October 3, 2006
Robin Good has recently published the first ever webcast explaining the peer to peer paradigm. It was conducted by James Burke, our collaborator in Amsterdam, and nicely complements the previously mentioned extensive interview with Richard Poynder. If you want an easy introduction to P2P theory, this is a good first try.
U-Myx Imogen Heap:
"One of the formats for the upcoming release of Immi's new single 'Headlock' will be a U-myx digital download. U-myx allows fans to buy a remixable version of the track which which they can create their own unique remix of 'Headlock'. The track costs the same price as a normal digital download and can be pre-ordered here. You can also check out a 30 second preview of the U-myx here."This is the first example I've seen where an artist makes available the source of a song. It's in the U-Myx application, which is a free download, but it's an easy way to see all the parts that go into making a song.
This is very cool.
Download it and click on all the little rectangles as the song plays to see how the song was made and how you can change it.
It'll be cool when you can buy remixable parts of TV shows with Final Cut Pro project edit decision lists...
At vloggercon last year I talked about values and technology, and how we need to tell companies what the values are and how to stay in line, and how technology evolves together with values and how that makes it even more important.
Anyways :)
In the past few days we had a nice example. I stumbled accross an audio feed that was being republished by Odeo, which is not a good thing. Replublishing feeds without permission means stealing subscribers.
So Jay contacted Odeo, and after some emails back and forth clarifying the issue, they said they would fix the problem, no longer republish feeds and basically be good net citizens.
Yey!
So speaking up works. And this stuff is important - we’re still setting examples here.
For reference, below is my email to Odeo. After some confusion at first they got the point and promised that in the next rollout things will be fixed.
I don’t know, this is good stuff. I know how it is to develop, sometimes you don’t even realize that what you’re doing is wrong, or sometimes you’re focussed a little bit more on your company and a little bit less on the user, and what you’re doing doesn’t seem so evil. So it’s good when users speak up.
——
Hi Crystal,
thanks for the clarifications. Unfortunately, Odeo *does* republish
feeds, let me explain.
http://odeo.com/channel/4442/view is the channel page.
It has indeed a link to the original RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/diaryofafauxjournalist
*However*, and this is what I am complaining about, that page *also*
republishes the rss feed here:
http://odeo.com/channel/rss/4442
The channel page also points to the republished feed in its
feed-discovery html, which means that anyone who uses Bloglines or
mostly any other reader on that page will subscribe to the Odeo feed,
*not* to the original feed.
At this point the original producer looses out on stats and subscribers.
What’s worse, in that republished feed, Odeo uses all links to their
own channel pages and audio pages. It’s ok for Odeo to have pages for
the channel and the audio, after all, you do provide links back. But
it’s not kosher to republish RSS feeds with those links in it.
As a good net citizen, Odeo should send traffic *to* the podcasters,
not take it away.
So yes, Odeo is republishing feeds without the author’s permission.
And through the feed-discovery mechanism, Odeo is spreading those
feeds wide and far.
You might be familiar with the podshow debacle and others. This is not
acceptable.
Please let me know if you have questions about this, and please let us
know what you plan to do about this.
Cheers,
Peter Van Dijck
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Looks like a nice open java sip implementation
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JOpenPhone is a client for voip protocols such as h323 and sip based on many others opensource projects from sourceforge like XTAPI JTapi Implementation , the The OpenH323 Project and Generic Jtapi (for the SIP implementation). In the early stage of the p
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Java Free Neural Network Network Engine
After a series of emails over the last several months, my friend, Maurice, has begun videoblogging in Rwanda!
[Click photo to go directly to Video post]
Maurice is a german working for an NGO to help build infrastructure in Kigali.
His blog is already a great place to read about his experiences there. The video just makes it all come alive. The sites and sounds are extremely important to understanding a different culture no matter how good a writer you are.
Please watch the short video and leave a comment.
We all know the tech isnt really difficult....the challenge is convincing someone that it's worth the effort.
The CBS broadband channel has debuted its web-only original series, Hook Me Up. An interactive game, users determine who four singles will end up dating. The first episode ran just over 5 minutes, and it’s sponsored by Dentyne. Enticing screen grab…
Ever sense Sascha started talking, quite animatedly, about this project — The Blind Camera — I became almost as excited as he. A camera..that takes someone else's photo. The semantics are tricky — it doesn't take a photograph of someone else, but take's (as in, borrows or copies or "snags") a photograph that someone else has captured, somewhere else in the world.
