unmediated

As the network neutrality debate has gone on and on, there are some aspects that are very troubling. The tech world is notorious for having what's basically a libertarian/free market approach to the world -- and applying that to the network neutrality debate gives plenty of good and convincing reasons why letting Congress regulate on this now will create problems down the road. Those are some of the reasons why I agree that legislation right now would be a dangerous move (especially as some of the laws are written). It's tough (if not impossible) for Congress to understand how this technology will evolve -- and trying to regulate it could stifle perfectly reasonable uses. At the same time, even if the laws seem reasonable, the companies in the space will likely figure out loopholes or other ways to use the regulations to their advantage. However, at the same time, it's really troublesome to see the telcos mostly ignoring that very reasonable line of argument, preferring to trot out made up horror stories and outright lies to try to make their point. It certainly raises questions about what they're trying to hide. If you're right, you should be able to make your point without resorting to disingenuous arguments.

Meanwhile, what's interesting to note is how uncomfortable some of the supporters of network neutrality legislation have appeared, noting that they usually fall into the libertarian/no-regulation-please camp, but support regulation in this case (even if they claim the regulation is designed to make the market more open). However, in the last few days, there's been a growing push to explore whether or not the free market has failed when it comes to US broadband policy. Broadband expert Dave Burstein notes that all of the world leaders in broadband have come from highly regulated environments, leading folks like Kevin Werbach to ask "Why does unregulated competition in telecom work so well in theory, but so poorly in practice?" It certainly deserves at least some head-scratching.

As it stands now, there are two potential answers that I see. The first, is that an unregulated telecom/broadband market is fundamentally not competitive. As we've emphasized ad nauseum, the real issue in the network neutrality debate is the lack of real competition in the space -- which is still a problem no matter what some people claim. This could be because broadband is a natural monopoly, like the highway system, where it simply does not make sense for there to be competition between different infrastructure projects. It's wasteful and, in some cases, damaging. Instead, it makes more sense to set a single platform, and push for competition within the infrastructure. This is exactly what has happened in France, and has helped build a thriving competitive broadband market there.

A second answer, however, may be that this is a race we shouldn't call yet. We have not hit the finish line yet, and there certainly is the potential that the infrastructure choices made within regulated environments may prove to be a legacy albatross down the road. For an example of this, just look at the race for HDTV from 15 to 20 years ago. There was a huge worry in the US that we were falling behind Japan and Europe in this technology, where their regulated approach allowed them to take a quick headstart, and achieve certain technology milestones that looked great and worried policy makers in the US. However, in the long run, the regulated approach proved problematic and inflexible, causing a lot of problems that the US avoided. To be honest, I'm still not convinced which scenario is the most fitting for US broadband policy, and can make arguments supporting either one. Hopefully, we'll get some interesting discussions going based on this, but it does seem useful to raise the level of discussion to actual disagreement points such as this one, rather than the ridiculous "this is the end of the internet as we know it" level both official "sides" in the network neutrality debate have taken.

T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest mobile phone company in the United States, is preparing to launch a service this month that will allow people talking on their cell phones to seamlessly switch between T-mobile's cellular network and their home Wi-Fi networks.

MAC address spoofing on wireless networks could come to an end with a new security technique that would allow network administrators to see a unique WiFi fingerprints for each device, reports Ars Technica.

Dr. Jeyanthi Hall, a researcher at Carleton University analyzed (pdf) the radio frequency (RF) signal of 15 devices and discovered that each and every device has its own unique signal. Even devices from the same manufacturer are unique due to variations during the manufacturing process. The signals were so clearly different from one another that she had a 95 percent detection rate with zero false positives during her testing.

MAC addresses are a unique, alphanumeric identifier assigned to each individual network card. Network administrators use these identifiers to distinguish between individual machines on a network and ultimately limit network access to approved machines.

However, savvy users quickly realized that they could easily spoof MAC addresses from other machines on their own devices to pose as someone else on the network. Although limiting network access to specific MAC addresses is very common, it is not considered the best form of network security for this reason.

Ars Technica says most admins now utilize user authentication and proxying in order to identify users rather than easily spoofed MAC addresses. However, if wireless hardware were to utilize this technology and combine it with MAC addresses, unique device identification could pick up steam once again, says Ars Technica.

Adrian Holovaty has cornered the geek-journalist market. Today, he picks up on 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites and identifies the oppotunties that journalists are missing.

Fundamental shifts need to happen for newspaper companies to remain essential sources of information for their communities…[W]hat I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of [a story]..
when I’ve tried to explain the error of storing everything as a news article, journalists don’t immediately understand why it is bad. To them, a publishing system is just a means to an end: getting information out to the public…The goal isn’t to have clean data — it’s to publish data quickly, with bonus points for a nice user interface. But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible.

Jay Small adds that real change won’t happen until the “legacy media” dam breaks:

none of those tipping points will be reached until (a) consumer audiences and (b) advertising dollars abandon the legacy media en masse. We’re seeing interactive audience growth, and ad spending growth, but it’s only chipping away at the legacy media. The dam is holding for now. And that’s slowing the pace of needed changes such as what Holovaty suggests.

A crucial aspect of peer to peer theory, the attempt to produce a theory that aims to understand peer to peer processes, and also a key differentiator between the more liberal and the more radical interpretations, is whether peer producton, the common production through communities, as evidenced in free software, linux and wikipedia, can be expanded to the physical sphere, and additionally, whether that expansion can be enclosed in the money economy.

My own take at the P2P Foundation is of the more expansive school of thought, we think that peer to peer has the potential, and even likelyhood, of becoming the new core of the next political economy, the one that will arise to save us from the very success of capitalism, and its corollary: the destruction and depletion of the biosphere.

Today, as if often said, we treat physical resources as if they were infinite, and the market does not bear most of these costs of negative externalization, and we artificially attempt to make infinite non-rival (even anti-rival) resources, scarce. A P2P-based society would simply reverse that trend, it would treat scarce resources as being scarce, and would free the natural abundance of a free culture. The key, in terms of human identity and desire, is to have a successfull shift from the accumulation of physical assets and resources, to the accumalation of immaterial ‘assets’.

If we ask ourselves, through what strategies and trends could we see an expansion of peer production to the material sphere, I usually give two answers, one is the ‘distribution of everything’. To the degree we succeed in expanding the distributed format, in intellect, productive capital, financial capital, we expand the space where peer production can thrive. Additionally, if we can envisage a process whereby the design phase of industrial production is separated from its physical production space, there is no limit to the use of open source methodologies in the design phase. We can easily imagine for example, the design of a car that would be vastly superior to the car designs by corporations. But the question remains on how to finance its physical construction. But we already see companies in the software industry, who successfully link their market-based aims and behaviour, with a dependence on a intellectual commons and an open source community, fruitfully building a ecology from which all parties profit. It’s a model that can be expanded to other sectors of the economy.

All of this above is a summary of my views so far, and a preparation for my review of an important contribution by Martin Springer, which is the subject of the next entry.

How can new media be used to improve the world we live in? Since the introduction of the Digital Communities category in 2004, Prix Ars Electronica has been dealing more intensively with the socially relevant implementation of artistic and technological innovations.

[Thank you Antoni Abad !! for submitting this item]

Barcelona Accessible illustrates how 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet.

The result is a map of Barcelona’s inaccessibility for those confined to wheelchairs, a cartographic representation of the parts of town that are closed to people with handicaps. In this way, 3,578 architectural barriers and stumbling blocks have been documented on canal*ACCESSIBLE since December 2005

Earlier this week, when we wrote about yet another weak strategy that newspaper industry-types were discussing as a plan to "fight back" against the internet, a few people complained in the comments that we only seem to focus on the negative side of what newspapers do, and never highlight the positives or come up with any suggestions on our own. Part of this may be because it just seems like so few newspapers seem to be doing much right. However, it's also not entirely true. In the past, we've discussed ways that newspapers can better customize and also why newspapers should recognize that their role has shifted from being just an information deliverer, to being an enabling party that helps its own readers spread the news -- something sites like Digg have shown many people want to do. Techmeme has pointed us to another interesting idea, this time suggested by Adrian Holovaty, who has worked for many years on the digital side of various newspapers. Rather than coming up with vague statements about blogs, tags or whatever the latest buzzword is, Holovaty points out how newspapers need to fundamentally shift how they think about the data they create. That is, they need to recognize that it's data they produce. Rather than focus on each "story" as a blackbox, they should be willing to break it up into chunks of useful metadata. That is, each story is likely to have certain consistent attributes, and making sure the newspaper database understands those attributes allows the newspaper to become a data source, rather than just a collection of news articles. This doesn't mean to get rid of the story itself, but at least make sure the database recognizes the different data attributes.

This is a very powerful idea, that may bring to mind Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the semantic web, where there's a lot more metadata for computers to understand. Of course, the big stumbling block for the semantic web over the years is often that it involves setting up too rigid a structure, eliminating much of what made the web so useful in the first place. It forces people to make choices and to assign specific labels or categories when they might just want to put the full content out there. In fact, Holovaty acknowledges some of this, when he complains that too many in the newspaper industry just see the content management system as the fastest means possible of delivering their story. They just want to be able to dump the story in and have it published. However, as Holovaty has also seen, some are beginning to see the light -- and with the consistency of certain types of news stories, there's really very little need for the "flexibility" that often holds back attempts at the semantic web. Just last month, for example, we pointed out that Thomson Financial is trying to automate the process of writing certain stories, such as on earnings releases. That takes the same concept from a different angle, easing the labor side, but at the same time inherently recognizing the metadata involved.

While some journalists may protest this attempt to "chunkify" their stories, there's nothing in this process that needs to take anything away from their traditional journalism. The story is still filed and is still important. What the additional data (or the classification/categorization of that data) does is open up a goldmine of additional information and services a newspaper can provide. Rather than just focusing on the qualitative angle, the data is exposed and can be used in a variety of ways -- many of which may not be obvious at first, but will come to light later. Holovaty uses an example of being able to break up a ton of useful weather forecast data, and easily combine it with a system for keeping track of little league games (where weather info is important). That's just a small example, but making news data, rather than stories, useful has plenty of other benefits that could revitalize the news business. As an example of how such things could be useful, I was going to point to the ChicagoCrime website that maps where crimes have occurred in Chicago -- and in looking it up, only now realized that it was actually created by Holovaty as well (no wonder). So the good news is that there are some really good ideas out there for improving the value of traditional news organizations. It's just a matter of getting more in the industry to embrace them.

Samsung has just announced the devleopment of an intelligent mobile display driver IC (DDI), which enables the displays on handheld devices to deliver clearer images in broad daylight. Mass production of the DDI device shoud begin at year end.

Until now, most mobile devices were near impossible to see in broad daylight, this new trend hopes to solve the problem.

[PC Exposure via digg]

Apart from the ShiftSpace presentation, the other Pixelspaces talk i really enjoyed was by James Powderly and Evan Roth (US) from Graffiti Research Lab. They developed the project at eyebeam in New York.

I didn't get this project at all before ars electronica. I kind of read about it here and there and thought "mmmh! throwing luminous thingies at buildings? So what?" But i discovered during their talk that there's more behind G.R.L. and i liked what i heard. A lot (though i wasn't really convinced by the "let's throw some luminous thingies at the tram" performance.)
My notes from their talk:

Roth explained that his fellowship at Eyebeam was based on a previous work: his thesis project at Parsons, the Graffiti Analysis system which makes visible the unseen movements of graffiti artists in the creation of a tag.

Powderly worked for a robotic company in New York and was until then thus only used to working on “leaving marks on the rocks on Mars.”

Their works has a lot to do with the hacking mentality. They don’t define themselves as graffiti artists but rather as graffiti engineers, a bit in the style of Q, the gadget guy who devised accessories for James Bond. Their work is an extension of the graffiti and aims to provide graffiti writers, street artists and protesters with new tools in order to help them take back public space and challenge corporate culture. All their work is OS, that was one of the requirements to work at Eyebeam.

They gave us an overview of the works they found most inspiring:

Zoetropes, by the Toyshop Collective, repurposed bicycle wheels animated and inspired by the zoetrope, a XIXth century device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.

Darius Jones, a graffiti artist from Brooklyn, whose work is characterized by a perversion in the use of existing systems. He clearly has a certain eye for creating romance in unexpected places, making the city fall in love with itself. Street signs falling in love; images of the signage brought into 3D space, at street level; surveillance cameras surveilling themselves, etc.

Mark Jenkins, based in Washington DC, used mostly tape as its material. He leaves his tape kids all over the city as gifts to the world.

Such pieces are very temporal, they stay there only a few hours and their traces live on on the web. He ended up using LED Throwies as well (see his Jesus). His “embedded” works are a big success as well. For example his Homeless Guy makes us look back at ourselves and at how we interact with each other.

Banksy, “the exterior paint specialist”.

Both Banksy and Jenkins have taken over surveillance cameras.
“Boring”: Banksy used a fire extinguisher to paint the letters on the wall of a building because he didn’t think much of its architecture. He emptied the extinguisher and filled it with red paint.

They showed also images of Banksy's works in zoos. The artist is known for sneaking into the penguin enclosure at London Zoo and painting 'We're bored of fish- We wanna go home'.

Hacks in museum (some of the pieces he hung in some museum are now listed as part of the permanent collection. “Vandalized oil painting”. GRL showed some of Banksys's films. He tags up for a very interesting reasons. Apparently policemen wear caps that hide their eyebrows. Apparently eyebrows are such an expressive part of our face that it’s best to leave them in the shadow. But it means that policemen cannot easily see what’s up.

