unmediated

So apparently those crafty cats up at BarCampVancouver were chattin’ up an open source alternative to YouTube, smartly backed by Amazon’s S3 mass-storage service.

Serve the files with Drupal, passing the media files into the open source Flow Player or aptly-named Flash Video Player, and you’re nine-tenths to bein’ illegal (as they say).

Now, that’s pretty hawt, if I do say so myself.

But, here’s what I pitched to the Flock guys last night at their SF meetup: why isn’t there an extension for browsers that takes any media file (I’m primarily referring to video, but audio support tends to be flakey too), sends it off to some server-side transcoding service and re-embeds a Flash file in place of the original media — that’ll play no matter what system you’re on?

I mean, this would be better than just distributing a player with the browsers… it would actually solve the cross-platform issue entirely (okay, so the Linux folks still need an up-to-date Flash player).

I’ve never been a big fan of Flash (for a number of reasons) but as it’s clearly the most cross-platform compatible format for sending out video and it’s not always possible for producers to generate Flash video, this solution would reside on the client-side, perhaps as a subscription-based service (owing the costs of licensing the all the codecs and so on).

I mean, until we get wide-spread adoption of open source video codecs and formats that are as good as the proprietary ones, this seems like a good stop gap solution. Don’t it?

UK musician and activist Billy Bragg questions the role of social networking sites in today’s MediaGuardian. He argues that in the old days, artists had to sign with labels to get into record shops and to get paid. They usually kept only 10-15 percent of takings, with record companies covering manufacturing, marketing and distribution from the rest.
In an age of much simpler distribution, Bragg says that artists still receive only 10-15 percent of the record company share of sales on platforms like iTunes. Even taking into account the cost of ‘breaking’ an artist, Bragg questions whether artists need to sign away rights to record companies when they can promote and sell their own work directly online and retain their own copyright.
Social networking sites have a big part to play in this because artists “no longer wait to be discovered”. Bragg says the vast majority have no contractual agreements with everybody and that is in the spirit of the internet.
But he is critical of some social net sites that are making claims of ownership on this content and singles out MTV Flux: he claims a close reading of its terms hand MTV rights to transmit material “in perpetuity and gratis”, as well as commercially exploit, distribute, edit… without payment. “Such terms are unprecedented in the music industry and could have serious long-term implications.” Will social net sites allow artists to circumvent the record labels, he asks, or will they become a new way for them to keep their monopoly on copyright and earnings?
Plus, coincidentally, more on MySpace jumpstarting music careers on Variety. TV director and gig venue owner Peter O’Fallon: “The great thing about the Web is that there are no gatekeepers - no lawyers, managers, A&R people.”
Related: Audio Interview: MTV’s New User-Gen TV Service Flux

"Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed information system, makes the following eight assumptions about the data. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences."

Motion DSP is creating a simple web based interface that will significantly enhance low resolution camera phone video into surprisingly high quality stuff. It started off in 1998 as a U.S. military funded project at UC Santa Cruz. In January 2005, Professor Peyman Milanfar, the primary researcher behind the technology, co-founded Motion DSP.

The company compares multiple frames in a video to find and replace lost pixels in a given frame, significantly enhancing the experience with little increase in overall file size after compression. The service works best when a video is not moving rapidly or in a jerking fashion, but tends to improve just about any low quality video. To see a demonstration, check out this page on the site that contains three different before and after video shots.

The service will go into consumer beta sometime this year, CEO and co-founder Sean Varah told us. The service will be free and will allow users to upload a video and download an enhanced version. But he also stressed that the focus will be on getting deals done with the large online video sites, such as YouTube, to enhance user-uploaded videos.

Motion DSP is headquartered in San Mateo, California and outsource large parts of software development to Serbia. They’ve raised a $500,000 angel round and are currently pitching a Series A round of financing.

Tags: military, video, youtube, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0

Mejan Labs has just opened Art & Activism, an exhibition featuring artists and organizations using technology to communicate a political message.

The works presented include:

vaticano.org, by 0100101110101101.ORG. In december 1998 the net artists published a spoof version of the official Vatican web site. At the time most visitors didn't know that the Vatican, being legally a state, owns its own national domain name extension ".va", and therefore many of them digited the ".org" one that the net artists had bought. The copy site was aesthetically identical to the real one but with slightly modified contents (for example, they added lyrics from pop music groups.) For 12 months, thousand of people visited the vaticano.org without realising the prank. At the expiring of the first year of contract, Network Solutions prevented the renewing of it.

Feral Trade where Kate Rich trades coffee over social networks. The project operates largely outside commercial channels and makes a direct intervention into the business of grocery running, using the surplus freight capacity of commuter, vacation, migration, cultural and other social movements for the underground distribution of goods. The Feral Trade Courier is an online database that helps organise shipping information, facilitate communications between suppliers, couriers and buyers, and assemble documentary product-packaging which report on the origins, transport and social connections of the feral trade product.

The artists group C6 will show Want & Need, a project where the audience can SMS their wants and needs, which will be screened in the gallery. The work asks if people aren’t mixing up they actual needs with what they want to have.

Glyphiti, by Andy Deck, is an online collaborative drawing project. Visitors are invited to edit and add graphical units or 'glyphs', which compose the image, in real time.

Emails with false reviews, press releases etc sent by Heath Bunting as part of a net art action.

The show runs until October 8 at Mejan Labs, Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm Sweden.

Vial Spectre.

Leonardo, as part of its collaboration with the Creativity and
Cognition Studios of the University of Technology of Sydney
(http://www.creativityandcognition.com) is pleased to bring to your
attention:

***********************************************
CREATIVITY & COGNITION 2007
Seeding Creativity: Tools, Media, and Environments

June 13-15, 2007
Washington DC, USA
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/

Sponsored by ACM SIGCHI
***********************************************

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: December 15, 2006
Author notification: February 19, 2007
Final formatted papers due: March 19, 2007

We cordially invite submissions focusing on creativity support tools
for individual and group creativity, bridging among technology,
science and arts to find common themes for user interface and new
media design, and producing rigorous research with innovative designs
and carefully conceived evaluations.

Wap Review writes:

My fellow mobilist and host of this weeks Carnival of the Mobilists, Daniel Taylor at Mobile Enterprise Weblog has posted an interesting piece on mobile web usability or lack there of. Daniel's article, Who Designs This Stuff? describes the difficulties and frustrations that he experienced trying to accomplish something on the mobile web that should have been easy - getting the arrival time of a airline flight.

el experienced are typical of the frustration that many users experience when they first try to use the mobile web. The good news is that the causes of some of these difficulties are relatively easy to fix.

ZDNet.com writes:

The service creates a dedicated retail environment that anyone can use to sell stuff in the Amazon catalog.
...
Everyone has something they want to recommend to others, and a lot of folks want to find ways to display their Amazon Wish List without looking too much like they are addicted to the idea of maintaining a permanent wedding registry—it's so unseemly to always be telling people what you want from them. The system was easy to understand and the product, a multi-page store with a front door consisting of feature products to which I was able to add my own descriptions, much more inviting than the typical list of Amazon links a blogger or Web site might display.