I mean..that's kind of brilliant in a playful, thoughtful way. The project captures all the amazingly promising characteristics of a world of sharing and circulating culture and experiences. And the most engaging part of the project, in my mind, is that it's an object, a tangible camera — an actual camera — and not just a bit of code, that you can download for free or whatever, and put on your laptop to play with for a few days and then discard or foreget about. It's an object — a physical affordance or whatever you want to call it. And that makes all the difference in the world for this project.
And another reason why I think Things that are networked matter. The idea of a general purpose computational device like your laptop has much less appeal in this regard. Or even the idea of the mobile phone being the one device you carry with you.
How, conceptually, from the perspective of design or even practicality, can we expect that this idea of one mobile device will sustain itself? There are so many things wrong with the mobile phone as an address book, for instance, or a game interface, or even as a telephone. Even the simplest of annoyances seem beyond the capabilities of the common phone to avoid. For example, how can you get people to stop shouting into their phone? People talk louder than they do when they're just having a normal human conversation — from inside my house on a nice pedestrian street, I can hear the phone conversations of neighbors walking their dogs as if they were sitting right here in my office.
Anyway, I am very fond of the idea of a diversity of devices at our disposal, whether or not we have them all the time. A baroque assembly of various instrumentalities, one of which is a camera that takes other people's photographs, another of which allows me to carry my online persona out into 1st Life so it can interact with other, offline objects, another that reminds me how to get where I'm going, etc. One device for everything seems positively impossible to achieve, practically or even conceptually speaking. And there's heuristic proof out there — my Treo is great because it has QWERTY. My Treo stinks cause it has Sprint. My Treo is great because it has a decent camera. My Treo stinks cause it weighs a ton and strains the seams of my pocket. My Treo stinks cause it has Sprint. This Nokia E61 I have is great cause it has QWERTY. This Nokia E61 stinks cause it has no camera. Etc. I think it is a conceit driven by corporate avarice and design hubris that there is One Thing that will embody all the interesting things we could do in our mobile lives.
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From Digital Media Wire and the New York Times:
"The Onyx Project" Interactive Short Film Launches on DVD
New York - Screenwriter and director Larry Atlas ("Sleepless in Seattle") on Monday released a short film on interactive DVD that lets users explore the film's 400 scenes in a nonlinear format, The New York Times reported. "The Onyx Project," which stars Academy Award nominee David Strathairn and tells the story of a U.S. Army Special Forces officer on a rogue mission in Afghanistan. The DVD features proprietary software called Nav that brings up fresh links for viewers while the film is playing, which can lead in different directions based on viewer choices. Atlas and Smith said "The Onyx Project," which is available on DVD for $23.95, cost less than $200,000 to make -- including the costs of developing the Nav software. The filmmakers said that Nav could be used in the future to create documentaries or educational films with scores of embedded links.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/technology/02onyx.html
http://www.theonyxproject.com
JSpiff is a Java API for reading and writing XSPF ("Spiff") open XML playlists. Tired of Winamp M3U playlists? So are we! JSpiff provides two different mechanisms for reading and writing XSPF playlists. A JAXP implementation which is simple and only requires JDK1.5 or higher to use. A JAXB implementation which has some Dependencies but is a newer API from Sun for binding XML to Java. Examples and test cases are provided for both API's.
This is actually the second Java API for XSPF. The first is in I/ON.
If you look closely at the logo, you'll see a little Xiph fish hanging out by the ankle of the Java guy.
XSPF has great momentum lately.
I've been a professional observer of new media for many years now, and I've tried to maintain distance while watching the disruptive innovations of Media 2.0. If there is one predictable absolute in all this, it is that incumbent businesses will do anything to deny the disruption before doing something to join it.
This is why I take the position of inevitability with regards to collapsing hegemonies and try not to pay much attention to "evidence" that seems to suggest otherwise. Such evidence is usually spin, but I find myself having to respond when people ask, "What about this?" There are two examples of this today.
One is a report by Lexis Nexis that consumersturn to mainstream media when they want information about urgent matters rather than blogs, podcasts or Web-only publications.