These artists have online equivalents: the Velvet Strike Team who conceptualized during the beginning of Bush's "War on Terrorism" a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game "Counter-Strike".

A walk series of stencils.

Graffiti artists use the web a lot to document their work. Which can lead to some problems as some of them have been arrested via their MySpace page, some have even been busted out of their MySpace page.

Now how does the work of Graffiti Research Lab fit into this?

They want to provide graffiti artists with the tools that would allow them to compete with corporate advertisers. Powderly even added that the most interesting things done using the throwies or the Night Writer have been done by others with the help of GRL sometimes (as with the Throwie Talkie, a Throwie hacked to blink graffiti messages in morse code, an idea of Pat & Ward Cunningham) but often without it. A search about throwies on google shows that it's not about GRL anymore.

Jose Luis de Vicente asked them about their concern for the sustainability of the Throwies (each of them is equipped with a tiny battery). GRL seemed to be very concerned with the problem. They developed a solar-powered throwie but as it's 7 times more expensive than the "regular" one, it wouldn't be affordable enough for artists. Usually throwies do not stay in the environment as people like to throw them then they want to take them back home as a souvenir. But here again comes the problem of recycling: do we know if these people recycle the batteries correctly?

GRL gave a second talk during the Forum I – Interactive Art presentations. You can download the podcast.
Many images found on wooster collective and visual resistance.

by Eric Schneider, Bluetooth SIG marketing director for Asia/Pacific and Japan (via the Kuala Lumpur Star and Asia News Network), 4 September: "Remember how strange it looked the first time you saw people walking down the street alone, apparently talking to themselves? We now know they aren't crazy but are wearing nearly invisible Bluetooth cellphone headsets. Today, you might also see people bopping or singing to music that you don't hear, coming from music players you don't see. They're probably using multipoint, or multi-use, Bluetooth headsets that connect wirelessly to their music players as well as their handphones. It's a sign of the times that such gadgets have gained acceptance nearly everywhere now. According to IMS Research, the number of Bluetooth units shipped in late 2003 totalled one million. Now, 10 million Bluetooth units are shipped every week and three new Bluetooth enabled products are qualified every day. At the end of last year, more than 500 million products [will] have installed Bluetooth solutions in total... ABI Research indicates the Bluetooth market will grow at a compound annual rate of over 40 per cent between 2004 and 2010, with equipment shipments expected to top the one billion mark by next year..." [story continues on our website]

hands-on guidelines

"This essay is about participation in online collaborations and the potentials of extreme sharing networks in the unregulated commons. Current debates focus too much on what social tools can do and not enough on the people who use them. Motivations of the multitudes who add content to online environments matter a great deal. What follows here are hands-on guidelines and an outline of preconditions for online participation. Terms like: involvement, turn taking, network, feedback, or distributed creativity (1) are frequently applied to characterise this kind of social and cultural interaction. Today, people do not merely browse the web. Instead they give away information, expertise, and advice without monetary compensation. They submit texts, code, music, images, and video files in settings that allow for such contributions. They also re-mix each other’s content. Thousands voluntarily participate in open encyclopedias, social bookmarking sites, friend-of-a-friend networks, media art projects and blogs or wikis. This exemplifies the growing interest in technologies of cooperation. Swarms of users/producers form extreme sharing networks, supporting their goal to lead fullfilled and engaged lives.

This broad cultural context of increased content provision facilitated by the World Wide Web is the precondition for the emerging paradigm of the artist as cultural context provider, who is not chiefly concerned with contributing content to her own projects. Instead, she establishes configurations into which she invites others. She blurs the lines between the artist, theorist, and curator. However, it is surprising how little emphasis has been placed on the subtle motivations for taking part in participatory projects." From THE PARTICIPATORY CHALLENGE by Trebor Scholz [from: Krysa, J., ed. (2006) DATA Browser 03. Curating immateriality. The work of the curator in the age of network systems. Autonomedia: New York.] Trebor Scholz 2006 Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.

Geography and Social interaction in Virtual Reality

"Abstract: This paper examines the interrelation between the geographical and social aspects of virtual worlds. We examine the main geographical features of Activeworlds, a multi-user virtual environment available over the Internet. Activeworlds is not only one of the most popular virtual environments, it is also the only publicly accessible one in which users can build themselves, and thus shape their geographical and social environment. We examine, among other features, transportation, mobility, and property appropriation in this virtual worlds system. Further, we describe some of the influences, both from urban planning and science fiction, on the geography of Activeworlds. We also examine the social relations that arise from these geographical conditions, including the ‘rough and ready’ mentality of this ‘cyberspace frontier’. Finally, we consider the implications of this virtual worlds system for theories of the emerging geographical and social relations in virtual environments." From Activeworlds: Geography and Social Interaction in Virtual Reality by Ralph Schroeder, Avon Huxor, and Andy Smith.

"1.0 Introduction: The idea behind ‘30 Days in ActiveWorlds’ was to fully document the development of a virtual environment from beginning to end, as a plot of virgin virtual land which, it was hoped, would develop into a community and a fully-fledged new virtual world. The aim was not to create a dialogue of life in the virtual environment, such as the well-documented “My Tiny Life” by Julian Dibbell [1] or “The Cybergypsies” by Indra Sinha [2], yet the events that unfolded over the 30 Day period led to just such a documentation, and with it my conclusions about not only community and design in a virtual environment, but also views on the increasingly blurred boundaries between what is real and what is virtual." From 30 Days in ActiveWorlds – Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith; Social Life of Avatars, Chapter 8, Ralph Shroder (Editor), Springer-Verlag UK. [via Digitally Distributed Environments]

Good info on streaming, includes embedding, encoding and so on...

pdf, good overview material

Hot from my workshop at Webvisions yesterday, here is my 103-slide magnum opus on Mobile Design.

• Designing for Mobile: Bringing Design Down to Size PDF (3.6Mb)

My workshop focused on the mobile ecosystem, some of the basic fundamentals as well as dispel myths and jargon common to the mobile industry. As this information can be incredibly hard to come by outside of the mobile industry, it seemed like a good place to start.

>If there were such objects, the gameplay itself could also have this meta-level, where players are actively looking for objects and interfaces in the environment to bring into the play and transforming them into gaming devices.

Humans live in much larger groups than other primates. Language may have evolved as a form of grooming to allow us to live with so many people.

Editor and Publisher published a Winning Online Manifesto by Tom Mohr, director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.

Newspaper industry leaders are frogs in a pot. The water’s starting to boil, and it’s time to jump. Only 19 percent of 18-34 year olds read a daily newspaper; 44 percent of them go to a web news portal. Broadband penetration has reached 57%. The blogosphere is doubling every 5 ½ months. Search provides instant access to the world’s information. User-generated content has turned the authority model of institutional media on its head. Peer-to-peer networks, tag clouds and reputation engines are fundamentally changing how people engage with content and communications.

Safa Rashtchy, Senior Internet Analyst for Piper Jaffray, has advanced the notion that these shifts in consumer behavior have precipitated a nascent shift in the marketing mix. He sees search at the center of a new marketing mix. Acknowledging a debt to his framework, I would expand the “center” somewhat to include all intention-based advertising (search, lead-generation advertising, and e-commerce).

Increasingly, smart advertisers are placing their first dollars in intention-based advertising. That’s because these ad dollars target consumers who demonstrate through their actions an expressed interest in the product or service being advertised. While traditional media are not completely replaced by intention-based advertising, they suffer lost market share.

These changes have begun to restructure consumer consumption habits and advertiser behaviors. Circulation has declined 12% since 2000, and the rate of decline is increasing. 3,500 newsroom professionals have lost their jobs, about 7% of the industry total, since 2000.

It is not beyond the pale for the $49 billion (2005) newspaper ad business ($47 billion of which was print) to begin to see accelerating declines in print ad revenue over the next five years. My rough projection is for 2010 print revenue to be just under $3 billion below its 2005 level. This loss must be offset by online. The $4 billion incremental revenue from a network ensures sub-two percent revenue growth from 2006 – 2010. Not robust, perhaps, but certainly much better than the alternative.

This migration path is difficult. The benefits of today’s actions will be seen in two to three years. It’s important to start now.

I have concluded that depends on an industry-wide understanding of seven key points:

• Local newspapers will not be the innovation source for top online products.

• "Local” is not, in itself, defensible online.

• The big money is not in newspaper websites, but in gaining access to top-tier product via partnerships with vertical online leaders.

• Moving newspaper websites onto common platforms will deliver improvements in quality, cost reduction, traffic and revenue.

• When networked, newspapers bring critical assets to the table that strengthen their competitive position vs. online-only players.

• The window of opportunity is closing; failure to act will compromise the future of the business.

• Ultimately, the key is leadership at the highest levels.

Jeff Jarvis says, "Journalism will become more collaborative — because it can, thanks to new tools; because it must, thanks to new business realities; and because it should, to build a new and respectful relationship with the public. So our challenge is to find the ways to help this happen. Jarvis says Saving journalism (and killing the press) is manditory in the age of Craig Newmark.

NewAssignment.net is a new approach to networked journalism. And who better to get the ball rolling than Jay Rosen:

The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

Free Mobile Blog Software for mobile blogging, is available using Melodeo, Shozu, SplashBlog, VoiceIndigo, YouTube and Spodradio. Journalism resources are available at Columbia Journalism Review, CRJ Daily, Paid Content, Online Journalism Review, Poynter, Transom, This American Life, and The Media Giraffe Conference.

Related DailyWireless stories include; CBS Goes Wireless, CBS Bluetooth Posters, Audio Book Sharing, Google Traffic on Cell, Advance to the Rear and Midnight in the Garden.

The quirky weekly “Consumed” column in the NYTimes Sunday magazine this week focuses on Ian Bogost / Persuasive Games’ Disaffected!, as well as Molleindustria’s McDonald’s Videogame, both blogged previously on GTxA (1 2). From the article:

Skepticism about, and mockery of, the claims of commercial persuasion has a long history. And “Disaffected!” shows how the sophistication, goals and tactics of both admakers and anti-admakers have escalated in tandem. It can also be seen as an example of what Sonia Katyal, a Fordham University law professor, calls “semiotic disobedience” in an article to be published this fall in the Washington University Law Review.

DVGuru's got the linkage to a cool Instructables technique for doing animation simply, and on the cheap using a dry erase board and a webcam. The parts list is short, and it couldn't be simpler to do. Check it out.

Photo © copyright Fabio Prati.

My PiC has yet another great post on identifying who you should be “targeting” when you’re building a startup, product, community or all three.

The Pinko approach demands that you become a member of your community to truly understand their needs and the world from their perspective. In fact, this is the only way for you to really be able to genuinely respond to their feedback and criticism, otherwise you’re always approximating what presume they’re saying…

When I was at Spread Firefox and planning out our adoption strategy, I followed very similar principles (though I didn’t have a catchy framework like “Pinko” at the time). By seeing the existing community as made up of concentric circles of enthusiastics and early adopters, my goal was to create a black hole suction of sorts deeper into the inner core community:

My theory was that the more folks we could bring into the inner rings of the Mozilla community, the more devoted they’d become and the lower the incremental effort we’d need to exert to pull in more outliers, like their friends, coworkers and family members.

Tara’s argument very much mirrors this approach. By focusing your effort and outreach on a core constituency, just like in a presidential campaign (read: Howard Dean), you’ll be enticing folks with a truly valuable service that those same folks can then turn around and preach about with more convincing passion, integrity and self-interest than you could… the very reason that the Spread Firefox campaign was so successful; it relied on concentric circles of true-believers to spread the word. For its part it only had to focus on continuing to build a great product and delivery community infrastructure to support its core constituency.

So when it comes to community barn-raising and product development, keeping your design and development efforts geared to a tightly knit core of enthusiasts is the best way to create the first drop that will ripple out to the wider audiences that your VCs are constantly (and damagingly) telling you to go after. There’s simply no better way to effectively and organically build out to a wider audience than taking the concentric circles approach.

Tags: concentric circles, pinko marketing, spread firefox

Folks are buzzing about Google’s new time wasting playable Image Labeler. Philipp Lenssen says:

More than a game, for Google this is a way to tag images using human brain power… to improve their image search results. Two people finding the same tag can serve as validation the tag makes sense. I suppose for Google it’s not important that two people find the same keywords at the same time – they can simply let people tag the images and then add any threshold they want (like “4 people must have chosen this tag for it to become a confirmed tag”).

Both Search Engine Watch and TechCrunch made the connection to research conducted by Luis von Ahn at my alma matter that was first blogged about as early as December last year (written up in the Pittsbrugh Post Gazette in August 2005).

According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch, the Google technology is indeed based on von Ahn’s work:

Yes, Image Labeler is based on my ESP Game, which Google licensed. I’m not employed by Google, however, since I’m a full-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.

In my experience, I found the images were often too small to make out clearly, whereas in similar systems like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, you get much higher resolution photos.

Interestingly, Riya uses a similar but closed system of human tagging to populate its object search. It’s unclear how such a system scales for web wide results unless something like Google or Amazon’s tool find enough widespread pick-up and open up an API to the tagged images.

Interview with the creator of del.icio.us

Originally posted by fagette from del.icio.us/fagette, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Sep 3, 2006 at 01:19 PM

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."

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.

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)

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?

"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."