Using TubeSock you can now download Videos from YouTube, and save them directly into iTunes in a iPod video compatible format.

Originally from digg / Technology, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Aug 30, 2006 at 06:29 PM

About as sexy as an eye exam, but damn, this technology is difficult to get right. So yesterday Google announced the open sourcing of Tesseract OCR, character/text-recognition software it developed back in the 80’s that it claims is better than most of the open source alternatives (I’d believe that) but not quite as good as some of the commercially available technologies (I’d buy that too).

But hmm, isn’t there a lot that could be done with this? Personally, can’t wait until we see this make it’s way into OpenOffice among other places.

Former broadcast industry executive Tore Nordahl recently published some predictions on the AVCHD format in the professional and broadcast space. He believes that AVC will replace HDV, and in the very near future. In a recent essay entitled "Will Panasonic lead the professional HD camcorder market with AVC in 2007?", Nordahl opens with the bold statement "HDV is in trouble."

"Panasonic never joined the "HDV club" choosing to tough it out with the HVX200 DVCPRO-HD P2 camcorder (with success) while developing its AVC technology. Panasonic's decision not to spend on HDV R&D will pay off big in 2007, when I expect to see several Panasonic AVC-based HD camcorders both for semi-pro and pro use."

Nordahl goes on to note that earlier this spring Sony and Panasonic announced the joint AVCHD H.264 format. With potentially double the encoding efficiency of HDV, he predicts that AVC can easily outperform HDV in the 20Mbps datarate arena.

Mentioning the HDR-SR1 and HDR-UX1 high-end Sony consumer model announcements, he predicts Panasonic professional model AVC announcements by October 2006...

(Continued at FresHDV)

Vid-Freaker is an interesting screensaver project for Mac OSX that takes footage from a given directory and slices, dices and juliennes it into a video mashup of sorts. Neato. The experimental screensaver is available as a Universal Binary, check the included README for install instructions. There is also a download mirror at versiontracker.

Dark Reading has more detail on a new law in California that tries to tackle Wi-Fi Freeloading and unsecured wireless routers. The bill, passed in the State Senate yesterday and soon to be signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, will require all vendors to put stickers on routers made after October 2007, warning users to password protect the devices.

It doesn't seem to clarify the muddy legal wording of existing laws when it comes to grabbing some free bandwidth. Both Section 502 of the California penal code and the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act "prohibit the intentional access to a computer without authorization." But are Wi-Fi freeloaders accessing the user's computer, or just the router? And does the word "computer" apply to router?

Daily Wireless picks out the choice quotes from web-coverage of the bill. "The question is, can we legislate away consumer idiocy?" asks Paul Debeasi, a wireless industry analyst with the Burton Group based in Midvale, Utah. "On the face of it, it's like cautioning the coffee drinker that the beverage is hot," said another Wi-Fi industry analyst. "It seems like a solution in search of a problem."

Scott Adams recounts an anecdote illustrating the ‘illusion of control’ and how important it is to many people - even to the extent that it is the single defining characteristic of mankind which one might use to explain human behaviour to aliens:

“The maintenance man is moving the thermostat in our office today. I started talking with him about the “Thermostat Wars” [from Dilbert comics]. He told me about one office with 30 women where they could never get the temperature to an agreeable level. At his suggestion they installed 20 dummy thermostats around the office. Everyone was told that each thermostat controlled the zone around itself.

Problem solved. Now that everyone has “control” of their own thermostat there is no problem.”

To what extent is the illusion of control, rather than real control, what most people really want in their products?

Do they care that their personal data may be encrypted and held to ransom by a software company, so long as they feel ‘in control’ in everyday use (e.g. the ability to change the colour scheme)?

And how should designers respond to this issue? Are there any examples of products (other than, say, children’s toys) deliberately designed with fake controls to make the user feel in charge even though he/she isn’t? (Fake solar cell calculators are interesting, but not quite the same issue)

P.S. On the other hand, it’s worth considering the opinion expressed by the Audi A2 owner, that she didn’t find it a disadvantage having to take her Audi to a ’specialist’ in order to open the bonnet (hood). Is even that basic level of control (being able to see the engine) too much for some people? Is it because, say, a thermostat affects people personally (temperature) whereas a car engine is something dirty, difficult, complex, for someone else to worry about?

When Google is not trying to eclipse the sun, they want to educate the masses (and its surprisingly not propaganda). The search giant has upped their "Project Gutenberg" efforts and are making hundreds of thousands of out-of-copyright books, which were previously available only for online searching and viewing, available to DOWNLOAD as a PDF, which you can then print and read at your leisure.

As a little tidbit, since we are all learning here, books are generally copyrighted for 70 years after an author's death, so a vast majority of children's classics will be available for the future generations.

"Application context inevitably drives the architecture design choices and the definition of services needed in a network. Over the past decade, the emergence of unanticipated applications of the Internet, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, networked gaming, podcasting, and voice telephony, has contributed to a pressing need to rethink the core Internet infrastructure and its accompanying architectural choices. To truly lay a foundation for tomorrow’s infrastructure, however, requires going beyond simply reacting to applications that have already emerged, to proactively considering the architectural implications of new classes of applications. A key area in this regard involves embedded sensing technology, presently poised to moved beyond scientific, engineering, and industrial domains into broader and more diverse citizen-initiated sensing in personal, social and urban ones."

The project's objective is to provide technical solutions and integrated systems for digital preservation of all types of audiovisual collections.

In this paper, we explore how current MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games) can use mobile phones in order to enhance player experience. We identify five different categories of how this can be done, and review our findings with MMORPG developers. This is continuing research, and we are working in IPERG [1] (Integrated Project of Pervasive Games) project with our partners on creating prototypes that will demonstrate some of these issues.

SensorPlanet is a Nokia-initiated cooperation on large-scale wireless sensor networks. The result of SensorPlanet is a global test platform for mobile-centric wireless sensor network research.

The objectives of SensorPlanet are to

* Make mobile handset -oriented wireless sensor network research easier
* Make possible for individual research groups to design and implement large scale experiments
* Allow creation and sharing of large data sets that can be analyzed/mined by many parties
* Establish a "Mobile Wireless Sensor Network Open Source community": Allow sharing of OS code
* Provide a forum for publishing early interesting results
* Accelerate concept innovation for consumer-oriented (and other) wireless sensor network research
* Create an ecosystem for industry and academia for collaboration and development

For several years, Javed Iqbal has operated a small company from a Brooklyn storefront and out of the garage at his Staten Island home that provides satellite programming for households, including sermons from Christian evangelists seeking worldwide exposure.

Mr. Iqbal's home, a modest two-story stone and brick house on Van Name Avenue in Mariners Harbor, stands out because among the children’s toys in the backyard were eight satellite dishes.