The report--based on a survey of more than 1,500 U.S. adults between the ages of 25 and 64--found that television and radio were still the most popular choice for news about matters such as hurricanes or disease outbreaks. Half of the respondents said they would turn to network TV for such news, while 42 percent chose radio, 37 percent would read daily local newspapers or watch cable news or business networks, and 25 percent said they would turn to Web sites of print publications and broadcast stations. But just 6 percent said they would turn to social media, including user groups, blogs and chat rooms.
Lexis Nexis, which sells access to stories from traditional media outlets, (ED: Emphasis mine. Note also that Lexis Nexis is a major Media 1.0 player) also reported that 52 percent of respondents said they will continue to mostly rely on traditional news sources in the future, while just 13 percent said they will rely on emerging media.
While traditional media companies are rightly touting this as a validation of their models, the point is missed that Media 2.0 cannot be measured using Media 1.0 logic. It isn't and never will be an "all or nothing" thing, for both the old and the new will be with us. In fact, I've argued many times that the new needs the old and that there is a symbiotic relationship that most new media observers tend to overlook.
Nokia has just introduced Wibree technology as an open industry initiative extending local connectivity to small devices. [PR Newswire and Nokia Press release ] Picture left of Nokia Research Center.
"This new radio technology developed by Nokia Research Center complements other local connectivity technologies, consuming only a fraction of the power compared to other such radio technologies, enabling smaller and less costly implementations and being easy to integrate with Bluetooth solutions.
Wibree is the first open technology offering connectivity between mobile devices or Personal Computers, and small, button cell battery power devices such as watches, wireless keyboards, toys and sports sensors. By extending the role mobile devices can play in consumers' lives, this technology increases the growth potential in these market segments"
Burger King - Burger King - just raised the bar for brands wanting to get into those videogames things. Burger King stores in the US are giving away mini 360 games with their Slappy Meal, or whatever it is that their $3.99 feed bag is called.
Hey, those aren't bad graphics!
This is too weird. Destructoid has the details. I'm going to lie down.
Day-for-Night, an hommage to Paco Rabanne and a celebration of the beauty of electronics, is a modular, reconfigurable dress comprised of more than 400 white circuit boards (the number changes as the dress can get longer or shorter). The circuit boards are tied together with metal rings, individually addressable and linked to a central control unit at the back of the dress. Solar cells are embedded on some of the tiles: they charge the dress during the day, and make it change colors in dimly lit surroundings.
"Each tile is designed in such a way as to accommodate a solar cell, a RGB LED, or a photocell, and jumper connectors (in the form of 0 Ohm resistors). A control board provides power, communicates with the tiles, and links to a computer via RF. The dress is completely modular both in terms of software and hardware."
More images. Designed and produced by Despina Papadopoulos. Project Technical Lead: Jesse Lackey. Max Programming: Chris Lackey.
Also on view at Sartorial Flux, curated by Valerie LaMontagne, at the A + D Gallery in Chicago until October 21st.
Other works by Despina Papadopoulos at Studio5050: The hugJackets, ClickSneaks, etc.
Microsoft and Hughes India today announced their commitment to work together on rolling out 5,000 broadband-enabled rural kiosks across India. The kiosks will be deployed across 200 small towns and rural regions and will be operated on a franchisee- based model offering budding entrepreneurs to offer e-commerce, education and e-governance.
"The ICT kiosks will not only provide a platform for exchange of information and knowledge, but also serve as a platform to create over 15,000 jobs and self- employment opportunities," said Pranav Roach, president and CEO, Hughes Network Systems India.
Hughes will leverage its satellite broadband platform to the remotest pockets of India. Among other services Hughes will offer, various broadband services, Internet access, value-added services, prepaid top ups, international voice calling and education services through the Hughes Fusion centers.
Microsoft will also offer a 12 day IT literacy program for kiosks operators. This training will be provided free of cost to the Kiosk operator and will be conducted in more than 60 locations across India.
Powered by HughesNet satellite broadband network and Microsoft's platform, the kiosks will be run and managed by local entrepreneurs for providing the content and services to the people that would ensure a sustainable return on investment.
Telephony Magazine is running a 6 part series on WiMAX, following the WiMAX Forum compatibility tests, that were scheduled to wrap up last week.
Part one of the series featured Motorola WiMAX gear:
If any vendor can claim to have momentum on Mobile WiMAX, it’s Motorola.
Not only did it come away with a major piece of Sprint’s multibillion-dollar deployment, it’s guaranteed itself a sizable slot of the wireless ISP business with its investment in Clearwire.