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.

With Steve Dietz, Lawrence Rinder and Benjamin Weil

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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."

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.

"Over the past 20-years information has shifted from a push model to a pull model. Take news for example, a few years ago we got our news pushed to us through the method of a morning newspaper at our front door, or the local news broadcast at 11 PM. The time and medium of delivery was defined, we needed to adjust our lives in order to receive it.

Today how we gather information is far different. We pull it from various sources when we need it or when it is convenient to our schedules, our expectation is information will always be available on-demand. The pull model is becoming an increasing pervasive method of gathering information, only to store and retrieve it later using the method or medium of our choice.

How does this impact the Agency business? Here are five coffin nails to the traditional agency model...."

"How to do breaking news online isn't so obvious. Some organizations want many of their reporters to add the quick post to their repertoire. Others are employing a variant of the 'get me rewrite' approach, handing off notes and information to online produ

Light Reading has done a comprehensive comparison of the online video sharing sites, and come up with a list, based on features. The full list of all sites they reviewed with table comparison is here. Their top-10 list is:
1) Blip.tv
2) VideoEgg
3) Dailymotion
4) YouTube
5) Veoh
6) Google Video
7) Grouper
8) Jumpcut
9) AOL
10) Eyespot
Lotsa other details, charts, tables etc…useful.

The University of California's secret agreement with Google for book digitization promises to improve access to parts of its library collections, but the contractual restrictions UC has accepted may enrich Google's shareholders at public expense.

Digitizing the world's books, films, video, sound recordings, maps, and other cultural artifacts could, to quote Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, provide "universal access to all human knowledge, within our lifetime." So it's troubling to see public institutions transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds, into private hands without disclosing the terms of the transaction.

Basic principles to govern mass digitization and safeguard the public interest have been developed by members of the American Library Association (forthcoming; see also http://litablog.org/?p=200), and by the Open Content Alliance. UC even signed on to the OCA principles (disclosure: I've worked for the OCA), which are designed to provide a baseline for digitization projects, in its scanning agreements with Yahoo and Microsoft. Transparency is a primary value to both the OCA, and the ALA.

So problem one is that the terms of the UC / Google agreement are secret, and were arrived at with no public input. As an institution that receives state and federal funding, UC should expect and welcome public comment if its inventory is effectively being privatized. The president's office says it expects that terms will only come out after it receives the equivalent of a FOIA request. Since when does it take a FOIA request to get information from the library?

But it isn't just the public that is excluded–it's the rest of the library community. Mass digitization is very complex (see Paul Courant's brilliant new article in First Monday). Librarians must grapple with new and unfamiliar issues that can only be resolved through dialog with peers. Google appears to be doing all it can to prevent this from happening, imposing NDAs on libraries at the start of discussions about mass digitization. By isolating librarians from each other, Google dramatically strengthens its negotiating position, and UC negates the goal of academic openness.

The second problem is more complex. Mass digitization is expensive. Public institutions that wish to digitize their holdings usually need to partner with private firms to get the work done. As described in Marketing Culture in the Digital Age, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and written by my colleague Peter Kaufman of Intelligent Television, commercial investment in digitization can be good for all concerned.

But private companies, at least profitable ones like Google, don't work for free. So the public institutions need to pay for those services. Typically, they can't pay in cash, so they pay in other ways, with labor, facilities, and some type of rights agreement. In other words, public use of and access to the digitized cultural works is usually limited in some way to benefit the private firm. This has to be done in the open.

The recent Smithsonian/Showtime agreement is a case in point that clearly shows what can go wrong in such a process. To recap, Showtime convinced the Smithsonian to sign a secret 170 page, 30 year agreement which gives Showtime control of the Smithsonian's film and video archive. This particular saga has been widely covered elsewhere, but the roots of catastrophe are in 1) secret negotiations 2) exclusivity 3) length of term.

UC's agreement is probably not explicitly exclusive. But as a practical matter, scanning doesn't happen twice; libraries learned this when their material was microfilmed (as an aside, the microfilming was sometimes done badly, and to this day microfilm users suffer from those quality problems). This deal will be costly for UC in staff time and other resources, and the chances that another vendor will come through and duplicate the work are slim.

In the absence of the text of the agreement, it's difficult to know what specific clauses may affect the ability of California citizens to read online the books now in their libraries. But there is a plausible nightmare scenario that UC needs to act now to prevent.

From the University of Michigan agreement (obtained only as a result of public records laws in Michigan, and despite Google's best efforts) it is clear there will be restrictions on what UC can do with the digital scans. This is a critical issue. If this deal follows the pattern at Michigan, there will be limits determined by Google on how UC may share its digital holdings with other libraries.

If the scanning process is made efficient at all the universities now in Google's orbit, a book already scanned at Harvard won't be rescanned at Berkeley. So Berkeley may not receive a copy, and because of the restrictions on sharing its holdings, won't have an easy time getting one from Harvard. The student of 2012 will have a choice: go to the complete digital library, owned by Google, or go to the partial digital library of his or her own university.

That extreme scenario may not come to pass, but there are many other questions about the Google / UC deal:

* What more might UC be able to do if its scanning project were funded by the legislature or foundations, rather than by Google?
* UC says the "digitized books will be searchable through Google Book Search." Can anyone else build services that access this data? Or is it another case of "Google can crawl everyone else's data, no one can crawl Google's data?"
* What quality assurances will Google provide? How can we ensure this won't be a repeat of the microfilm experience?
* Will UC have copies of the full, high quality scans, or will certain information, such as image positioning data needed for searching, be kept by Google alone?
* What restrictions will be placed on UC's use of those scans?
* What will be the different treatments for material in copyright, or orphaned, or in the public domain?
* Is it reasonable to ask the public to pay a second time (or watch ads) for material already purchased, simply because it's now necessary to convert the format in which it is stored?
* Why haven't the Regents appointed a panel of advisors on this matter?

Clearly, UC's high level goals are laudable. The Google people I've met believe in the company motto, "don't be evil." And it is not really in the public interest to side with the publishers who are the loudest voices now attacking Google, and a primary cause of the all the secrecy. Yet by acquiescing to Google's demands for secrecy, UC has compromised the public interest, and set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the academic community.

Improving Civic Participation

"Can social media increase and improve civic participation? If so, in what ways? There's a lot being said and written about the subject these days, but it is difficult to get a clear overview of the opinions. I attempt here to collect viewpoints both for and against the premise that social media is creating a better public sphere, and analyze them in the context of what constitutes a public and its antithesis, a mass. In presenting what are sometimes extreme positions within this debate (too idealistic v. too critical), my hope is to begin to understand the reality that lies in the middle, and come closer to understanding social media's potential (and limitations) as a tool to bring about social change.

At a general level, we could say that on one side of the debate are those who believe that social media can increase civic participation and shift the balance of power away from the institutions that currently stand in the way of change. On the other side are those who warn that social media can only offer a reduced form of participation, that it diminishes the value of individual contributions, and that it leaves social systems more prone to manipulation by lowering their intelligence to the minimum common denominator (i.e., stupidity or mediocrity).

Thus, the debate can be framed in terms of whether social media can engender democratic publics that embody an intelligence and capacity for action greater than the sum of its members, or whether it will merely continue to support the production of anti-democratic masses of disenfranchised and alienated consumers. Of course, social media is a big label encompassing many different technologies, and even the same technologies can be applied differently in various contexts. But while features and applications might differ, the people contributing to this debate are obviously focused on the aggregated impact that social media is having on our societies rather than on specific examples of applications." Continue reading Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere by Ulises Ali Mejias.

O'Reilly's Radar has a brief write up of a "3D live motion video camera that uses LIDAR technology to get a range-finding for every pixel" - you could "scan" an area and put all the 3D data in to just about any application, wow! Link & full image.

Related:
Google video tech talk about the camera - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by admeyers on Aug 16, 2006 at 04:08 PM

Bluefavour has a presentation "on the mobile ecosystem, some of the basic fundamentals as well as dispel myths and jargon common to the mobile industry."

Snippet TV is a project that we are developing for MNN that allows people to submit online or digital video to MNN online. It also has a playback component meant to support a show based around that content.

For more about it checkout: Snippet TV | PEGSpace

WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show: Why Videocommunication Didn't Catch On (July 25, 2006)
From the post:
Computer scientist Jaron Lanier looks at why—despite all the predictions—videocommunication never caught on.

Pretty interesting. Discussing the non-verbal cues that we are missing in video conferencing.

(I wish WNYC would have permalinks on their site for each of these segments. I would rather post on my own blog than on Delicious but for now I have to click on the Delicious link and copy the URL and so forth. - That's for you Brian, if you are listening)

Thanks Spencer..

The latest issue of Harper’s features an excellent roundtable discussion on how video games might be used to teach writing. Though most of it will be familiar to anyone who has followed recent debates about “serious games,” it is worth reading. Among the discussants, Raph Koster stood out as particularly insighful, and his comments about new forms of literacy really struck home:

What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation–of a painting, or a historical text–and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. … Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy.

Appropriation and annotation (or, to use the popular vernacular, remix and tagging) have been at the center of my interests for a while now, but it’s nice to see them being discussed in a high-profile forum like Harper’s.

Koster’s comments echo the views of my friend Dan Perkel, who has been investigating “copy and paste literacy” on MySpace. Many people focus on the “remix culture” of appropriation and annotation as if it is something new–but these practices have been around since the dawn of culture. What is new, as Koster and Dan indicate, is the general rise in people’s ability to recognize and engage in these practices: their literacy.

The discussion in Harper’s ends with a kind of lament that a population highly literate in appropriation and annotation will squeeze out the “great artist” by flooding our culture with lesser-quality niche productions. I agree with that conclusion but not the explanation. The era of the great artist will come to an end, not because of overcrowded cultural markets, but because a literate population will recognize appropriation and annotation at the heart of all creative production, and it will reject the myths of the solitary genius and the original creative act that have dominated for the last few centuries. The great artist will disappear, but there will continue to be great art.

Dearman, D., Hawkey, K. and Inkpen, K.M. Rendezvousing with location-aware devices: Enhancing social coordination. Interacting with Computers 17, 5 (2005), 542-566.

A very interesting paper directly connected to my current research about the influence of location-awareness on collaboration. It examines how location awareness impacts social coordination when rendezvousing.

This paper presents a field study investigating the use of mobile location-aware devices for rendezvous activities. Participants took part in one of three mobile device conditions (a mobile phone, a location-aware handheld, or both a mobile phone and a location-aware handheld) and completed three rendezvousing scenarios. The results reveal key differences in communication patterns between the mediums, as well as the potential strengths and limitations of location-aware devices for social coordination.
(…)
close observation of the behavioural and communication differences demonstrates that the technology available significantly altered how the participants’ managed their social coordination

Results about the functions of location-awareness were quite pertinent too (as in my case, they also found detrimental effects of it):

Having access to location-awareness information has obvious benefits. Users can make more informed decisions and have a stronger sense of ambient virtual co-presence. The participants in our study made extensive use of location-awareness information as a background communication channel to monitor their partner’s location (as well as their own) in an unobtrusive manner.
(…)
we observed instances where location-awareness information was extremely beneficial and other instances where it was detrimental. It was beneficial because participants could see their partner’s location and track their progress in an unobtrusive manner. This arguably provided the waiting partner with enough information to wait contently. However, when their partner appeared to be lost or not making progress, it was very disconcerting to the waiting partner because they did not have enough information to determine what the problem was. This uncertainty was strong enough in some cases to actually draw the waiting partner away from the rendezvous location.

Why do I blog this? this goes straight to my literature review.

The Seven Maps Project - the most recent videoblogging project to receive funding via Have Money Will Vlog is now over and it was, in my opinion, a success. But, more on that later when Daniel Liss, the intrepid traveller, has had some down time. I’m going to be interviewing him about the process, his expectations and his thoughts on the results.

The latest project on the HMWV funding block is The Sustainable Route - another travelling vlog series that raises some interesting questions.

The Sustainable Route, proposed by Ashley Hodson and her friend Megan, hopes to create a dialogue about sustainability by meeting up with people who are involved in the sustainability movement, educating themselves and their viewers during the journey.

For those of you who don’t know much about Have Money Will Vlog, the site was organized as a way to solicit funds for video projects. Chosen projects are promoted by the site which asks for donations using the model of Fundable.org (if the proposed amount is reached, the donations will be paid. If not, the donations are not collected).

There is a Google Group devoted to the site that anyone can join with the provision that those involved in choosing projects cannot apply for funding themselves in order to preserve objectivity and avoid favoritism. Group members are asked to bring forward projects they have knowledge of as well as go through independent proposals and engage in discussions over the merits of each one until an agreement is reached on who to fund.

As a member of this group, I have seen many proposals, some of which have been rejected or sent back to the author for further development. This is one project that seemed destined to be a "pick".

Ashley Hodson is Ryan Hodson’s sister and Ryan is one of the founders of Have Money Will Vlog. Is this, as suggested by MissBHavens in our own comments, nepotism? Does it conform to the basic tenets of HMWV as an objective choice?

It was a difficult position to be put in as a group member. On the one hand, a project about sustainable technology would be interesting (although Daryl Hannah is already doing it on her vlog!) but, on the other hand, is it really an arm’s length assessment when those making the final call are relatives that are, not only helping to promote the cause but, helped with the proposal itself?