But this week, the budding entrepreneur's house and storefront were raided by federal agents, and Mr. Iqbal was charged with providing customers services that included satellite broadcasts of a television station controlled by Hezbollah - a violation of federal law.

For the first time, Burning Man participants will be able to "offset" their global warming impact much the same way large corporations do, by investing in clean energy projects.

With Steve Dietz, Lawrence Rinder and Benjamin Weil

Wired puts their story about wikis up on a wiki and will run the final product in a couple weeks. *crosses fingers*

David Weinberger boswells a chunky discussion of the future of news at Foocamp.

Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com is interested in optimizing information collection. How do we get journalists to collect information in ways that machines can reuse it. Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information, he says. . . . Adrian says that the categorization onus should be on the reporter. All the info in it ought to be categorized so, if it’s a report on a mayor’s speech, we can see all the speeches by the mayor, all speeches about the same topic, etc.

>

When I used to call bloggers et al “citizen journalists,” many professional journalists objected: “We’re citizens, too.” Absolutely, you are, and that raises questions about your responsibility as citizens. Consider these three illustrations involving The New York Times:

Sunday’s Times carries a most eloquent essay by Michael Wines on covering the world’s poorest and sometimes intervening to help them.

How to respond to it is a moral dilemma that lurks in the background of many interviews. Reputable journalists are indoctrinated with the notion that they are observers — that their job is to tell a story, not to influence it. So what to do when an anguished girl tells a compelling story about her young brother, lying emaciated on a reed mat, dying for lack of money to by anti-AIDS drugs? Is it moral to take the story and leave when a comparatively small gift of money would keep him alive? If morality compels a gift, what about the dying mother in the hut next door who missed out on an interview by pure chance? Or the three huts down the dirt path where, a nurse says, residents are dying for lack of drugs? Why are they less deserving?

nalism, paying for information is a cardinal sin, the notion being that a source who will talk only for money is likely to say anything to earn his payment. So what to do when a penniless father asks why he should open his life free to an outsider when he needs money for food? How to react to the headmistress who says that white people come to her school only to satisfy their own needs, and refuses to talk without a contribution toward new classrooms? Is that so different from interviewing a Washington political consultant over a restaurant lunch on my expense account?

If it is, which is more ethical?

The same question was raised during Katrina, as journalists saw people in need and had to help. I think it is insane to argue that as journalists, they should not act. As citizens of the world, as neighbors, as compassionate people, the canons of their profession should not stop them. At the same time, though, as Wines points out, you can’t help everyone — and sometimes your reporting will bring help.

Now hear Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald on On the Media this week talking about turning child porn sites he finds in the course of his reporting over to the authorities. Last year, in a much-discussed case, Eichenwald, convinced one of his youthful subjects to testify against the pornographers. Now, in a new series, he reveals, with admirable transparency, that he turned in sites because it is the law:

Covering this story raised legal issues. United States law makes it a crime to purchase, download or view child pornography, unless the images are promptly reported to authorities and no images are copied or retained. The Times complied with the law, disclosing what it found to appropriate authorities.

ack Shafer argued against what Eichenwald did:

What extraordinary intervention! The analogies aren’t perfect, but imagine a Times reporter encountering an 18-year-old who had been thrust into the illicit drug business at 13 as a consequence of his neglectful family and unscrupulous dealers? Would he help the young man leave the drug trade and find him a lawyer at a Washington firm who is “a former federal prosecutor,” as Eichenwald did Berry? Not likely. Would a Times reporter extend similar assistance to an 18-year-old female prostitute? An 18-year-old fence? A seller of illegal guns? No way.

But why the hell not? Shafer argues that this puts the next reporter in a risky position: Will sources trust him or see him an an agent of the law? I think the reporter who does not follow Eichenwald’s lead is in a riskier position: of allowing and thus even abetting crimes to be committed. And what does that tell the public about our role in our communities? What kind of citizens are we then?

Now to the third, inevitable illustration. I wish that On the Media had asked Eichenwald about Judy Miller and related cases, for the parallels are clear. She knew a crime had been committed and she went to jail not to reveal the criminal. Now, of course, the counterargument is, once again, that sources — especially if those sources are the ones performing the criminal act — will not trust reporters and reveal information that should be revealed if they believe those reporters will not protect them and will hand them over to the authorities. But what if the crime is even clearer than revealing classified information? What if it is child molestation or murder?

Where is the line? Especially in a time when any citizen can perform an act of journalism, can there be a line between being a citizen and a journalist?

: LATER: Jeremy Wagstaff disagrees and says journalists aren’t built to be citizens.

The New York Times checks in on who made out in the recent FCC AWS spectrum auction. While touted as a chance for pesky upstarts or wistful third-pipe competitors like DirecTV to grab much needed spectrum, the paper notes it was the incumbent wireless providers who walked away from the auction happy.

"Of the $13.3 billion in bids registered thus far, $2.2 billion has come from the cable providers, bidding together in a consortium with Sprint, the third-largest cellular carrier. But about 60 percent of the total bids have come from Cingular, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, the first-, second- and fourth-largest cell phone companies. T-Mobile has bid nearly $4 billion, mostly for licenses in major metropolitan areas, while Cingular and Verizon have sought licenses that cover broader regions."

"The kings of the hill defended the hill," says one wireless industry analyst in the piece. "The dream of another wave of new entrants has died."

Second Life resident Chili Carson is launching what could be a great boon for SL’s business owners as well as their customers: a Chamber of Commerce for the virtual world. While news of the venture first surfaced at the Second Life Community Convention and on New World Notes, 3pointD has some fresh details from Chili as she builds out the concept and seeks to garner support in the virtual world. The question now is whether the chamber can withstand the slings and arrows of the Second Life community.

While Chili (otherwise known as Arlene Ciroula, chief operating officer of Baltimore-area CPA and consulting firm KAWG&F) is still in the process of hashing out details with a small planning committee, she hopes to launch the Chamber as soon as possible, perhaps sometime next month. A second introductory presentation will be held Sunday, September 10th at 1:00 PM SLT (IM her to RSVP or to be put on the mailing list for announcements) to discuss recent developments. Other SL residents involved in the planning process so far include Lou Tones, Sudane Erato, Gwyneth Llewelyn and Bean Wollongong.

At the moment, the planning committee is working on hashing out the application process through which businesses would join the organization. Initial plans are to form a membership committee which would review applications and then accept or reject businesses based on a set of standards, also under development. A board of directors would be elected by members. A framework for presentation to prospective members is currently being drawn up, and an election for board seats will be held after a first round of businesses join the organization. Members will pay a small fee, and have access to information, support and promotion for doing business in Second Life. Some of those resources will be available to non-members as well.

The shape of the venture has been well thought out by someone who seems to have a great deal of experience fostering business growth in the real world. Among the benefits to members that are envisioned by the chamber are a business directory and newsletter, chamber-sponsored workshops and seminars, industry-specific expos and conventions, member-to-member discounts, and an executive dialogue program, among others.