For good measure it’s even landed a few smaller WiMAX contracts worldwide, including one for a national broadband network in Pakistan.Motorola not only stands to make a lot of money selling WiMAX phones and multimedia devices, it can use its handset businesses as leverage for new WiMAX contracts, especially if it continues to target wireless carriers such as Sprint.
Part two of the series is entitled; Nortel: The Lab Rat:
Nortel Networks is aching for a rumble. Or, to use Nortel’s new WiMAX general manager Peter MacKinnon’s more domestic imagery, it’s ready to pit its WiMAX gear against any other vendors in a “competitive bake-off” to see whose is superior.Nortel has seven years of solid research in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technology under its belt and the intellectual property and patents to back it up. But more than just ideas on paper, it has a commercial Mobile WiMAX kit that MacKinnon claims can achieve a cost-per-bit ratio three times better than any other vendor’s commercial WiMAX gear and a 10-times improvement over whatever 3G technologies can provide today.
Looks like a great series -- lots of red meat to chew on.
Meanwhile, Airspan today announced it has successfully tested a prototype HiperMAX base station and 16eUSB device at the Mobile WiMAX Plugfest held at the Bechtel labs, in Frederick, Maryland.
The next step for companies participating in the PlugFest is to achieve the WiMAX Forum Certified seal. The WiMAX Forum Certification Test Lab located at CETECOM in Malaga, Spain will soon be joined by TTA Labs of Korea for the initial certification of mobile WiMAX products.
Mobile certification testing is scheduled to begin towards the end of 2006, with market availability of WiMAX Forum Certified mobile WiMAX products beginning in early 2007. Representatives from both labs are heavily involved in the current mobile PlugFest.
But the article touches on other options MSOs can attempt until DOCSIS 3.0 is solidified:
"For one, they can add a new QAM for a group of 500 homes sharing a 6 MHz channel, and split that to 250 homes on that channel. "Now you can do 10 Mbps with relatively small costs," says Gil Katz, director of cable solutions and strategy for Harmonic Inc. Another near-term option is to leverage (but not bond) an additional 6 MHz channel for high-speed data (HSD). In addition to increasing the capacity that can be shared by a given group of homes, another benefit is that operators will not have to introduce a new class of modem to support the strategy."The piece predicts cable providers will begin shifting to DOCSIS 3.0 in 2008 or 2009. Full deployment will be slow indeed, with DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS use at 60% by 2011, and DOCSIS 3.0 CPEs (modems, set-tops, eMTAs, etc.) to be at only 40% by that same point.
October 2, 2006
I thought you would be interested.
I am presently representing Josh Wolf, the jailed San Francisco blogger, who refused the Grand Jury subpoena to turn over pictures of a WTO demonstration.
Josh Wolf is being subpoenaed because the Anti-Terrorism Task Force believes he may have information about “anarchists” and other people who were at the demonstration. He’s already stated, and you will see, that there’s nothing in his tape in any way relating to the police car. The FBI and the government, having failed to be remarkably successful in going against Al Qaeda and related people, are now going after “terrorists” totally unrelated to the “September 11th problem.” They are using the September 11th issues to throw a net over other people who would normally be out of the reach of any Grand Jury. That’s why the Josh Wolf situation is so pernicious.
The difference between Judith Miller, the San Francisco Barry Bonds writers and Josh is apparent.
The Barry Bonds writers had Grand Jury information as a result of a leak.
Judith Miller had information potentially relevant to an ongoing federal investigation of a federal crime.
Unfortunately, the probabilities are that he will wind up being the longest-jailed journalist in America.
Best,
Marty
I’ve been a fan of Livewriter and the new version is even better - and still beta! It’s really a blog writer’s dream. The new version does microformats, tags and all sorts of goodies.
Here’s a screencast by Jon Udell.
(And yes, this is a Microsoft product.)
WHAT: FCC Hearing on Media Ownership
WHEN: 1-4:30 P.M., Tuesday, Oct. 3
WHERE: University of Southern California, Davidson Conference Center, Embassy Room, Los Angeles
Andrew Heavens gave an amazing seminar on photoblogging at the Digital Citizen Indaba a few weeks back. One idea that stuck with me from his talk: The camera doesnt matter, but being there does. More important than having the right gear is being in the right place to take an important photo. Andrews one of the few photojournalists in Ethiopia, so hes able to share images that no one else is able to.