Whether or not the group as a whole decided the project would be a go is questionable. No sooner had discussions begun, we were informed that the project would be a go. The intro video that group members asked to see first had not yet been posted:

hey all
just a little update on this

on having her preliminary proposal video done by the end of this week/weekend
so you can get a better idea of where she’s coming from/what she’s planning.

she’s also building a google map for the trip.

jay and i discussed posting this project after the second week of august
to give people some breathing room after the 2000 we raised for daniel
and to watch 7 maps unfold (should be happening the second week in Aug)

then we’ll move forward on this one…

cheers
-ry

After this post, conversation about the project ground to a halt. I’d like to say that I posted my concerns to the group but I didn’t. I was busy with Seven Maps and I saw no indication that the project was moving forward until it was already in the works.

I think that Have Money Will Vlog is a good idea but this latest project has me concerned. From MissBHaven’s comment, I can see I’m not the only one.

- Anne

"Web sites that attempt to build community quickly on a grand scale will not succeed... It is possible to create a big community site, but it has to be a network of affinity groups -- a community of communities."

"What today's internet firms can learn from 19th-century history"

I attempt here to collect viewpoints both for and against the premise that social media is creating a better public sphere, and analyze them in the context of what constitutes a public and its antithesis, a mass.

Be the first with the facts by trying some of these suggestions for uncovering news that others haven't.

(via boingboing)

Jamie Boyle, co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is always worth paying attention to (c.f., The Second Enclosure Movement). Now he's written about the cognitive bias he has detected against open systems. The periodic diatribes about Wikipedia, the conflation of collectivism and collective action, the war against net neutrality all reflect this mindset:

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open – open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?

Source: SSRN
Title: Stopping Play:  A New Approach To Games (DRAFT)
Author: Thomas Malaby

Abstract:

Games have intruded into popular awareness to an unprecedented level, and scholars, policy makers, and the media alike are beginning to consider how games might offer insight into fundamental questions about human society. But in the midst of this opportunity for their ideas to be heard, it is game scholars who are selling games short. In their rush to highlight games' importance, they have tended toward an unsustainable exceptionalism, seeing games as fundamentally set apart from everyday life. This view casts gaming as a subset of play, and therefore - like play - as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable. Before we can confront why games are important, and make use of them to pursue the aims of policy and knowledge, we must rescue games from this framework and develop an understanding of them unburdened by the category of play, one that will both accord with the experience of games by players themselves, and bear the weight of the new questions being asked about them and about society. To that end, I offer here an understanding of games that eschews exceptionalist, normatively-loaded approaches in favor of one that stresses them as a characterized by process. In short, I argue for seeing games as domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations. This approach enables us to understand how games are, rather than set apart from everyday life, instead intimately connected with it. With this approach in place, I conclude by discussing two key recent developments in games, persistence and complex, implicit contingency, that together may account for why some online games are now beginning to approach the texture of everyday life.

• Link here... (PDF)
• Associated discussion on Terra Nova...

.

SIMVeillance: San Jose, by Katherine Isbister and Rainey Straus in collaboration with SIM consultant Chelsea Hash, uses surveillance cameras and the video game The Sims 2™ to re-present passersby within a game environment that mirrors a "real life" public space: the Fairmont Plaza in downtown San Jose. The SIMveillance game is inhabited by avatars of the people passing through the plaza who’ve been caught on camera. The virtual population grows throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Side-by-side monitors within the museum display contrasting images of the same scene: One shows passersby on the Fairmont Plaza as seen on surveillance cameras; the other shows the area using the computer game, with the strolling characters modeled from some of the people recorded by the cameras.

Straus conceded in an interview, "I think there's the potential for people to feel invaded." From the creators' standpoint, the uncertainty about how people will react is essential to the project's artistic value. "Part of what we're doing," Straus added, "is seeing what questions we raise and what people's answers are."

The work also explores the territory in which simulated-avatars co-mingle in the landscape with “the real” to produce a hybrid community with potentially unexpected results.

Further information in MercuryNews and Campus News.

The mix of user-generated content with the newspaper’s professionalism and existing infrastructure should enable newspaper sites to quickly become the dominant player for local events, Kevin J. Mireles says.

Tim Spalding has taken discussion forums a big step forward over at LibraryThing. The concept is simple but could make a real difference because it allows forum msgs to be aggregated in multiple ways. When you’re entering a msg at a forum, you can put a title or author in brackets and LibraryThing will take a stab at identifying what you have in mind. Think of it as in-place tagging. You can thus easily find all the posts about a book. And all the references to a book or author will be lilsted on that book or author’s page.

Because LibraryThing knows which books you own (because you’ve told it), it can feed you msgs about any of them. And, as Tim points out, this unhiding of msgs will change the temporality of posts: Rather than msgs fading into obscurity a few days or weeks after they’re posted, they’ll be easily findable and reply-able.

Very cool.

"The key is going to be the trust that develops in the continuous back-and-forth between an editor and users. If it's based on an unspoken covenant to strengthen each other’s prejudices and find facts that support them, then, yeah, this is going to lead to big, big problems."

Virtual-world services company Rivers Run Red is busy these days. Having recently announced they’d be bringing hit pop band Duran Duran to the virtual world of Second Life, the news is now that they’re bringing the metaverse back home, so to speak, by working with publisher Penguin to create a virtual version of Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, to be distributed in Second Life, a world largely inspired by the book. Virtual copies of a portion of the book should be available starting next week.

Book publishing in Second Life, of course, has not been a smashing success. “Prim” books are unwieldy, hard to manipulate and often very difficult to read. But RRR and publisher Penguin seem savvy on this note, with the in-world version apparently offering only a sampler of portions of the text and excerpts from an audio version — with a special discount (presumably on paper-and-ink purchases) being offered to Second Life residents.

While it may only be a small step forward in virtual media technology, it’s a very cool undertaking nonetheless. Written in the years 1988 through 1991 (”as the author listened to a great deal of loud, relentless, depressing music”), Snow Crash foreshadows a Second Life-like metaverse (a term coined in the novel) with remarkable accuracy — especially given that even the Web browser was yet a few years out. Many of the emergent societal tropes that can be found today in Second Life were present 15 years ago in Snow Crash, from the ability to create one’s own fantasy assets (and the wide disparity between newbies and uber content creators in that regard), to the social pressure felt by residents whose avatars aren’t up to fashionable standards and even a feted inner core who enjoy special privileges not available to those standing outside the velvet rope of a virtual nightclub like the book’s Black Sun. Second Life creator Philip Rosedale has said, “Snow Crash has the closest practical resemblance to Second Life as it exists now: a parallel, immersive world which simulates an alternate universe, which thousands of people inhabit simultaneously for communication, play, and work, at various levels and variations of role-playing with their avatars.”

No word yet on whether this means a brand new print version of the book, but I’d assume that it does, since I think the current version of Snow Crash is in print from a division of Random House. Penguin’s involvement may mean only a new UK version. More details will presumably emerge soon. Meanwhile, 3pointD welcomes Stephenson and his seminal metaversal vision back to the metaverse. Good to have you.

advertising, books, media, metaverse, news, Second Life, virtual worlds, VW services

Another way to think about Answers is that it’s a system by which would-be “bloggers” can pick off areas of expertise and easily “post” what they know. You can think of each answer as a micro blog post

I'm off to Banff early tomorrow morning for the BNMI's Interactive Screen 0.6 event - really looking forward to hanging out with interesting people in one of my favourite places and excited because I'll finally get to play Blast Theory's Can You See Me Now? mixed-reality game, instead of just reading about it!

On Monday I'll be giving a short presentation as part of The View From The Inside Out panel with Jan-Christoph Zoels from Experientia/IDII, and Mark Resch from Onomy Labs. I thought I'd talk a bit about my research - what I see as significant interests and values shaping, and being shaped by, contemporary locative media design practices and the shifting relationships between, and amongst, producers and consumers. Ultimately, I'd like to connect these local observations to more global concerns of community and citizenship in the 21st century, and discuss what I see to be some of the most insistent challenges facing practitioners everywhere today.

On Thursday I'll give a longer and more detailed keynote address - I posted the abstract last month but here it is again:

Technosocial Screens: Mobilities, Communities, Citizenships

screen, v. to show, or hide from view; to sift or separate; to shelter or protect

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

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

As always, I'll post my presentations when they're done, and I'll blog my reflections as the week progresses.

Gartner says hot technologies include social-network analysis, collective intelligence, location-aware applications, and event-driven architectures.

After yesterday's post, got this great email from good friend robb monn (you probably want to download his brilliant, creative commons-licensed album, hello mr. ohler), who has some thoughts about where Hollywood's going. I love some of the things in here, especially, "Quality is still after all this time a niche market," which is such a smart observation that it just kills me. Here's what robb sent in full:

Do you remember how in Life (Conway's Game of Life, that is) how the seeds grow and grow and then go black at the core and thenthe dead core expands too, catching the ring of vitality at some point and leaving only a few flitting bits oscillating?

My thinking is that the Empire is dying and it is dying right now when it is bigger than ever. As the core of the patterns die in Conway's Life the circumference of the whole life-explosion is still growing and until pretty late in the death of the colony it is larger, by pixel-count than ever even as it dying more and more quickly.

Hollywood is spending Spiderman II's money to make Spiderman III. It is what, three production cycles of total failure away from being broke? While there is more money than ever (or maybe not even that) if the apex of profits has been reached, or when it is reached, the fall will either be expected and very controlled or it will be profound and rapid, but either way I think that it will be a fall.

I don't feel like they know how to fix the system. The problem is the same as it has always been: they know how to promote just about anything that is unchallenging so that it stands a certain chance on the P&E, but they don't know how to make quality something that they can sell to consumers. Quality is still after all this time a niche market.... and seemingly it is more niche now than ever. The Third Man was a blockbuster. My grandparents (poor, 100% blue collar military family) dressed up in suit and party dress to go see each Hitchcock film when it came out. My other grandparents occasionally mentioned the 12 Angry Men with Peter Fonda that was produced for TV decades after it aired. While there has always been trash produced for TV and Hollywood that has done very well I think that there hasn't been a time previous to today when high quality programming (which is often relatively cheap when compared to The Rock or Triple X, say) is always considered to have at best an outside chance of getting made much less being financially successful. If Hitch were making films today I think his getting Strangers on a Train on theater screens would be considered by his peers as equivalent to his winning the lottery.

I think blockbuster, all-pro-all-biz Hollywood is a decadent mode that like all decadence is rotten at the core, unsalvageable.

flare">

The podcasts for the Citizen Journalism unconference are now posted. So are the podcasts from the Wikimania 2006 conference, including talks by stars like Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons, and Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks.

Jay Fienberg emailed these interesting comments on the MP3HTML file format I made up a couple weeks ago:

I've been thinking about your MP3 embedded in HTML experiment, and I keep meaning to write you about it. Mostly, I keep wanting to write and say "no", and then think "why not?", and get stuck--so, I guess it's an interesting experiment, and it got me thinking :-)

BTW, Why not just embed HTML and other stuff in MP3s?

Part of my bias against this kind of embedded approach is that, generally, I like the idea of decoupling data / information from files. The nice example, I think, is being able to put a URL in my browser and get back lots of files that represent a "web page"--the browser decides to load lots of images and supporting files to give me a page that is not just what's in the HTML. (And, generally, I think the browser / hypertext interaction can be pushed further, with the browser doing more / different things with various forms of links--all without me, the end-user. having to worry about what is or isn't in one file or another.)

Along these lines, I could imagine an HTML based media format, e.g., application/xhtml+mp3, that doesn't necessarily embed the media data inside the HTML, but media players would read this type and expect different / specific elements representing binary media files that they then would do something with / download / play.

In terms of the potential to exploit this using existing browsers with Javascript, I think it's maybe comparable with the embedded MP3 approach--the Javascript can download external mp3s via HttpRequest.

Anyway, I think there's something to what you've done--maybe embedding vs external is just a matter of options, the way it is generally. In other words, if we have a way to declare something a "media HTML" resource that should be played by a media player, in principle HTML allows binary data to be either embedded or linked, and either should work.

I actually think that is the bigger deal: suggesting that there might be a viable "media HTML" format that's not too much weirder than HTML itself.

An answer to one specific point:

Why not just embed HTML and other stuff in MP3s?

Because you wouldn't be able to get at the HTML and other stuff without knowledge specific to MP3. If nothing else, we should be able to get out of the problem where every user agent must understand every media format.

There is a secondary problem which isn't directly related to format design: to get anything done, we need a strategy for avoiding the need for client-side software.

One last thing -- I love the coinage Media HTML. It's the kind of name which evokes the thing being named without any explicit setup or explanation.

Ryan Shaw emailed this reply to Jay Fienberg --

What Jay Fienberg describes is basically what life would be like if the Flash NetStream API (and some syntax for binding it to HTML-defined boxes) were standardized, available in the major browsers, and scriptable from JavaScript. In fact, it is available in the 98% of browsers that have a Flash plugin installed, and JavaScript <-> ActionScript bridges work pretty well these days--but obviously it sucks that Adobe controls the API and all implementations. It would be nice if IE adapted its HTML+TIME code to support a NetStream API, and Mozilla shipped media playback capability (perhaps based on VLC or GStreamer) and standardized on the same API. Until that happens, though, using MTASC and some JS<->AS hackery isn't a bad way to go.

The NetStream API is new to me, and since I like to provide some sort of explanation when a technology first appears on my blog, here's some documentation.