The chamber will also provide a repository of information about SL businesses to the broader community, and some assistance for real-world companies coming into SL, as well as guidance on how to integrate themselves into the world “in a positive fashion.”

The chamber will also see to lobby on issues affecting the Second Life business community, to advocate for sound business practices in Second Life, and to set standards to assure commercial transactions are conducted “with the highest possible level of professional conduct and ethics.”

As with many past ventures in the SL business community, the chamber will stand or fall based not simply on its soundness, but also on its resolve. One without the other will not be enough. Though 250,000 avatars log into SL on a regular basis, it’s still a small community, and many residents tend to bristle at any attempt to build structure of any sort atop the individual efforts at work on the Grid. Most people simply give up when they do not get wide buy-in immediately.

But that doesn’t mean a chamber of commerce can’t fly in Second Life. If it does its work well and is willing to invest a lot of time in slowly garnering members and building a helpful reputation, it will eventually benefit from the network effects of the growing SL business community and see its subscribers take off. The hard part is hanging in there long enough to see this start to happen. Competitors will crop up and naysayers will criticize the organization for being elitist and for running against the prevailing currents of Web 2.0 and the 3pointD world.

But the timing just may be right. With more and more people streaming into Second Life, there is currently a real need for more and better business information on the Grid. Even a simple shopping directory (one more useful than the SL search function) would be a great boon to SL businesses and shoppers alike. If the chamber of commerce emerges as a source of useful information, it could catch on fast.

The one thing that could trump it is a more 2.0 version of the same idea. But Web-based community sites for SL — things like SLProfiles and Web-based retail markets like SLBoutique and SLExchange — have trouble catching on. Word of mouth still seems to be the best way to get one’s message out in Second Life. That may change once the API is more open and truly useful Web tools begin to be built, but it hasn’t happened yet. The best way forward for a chamber of commerce is probably just to build it and try to get people to come. If it works, though, it could easily become a great resource. We wish Chili and her crew the best of luck.

advertising, governance, Reputation, virtual commerce, work

Add terrorism and politics to the list of world-historical factors now driving people into the metaverse. Several links in this VRoot post discuss “how travel restrictions have given a boost to telepresence and effective visual collaboration as alternatives to physical travel.” Add to that high fuel prices that may simply make it cheaper to hold a meeting at your desk, rather than at someone else’s desk across town, and even environmental concerns about the pollution you’re pushing into the atmosphere to get there.

As IT Week executive editor Martin Veitch puts it, “The old model of business collaboration is broken.” Of course, that doesn’t mean a 3D virtual world is the perfect place for every meeting. But it does mean that people are increasingly looking for alternatives to physical meetings that might more efficiently be held elsewhere. Seek and ye shall find.

Does this mean there’s a new model of business collaboration in the works? Most likely, though it may take some time. When it comes, it will rely for its foundation on the simple 3D structure of virtual places, but that won’t be enough: you’ll need robust 3pointD capabilities to make your metaversal business meetings truly efficient. That means 3D collaborative spaces that are fully interfaced with the 2D Web, and which support robust interpersonal interaction in a variety of modes, from voice to social networking, information sharing and more. This kind of thing is already happening (viz. the communal writeboard made by Second Life resident angrybeth Shortbread). Better hooks to the Web are coming as well. With Business 2.0 flagging global startups that are increasingly taking advantage of distributed processing power and collaboration tools, significant new kinds of collaborative business models may not be all that far off. It’s certainly not too soon to start exploring the possibilities.

3pointD, metaverse, Technology, virtual worlds, Web 2.0, work

Douglas Fisher published a 75-page report on the first year of a South Carolina citizen journalism project, Hartsville Today.

Culver City, California, the first Los Angeles municipality to offer the public free WiFi, has now installed a program to filter illegal and problematic content from their network, notes GovTech and Broadband Reports.

The city added Audible Magic's CopySense Network Appliance to filter illegal and "problematic content" from their network. Three major movie studios call Culver City home.

According to John Richo, Director of Information Technology for Culver City, the city was concerned with taxpayer dollars funding such activity. "This type of content defeats the purpose of the wireless hotspot".

Culver City is home to nearly 40,000 residents. Their public Wi-Fi system covers ten square blocks in the city's newly renovated Town Plaza. They used a Firetide Wireless Mesh Network with three HotPoint 1000R outdoor mesh routers mounted atop city and privately owned buildings. It was installed by Wireless Hotspot, Inc. The city's redevelopment agency spent around $20,000 putting the network together to entice more "foot traffic" to the downtown area with free WiFi access.

Audible's Copysense device inspects all network traffic looking for legitimate audio or video fingerprints in an effort to weed out copyrighted files based on a master database. The device can also throttle back p2p bandwidth, or prevent p2p altogether. However, notes Broadband Reports, the latest Bit Torrent clients, such as Azureus, can defeat the device since they have incorporated encryption that also helps get around the traffic shaping and copyright filtering.

For NSA-grade surveillence, cities might bring in Booz Allen for a consultation. Applied Signal Technology has voice channel processors and other Wireless Signal Processing gear. With GimmerGlass optical switches, Culver City might contract it out to India.

Dave Winer has come up with a way to make mobile news feeds easy to access and read on portable media devices. He calls it "NewsRiver" and uses the device's browser instead of an RSS aggregator. He's using OPML technology to create a web page that's readable in his River of News style (scrolling through text instead of clicking on headlines).

While this has been available for several months, it has moved to the front burner with Dave, because he recently purchased a Blackberry and is discovering what he likes and doesn't like about the device.

A lot of people are going to say, "Big deal. We can already read news on a PDA." But let's all remember that this is Dave Winer, and when Dave gets excited about something, it's time to stop what you're doing and pay attention.

I wouldn't be blogging if it wasn't for Dave, and I think that's true for most. I wouldn't have an RSS feed if it wasn't for Dave. Podcasting wouldn't exist today if Dave hadn't given his mind to it.

He has a unique way of getting downstream, having an "a-ha" moment, and bringing it back to the rest of us. We look at it and think he's nuts, but that only lasts for a moment.

This discovery has pretty profound ramifications for local media companies, especially those who are currently paying outsider providers to do something similar for them. These companies will likely see their business model disrupted by this simple application.

I love Dave Winer.

(Via Stephen Downes)

All you wanted to know about green Wi-Fi:

Green WiFi has a simple goal: provide people with stable and reliable internet access from a renewable resource for developing nations. Many readers probably know that this sounds easier than it is. The thing is, Green WiFi has a solution that looks like it will work easily.

I recently spoke with Marc Pomerleau, one of the founders of Green WiFi, and we had a very interesting conversation talking about both the Green and WiFi part of Green WiFI. Their approach to providing internet access is novel in that it is simple, low-cost, and can be quickly setup.

Essentially, they’ve designed a system that uses a solar panel, a charge controller, a battery, and a generic router to create nodes that cost around $200. This system is comprised of stand-alone units that can talk to each other over a mesh network that can also heal itself. The system was designed primarily by Bruce Balkie, the other founder of Green WIFI, and the prototype node tested on his roof without a complete power loss.