Two of the key examples almost everyone - myself included - gives when explaining the idea that people can commit acts of journalism without neccesarily being journalists are the photos taken in Thailand of the Southeast Asian tsunami and in the London underground after the tube bombings. Like the citizen video of the Rodney King beating, these documents demonstrated that journalist in the future is going to involve professionals as well as people who happened to be there with the opportunity to record what they saw.
While theres no doubt that Andrews right and that being there is critical to some types of online publishing, I wonder if we dont sometimes oversell the importance of being there as part of citizen media. Much of the rhetoric around the importance of citizen media - including the rhetoric I deliver roughly once a week these days - is about diversifing the media by introducing more local voices - people in their own communities who can report their own news. But I think theres another place where citizens media may be at least as important - introducing citizen expertise on subjects where existing journalists may not be expert.
I found myself exploring this train of thought as I talked with Professor Bernard Hibbitts at the University of Pittsburgh yesterday. Hibbitts is the founder of Jurist, a remarkable website that covers legal news around the US and, increasingly, the world, primarily through the efforts of University of Pittsburgh law students. Students write original articles on legal issues, often providing legal context for stories reported in other media.
Hibbitts tells me that an inspiration for the site was the realization that newspapers were eliminating their legal reporters, combining legal reporting with crime or political reporting. Reporting on a legal story often requires sophisticated knowledge of the law - many of the best legal reporters are lawyers or have a legal background. By asking law students to work as legal reporters, Jurist gives a lawyers perspective on a wide range of news on a daily basis.
(Theres a long history of asking law students to take on professional responsibilities while theyre still in school. Unlike most professional journals, law journals are edited by students, inverting usual power dynamics by giving students the chance to edit and select papers for publication by their professors and their colleagues.)
Its interesting to think about other subjects where citizen media might be able to bring expertise to the table that professional journalists might lack. When Grigoi Perelman refused the Field Medal for his work proving Poincaires conjecture, most newspapers didnt even attempt to explain the substance of Perelmas work - it would have been interesting to see how a citizen media site with mathematician reporters would have covered the story. (Alas, Wikinews, which likely had mathematicians reporting the story didnt do much better. At least they tried.) Mathematician reporters would also have an interesting set of insights on stories involving economic statistics, statistical analysis, climate change extrapolations it makes you wonder why math departments arent encouraging projects like Jurist.
As we talked about the similarities and differences between Jurist and Global Voices, I realized that while some of GVs strength is about where our contributors are - all around the world, in countries not sufficiently covered by mainstream media - some of our strength comes from what we know, especially what our editors know. Our Africa editor, Ndesanjo Macha, is living in North Carolina, pretty far from his home in Tanzania. But hes got great knowledge of African politics and issues and is able to use that knowledge to make content decisions despite not being on the ground. Ditto for Neha Viswanathan who covers India from the UK, and several of our other excellent editors.
Its easier to talk about citizen media in terms of being there because its less threatening to existing media outlets - everyone understands that no newspaper can have a bureau in every corner of the world, and that the citizen with a camera will sometimes be the best first source of information on a story. But its a bit more threatening to talk about citizen media filling holes in journalists expertise. Most journalists arent physicists, currency traders or airplane pilots - when covering those subjects, maybe its helpful for the journalists and the physicists, traders and pilots to work together.
(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 09:31 AM)
The time I’ve spent with the New York Times has probably trebeled since I began using NYTimesRiver on my blackberry. (Thanks, Dave Winer, “media hacker.”) (An ancillary benefit: reading news on my bb in the morning in bed bothers my wife less than did crinkly, bulky, dirty newsprint.)
Two internet-related stories jumped out to me this morning. First is HASSAN M. FATTAH’s creepy story on Al Qaeda citizen journalists. “Al Qaeda has been turning itself from an active organization into a propaganda organization,” said [Chris] Heffelfinger, a specialist in jihadi ideology at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Fattah focusses on 28 year old Abu Omar, who is
part of a growing army of young men who may not seek to take violent action, but who help spread jihadist philosophy, shape its message and hope to inspire others to their cause…“We are typically observers, but when we see something on the Net, our job is to share it,” Abu Omar said. He no longer trusts news reports on television, he said… “We become like journalists ourselves.”
Second was this story on the difficulties facing independent filmmakers. A telling quote from American Splendor direcor Ted Hope: “If I were starting out now, I would be a producer for the Internet.”