NetStream - Flash 8 ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference

The NetStream class provides methods and properties for playing Flash Video (FLV) files from the local file system or an HTTP address. You use a NetStream object to stream video through a NetConnection object. Playing external FLV files provides several advantages over embedding video in a Flash document, such as better performance and memory management, and independent video and Flash frame rates. This class provides a number of methods and properties you can use to track the progress of the file as it loads and plays, and to give the user control over playback (stopping, pausing, and so on).

What Ryan is picturing here is a Javascript-accessible library for media rendering in the browser. In Internet Explorer the library might be accessing the underlying COM API to Windows Media Player, while other browsers would be accessing Flash. In either case there would be a standard API between the Javascript and the media player.

A few months ago, we wrote about why strong DRM supporters' argument that copy protection is somehow "necessary" for content creators didn't actually make much sense. It appears that even some of those DRM supporters are recognizing this as well. Ed Felten has noticed that supporters of stronger legal backing for copy protection laws have started to shift their argument, relying less on "stopping file sharing" (which copy protection doesn't do) and moving on to "it allows new business models" including things like price discrimination. He also claims that they're promoting how DRM helps support lock-in of customers -- which it does, but I've yet to hear that argument made as a positive reason for DRM. Even the price discrimination argument is a risky one, since even when it's more efficient, it adds in unexpected economic friction in the form of pissing people off. Though, as Felten points out, neither of these arguments (whether or not they make sense) have anything to do with copyright -- yet, supporters still seem to be focusing on bolstering protections for DRM within copyright law. It's great that these content providers want to introduce new business models, but there's no reason that those business models should need to get extra special legal protection.

If you want an inside track on the future of free content licenses you could hardly do better than watch or listen to recordings of two Wikimania sessions -- Lawrence Lessig on The Ethics of the Free Culture Movement (particularly the last twenty minutes) and Eben Moglen on Document Licenses and the Future of Free Culture, which also features Q&A with both Moglen and Lessig.

You'll recognize this discussion if you followed Lessig's series about the history and future of Creative Commons from the end of last year.

Heather interviews Ze about some of the copyright and control issues that indie producers are wrestling with.

I am not following voice-recognition and its potential applications but today I’ve been confronted to three papers about it in my daily scans. Even though it’s still R&D oriented, each papers delivered some promising messages about a technology that I am skeptical about (based on previous research project and research readings).

First there is this ACM Queue discussion by John Canny (University of California, Berkeley), which is actually a great piece about the future of HCI. Canny quote Jordan Cohen’s work (formerly of VoiceSignal, now of SRI International)

“The killer application is probably going to end up being some kind of interface with search, which seems to be the very hot topic in the world today; for mobile search especially, speech is a pretty reasonable interface, at least for the input side of it,”

This “search” concept is what I ran across this morning in a Business Week article by Steve Hamm, there is a presentation fo a curious application called TellMe about voice-driven Web information:

The idea is to create mobile search services that can make it easy for those on the go to find people, businesses, and information. That goes for any phone, but especially those equipped with browsers. A tourist might bark “restaurants,” “sushi,” and “downtown” into his cell phone and then see listings, read online reviews, make reservations, and retrieve a map with directions. “It has taken us six years to get to this point, but now we can really start to deliver on our original mission,” says McCue, TellMe’s CEO.
(…)
Skeptics point out that despite technology advances, voice recognition still turns off many consumers, who remember past glitches. But experts say that will change when systems combine voice, text messaging, and graphic info from Web pages. Each mode will be used for what it does best. “People will be using voice to launch into their search, and they’ll want to see the information on a screen,” says David Albright, executive director for marketing for Cingular Wireless, which is working with TellMe.

Yes, of course these last pointed I quoted are recurrent, but as presented in this Speech Technology Magazine Issues, there are others applications:

Use your telephone or cell phone to talk with Google—search the Web for answers to your questions, extract the information chunks you need, and listen to the results…Rather than struggling to find the answer to a specific question by chasing links across a Web site, you can simply click a button on the GUI screen and be connected to a human or artificial agent… instruct your oven through your cell phones…

Why do I blog this? don’t know whether it’s apophenia but I ran across those 3 articles today. So what? I am still dubious about speech technologies but there seems to be confidence in this avenue.

This thesis reviews the influences and explores the characteristics and elements of live cinema, a recently coined term for realtime audiovisual performances. The thesis discusses the possible language of live cinema, and proposes "vocabulary and grammar."

Here's an enjoyable article about the whole online video stampede from Adario Strange: The 'Nothing' Special. Not a lot of new info, but a different, slightly more arch perspective than the many business articles coming out daily, and choice passages like this one:

When everyone, everywhere, has their own video show, can anyone’s video really be considered something special anymore?

As the rising tide of reality shows and navel-gazing weblogs have proven, there is [a] large market for recursive ephemera.

ow I feel about it is simple. Personal, grassroots video is great and fun, and I watch it on the YouTube, too, and will probably watch more of it. I'll watch more reality TV, too, if it's more like the stuff, say, A&E is doing and less like the dreck on the big 4 networks. But I can't believe, looking at what sells DVDs, rather than drives ephemeral TV ratings, that we aren't taking for granted the really good stuff, the comedy, the dramas, the action series, that can only be created using more money and more people. Cameras will get cheaper, bandwidth will get broader, hard drives will get bigger -- but for the foreseeable future it will still take the collaborative efforts of groups of specialized, talented people (resources that only get more expensive) to capture with those cheaper cameras the things we most want to download, purchase, watch, and more and more, participate in. (update: Even the Rocketboom $25 a day myth is just that -- a myth -- as the real costs of each episode were and continue to be considerably more. Those three minutes of video each day took, on average, a team of at least four people at least four hours each to make. Writing, shooting, editing, post-processing, posting on the web, reading e-mails and story suggestions, coordinating talent, locations, and shoots. Not to mention bandwidth bills to serve a couple hundred thousand video files a day. It only helped that many of the people involved didn't immediately need to get paid.)

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is: demand for the artistry needed to make big entertainments is not lagging, though it may be shifting for now from the multiplex to netflix, from the networks to the net. And we'll still need people with money to put up enough to pay the artists in advance until a profit can be made. It's the middle men -- the ones that own the infrastructure and marketing machines -- that are in trouble.

Last night I published the first part of my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week.

Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about my post said they'd prefer to get the whole context, rather than just my write-up of it. So here now is the full interview as a podcast [37 minutes, 17MB]. The audio quality is not great at the start (due to a bad telephone connection), but it gets better after a couple of minutes. Note that this is instead of me doing a separate write-up of Part 2.

powered by ODEO

cussed

Some of the subjects discussed in the full interview podcast are:

• The past and future of the Web - and where Sun fits into the picture.
• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and why Tim and Radia don't think it will be a major driver on the Web.
• Web-connected devices (music players, TV, games machines, etc) and the future of the browser.
• Web Office - do Tim and Radia think a browser-based office suite will ever be competitive with MS Office? Sun has StarOffice, which is a desktop alternative to MS Office. Will it go web-based?
• How does Sun fit into the Web 2.0 era we're currently in - e.g. social software, apps that leverage collective intelligence.
• How will RSS and ATOM be used going forward; and thoughts on Google's data format GData.
• Security on the Web
• Where will the Web be at in another 15 years?!

Key Quotes from Part 2

Some key quotes not featured in Part 1:

• Tim on media on the Web: "I do not expect the Internet to be a suitable medium for broadcast video, at any kind of acceptable level of quality that we've come to expect on our TV screen, any time soon. The architecture isn't built to do that and the bandwidth isn't there."
• Tim on Web Office: "Anything that can migrate onto the Web absolutely will."
• Radia on security on the Web and stopping the bad guys: "People ought to be trying to make it easy and cheap, rather than trying to make money out of security."

Hope you enjoy the podcast. I plan to interview more Web industry luminaries over the next few months.

Virtual snail race, or mere hallucination?

A week or two ago, I found myself describing the greater metaversapolitan area to a friend who had never heard of things like Second Life or There.com, virtual worlds or massively multiplayer online games, and who had only passing knowledge of apps like Google Earth and the concept of mirror worlds. I told her about the little business boomlet the sector seems to be experiencing these days, and the potential such places and applications hold for not only increasing our knowledge of the real world and the ways we connect there, but for making possible new modes of being and richer ways of interacting. A great place to get your fantasy on, and you can pull down six figures there, to boot, or so the marketing goes. Regardless, I said, it was exciting to be a part of it, to see this new thing unfold before my eyes, to be reporting on it from the front lines, so to speak, and to ride along and see just where it might go — even if it’s headed for a fiery crash, as some would argue, or a more mundane sputtering thud.

Her reaction was interesting: “It sounds like you’re living through the 1960s of technology,” quoth she. This strikes me as pretty spot on.

Now, as a point of disclosure / disclaimer, I should note here that I lived through only the last three and a half years of the 1960s, and have only patchy memories of the time. Of course, I share this last characteristic with a lot of people who lived through the entire decade, but in my case it isn’t because I was on drugs but because I was in diapers. That said, the era is by now pretty familiar to most of us, so I don’t mind commenting on it here. (And my parents were deep hippies at the time, so I have a lot of close knowledge through them.)

The more I think about it, the more I like my friend’s analogy. A lot of the concepts that are associated with 60s culture and counter-culture are also showing up in the metaversal sphere. Virtual worlds often create a hallucinatory landscape (giant snail races, anyone?) that would not be out of place in the most colorful acid trips of the decade in question. Virtual worlds are also being used as new avenues of personal realization and empowerment. There, you can be anything and anyone you want — or so it’s said. There’s something very akin to a sexual revolution in the offing, and many people are also exploring new approches to what we think of as “work.”

There is also an explosion of creativity. Much of the various forms and examples of art and creation that is coming out of the metaverse is truly new and exciting — though as much if not more is not very interesting at all, of course. But the moment has sparked a new flame under the broad class of people known somewhat clinically these days as “content creators,” and has in fact radically broadened that class by giving people new tools (even if they’re crude, as yet), which they are now using to pry open doors that hadn’t even been perceived before.

The metaverse at the moment is also a place where the received wisdom of established rights and laws is being challenged on a daily basis, and where people are struggling to find new ways to organize their society, as well as creating new kinds of communities that attempt to exist apart from those already established. And, as eventually happened to 60s culture, metaverse culture has now begun to be adopted by “the establishment,” much to many metaversal citizens’ chagrin.

Of course, many of the tropes that are kicked around about the 60s are in fact only partially true. Peace and love may have been the watchwords of the day, but the reality was somewhat more gritty than those words suggest. The same is true of the metaverse. A fantasy world where you can be anything, do anything and even make your living is only a very partial description of what’s going on in virtual worlds. The metaverse also sees its share of heartbreak, conflict and unfeeling bad governance, just as the 60s did.

The joyful uprising of the metaverse may also, arguably, have some ill effects going forward, just as could be argued of the joyful uprising of the 60s. Consider the fact that Linden Lab’s favorite management tool is known as the Love Machine, and their working philosophy is The Tao of Linden. Many SL residents would argue that the ill effects of these exactly match the analogous child-rearing practices that cropped up in the 60s, when kids were often left to their own devices because parents were afraid of corrupting their minds by providing too much authority. The reality was more mixed, with some people deriving great advantage from learning to be self-directed, while others floundered without guidance. The LL development process seems to suffer the same inconsistencies, if the complaints of residents are any judge.

The exciting thing is that the metaverse is happening at all, and for that much credit is due to the people at Linden Lab, There.com, ActiveWorlds, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Google, MySpace, even Flickr and many other places. If nothing else, the 60s saw a radical shift in the way we approach culture and its creation, with many of the “gatekeepers” being swept aside in a move toward a more democratized and inclusive process (though not a fully democratized and inclusive one, to be sure). It could be argued, too (as John Markoff does in What the Dormouse Said), that this is part of what led to the development of the personal computer, and I’d further argue that the continued trend is part of what’s driving Web 2.0 apps — and the metaverse. Philip Rosedale’s original vision of Second Life seems to be of that place where you can be anything or anyone and do anything you like, a fantasyscape of dreams realized (or at least, virtualized). It’s a similar cultural shift, with technology now becoming a tool for personal expression in new and deeper modes, just as music, art and lifestyle were as a result of the changes of the 60s. You can now log on, rez in, and, if you like, drop out. It’s anyone’s guess as to how far-reaching the cultural effects of virtual-world and metaversal technologies will be, but it’s worth remembering that long hair and rock music was at one time thought to be a passing fad as well. Welcome to the 60s of technology.

3D Web, 3pointD, art, culture, governance, Identity, kids, metaverse, music, Technology, virtual worlds, Web 2.0, work

The walled garden approach, adopted by most wireline and mobile telecom providers, has a number of key shortcomings says a new report by Pyramid Research; Transforming Telcos With IMS: The Telco Silver Bullet for an Applications-Centric World.

Eventually, voice and data will converge around an IP transport. The IP Multimedia System (IMS) is the multimedia architecture that provides interoperability. "The walled garden approach remains the preferred option for telcos, for a simple core reason: control," comments Svetlana Issaeva, the report's author.

Using IMS, carriers can track, charge for or block subscriber access to Internet-based services. They will be able to charge extra for preferred handling of multimedia traffic, and allow preferential treatment for some services and websites over others.

For all the advantages that the walled garden approach has, says the report, it does not take the full measure of the challenges telcos are facing. Walled gardens have a number of key limitations. The cost and ultimate price of quality of service and service customization and also the restrictions to subscriber choices make this model inadequate for ultimate IMS rollout, says the report.