Bruce and Marc were working at Sun Microsystems when the idea to use their knowledge to make the world better came to mind. They had always wanted to do something “with meaning” and they figured out what to do.

Fireside Chat: The Long Tail - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals): a great discussion about findability in the long tail.

In July, we guest-blogged for the Belgian These Days Blogs, creating a dictionary of terms related to the process of social innovation, which now increasingly takes place, ‘outside the corporate form’.

It was published in 3 parts: one, two, and three.

For more information, and more concepts, see our P2P Business section.

A useful add-on are the 10 Laws of Innovation, posted by John Thackara:

Power Law 1: Don’t think “new product” - think social value.

Power Law 2: Think social value before “tech”.

Power Law 3: Enable human agency. Design people into situations, not out of them.

Power Law 4: Use, not own. Possession is old paradigm.

Power Law 5: Think P2P, not point-to-mass.

Power Law 6: Don’t think faster, think closer.

Power Law 7: Don’t start from zero. Re-mix what’s already out there.

Power Law 8: Connect the big and the small.

Power Law 9: Think whole systems (and new business models, too).

Power Law 10: Think open systems, not closed ones.

The rumors were true: Sony Pictures has made its first Internet acquisition in a long long time, and officially enters into the social media arena: it has bought video sharing site Grouper, for $65 million. The company had about $5.25 million in funding, from T-Ventures, T-Online's investment arm, and Duff, Ackerman, Goodrich.
Grouper was started about two years ago, by Josh Felser and Dave Samuel, previously founder of Spinner.com, which was sold to AOL for $320 million in 1999. The company started as a P2P file sharing client, and then morphed into a video sharing site last year…it has had some success, though nowhere near YouTube in terms if usage (not that anyone else is near).
So the valuation is not really based on traffic…what it does have is a solid management and technical team (CTO Aviv Eyal founder Friskit, for those of you who remember from the late 90s). And user tools which build upon basic sharing, with ability to download any video to iPod, PSP and others portable devices, video commenting and other features. It also has a simple video editing program built in called "Groovie".
FT: Grouper has just 8 million unique users last month (internal company figures for last month…ComScore says 542,000 unqiyes last month, compared to 16 million for YouTube…Grouper disputes the numbers, says WSJ)). Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures, said the studio saw a number of possible uses for Grouper, from distributing and promoting its films and TV programs on the internet to serving as a pipeline of new ideas and creative talent. He also argued that Grouper overlaps with Sony Pictures' consumer electronics parent company. Visitors to the site, for example, frequently use Sony cameras and computers to help create and edit their videos.
Release: No immediate changes are planned for the site. Over time, Lynton said there is potential for development of ad-supported and premium content businesses.
Some points: It's about Sony realizing they don't have to invent everything, and trying to prove they can bring in good people and let them do something solid. Secondly, this probably signifies the start of a shakeup in the video sharing space, where other also-rans are struggling to find their footing against the YouTube juggernaut. So you'll probably see similar buyouts in the next few months…others in the line: Revver, Guba, Blip.tv, Veoh, Break.com, PureVideo and countless others.
Related:
– Video Sharing Firm Grouper Gets $1.75 Million Funding
– Top Ten Video Sharing Websites

Holy Smokes - Amazon is offering computing on demand. They have a new service called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the company page describes it as a “web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.” This in tandem with the Amazon storage service, S3, makes the cost of development for web-based applications even lower. More thoughts to follow…

YouTube today introduced a new campaign that casts a “pro” as one of its users. Paris Hilton, famous for being famous, has a pop album. YouTube is giving her a “brand channel,” where Hilton appears in a choppy video welcoming visitors and asking them to leave a comment. It’s like real-time reality television; when I visited, she had logged on two minutes before. Hilton comes off as strikingly similar to the 20-something amateur YouTube ladies who primp and pontificate in front of their webcams (in some cases, for the benefit of large fanbases).

As part of the campaign, YouTube is selling ads for Fox’s Prison Break and sharing some of that revenue with Hilton’s label, Warner. Selling ads on ads — strong work! But instead of dealing with making money from amateur material (and potentially sharing ad dollars with the amateur creators), YouTube seems to be creating a new kind of amateur. Since Paris Hilton already blurs that line, by choosing her YouTube seems to reassure us it’s in on the joke. Who next — Puck from Real World or Survivor’s Richard Hatch?

Everyone wants to know if YouTube can profit on its potential. This is an interesting tweak, but it’s not going to bring the revenue pouring in. As many are pointing out, the campaign doesn’t apply to the vast majority of YouTube’s videos. Still, it’s good to see YouTube try before cashing out. A similar new initiative, an ad for the movie Pulse that users can rate, share, and comment on just like any other YouTube content, has been viewed nearly a million times in four days, according to Reuters.

YouTube, it seems, is “charging [Fox and other advertisers] based on the number of users regardless of whether the consumers actually watch the videos,” according to the Wall Street Journal. I assume this means the number of visitors to a “brand channel’s” page, or the home page when the brand is featured, not YouTube’s total visitors (11 million per week and counting)…but it’s not clear. The WSJ also reports YouTube wants to turn this into an AdSense-like program, brokering video ads for other sites. That’s a good business, but Google would clearly have the edge on syndicated video ads if push came to shove.

Getting this many users for a free service was a mix of smarts and luck. Working out how to make money off them? That’s tough.

While marketing prognosticators and technophiles rush into the future, raving about the next big content delivery system or ad model, the fact is most Americans -- notably adults with steady incomes -- still get their content the old-fashioned way, from TV, print and Internet ads, Advertising Age reports.

According to Jupiter Research, 7% of American adults write blogs and 22% read them; about 8% listen to podcasts and 5% use RSS feeds. According to a separate study by WorkPlace Print Media, 88% of the at-work audience doesn't even know what RSS is. And recent data from word-of-mouth research group Keller Fay indicate 92% of brand conversations were taking place offline -- far more than the commonly assumed rate of 80%.

We saw wireless MIDI and mouse control via the Sony PSP, the creation of media artist and hacker Rob King. Now Rob writes to say he’s finished the first release of his software for controlling Ableton Live directly from PSP, and it’s available as a free download.

PLAYLIVE IS HERE [Rob King’s E-mu.org]

The Ableton Live interface is neatly recreated in miniature right on the PSP screen. Features:

1. Wireless control — MIDI sans wires
2. 8 tracks
3. 12 clips per track for clip triggering
4. 4 X/Y pads for joystick-style control (though for touch-X/Y, it’s still all about the Nintendo DS)

ulation is under discussion, but then you wouldn’t be able to use the clip triggers to send MIDI notes. Currently available as a free Windows download, with a Mac version on the way. But even in its current form, this should demonstrate to the folks at Ableton the real breadth of possibilities for controlling their software. Sure, you could have another generic plastic controller and slap an Ableton logo on it, but — Live users can’t be underestimated in their devotion to unique and personal solutions.