“[Web video] is not replacing the high-end, high quality programs on television. They are offering different experiences,” said NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker at Wired’s NextFest conference. What about YouTube? “I don’t think we can ignore it, anymore.” He said YouTube has been great promotion, “but then we said ‘why don’t we have the ability to do this ourselves?’” Zucker said NBBC is a step in that direction. Meanwhile, Judy McGrath, Chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, said “the notion of exclusivity has blown up. It has no value. Any exposure [of music videos or a TV network’s programming] helps. It doesn’t hurt. It somehow rubs off on us. It’s additive. It’s the greatest thing that could have happened.”
Part of the Netflix experience is its automated recommendations of other movies based upon movies you’ve already rented. It’s an OK system, but not great. So Netflix is opening up its database of 100 million customer ratings in a contest to see if someone can come up with a program that’s at least 10 percent more accurate than the one in place. The anonymity of those ratings has been preserved, so you needn’t worry about that rental of “Hot Dog: The Movie.” Winner gets $1 million.
The Cable Television Ad Bureau released a study today that found that mobile users would tolerate a 9 second ad, compared to 42 seconds on TV. And more than half of respondents said they didn’t want advertising on mobile devices. Gee, translating TV on a mobile device isn’t received the same way? Duh.
FIRST CALL
11th European Interaction Design Workshop CREATIVE THINKING FOR INTERACTIVE TV by Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibás, University of Brighton :: October 5-8, 2006, Istanbul Kadir Has University.
This winter, one of the most prestigious interaction design workshops, IDWS, is looking for 14 talented design students (7 Turkish nationals and 7 non-Turkish nationals). This time, IDWS will host Spanish Researcher Anxo Cereijo Roibás who specializes in Interactive TV application. The workshop will explore suitable methodologies and techniques to design new scenarios defined by intersections between handhelds and other devices (e.g. iTV). It will also analyze crucial issues in the design of applications and interactive content in these contexts.
Application deadline: November 30, 2006 (Application fee is not required) For more details concerning scope, background of participants, accommodation, workshop fees, etc., please see: http://web.idws.info
IDWS winter workshops are part of the ERASMUS IP project 2006-2008 and has sponsored by Istanbul Cervantes Institute and British HCI Group.
contact: application[at]idws.info
Oguzhan Ozcan
Curator
Graph Theory
Turbulence Commission: Graph Theory by Jason Freeman, with Patricia Reed and Maja Cerar :: [needs Macromedia Flash Player plugin; Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0+, or Safari 1.0+]
"Graph Theory" seeks to connect composition, listening, and concert performance by coupling an acoustic work for solo violin or solo cello to an interactive web site. On the web site, users navigate among sixty-one short, looping musical fragments to create their own unique path through the composition. The navigation choices which users make affect future concert performances of the work. Before each performance, the soloist prints out a new copy of the score from the web site. That score presents her with a fixed path through the piece; the order of the fragments is influenced by the decisions that recent web site visitors have made.
"Graph Theory" is a 2006 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from The Greenwall Foundation.
BIOGRAPHIES
JASON FREEMAN'S works break down conventional barriers between composers, performers, and listeners, using new technology and unconventional notation to turn audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators. His music has been performed by the American Composers Orchestra, Speculum Musicae, the So Percussion Group, the Nieuw Ensemble, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Evan Ziporyn; and his interactive installations and software art have been exhibited at the Lincoln Center Festival, the Boston CyberArts Festival, and the Transmediale Festival and featured in the New York Times and on National Public Radio. N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella) (2003), a commission from Turbulence.org, was described by Billboard as "an example of the web's mind-expanding possibilities." Freeman received his B.A. in music from Yale University and his M.A. and D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University. He is currently an assistant professor of music at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
PATRICIA REED (1977, Ottawa, Canada) completed her studies in Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montréal (1999). In 2001-02 she attended the residency program of CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; in 2003 she relocated to Europe, through an artists' residency in Prague and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2003-4, 05). While maintaining an active artistic practice, she also works as a designer with focus on developing interfaces and means of visualizing scientific research, thereby making accessible complex information to a broader audience. Recent design projects include the development of information cartography/exhibition architecture for The Gallery of Research, Vienna (2005) and a sociological web 'diorama', Paris:Ville Invisible, with Bruno Latour (2004) which will be featured in an exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007). Graph Theory is Reed's first collaborative work within the field of musical composition. She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
MAJA CERAR is a concert violinist who studied with Aida Stucki- Piraccini in Zurich and with Dorothy DeLay in New York and is currently completing her Ph.D in Historical Musicology at Columbia University. She frequently works with composers, has premiered numerous works written for her, and has been coached by Beat Furrer and György Kurtàg. Since her debut in the Zurich Tonhalle in 1991 she has played as a soloist with orchestras in Europe, given recitals with distinguished artists on international tours (Paris, Rome, Washington, Chicago, New York) as well as at festivals in Europe (including the Davos "Young Artists in Concert," the Gidon Kremer Lockenhaus Festival, the ISCM World Music Days and the ICMC Barcelona), America (Aspen, Vermont, Santa Fe, San Diego), and Asia.