IMS is the foundation for next-generation fixed/mobile convergence based on IP. It allows, for example, a single video clip to be played on a cellphone, laptop or television set. It allows interoperable messaging, data exchange and billing across different platforms (like a WiFi/Cellphone).

Sprint's commitment to Mobile WiMAX yesterday also brings challenges. The Average Revenue Per User could be under attack if users dumped Sprint voice services and went with Skype. iSkoot allows Skype calling on regular cellphones, for example. WiFi or WiMAX might provide a (cheaper) alternative route to cable or cellular VoIP services, resulting in a net loss of revenue.

The next 12 months will be critical for the future of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), as carriers begin to deploy IMS-specific systems and determine whether it can deliver on its promises, according to Heavy Reading analyst Graham Finnie.

Carrier vendors implement IMS around their own hardware and software:

• Motorola's IMS approach is based on their SoftSwitch platform for seamless mobility. Using their IMS core and MOTOwi4 wireless solution, Motorola provides IP-based voice, video, conferencing services, unified messaging, ringback tones and other SIP-based applications on multiple devices.
  
• Nokia's IP Multimedia Subsystem uses SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to establish IP connections between terminals. The IP connection can then be used to carry any IP traffic, for example interactive game sessions or push to talk communication.
• Nortel's IMS system is likely to be a key piece of Microsoft's plans. It enables a subscriber to launch a video conference during a voice conversation, or access a personalized Video-on-Demand service subscription not just from their home TV, but online from a laptop, a hotel room or from a mobile phone.
• Ericsson's IMS system says it enables communication through various media, adapted to each individual's preference and provides a consistent experience across multiple access technologies.
• Lucent's IP Multi-Media Subsystem supports IP to IP session over wireline IP, 802.11, 802.15, CDMA, packet data along with GSM/EDGE/UMTS and other packet data applications.
• Hewlett-Packard has a a multimedia service to help carriers provide "triple-play" services of voice, video and data.

Control of the IP Multimedia Subsystem could become an thory issue. Consumers want "open" systems while cellular and cable operators prefer a closed "walled garden" approach.

Verizon, Cisco, Lucent, Motorola, Nortel and Qualcomm have collaborated over the last year to create A-IMS (Advances to IMS), meant to provide a foundation for the roll-out of both SIP- and non-SIP-based services in future networks, according to the companies.

The Sprint/Cable wireless partnership may have lots of tricky issues to resolve.

The nascent mobile TV market in the U.S. cannot support the current number of players and is likely to undergo consolidation, according to Mobile TV: Analysis & Forecasts, a new report from Parks Associates.

The report specifically points to Crown Castle's Modeo and Aloha Partner's Hiwire as candidates for consolidation, with both companies planning to launch nationwide mobile TV networks using DVB-H technology.

Parks Associates cites several factors that make consolidation likely. In addition to DVB-H over Hiwire (700MHz) and Modeo (1.7 GHz), there's Qualcomm's proprietary MediaFLO (700MHz) and Sprint-Nextel's MobiTV over WiMAX (2.5 GHz), bringing the total to four.

This number is high by international standards, says Parks Associates, despite the fact that the U.S. has a relatively low cellular penetration rate. Italy and South Korea, by comparison, have just two networks each even though consumers in these countries show a stronger propensity for using mobile phones as multimedia platforms.

"If you do the math, there are four networks for four operators, and that isn't realistic because you lose all the advantages of network sharing," said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates. "Consolidation would be a win-win scenario for the industry. Hiwire needs a network, and Modeo needs a more favorable spectrum allocation. They are a natural fit, whereas Sprint-Nextel has a large subscriber base to support its network and Qualcomm is dedicated to promoting its technology and chipsets."

Related DailyWireless articles include; Sony's WiFi Mylo, Microsoft Plans Wireless Music Player, Zing Go the Strings, WiFi Gremlin Music Player, Mobile Shopping, WiFi TV, MediaFLO Gets Satellite Backbone, Mobile TV: The Battle is On, New Mobile TV Flavor: TDtv, Verizon Goes with FLO, Global Mobile Television, T/W, Cingular: On Demand, DVB-H Headend Software, Intel On DVB-H, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, The 700 Mhz Club, 700 Mhz Worth $28B, The 700 Mhz FCC Auction, Winner of the Triple Play, Satphones Localize, TiVo on a Stick, Clear Channel Podcasting, Multicasting the Olympics, WiMax Handsets, Laptop Television, Sirius Portable Radio, U.S. Broadband Policy?, XM Buys 2.3GHz, Sprint Gets Sirius, MPEG-4: Satellite, Cable & Wireless, Satellite TV on Cell Phone?, Sprint Bundles EchoStar, Satellite WiFi, DirecWay Modem Shares Access, Satphones Get Giant Antennas, U.S. Cellsats and FCC Approves Big Mobile Sat.

Households in Britain can be classified into 23 "e-types" depending on their access to technology, say researchers.

As noted below, I'm starting to think again about how open source scenario planning might work. First issue to look at is the question of what it means to be open.

Not all open systems are open in the same way. Although most uses of the term open as a modifier for a system (open source, open society, open bar) reflect open's broad meaning of "freely available for use," the details of how each of these kinds of open systems operate can vary considerably. This becomes a real issue when we encounter -- or create -- new jargon. When we speak of "open biology," for example, what kind of open do we mean? One in which anyone is free to participate? One in which anyone is free to receive the results of research? One in which all research is shared? More abstract variations, such as "open future," only confuse the issue further.

Experts and insiders may grimace at specialized terminology becoming common language, but it usually doesn't help to attempt to narrow the terminology only to its root meaning. In most cases, the democratizing of the term (if you will) happens because the word or phrase expresses something important or useful in a powerful or colorful way. Moreover, the version used in the broader vernacular gains its utility by having a direct link to the original meaning. If we describe something as a "black hole," for example, we probably don't mean that it's literally a body of such immense gravity that nothing can escape, but the popular meaning builds on that core definition.

With that preemptory defense in mind, here's a taxonomy of open systems, derived from the original, technical meanings, but with broader application:

Open Source:

Original version: a category of software in which the underlying programming instructions, or source code, is made available at no cost to interested developers, usually with the stipulation that derivative work should be equally freely shared. (Example: Linux)

OtF version: a system that allows you to reproduce at no cost the underlying design, methods and instructions, as well as the results of the system (if digital), and allows you to build upon either without significant restriction.

Open Access

Original version: a category of scientific publication in which articles are made available at no cost to the reader, who may also duplicate and share the material with others. (Example; PLoS)

OtF version: a system that allows you to reproduce its results or description freely, and to build upon these results without significant restriction.

Open Standard

Original version: a category of technical design made publicly available and implementable, in order to guarantee compatibility across components. (Example: HTML)

OtF version: a system that allows you to build upon its results, including building compatible systems, without significant restriction.

This taxonomy allows for a re-examination of the concept of "open source scenarios" (OSS).

In my original OSS concept, scenario creators would make freely available the scenario model (the key question, potentially the structure of divergent worlds), the scenario narratives (the stories and descriptions of each divergent world), and the scenario drivers (the various uncertainties, driving forces, and catalysts of change identified by the workshop participants). This falls squarely into the "open source" definition above. A number of scenario and foresight professionals responded to the OSS concept with the argument that even among the clients willing to see the scenario narratives published, few would want to open up the list of drivers, as these are most likely to illustrate where an organization sees internal vulnerabilities.

An open access model would be more comfortable, then, as it would omit the scenario "source code" -- the driving forces, uncertainties, and the like -- but still make the results freely available for examination.

The open standard approach would offer up the key questions and, perhaps, the scenario structure, allowing other scenario creators to consider the same basic set of divergences. This is probably the least useful form of open scenario planning, but might have some application as a learning tool.

Social Networking the Mobile Way

Receiver #16 wants to spark off some ideas about social networking the mobile way: clubbing, seeing your favourite band, sharing memories of a night out or playfully exploring the city, getting to know and experiencing, even creating, music – can mobile add to all these? And how does it affect how we get our friends together for joint action? Does it trigger emergent behaviour? Or is it the ideal means to pull it all together? What do *you* think?

Lee Humphreys: Out with my mobile - exploring social coordination in urban environments :: Tim Cole: The mobile phone as the next electric guitar (or any other instrument you want) :: Rudy De Waele: Connecting cultures through music :: Charlie Schick: One night - a global story of one night in the mobile life :: Antony Bruno: Where the long tail ends :: Karenza Moore: Come together - the use and meanings of mobiles amongst UK clubbers :: Frank Lantz: Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated :: Mark Curtis: Mobilising our meat based selves - social planning while on the hoof.

visualization of user relationships done in perl and processing. Nice work.

"I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the same tools exposing the same data being co-opted by the direct opponents of the various groups that set them up. Each poll or news article may become nothing more than flashpoint fights between radicals of every persuasion in which the quieter, more average voices get completely drowned out. So there you have it - flashpoints of argument, massively multiplayer campaigning and propoganda techniques, the loss of the common voice and a scouring of the commons. So much for a democratising medium..."

Texting is insanely popular overseas, but practically nonexistent in the United States - for now, writes Paul Kedrosky in Business 2.0 Magazine, published in CNNmoney.com via digg .

"Consider this anomaly: Ecuador, with a per capita GDP of $4,300, has the United States beat when it comes to a critical wireless technology. Americans may be 10 times as wealthy, but Ecuadorians send four times as many text messages.

The opportunities start with understanding economic and cultural factors that drive usage. Pay-as-you-go cell-phone plans offered abroad encourage text-message use, as does the fact that in most countries, fewer people own PCs on which to send instant messages and e-mail.

...The overseas ardor for SMS is not a quirk Instead, it's a leading indicator of what will happen in the United States. Rather than substituting for PC-based communication, as it does in poorer countries, mobile messaging Stateside will untether commerce, social networks, and other applications originally tied to PCs. When smart innovators translate services originated abroad to America's cell phones, we'll really get the message. "

Catching up with this month's Wired at 33,000 feet, I was struck by a little snippet of a survey of Wired readers – thus highly biased, in the nicest possible way. These people are some of the most technically literate on the planet.

The question asked was; Which device or tool do you think you're not using to its full potential? Surprise, surprise, the mobile phone led the field with 27%, with runners up the digital camera (25%) and the computer (18%). Somewhat surprisingly, 2% actually cited their office chair – what was I saying about being technically literate?

But if that's the situation with Wired readers, what's it like for the rest of the population?

Usability of mobile devices, coupled with clever ways to educate users, are going to take centre-stage in the mobile phone sector in the next few years. As an industry, we need people to start using their mobile phones beyond voice and texting – that's abundantly clear, especially as they switch over to 3G.

Already, usability experts are at a real premium, with employers falling over themselves to retain their services – even on a temporary basis. If you have a tame usability person you're using, be very nice to them indeed and proffer a pay rise quickly, as we're just about to see demand way outstrip supply. Just a feeling I have, you understand.

Fred Wilson writes:

When it comes to networks, the most powerful model is the self organizing network. That allows participants to move seamlessly between networks and takes out all the overhead of managing them.

en't seen self organizing media networks take hold. Adsense is a self organizing network for publishers and advertisers, but not for the readers/consumers. You can't put together a page that shows all the content that an email marketing ad has appeared on. You might be able to use search to do that, but it's certainly not a seamless process.

This is in the context of FeedBurner Networks.

At Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson asks whether, in a world where DRM is presented to so many customers as a benefit (e.g. Microsoft’s Zune service), the public as a whole will be quite happy to trade away its freedom to tinker, whether the law needs to intervene in this, and on which side: ensuring freedom to tinker, or outlawing it in order to enshrine the business model that “most people” will be portrayed as wanting, given the numbers who sign away their rights in EULAs and so on.

“Many of us, who may find ourselves arguing based on public reasons for public policies that protect the freedom to tinker, also have a private reason to favor such policies. The private reason is that we ourselves care more about tinkering than the public at large does, and we would therefore be happier in a protected-tinkering world than the public at large would be.”

Many of the comments - and those on the follow-up post - look in more detail at the legal issues, with some very interesting analogies to freedom of expression and points made about the impact on innovation - which benefits everyone - when power users are prevented from innovating.

I felt I had to comment, since this is an issue central to the architectures of control research; here’s what I said:

“I think I’d ask the question, “Even if it becomes illegal to tinker with a device, what is there to to stop someone doing it?”

If it is purely the fear of getting caught, then tinkering will be stifled, to some extent. But power users will form groups just as they do now, and some tinkering will still go on. (If the tinkering is advanced enough, it will be too difficult for law enforcement to detect/understand it anyway).

At present much file-sharing activity is illegal, but it still goes on in vast quantities. The fear of getting caught is a major retardation to that activity, I’d suggest; there may also be an ethical component to the decision in many people’s minds. They’re told it’s analogous to stealing a CD from a store, and they believe or are persuaded, partially at least, by that. It seems immoral or unethical.

But does anyone seriously believe that tinkering with devices is unethical? (There are probably a few people who do, e.g. ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley)

Tinkering with devices will never seem immoral or unethical to the vast majority of the public, hence the only barriers to stop them doing it are a) fear of getting caught and b) lack of knowledge or desire. Most people don’t bother tuning up their cars or tinkering with their computers, even though they could.

Power users do, and in a future where tinkering is illegal, it will again only be power users who do it, and fear of getting caught will be the only reason for not doing it.