Now, we just need wireless MIDI for Nintendo DS. That or else I should take this as a sign that I can justify buying a PSP. Thanks, Rob!

Anyone got a PSP who wants to write up a review of this, let me know!

Ableton Live, alternative controllers, free, gaming, homebrew, MIDI, mobile, PSP, software, Sony

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=w4fTwf">

From the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, Generation Vlog: A new breed of filmmaker has emerged from the computer monitor (and even the iPod) onto the big screen as part of a breakthrough digital film series

I wish I could see the newspaper version which probably has pretty pictures. They talk about the Vloggers Unite! series @ The Pionner Theater, especially LOL and Charlene Rule's Scratchvideo.tv. Here's my blurb:

The value of blogs comes into question on Wednesday with "Blogumentary," a doc that takes a hard look at the ways in which blogs affect our politics (think Joe Lieberman), our media (Huffington Post) and our relationships (MySpace and Friendster).

An interesting article in MediaWeek wonders whether MTV Networks might have plans to build a MySpace-like social network out of various properties it’s acquired lately, including things like Xfire and Neopets. While MTV’s still-in-alpha Virtual Laguna Beach isn’t mentioned by name in the article, it can only lend more weight to the theory, despite the fact that it doesn’t have much of a social-networking component — yet.

The MediaWeek writer doesn’t seem to be reading 3pointD, or he might have made more of the following, which is buried toward the end of the piece: “Rumors persist that Viacom is cooking up a social networking play of its own—perhaps melding that trend with the virtual reality phenomenon. [MTV Networks president Michael] Wolf wouldn’t get specific, but hinted something was in the works using avatars (virtual representations of people).” Taking Virtual Laguna Beach into the social networking space could be quite interesting. That’s one feature Second Life and other virtual worlds could benefit from, if you ask us.

avatars, media, Social software, There.com, Viacom, virtual worlds

This in-world collaboration tool for the virtual world of Second Life has been around for a couple of months at least, but 3pointD contributor Chip Poutine just flagged it to me, and it looks so cool I thought I’d flag it here. Its name is self-explanatory: “communal writeboard.” Created by SL resident angrybeth Shortbread and described on her blog, “the main ideas behind its design are to have a slideshow presenter that anyone can add or remove pictures from, plus a range of overlay tools that can be used to annotate or point to areas of interest within an image. These overlay tools can also be used to create simple mindmaps or visual polling events.” (See a shot of the overlay tools after the jump.)

I haven’t checked it out yet, but I’m probably going to put one on my land in Louise at some point, just for kicks. If you want to check it out for yourself, the writeboard is available for L$1 at angrybeth’s Metalab, at Gourdneck (204, 180, 724)” [< -- SL link]. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's been using this. I'd also love to see a text-based wiki in Second Life, perhaps one that was editable by a list of people. I've been having some fun working on a project on a Schtuff wiki lately with a friend, and it would be cool to be able to bring that into Second Life.

/a>, interface, Second Life

Zooomr, a worldly social photo hosting site, had added the ability to attach audio files to pics. I tested it out and you can see me here...

I think it’s a really cool idea. Still video anyone? I’ve been thinking of "video" that involves stills with accompanying narrative. Not slide shows. No. Just one image, persistantly still, with audio overlaid. Zooomr allows this capability with what they call Zoomrtations (and unfortunate name, if you ask me). It’s an audio player off to the side of the image that you can listen to as you view the image.

Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be any way in which to blog the results. Can’t seem to find any RSS feeds either.

Nevertheless, I think I’ll be doing some experiments there in the near future...as soon as I get my audio woes remedied.

- Anne

Webwag is a new personalized start page set to be released at the end of this month. According to E-consultancy.com, it's the latest creation of ex-Google France chief Franck Poisson - who says it "will move out of beta on August 28" and be officially announced in early September. More from E-Consultancy.com:

"According to Poisson, Webwag will shortly launch a toolbar, allowing users to import bookmarks and other sites into widgets on their home page, as well as to search their chosen sites or the web as a whole. For the latter, it has inked a partnership with a “big search company”, which Poisson won’t name."

What's more, Poisson is talking up the chances of the independent start pages - such as Pageflakes, Netvibes and now Webwag. He thinks the big companies - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo - won't capture more than 50% of the market:

"According to Poisson, Webwag’s revenue streams will include affiliate marketing – something Netvibes is doing via Kelkoo - and B2B deals, an as yet unexplored area. Chris previously suggested that white labelling this technology is one key revenue opportunity for these firms to consider.

Poisson said: "As Web 2.0 develops over the next three three to five years, two things will remain. Firstly, everyone will have their own blog, and over 75% of people will have their own personalised start pages.

"My belief is the big search portals (My Yahoo etc) will get 50% of that market, and 50% will be taken by three to four independents.”"

Personally I think that 50% figure for independents is too ambitious. I also question his claim that 75% of people will have a start page in 3-5 years, unless you count the likes of Yahoo.com as a 'personalized start page' (actually I suspect the distinction will be moot in 5 years time).

In any case I do believe there is very viable market for the 'independents' - particularly in white labelling and B2B deals. Personalized start pages are one of the more inventive areas of Web technology at the moment, with action aplenty from Internet giants and small startups alike. It'll be interesting to see what Webwag has to offer - currently the link above is password-protected.

I happened upon a post on Nicholas Carr’s Blog this morning called The Great Unread. Although it’s about written blogs, specifically, I think the gist of it carries over into the videoblogging realm quite nicely.

As the Yahoo Videoblogging Group has grown, there have been repeated complaints about A-list vloggers - vloggers that get the hype, the views, the links, the magazine articles (also known as the usual suspects). This has led to some acrimonious debates over fairness in group dynamics.

Do A-listers exist in the vlogosphere? Is it a clique? An attention grab? Is it a question of who speaks the loudest and most often or is does it have to do with who came into the scene first?

Nic Carr calls the idea of a democratic and egalitarian blogosphere an "innocent fraud":

An innocent fraud is a lie, but it’s a lie that’s more white than black. It’s a lie that makes most everyone happy. It suits the purposes of the powerful because it masks the full extent of their power, and it suits the purposes of the powerless because it masks the full extent of their powerlessness.

elves about the blogosphere - that it’s open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud.

The post goes on to explain why he feels that is,

and ends with an tale of A-listers merging with big media moguls while "blog peasants" look on.

There are a great many comments following the post, some in agreement and some railing against it’s perceived hyperboly. The gem that I found within it, however, is a link to an article written in 2003, considered an important document on the matter.

Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality attempts to offer an objective view of a growing gap between popular blogs and what Nic refers to as The Great Unread.

In 2003, the most popular blog was Instapundit, blogging was still fairly young but growing quickly…much as videoblogging is today. I think some of the parallels are striking and would help to explain the growing disparity.

