decided to put Rocketboom on a summer hiatus to try to work things out, at the urging of many of us on the list. In the end, though, nothing could be done to mend the breach.

Amanda and Andrew are two of the most creative, hardest working people I've had the pleasure of knowing on the Internet. They turned their low-budget video blog into a force to be reckoned with. And now the future is uncertain. Amanda's moving to LA, while Andrew will push forward with Rocketboom. I know both of them will be successful with whatever endeavor they choose to embrace; I am just saddened they won't be doing it together anymore. -andy

The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) are excited today about announcing a new project: a virtual Home Run Derby in Second Life that’s being held in conjunction with Major League Baseball’s own Home Run Derby, on Monday, July 10, at 5pm SL time (8pm Eastern). In fact, the virtual derby will not be a separate contest, but will be “a real-time Second Life re-enactment” of the real thing, featuring avatars for each of the eight Derby players — Major Leaguers competing to see who can hit the most home runs over the course of two rounds.

I haven’t heard what the technology is behind the re-enactment, whether it’s something like the virtual Wimbledon created by some IBM researchers, or something completely different [UPDATE: see this post for more on that]. The stadium the Sheep have built (pictured above), a re-creation of Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, where the Derby is being held, is certainly impressive. Presumably to combat lag caused by overcrowding of SL regions, a “limited number” of tickets to the event will be on sale via the Electric Sheep’s retail site, SLBoutique for a whopping L$1,000 — actually only about US$3. (Tickets go on sale at 7am SL time — 10am Eastern — tomorrow morning, July 6.)

But will anyone actually show? Hardcore baseball fans will presumably want to watch their home run heroes in flesh-and-blood 3D, which they’ll be able to do on ESPN. [UPDATE: Electric Sheep Chris Carella now reports that the Derby will indeed be streamed into the Jumbotron in the virtual stadium.] The SL event will probably be an interesting use of virtual space and a good opportunity to hang out with your friends (if you can all get tickets), but I’m betting baseball fans will tune the Derby in on their other screen.

The stadium, on the other hand, has huge potential. The Sheep press release says the stadium — and the inevitable souvenir shop attached to it — will be “open to the public following the event,” but it’s not clear on whether it will be open Monday only, or will become a persistent fixture of Second Life. (I’m going to check with the Sheep and get back to you on this. [UPDATE: see this post for more on that.]) If the latter, it would be great to make it available for some kind of organized competition. Even better would be for the Sheep to build the technology into Second Life that allows residents to show up and play a baseball game at the virtual PNC Park. It would be a big home run if Major League Baseball were to allow that kind of thing in their virtual stadium.

advertising, games, news, Second Life, sports

In developing manual or semi-automatic approaches, however, careful consideration should be give to the interface between the processes for assigning words and for using words. More independent the two processes are, better the complete system will be.

"MetaFilter Music is a site for members to upload their own songs for others to enjoy and share."

"The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis."

"We all have many social networks: our primary social network, which is comprised of our close friends and family, and numerous secondary social networks, which may be comprised of coworkers, classmates, neighbors, fellow church patrons, teammates and so on. As our social networks are webs, the primary and the secondary nets all intertwine; regardless, we maintain separate identities for each."

an ideas incubator a la Open Source with cash prizes, and there are a couple of very cool twists. First the community decides on whether an idea goes forward, and then, if it gets to market, everyone who has helped out along the way (i.e. inventor, copywriter, etc) gets a cut.

from the coder of iSquint: VisualHub allows you to convert video files to one of 9 formats in as little as three steps.

The Internet is forcing the entire media business into a disaggregated horizontal model where the creation of the content will happen in one place, the editorial function will happen in another, the production will happen somewhere else, and the distribut

Going beyond the mix tape now, here’s a new community for creative types to meet up and collaborate, all while sharing work under a Creative Commons license, as created by Marco Raaphorst of Melodiefabriek:

Any Creative Commons creator can join for free. So if you’re a composer, a filmmaker, a podcaster, a writer, you name it, please join! As far as I know this is the first community which is so broadly oriented and Creative Commons based. Sure, I love to talk with other composers and remixers about music, but wouldn’t it also be nice to communicate directly with the new generation of filmmakers for example? Connecting filmmakers and composers.

At ccCreators we can have discussions about all sorts of things, share photo’s with each others, add events to the calender and start new collaborations. It could become a killer website. So please join! No sneaky commercial reasons, just a way to connect to creators, artists using Creative Commons.

Sounds good to me. If you do join up, send us a link to your page on our Share Your Work forum and let us know how it goes.

ccNoise

Creative Commons site; CDM on Creative Commons

collaboration, Community, composers, Creative Commons, MP3, musicians

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=4HJBEL">

Fed up with 'Flash'? Getting annoyed with animated gifs? Well, why not try an alternative - CSS Flick Animation

The Moment of Long Now is an alternative news tv channel. The channel is showing short snippets of news footage with a pace that is a hundred times slower than what we are used to

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of ALL documented human languages.

'The behaviour of the people living today must allow for succeeding generations to be also capable to act with equal or improved capacity.