So what about this fear of getting caught? How likely is it that one’s modifications or tinkering will be detected by some kind of enforcement agency? The only way I can see that this could be carried out in any kind of systematic way would be if observation/reporting devices were embedded in every product, e.g. every PC reporting home every few hours to squeal if it’s been modified.

But we already have that! Or at least we will soon, and therefore it seems irrelevant whether or not it becomes illegal to tinker with devices. If every computer is ‘trusted’ and spies and reports on its user’s behaviour, whether it reports to Microsoft or a Federal Anti-Tinkering Agency is, perhaps, beside the point.

Architectures to prevent or stifle tinkering can be designed into products and technologies whether or not there is a law requiring them. The user agrees to
have his/her behaviour and interactions monitored and controlled by the act of purchasing the device.

Even if the law went the other way, and there were a legally guaranteed right to tinker, all that would happen is that manufacturers will make it more difficult
to do so by the design of products. Hoods (bonnets) would start to be welded shut, in Cory Doctorow’s phrase, (the Audi A2 already has this, sort of), backed up by stringent warranty provisions. You might have a right to tinker with your device, but no law is going to compel the manufacturers to honour the warranty if you do so.

This, I think, is the crucial issue: the points Lessig makes about the designed structure of the internet, the code, superseding statute law as the dominant shaper of behaviour in the medium, apply just as strongly to technology hardware. Architectures of control in design will control users’ behaviour, however the laws themselves evolve.”

If the academic gift economy – where we offer each other intangibles and are tied to each other through vague debts of gratitude – were to be phased out entirely, the result would obviously be disastrous for the development of knowledge.

QR Codes can be used with URL's, Telephone Numbers, SMS, Text, E-Mail etc. (for an illustration, see the QR Code Generator). Now the question is, why use short codes as well?

There are several answers to this, but let's first explain how short codes work:
Short codes is a number translated on the server to an URL. Short codes look like that: 2020400102 for this blog. If you want to address a singular post - this one for example - it would be 2020400102501.

They can be directly input in the Kaywa Reader and you will get the same result as with a QR Code. Just open your Kaywa Reader, click Options and "Enter short code" 2020400102 and you will get to this blog.

PS: Short codes can be shorter if needed.

Why?

1. In print where space is scarce, you can imagine the following scenario. A lot of small classifieds in a newspaper can have one general QR Code and then for every individual classified a short code number. This way you can give an easy access to very small items (in a normal newspaper you can find items with a size of 0.5x3.9 cm)
2. In print this scenario is already in use, think about NZZimmo (Search with code from NZZ ad) for example, where you have next to every real estate ad in the newspaper a number which on the web you can type in to find more information about the object. With a short codes in your Kaywa Reader, you could now access this same information more quickly and easily without using a desktop computer.
3. As we haven't got yet the macro camera phones which are commonplace in Japan, we cannot go as small as 0.9 cm yet. With the short codes however we can provide a QR Code that is at the same time small and always of the same size.

So, how neat is that;)

From Nicholas Garr's blog: Yochai Benkler on Calacanis's wallet.

"Yes, it's easier to publish today. It was also easier at every point in history when a new technology for disseminating information has been introduced. The most recent example before the blog was the Web page, and prior to that desktop publishing "revolutionized" communication, giving everyone the power to layout a page without the extraordinary hassle of using wax to hold design elements in place on a board that could be photographed for use in a press. If we acknowledge that all of this is progress instead of declaring every new thing a revolution, we might actually make some solid progress as a species instead of insisting that all the old lessons aren't of any value anymore."

Today’s Tech Crunch posts made me think about a startup concept that’s been kicking around the net for awhile now. Through a VC friend of mine I heard about a sad tale about a company called Third Voice. This company’s software did something similar to what recent releases OthersOnline and Diigo are doing. The basic concept was to provide a message board and chat service that allowed people to leave comments about a given URL. I thought it was a pretty good idea. The Third Voice would provide a way for people to get reviews of products or services, discuss recent news and find out about crooked websites or poor service.

A buddy of mine and I heard about the concept (and it’s demise) and decided to take a whack at it. I was setting up the technical side of things when I started to look closely at the business model so I could develop the software requirements. I noticed more than a few problems with the concept when I was putting it through it’s paces designing the spec…

When I was doing research and looking around, I noticed that most site that the product would be useful on already had discussion, either in comments or a messageboard/forum. People usually discuss things like news, new products, music, etc. Well all of these things already have comment boxes. I love the idea of putting up a way for people to talk about a web 2.0 product or story…but that’s what techcrunch is for right? Amazon for books, various music sites for music… It just didn’t seem like there was a need that wasn’t being filled.

We thought about the use for doing reviews of a site or it’s product/service. But then we’d have to have a way to moderate it somehow to prevent people from slandering their business rivals or to give a business owner a chance to defend himself (granted most “forums” don’t do this, but it only seems fair if the product would be used mainly for reviews and hints). And then when looking at the list of sites I browse on a regular basis…not many need “reviews”. It just didn’t seem to be that useful…

I also took into consideration the resistance from website owners. In the wired article about the demise of Third Voice people referred to it as “digital graffiti”. And I would assume that a web site owner would prefer to have someone on his comment board, giving him more page views and community loyalty than to have some 3rd party app making a living off of his content. The more I thought about that, the less I liked it.

The final problem I saw was adoption. Installing an IE or firefox plugin is pretty easy. But really, how many people have the knowledge or inclination to do it? The thing about a forum is it takes a large volume of contributing users. You have to include everyone, even the people who render themselves technically incompetent. I tried all kinds of ideas…downloaded app, browser plugin, bookmarklet… just none of it seemed easy enough to set up to where you could get a large enough volume of people.

It’s possible that I over thought these issues or was a bit risk adverse. There are times when I wish we had just done it and thrown it out there (and I guess it’s not too late). I will be very interested to see how OthersOnline and Diigo do. I considered a social networking system like OthersOnline, but my problem is that surfing habits aren’t all that indicative of personality or traits. Look in your browser History right now and look at the last 20 sites you went to. Are these the things you want to be associated with? (if you’re reading this in the evening and you’ve got porn in your history, you know what I’m talking about). I think Diigo could be very valuable, but it has some of the “digital graffiti” aspect to it. The annotation feature was something I’d considered previously and I think it’s a great, great idea. I think this product could really go far, if they can get people to adopt it.

Even with all of it’s problems, I think the Third Voice concept has a lot of merit. In a more offline context, the idea of being able to leave little warnings or notes or interesting comments at various places in the real world is very intriguing and would be good to model online. For example wouldn’t it be great if you could access (useful) notes / tips / trivia / warnings when you were in a strange city (”Warning: Do not flirt with the redheaded bartender, she’s prone to violence”). That same concept would be wonderful on the web. I’m glad that there a few people playing on the edge of this space so I can see how it works out. And RIP to Third Voice.

I read Henry Jenkins’s new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the founder of the Education Arcade, an MIT group interested in the intersection of videogames and learning. And so, even though the book addresses games as a minority subject, I offer this review to alert our readers to Jenkins’s current thinking. In a future post, I will attempt to address what convergence might mean for videogames with an agenda.

Originally from Water Cooler Games at August 1, 2006, 15:07, published by Pau Waelder

Interactive map displays titles of songs playing on US and Canadian radio in real-time.

A new study by market research group In-Stat and reported in MediaDailyNews finds that the market for online video will increase by tenfold in the next four years. The big winners? Content aggregator companies:

As one of its foundational premises, the In-Stat report notes that "within the very near future," individuals will control what, when, and how they see all the programming of interest to them. Furthermore, In-Stat asserts that this consumer-controlled delivery will be dominated by major content aggregators like AOL, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Apple--which are increasingly able to "blend professional video with their high-touch services that follow consumers from screen to screen," Kaufhold (Gerry Kaufhold, a principal analyst for Converging Markets and Technologies) says.

According to In-Stat, 12.8 percent of broadband-equipped households around the world are already viewing content via an online aggregator. And the raw numbers can only grow as broadband penetration jumps from about 194 million households in 2005 to 413 million worldwide by 2010.

broadcasters have to adopt two strategies in order to be competitive. One, we must unbundle our content to play in this space and, two, we must get into the aggregator business themselves, and I think this has to happen at the local level.

Funny the report doesn't mention youTube, the 800-pound gorilla of online video aggregators.

Anthony Giddens, British sociologist and one of my long-time personal guiding lights, has characterized the primary interest of sociology as an effort “to explicate how the limitations of individual ‘presence’ are transcended by the ‘stretching’ of social relations across time and space.” It’s always seemed to me that the growing adoption of social technologies–like this very one here–into our communication practices (activities, coordination, exchange, commmerce, learning, etc.) serves as a direct reflection of this “stretching of social relations across time and space.” I’ve felt that these technologies line a frontier defined by concerns that touch our society and culture deeply. And that our very proximity to one another is shaped and informed by our use of these technologies to conduct our lives in non face-to-face communications.

We often speak of proximity as a matter of space, of closeness, nearness, even touch. We’ve seen that distance collapse, foreshortened by the spin of a mouse on the point of a click. Who among us is not a click away? But interestingly, I think, the dimension that’s transformed most by social media is time, not space. It’s time in the sense that the duration, episode, and rhythm of our interactions with others is radically lightened by social technologies, faciliated by a medium that has no “there” there, presented but not with a deep presence. It’s a strange thing, this discontinuous time of media. Things happen, but are not tied together, perhaps because we have such difficulty negotiating our availability and thus presence to others. Interruptions occur so frequently they become a continuity in and of themselves. We’ll have 16 tracks of conversation going but at different time signatures, and our presence to and in all of them will feel more fragmented than whole.

I don’t know what a p2p take on temporality might look like. I think the discipline is more inclined to spatial and visual maps and representations. But time and temporality are of paramount importance to production coordination, action sequencing and the organization of dependencies in the distribution of work, and so on. We have long departed from a simple “serial” time and temporality. But might the organization of social relations by p2p not better accommodate time than it currently does?

Dirk Riehle posts an interview with several active Wikipedians on "How and Why Wikipedia Works." Lots of detail, plus this interesting nugget (that Science Library Pad caught):

DR: What about the 'collective intelligence' or 'collective wisdom' argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?
EB: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.
KN: Elian is right. Also, most of the short articles remain short and of rather poor content.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, wiki

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

I was going to write some thoughts about Columbia J-School dean Nicholas Lemann's New Yorker hatchet job on citizens media, but Jeff Jarvis has done such an excellent job that I'll simply point to him. MUST read stuff.

This week’s Carnival is at SmartMobs and a very fine job Judy Breck has done as moderator.

Congrats to Rudy and Stephanie for winning host and post of the month in the awards sponsored by Khosla Ventures for June.

From now on we’ll still to the new Monday morning timetable as it seems more popular with readers and hosts have the weekend to polish things.

< ![CDATA[

Chicago Tribune

That's because what motivates a person to e-mail a story is often different from what motivates that person to read one, says Steve Johnson. "Talk to people involved in digital publishing, and mostly they'll tell you that a story rises to the level of being e-mailed when it contains practical advice or cautionary tales -- on travel, say, or diet -- or when it has a 'holy-cow' factor," he writes. "Sometimes that means hard-news stories, as in, 'Holy cow, Israel is dropping bombs in Lebanon.' More often, though, it seems to be on the order of, 'Holy cow, a man tried to molest a cow.'"

Makes sense, and explains the breathless prose style of top headlines on Digg or Cosmo. --MM

Originally posted by Jim Romenesko from Romenesko, ReBlogged by migurski on Aug 1, 2006 at 12:29 PM

I suppose the big game industry news of the day is the cancellation of the yearly E3 tradeshow (who gives a crap, it was just a big marketing fest), but more interesting is the announcement of a new technology for digitally capturing super-high resolution models and motion of actors, called Contour. See articles in the NYTimes and Wall Street Journal. It’s developed by entrepeneur and inventor Steve Perlman (veteran Apple guy, General Magic, WebTV) and to be demoed at this week’s Siggraph in Boston. See and read more at his website, Mova.com.

Instead of placing a mesh of glowing dots all over the actor’s face and filming her from various angles to create a moderately hi-res model and motion capture, Contour mixes fluorescent powder into the actor’s makeup, and captures monochromatic shaded images of the actor’s face while she performs under seemingly normal lighting conditions — made possible with modified strobe-like fluorescent lights. The result is an extremely high resolution digital model, photographed textures and motion capture of the actor’s face. (Animators have to manually add detail to places makeup can’t go, like eyeballs and inside the mouth). Effectively each grain of makeup is like a motion-capture dot, allowing for very very hi-res, and low-cost, capture — “volumetric cinematography”. Brilliant! (literally)

This has immediate applications to filmmaking, as the articles describe, as well as to motion-capture oriented videogames. On purely visual terms, Contour does seem to make major progress towards crossing the uncanny valley, for linear (non-interactive) playback of an actor’s performance.

But, it does nothing to cross what one might call the uncanny valley of AI — how to generate believable interactive behavior. Canned motion capture sequences are of little help when implementing highly dynamic, procedurally animated interactive characters.

academic research on RFID-embedded traditional playing cards

Techcrunch: CNN is unlikely to allow unmediated upload of content and users are unlikely to agree to giving up their rights to it.

Guardian: It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it and the other 89 will just view it.