Rather than using a loaded term such as Innocent Fraud, Shirky refers to something called Power Law Distribution and how small historical moments are writ large over time as more and more people enter the arena.

A few people begin vlogging. They link to each other. Soon, others arrive on the scene and create their own vlogs. Their links reflect the vlogrolls of their predecessors with a few additions. As each new vlogger arrives, their vlogrolls are more inclined to include vlogs that have been linked to by the majority of the participants and less inclined to include the vlogs that are only linked to by a few. Oddly enough, the greater the number of options, rather than flattening the plane of attention, the results become more skewed toward the favorited vlogs.

In the section, Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable, Shirky writes:

Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

o the question of "is it fair", Shirky offers four points:

1. there is no threshold for having a weblog
2. good blogs stay on top because they continue blogging (a difficult accomplishment in and of itself! It’s hard work!)
3. This one is important, in my opinion so I’ll quote directly:

the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake.

o A-list because "the lines separating more or less trafficked blogs is arbitrary"

Once a blog (or vlog) becomes popular, will the content creator become part of an elite clique that predominantly links to and associates with other popular creators or is it a question of numbers?

…as a blogger’s audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can’t link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can’t answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site.

uts loudest, works hardest, socializes online more, or is it a question of who you know (as some have suggested through Nic’s comments)?

Video’s visual component also might ask the question, is it who is the most attractive or the most engaging/entertaining on camera?

I don’t think there are any direct answers to these questions.

Shirky asks and answers a couple of questions of his own that are worth considering:

Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes.

that occurs organically a problem or not? Do you consider yourself an A-lister? Why or why not?

- Anne

Use JavaScript to crawl the DOM looking for links with the :visited pseudo-element. It wouldn't be hard to add hidden links to the page to test whether your visitors have visited your competition's site.

Neave.tv is an experimental use of video over the web, lovingly powered by Blip.tv, Google Video and You Tube.

The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research.

Scott Craver of the University of Binghamton has a very interesting post summarising the concept of a ‘privacy ceiling':

"This is an economic limit on privacy violation by companies, owing to the liability of having too much information about (or control over) users."

It's the "control over users" that immediately makes this something especially relevant for designers and technologists to consider: that control is designed, consciously, into products and systems, but how much thought is given to the extremes of how it might be exercised, especially in conjunction with the wealth of information that is gathered on users?

"Liability can come from various sources... [including]

Vicarious infringement liability.

Imagine: you write a music player (like iTunes) that can check the Internet when I place a CD in my computer. You decide to collect this data for market research. Now the RIAA discovers that this data can also identify unauthorized copies. Can they compel you to hand over data on user listening habits?

Your company is liable for vicarious infringement if (1) infringement happens, (2) you benefit from it, and (3) you had the power to do something about it—which I assume includes reporting the infringement. So now you are possibly liable because you have damning information about your users. This also applies to DRM technologies that let you restrict users.

Note that you can't solve this problem simply by adopting a policy of only keeping the data for 1 month, or being gentle and consumer-friendly with your DRM. The fact is, you have the architecture for monitoring and/or control, and you may not get to choose how you use it.

Other sources of liability described include: being drawn into criminal investigations based on certain data which a company or other organisation may have - or be compelled to obtain - on its users; customers suing in relation to the leaking of supposedly private data (as in the AOL débâcle); and "random incompetence", e.g. an employee accidentally releasing data or arbitrarily exercising some designed-in control with undesirable consequences.

Scott goes on:

"Okay, so there is a penalty to having too much knowledge or too much control over customers. What should companies do to stay beneath this ceiling?

1. Design an architecture for your business/software that naturally prevents this problem.

It is much easier for someone to compel you to violate users' privacy if it's just a matter of using capabilities you already have. Mind, you have to convince a judge, not a software engineer, that adding monitoring or control is difficult. But you have a better shot in court if you must drastically alter your product in order to give in to demands.

...

2. Assume you will monitor and control to the full extent of your architecture. In fact, don't just assume this, but go to the trouble to monitor or control your users.

Why? Because in an infringement lawsuit you don't want to appear to be acting in bad faith... if you have the ability to monitor users and refuse to use it, you're giving ammunition to a copyright holder who accuses you of inducement and complicity.

...

But ... the real message is that you should go back to design principle 1. If you want to protect users, think about the architecture; don't just assume you can take a principled stand not to abuse your own power.

The third principle is really a restatement of the first two, but deserves restating:

3. Do not attempt to strike a balance.

Do not bother to design a system or business model that balances user privacy with copyright holder demands. All this does is insert an architecture of monitoring or control, for later abuse. In other words, design an architecture for privacy alone. Anything you put in there, under rule #2, will one day be used to its full extent.

I have seen many many papers over the years, in watermarking tracks, proposing an end-to-end media distribution system balancing DRM with privacy. Usually, the approach is that watermarks are embedded in music/movies/images by a trusted third party, the marks are kept secret from the copyright holder, and personal information is revealed only under specific circumstances in which infringement is clear. This idea is basically BS. Your trusted third party does not have the legal authority to decide when to reveal information. What will likely happen instead: if a copyright holder feels infringement is happening, the trusted third party will be liable for vicarious infringement."

Summing it up: any capability you design into a product or system will be used at some point - even if you are forced to use it against the best interests of your business. So it is better to design deliberately to avoid being drawn into this: design systems not to have the ability to monitor or control users, and that will keep you much safer from liability issues.

The privacy ceiling concept - which Scott is going to present in a paper along with Lorrie Cranor and Janice Tsai at the ACM DRM 2006 workshop - really does seem to have a significant implications for many of the architectures of control examples I've looked at on this site.

For example, the Car Insurance Black Boxes mostly record mileage and time data to allow insurance to be charged according to risk factors that interest the insurance company; but the boxes clearly also record speed, and whether that information would be released to, say, law enforcement authorities, if requested, is an immediate issue of interest/concern.

Looking further, though, the patent covering the box used by a major insurer mentions an enormous number of possible types of data that could be monitored and reported by the device, including exact position, weights of occupants, driving styles, use of brakes, what radio station is tuned in, and so on. Whether any insurance company would ever implement them, of course, is another question, and it would require a lot tighter integration into a vehicle's systems; nevertheless, as Scott makes clear, whatever possibilities are designed into the architecture, will be exploited at some point, whether through pressure (external or internal) or incompetence.

I look forward to reading the full paper when it is available.

libsecondlife, the reverse-engineering effort by a group of talented Second Life residents (which has caused no small consternation among some users of the virtual world) got a welcome imprimatur from Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka in his closing talk at Saturday’s sessions of the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco. Ondrejka also gave a look at changes being made to the code-base, changes that should make building Web-based SL mashups easier for everyone, whether or not you know enough to pick apart the platform to build something like libsecondlife.

“The official position of Linden Lab on libsecondlife is, we like libSL, you guys rock,” Ondrejka said. “We are blown away by what you’ve accomplished, and we’re very excited to see you do more, so do not stop. But everything you’ve reverse engineered is changing, and for that I do apologize.” libsecondlife hackers that 3pointD spoke with at the convention remained unconcerned, however, as the changes Cory described will no doubt be slow in coming.