Second Life resident Pierce Portocarrero, one of the virtual world’s most gifted creators of the in-world filmmaking art known as machinima, has been on hiatus of late. He returns this week with a new piece that’s even better than the ones I’ve seen before. Check out Game Over, which aired in-world as part of the latest monthly machinima festival run by Alt-Zoom Studios. Seemingly a parable of love in the age of self-replicating objects (or something like that), the short film features some truly creative character models, an excellently ambiguous plot and ending, and acting that’s conveyed very well through animations and completely without dialogue. It’s a really excellent piece, including in its camerawork and editing. All we need now is for credit rolls to come to machinima, so we’d know if it was Pierce doing all the work or whether there are other people who deserve some kudos as well. Whatever the case, it’s nice stuff, and we look forward to more.
Andrew Reynolds over at eightbar (the blog of a few IBM researchers at the company’s Hursley installation) writes that he’s put together a crude version of an app that 3pointD has been looking for since earlier this summer: a tool to export shapes from Google’s cool free 3D modeling app SketchUp and import them to the virtual world of Second Life. Andrew’s plug-in for SketchUp writes basic model information to a text file, from which it can be imported to Second Life in notecard form (presumably by manually cutting and pasting). After that, an in-world object parses the notecard and re-generates the model in Second Life. It seems to only handle very simple objects, but it’s a good start.
“In erring very heavily on the side of simplicity, I’ve made something that you’ll either find delightful or frustrating,” Andrew writes. “Each face in your SketchUp model, you end up with a flat, rectangular prim which represents the bounds of that face. Imagine if every face of every shape in SketchUp was simplified down to a rectangle which marked it extents. That’s what my script does.”
More importantly: “I’m already enjoying it as a faster way to put simple things together.” 3pointD looks forward to seeing whether tools like this might ease the creation process for more residents. Nice job, Andrew.
(Also just want to flag something I’d missed a few weeks ago: eightbar’s Dave Braines has written an app that can import a 2D structure to Second Life from PowerPoint, of all places. I look forward to getting my hands on both these things.)
architecture, Google, Second Life
Something with an interesting ‘forcing function’ story has been right in front of me all this time: the QWERTY keyboard, developed by Christopher Sholes and then Remington, with the intention of controlling the user’s behaviour. Until typists became proficient with the QWERTY system, the non-alphabetical layout with deliberate, if arbitrary, separation of common letters allowed the maximum typing speed to be slowed to something approaching writing speed, which reduced the amount of keys sticking and thus benefited both the manufacturer (less product failure, fewer complaints) and the customer (less product failure, less irritation). It also locked users who learned on a Remington QWERTY typewriter into staying with that system (and manufacturer, at least until the patents expired).
Whether or not QWERTY is a real example of market failure (in the sense that it’s an ‘inefficient’ system which nevertheless came to dominate, through self-reinforcing path-dependence, network effects, lock-in, etc), it’s an interesting design example of a commonplace architecture of control where the control function has long become obsolete as the configuration becomes the default way of designing the product.
Would designers today dare to create anything so deliberately idiosyncratic (even if clever) for mass consumption? (Systems that have evolved collaboratively to create complex, powerful results, such as UNIX, probably don’t count here.) The individualistic interfaces of some 1990s modelling software (e.g. Alias StudioTools, Form Z, Lightwave) which required a significant learning investment, were presumably designed with making the user experience easier “once you got used to it” (hence not really architectures of control) but have increasingly fallen by the wayside as the ’standard’ GUI model has become so commonplace.