Portable music player technology isn't as simple as it once was. With digital music files have come new restrictions from the music labels on how music is played and transferred, as well as discussion of various specifications for connecting devices to computers. In a June 16 story on Platform-Agnostic Drag-and-Drop Music Listening, I suggested lovers of independent music might be better off foregoing both Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Microsoft's preferred connection mechanism, the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP).

There has been a lot of criticism of DRM, but in the process, a lot of people have missed the details on Microsoft's MTP. I advocated using the older USB Media Storage Class (MSC) connection method because it's compatible out-of-the-box with Mac and Linux as well as Windows. But I did note that MTP isn't itself “DRM,” since many of its features are unrelated to music, let alone music DRM. That launched a semi-interesting debate with Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, and in the process we learned many of you really can't stand Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow.

The best way to learn something about a technology, though, is to talk to someone who actually develops it. Dave McLauchlan from the Windows Media Devices Group at Microsoft wrote me privately to rebut some of what I said, make some corrections, and set the record straight on the Windows Media devices and specifically MTP. Dave is himself a musician — see his music site, and note that even though he works for Microsoft, his music is available on iTunes via CDBaby and in non-DRMed MP3 downloads. His response isn't the one-sided DRM advocacy you might expect, though he has some pragmatic points to make about DRM, as well. Most interesting to me is some of the insight he provides on how these technologies are evolving for music use. I stand by my claim that musicians should consider sidestepping labels and selling non-DRMed music direct to their listeners. But there's plenty to be learned here.

(Continued at CreateDigitalMusic.)

The latest Pew study on news usage is out (David Newberger does a great job picking the good bits) but this is what struck me:

The consumption use of news across media is fairly constant. Use of newspapers is shrinking. Says Pews: “…even the highest estimate of daily newspaper readership — 43% for both print and online readers –­ is still well below the number reading a print newspaper on a typical day 10 years ago (50%).” That leads some to believe that interest in news is thus decreasing, but Pew says that’s not the case:

The rise of the internet has also not increased the overall news consumption of the American public. The percentage of Americans who skip the news entirely on a typical day has not declined since the 1990s. Nor are Americans spending any more time with the news than they did a decade ago when their news choices were much more limited. In 1996, people on average spent slightly more than an hour (66 minutes) getting the news from TV, radio or newspapers. Currently, they spend virtually the same amount of time (67 minutes) getting the news from all major news sources, the internet included.

hat much of a chunk of life. People want that much news and they then allocate how to get their news across more choices and more means to get the news that is relevant to them. Some might say this is evidence of attention scarcity but I think it’s more like interest scarcity: News is only so worthwhile. An hour a day for news is a quite sane proportion — large, I think — but it is limited.

: Oh, and tell this to Jack Shafer:

But one constant remains: Local and community news continues to be the biggest draw for newspapers. And as was the case during the mid-1980s, roughly nine-in-ten of those who at least sometimes read a newspaper say they spend a significant amount of time getting the news about their city, town or region.

Pew:

People who say they logged on for news yesterday spent 32 minutes, on average, getting the news online. That is significantly less than the average number of minutes that newspaper readers, radio news listeners, and TV news viewers spend with those sources. And while nearly half of all Americans (48%) spend at least 30 minutes getting news on television, just 9% spend that long getting news online.

I think that’s a bit of a red herring. The use of each medium is different: one passive and time-based, another directed and involved. Even so, it’s clear that the internet is not taking over news. It is remixing news time. Says Pew:

The web serves mostly as a supplement to other sources rather than a primary source of news. Those who use the web for news still spend more time getting news from other sources than they do getting news online. In addition, web news consumers emphasize speed and convenience over detail. Of the 23% who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape.

y add this:

To some degree, news consumers are drawn to the internet for the very reason that it does

not take much time to get news online. Most users say what distinguishes web news is its format and accessibility ­ the ease of navigation, speed with which information can be gathered, and convenience “at my fingertips.”

I wonder whether there is a way to get another measure of news: how many stories, how many topics, hoe much information, rather than just how much time. In other words: If you spend 30 minutes watching TV news, you get a handful of stories. If you spend 30 minutes online, you could get dozens of stories or you could spend a long time on one. Time is not the best measure. I want to know about the number of news nuggets mined.

Much more to dig into in the Pew survey….

: LATER: Nicholas Carr writes about the survey, too. He tries, as usual, to turn this into a confrontation, though I don’t think it is; it’s all a matter of degree and time but the trends are the trends.

(By the way, Carr never passes up an opportunity to snipe at me as his resident philistine, which is fine, and I’ve parried back. But I’ll also note that when we met at an Annenberg event, he didn’t have the guts to say any of that, face-to-face. I sought him and and joked that we were matter meeting antimatter. He did not discuss his apparent efforts to feud. But then he got back online and immediately brought out the rifle again. It’s odd to define oneself by what one is not but if you do that, I suppose you need to find or manufacture an opposite number. This is all beside the point. And that’s my point.)

The upcoming Siggraph conference, which starts Sunday, will see demonstrations of a boatload of interesting new technologies, among them a fingertip digitizer developed by researchers at the University of Buffalo’s Virtual Reality Laboratory (which has a bunch of other cool projects going, to boot).

A small thimble-shaped device worn on the tip of a finger, the digitizer is interesting as an input device. Imagine dragging your finger across the surface of a solid object and having it gradually take shape on your screen, complete with surface texture. While devices exist to do such things already, a fingertip is arguably a more intuitive and responsive device than any stylus or other peripheral. The UB lab has also developed cool stuff like a touch-based CAD device. Toss ‘em all in the pot and you could very well have a powerful interface that closes the gap between personal intention and what a computer understands. [Via What’s Next Network.]

architecture, design, events, interface, Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edgebomber was developed by Susigames.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annalee Newitz has a fun suggestion:

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

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

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

What is Mobile Web 2.0?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via randomwalks/dj

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

Jon has followed-up:

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

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

Re-blogged from Redcouch.Typepad.com:

Shel Israel outlines Global Neighbourhoods, asks for comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: Email, Underground Blogosphere

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

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

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

Another communication patent find from wonderful Barry Fox for NewScientist.

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

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

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

Technosocial Screens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neat experiments on clickstreams. --MM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Uphill Battle for Netscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vulnerabilities, Strengths of the ‘Hive Mind’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.

Device uses waves to “print” on water surface.

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: Fuji Sankei]

ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex

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

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

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

See also:

Brenda Laurel's website

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

Review of Laurel's _Design Research: Methods and Perspectives_

Laurel will also be giving the closing keynote at Ubicomp 2006

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

participation as activism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Continued at IDFuel)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Anne

Filed under: Culture

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

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

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

The New York Times writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Continued at MicroPersuasion.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Robert pointed out in response to this idea:

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

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

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

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

Related:
DIY Backyard Theater - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]



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

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

[More….]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johannes Ernst, the creator of MyLID, said:

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

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

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

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

VirtualFlavius said:

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

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

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

Marco Raaphorst said:

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

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

---

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

---

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

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

I think it was worthwhile in the end..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hacktivism and Networking with a Low Budget Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

new media art. emusic. hacktivism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As he explained to Regine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile Phones and Spirituality, on BBC Radio 4 in 2005

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

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

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

More good stuff from Canada:

The Surveillance Project

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

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

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

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

See also:

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

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

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

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

My Second Life avatar, Abdi Kembla.

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

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

Here's my small contribution to the article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

blip.tv (beta)
Check it out!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

reBlogged from Yanko Design

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

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

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

Filed under: Culture, Business

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

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

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Economist reviews Chris Anderson's book:

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

Wired has an excerpt from the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link: The Wireless Report

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow: The Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Via Emily

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

design, interface

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

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

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

3pointD, IBM, metaverse, RFID, Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Shahrani and Mario Gerosa have completed a Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architectural Heritage.

The document aims to lay a foundation for the conservation of our "virtual architecture", the environments and places that make up the synthetic worlds of video games. More commonly referred to as "levels", "maps" or "worlds", these environments are the stage for players' experiences in video games. Unfortunately, little has been done to protect, catalogue and analyze these game spaces, but such conservation is necessary in order to provide reference material for study. The goal of the Convention is to provide a framework for this vital preservation work, and to encourage further academic study of the principles of level design and the architecture of synthetic worlds.

Via videoludica and terra nova.

In the following paper, Edwin Hutchins (proponent of the Distributed Cognition approach/framework) discuss what he calls “the cognitive life of things”, attempting to place this in the context of rich multimodal interactions.

Hutchins, E. (2006) Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things, presented at the symposium:”The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the boundaries of Mind” organized by Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, UK 7-9 April, 2006.

Hutchins’s claim (which he developed in his book Cognition in the Wild) is that cognitive science was fundamentally flawed since its focus was to put cognitive properties inside the person and not in the social and material world. His book had been criticized about the very fact that he almost said nothing about the embodied practice of human in his examples (navigation). This paper tries to make distributed cognition less disembodied by showing how interaction are richly multimodal creating emergent cognitive effects. In this paper, the author also describes ths “cognitive ecology” concept:

By cognitive ecology I mean that all of the elements and relations potentially interact with one another and that each is part of the environment for all of the others
(…)
This rich cognitive ecology gives rise to some powerful cognitive processes. The embodied interaction with things creates mechanisms for reasoning, imagination, “Aha!” insight, and abstraction. Cultural things provide the mediational means to domesticate the embodied imagination.

Why do I blog this? this kind of argument is interesting to me especially when I think back about what I learn from my early cognitive psychology courses which were definitely disembodied (un-embodied at all I would say). I also like the development around the idea “Using the body to imagine the dynamics of things”, this connects to the things I’ve read about the affordance of space in socio-sognition.

Thanks Cyril for pointing me on Collectic: developed by Jonas Hielscher as a part of a graduation project for the Masters program Media Technology at Leiden University in 2006. I met Jonas in Utrecht few months ago (are you in Basel now? stil in game stuff as I see) and I am always intrigued by what this guy is doing.

he game is developed for the Sony PSP and uses the standard features of the console, especially scanning for wireless access points to the Internet.

cTic can be played anywhere, where WLAN access points can be found by a PSP. The objective of the game is to search for different access points, to collect them and to combine them in a puzzle in order to get points. In the game, the player has to move around in her/his local surrounding, using her/his PSP as a sensor device in order to find access points. By doing this, the player is able to discover the hidden infrastructure of wireless network coverage through auditive and visual feedback.The game is designed as a single player game, but it can be easily played competitive after each other or at the same time with two PSPs.

A video here.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of a game played with regular console features enhanced by some software components. Besides, the game concept is quite simple and funny and discovering network infrastructure that way seems to be a cool experience. I am looking forward to test this!

the t-qualizer is a t-shirt with a built in graphic equalizer panel that is sound sensitive. as the music beats, the shirts equalizer lights up to the beat of the music. each frequency of music will activate a different equalizer bar, just like a normal equalizer.
the digital clock t-shirt assures that no one will ask you what time it is.
see also noise shirt & wearable display clothing.
[glowgadgets.co.uk & iwantoneofthose.com & uberreview.com]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, ReBlogged by Tom Ritchford on Jul 9, 2006 at 10:19 PM

Report claim: 9Gig HD vid costs ISP $39??. Widespread downloading of high-definition (HD) movies and other video could force providers to charge users extra, claims a new study explored by ZDNetUK. The report claims that, at least in the UK, it costs an ISP around £21.13 ($39) to stream a..

I had to come up with a three minute rant for the Alliance for Community Media workshop on "Evaluating the PEG (Public Access) Model of Community Media." This is the rant I decided not to use:

For years we talked about the coming media revolution. This revolution was going to put the power of mass media in the hands of The People. The People were the individuals and small (non-business) organizations who were ignored, marginalized, and disinfranchised. They were going to use television to allow people to take over the airwaves and make their voices heard. They were going to produce, organize, and take action. Most importantly, this revolution was going to happen because of us.

Well the revolution happened and we weren't there to broker it.

The revolution came in the form of blogs and iMacs and cameraphones and MySpaces and YouTubes and it had the full backing of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch, and the Fortune 500.

The revolution wasn't broadcast quality so we thought the revolution wasn't worth our time. The revolution was agnostic and equally exploitable by all so we said the revolution had no ideology. The revolution reduced all of our paperwork to one click agreements so we said it was too irresponsible. The revolution didn't route through us so we thought the revolution wasn't the real revolution.

The revolution was unorganized and we didn't know how to deal with it.

But now's the time to start dealing with it.

Because although more folks are talking, they still need models for organization and effective action.
Because although anyone can blog, the power laws still apply.
Because although everyones actions are becoming more explicit, no one's holding our institutions more accountable.

Most of all, because the revolution is here and it looks just like any other day.

Research and Markets have a report on 2006 Global Mobile Data usage. Here are a few insights…

• Current mobile technologies are not well suited for economically viable business models for mobile data
• The lack of suitable infrastructure has hampered the growth of mobile data
• The business models that these (mobile) operators offer are hopelessly inadequate
• very few sustainable models are currently in operation
• The rest of the world is waiting on MVNO models that provide content providers with the freedom to distribute their own products and manage their own billing and customer service.

There are some real opportunities here for third parties (such as Yahoo, Google etc) and brands to take over where network operators have failed. However, one of the greatest barriers for them is payment. The only convenient way to pay is currently premium SMS which network operators control (and take a huge profit share). Maybe some large payment provider such as Visa, Mastercard or Paypal needs to create/invent a convenient, global and cost-effective mobile payment system. Only then will off-portal services become viable.