Among the upcoming changes:

• the internal messaging system over which various parts of the SL platform communicate is being moved to well defined XML
• the user interface is being refactored (more or less a fancy word for cleaned up), and also moved to XML
• the system will move to a “capabilities-based permissions structure”
• as much data as possible is going to be exposed in representational-state transfer (REST) interfaces, which will allow it to be much more easily accessed from Web-based applications.

“You’ll be able to hit things with browsers and with RSS,” Ondrejka said. “We want you guys to be able to get at the data, to be able to do things like build own Web-based parcel manager for parcels. Long-term, our goal is open, discoverable APIs for as much of the sytem as we possibly can. You guys are doing incredible things, we want you to be able to do more.”

Some Second Life residents had become concerned about the libSL effort after it was revealed that proprietary textures could be stolen using the tool, and a crude version of “god mode” could be entered that might give users access to data that normally wouldn’t be available. But the presence of the tool has not caused any widespread problems for SL residents. And Linden Lab itself clearly has no problem with the effort.

The changes Cory described may make libsecondlife obsolete, but they will open up broad new potential for SL residents to write Web-based apps that interact more closely with the virtual world. It will no doubt be some time, however, before the company can accomplish such a deep overhaul of its code. For now, look to the hackers.

events, interface, Second Life, security, Web 2.0

Via Dave Farber's Interesting People, a brief New Scientist article outlines Sony's continuing obsession with restricting and controlling its customers (the last one didn't go too well):

"A patent filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making "too many" back-up copies of its CDs...

Sony's latest idea is to place a piece of monitoring hardware inside the CD. Its patent suggests embedding a radio-frequency ID chip that could be interrogated wirelessly by a PC or CD player. The chip would record the number of times the disc was copied and prevent further recordings once it reached the limit. The device could also be fitted to DVDs. Whether Sony will turn the patent idea into reality remains to be seen."

Of course this will require new CD players and CD-ROM drives with the ability to read, write to and act on the signal from the RFID chip - which means its impact may not be very significant.

It's not clear whether the "permitted" copies have to be made onto "chipped" Sony-authorised discs (otherwise the technology seems rather pointless, as people will just make copies of the un-protected copies instead of repeated copies of the original) - if this is the case, then is this not just a sly "razor blade model" or "PRM" (in Ed Felten's phrase) attempt to make Sony CD-writers require the purchase of Sony chipped blank CDs in order to copy music?

And would this break the Orange Book standard for CD-Rs?

"The future of user interfaces for computer technology looks fascinating and full of amazing surprises. After having showcased the eery magic of seeing images displayed into thin air, user interface researcher Jeff Han guides you to see how amazing will be working with computers once we will have gotten rid of mouses and will begin to draw and manipulate screen objects directly with our fingers."

"Jim Gilliam is only 28 years old. In a previous incarnation, he was a venture capitalist and a chief technology officer. Now his voice is a old man's rasp and he does not have the strength to cook his own food. He is waiting for a double lung transplant. But sick in his bedroom, Gilliam had a revolutionary idea: Why not get the audience to pay for a movie before it gets made?"

Deborah Platt Majoras, the FTC's Republican chairman, said extensive Net neutrality legislation currently pending in the U.S. Senate is unnecessary, reports C/Net.

Majoras said there has been no demonstrated harm to consumers, that normal market forces would likely prevent any problems, and that new laws would cause more problems than they solve.

Majoras' comments come as the Senate is considering a massive legislative proposal to rewrite telecommunications laws. In June, a Senate panel narrowly rejected an amendment that would have slapped strict regulations on broadband providers. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has said he'll try to block a floor vote on the measure unless that amendment is adopted.

The Federal Trade Commission has formed an "Internet Access Task Force" to examine Net neutrality, reports Network World.

Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras Monday called on lawmakers to be cautious about passing a 'Net neutrality law, which could prohibit broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from giving their own Internet content top priority, or from charging Web sites additional fees for faster service. New legal mandates often have "unintended consequences," she said.

The FTC has published Promoting Competition, Protecting Consumers: A Plain English Guide to Antitrust Laws, to pitch its position.

Echoing the promises of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and congressional Republicans, Majoras said that "if broadband providers engage in anticompetitive conduct, we will not hesitate to act using our existing authority."

But Net Neutrality is not a new thing. It's the law.

Telcos are currently required to share their twisted pair on a wholesale basis to competitors. That regulation will largely disappear in a few years as fiber and broadband to the home are installed.

Then it will be a level playing field. Net neutrality advocates fear it will enabling cable and telcos to charge whatever they can and encourage them to create "walled gardens" of controlled access.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Advance to the Rear, Net Neutrality: Not Dead, Wyden Blocks Telecom Vote, Net Neutrality: Bridge to Nowhere?, Cable/Sprint Pole Dance, and Dirty Tricks for Net Neutrality.

Business 2.0 says Michael Arrington is a partying kind of guy.

Arrington, a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Why? The answer lies in TechCrunch, Arrington's blog about new technologies and companies. In the year since he launched the site, he has amassed such a strong following that he's become a go-to person for VCs and tech execs looking to leak corporate tidbits or announce news.

More than 1.5 million readers regularly check out his site. But here's what gives Arrington real distinction: He's pulling in $60,000 in ad revenue every month. That's 10 times what the site was making earlier this year, which was when Arrington, convinced of the potentially monstrous riches ahead, quit his day job as president of a startup to blog full-time.

The monetization of blogging can trace its roots to late 2002, when Google (Charts) created a revolutionary system that allowed anyone with a website to run ads. The technology, called AdSense, matched ads with a site's content. Each time a visitor clicked on a linked ad, the site's owner got paid (a model now referred to as cost-per-click advertising). For the first time, anyone could be a real publisher with real advertisers, with no need for the big sales forces that magazines, newspapers, and other traditional media employ.

Don Dodge is less sanguine:

Blogs are like Open Source projects in that anyone can do them for free. There are literally tens of millions of blogs all available for free and produced by individuals with no investment. Why would you need $5M to write a blog when your investment is zero? What kind of return will VCs see from this investment?

Like Open Source, blogs will produce a few popular brand names that will attract 95% of all the attention and money. These blogs will attract advertisers and sponsorships. But, is there really enough upside to generate VC like returns? Perhaps in very rare cases, but it doesn't look like a very good sector bet.

Kevin Rose has the right attitude. Bullshit.

Of course Don Park and myself at DailyWireless are not crazy. We'd like DW to make money. We just haven't gotten around to it yet.

The goal of Technology in the Arts is to be a resource for the arts community, sparking dialogue around the role of technology in our planning and programming, discussing best practices as well as lessons learned, and providing hands-on, practical skills where possible.

Technology in the Arts will bring together the full spectrum of organizations within the arts, from the local to national levels, to examine the commonalities