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.