Today’s architecture of control is more likely to be something more robust against the user’s adaptation: if for some reason it was desirable to limit the speed at which users typed today, it’s more likely we’d have a keyboard which limited the rate of text input electronically, with a buffer and deliberate delay and no way for the user to learn to get round the system. Indeed, it would probably report the user if he or she tried to do so. Judging by the evidence of the approaches to control through DRM, such a wilfully obstructive design seems more likely.
Returning to the idea of slowing down users for their own benefit, as commenter ‘Apertome’ points out on Squublog:
“One way in which some such designs [i.e. architectures of control] can be GOOD is when mountain biking - a lot of times, they’ll put a tight curve before an obstacle to force you to slow down.”
Note how this is a somewhat different practice to deliberately reducing visibility at junctions: using a bend to slow down a rider before an obstacle does not impede riders who are already travelling at a lower speed, while it makes the higher-speed riders slow down and hence keeps them safe, whereas wilfully removing sightlines at roundabouts would seem in many cases to work to the detriment of drivers who like to assess the road ahead well before the junction, and force all to stop instead.
Not Terry Teachout. The drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and all-around cultural guy writes this weekend about the on-demand fine-arts channel he put together out of YouTube, finding an amazing list of often-rare fine-arts performances there (all of which he posted on the sidebar of his blog):
But YouTube, like the other new Web-based media, is a common carrier, a means to whatever ends its millions of users choose, be they good, bad, dumb or ugly. You can use it to watch mindless junk — or some of the greatest classical and jazz musicians of the 20th century. . . .
By posting this list of links, I have, in effect, created a Web-based fine-arts video-on-demand site. The irony is that I did so just as network TV was getting out of the culture business. Not only have PBS and its affiliates cut back sharply on classical music, jazz and dance, but cable channels like A&E and Bravo that used to specialize in the fine arts are now opting instead to show “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” This abdication of cultural responsibility has created an opening for entrepreneurs who grasp the new media’s unrivaled capacity for niche marketing.
Primetime viewing for mobile video is largest during the afternoon and early evening, according to Telephia, a consumer research firm.
According to Telephia's Mobile Video Diary Report, 30 percent of mobile video users watch mobile TV and video clips on their cell phones during the hours of noon and 4 pm, and 31 percent watch during the early evening commute hours of 4 pm to 8 pm.
Table 1: Mobile TV Usage based on Daypart (U.S.)Daypart Percent (%) --------------------------- 6am - 9am 9% 9am - noon 9% Noon - 4pm 30% 4pm - 8pm 31% 8pm - 11pm 9% 11pm - 2am 11% 2am - 6am 3% ---------------------------
Telephia also says contrary to popular belief, mobile video usage is being consumed by older age groups. Fifty percent of mobile video users are 25-36 year olds, compared to 24 percent of the total mobile population (see Table 2).
Table 2: Mobile Video Demographic Breakdown (U.S.)Demographic Current Mobile Video Users (%) All Mobile Subscribers (%)
Age Group
18-24 23% 11%
25-36 50% 24%
37-55 24% 39%
56+ 3% 26%
Gender
Male 70% 47%
Female 30% 53%
Race/Ethnicity
Caucasian 42% 74%
African
American 16% 11%
Hispanic 27% 11%
Other 15% 4%
Source: Telephia Mobile Video Diary Report, Q2 2006
MediaFLO, HiWire, Modeo and Mobile WiMAX using 700 Mhz, 1.6 GHz and 2.5 GHz frequencies respectively, promise to multicast dozens of audio/visual channels to millions of mobile devices - often integrated into cell phones.
Sprint and Cingular use MobiTV for streaming video on cell phones. MobiTV currently uses a single 1.25MHz CDMA EV-DO channel for every viewer. MobiTV is also trialing a tv service using a mobile WiMAX network that will span a number of Northern California cities. Live HDTV delivered over a Navini pre-mobile WiMAX network has been demonstrated, too.
But portable devices need power conservation. That's what DVB-H does. If Sprint and Clearwire have the bandwidth, perhaps there's nothing to stop them from dedicating a slice to multicasting in DVB-H.
By dedicating (another) 10 MHz of bandwidth (for mobile television), perhaps WiMAX operators could deliver 5 (free) local channels and 5 (premium) channels at 640x480 (using MPEG-4 AVC). Pick it up on a WiMAX-enabled Zune or iPod. Mobile MTV.
MobileTV News, TV Phones and the MobileTV Blog have more.