This month, Roderick expanded his site, adding three additional blogs and a slew of contributors, shifting LA Observed from a one-man blog to an emerging community portal. Roderick answered questions about the changes in a telephone interview with OJR.

Josh Wolf, the videoblogging journalist who has been brought before the Grand Jury by the Feds in order to obtain raw footage of a protest he documented, has been charged with civil contempt. His hearing is today.
Ryan Hodson, on her new site, Ryan Is Hungry, posted an interview with Josh concerning the trial and the ramifications of forcing journalists to give up their rights.
It’s ten minutes of time well spent in order to understand what is at stake with this trial.
Josh needs donations in order to pay for this battle. So far, he’s raised two thousand dollars but may need much more if the trials continue.
Preserve your right to record.
- Anne
The Wi-Fi in Your Handset - New York Times
It's a pretty innocuous headline and photo, but make no mistake this is an early salvo in what looks to be a heated battle over the control of the wireless infrastructure. The cell phone service providers are on one side, the equipment makers and software companies on the other. Governments? They are both omnipresent yet conspicuously absent from the core of the debate, they seem to only have a clue as to what is happening at certain key junctures (ie when municipal WiFi discussions get serious like in SF or Philadelphia).
Originally posted by Abe from Abstract Dynamics, ReBlogged by migurski on Aug 1, 2006 at 12:38 PM
10. "The little network that could" literally has defied all odds and expectations gaining major distribution on ComCast's digital tier.
9. Current has pioneered viewer created advertising (V-CAMs) by giving our viewers the opportunity to create ads they want to watch. We have already aired a couple on the network, and awarded our first V-CAM producer $5K for having an ad used on another website!
8. In addition to winning numerous awards for our own programming and broadcast design, we have also had VC2 producers like Crystal Frambrini and Marco Franzoni win prestigious awards for their Current TV Pods.
7. Over the past year we have hired or done exclusive deals with VC2 producers Joe Hanson, Mark Rinehart, Adrian Baschuk and Roberto Grijalva.
6. When we launched with VC2, we thought maybe it would make up about 5-10 percent of the network. It has exploded to 30 percent and continues to grow.
5. The fact that we are reinventing journalism.
4. Expanding into other mediums to tell stories in ways that allow even more people to participate.
3. Pods like this uploaded to our Website.
2. Current folks meeting together offline.
1. Comments like these on our message boards.
Hollywood Reporter writes:
What's next for FIM is leveraging MySpace's online community and communication into a peer recommendations framework for leads on everything and anything: the best children's playgrounds in Los Angeles to the best concert seats in Madison Square Garden to the best steakhouse in Dallas. Such peer recommendations provide a gentle seaway into targeted, fine-tuned behavioral marketing for national and local advertisers wanting to reach MySpace's 15- to 34-year-old core user.
lenge is to utilize that viral marketing and communications to develop a host of next-generation media services in-house so as to keep the lion's share of the revenue they will generate. Most significantly, FIM is developing refined advertising tracking, pricing and sales tools that will cater to every new-media platform and device, and quantify the collective reach of content and services reaching consumers anywhere, anytime.
This RFID in Japan post says "Shelly is a card for protecting RFID cards from skimming attacks. You just cover your RFID train pass (e.g., SUICA) or payment card (e.g., Edy) with this Shelly card and it disables the RFID's wireless communication".
Hello Kitty Protects You from Skimming Attacks

(click for bigger, or see the original here)
The first thing that struck me was how well ToonTown is doing (it's not that far off Eve or SWG for user numbers)! Also, how badly Star Wars Galaxies is now doing, but that was less of a surprise.
Also, do you think there's room for more genres in the market.. or what?
(via sexingames)
"Can't make it to Europe for the current tour by the Rolling Stones? No problem.Dial a toll-free number and listen to them perform all down the line in real time for $1.99 per seven minutes.
The British rockers are the first to use a new technology called Listen Live Now, which is backed by Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency, tour promoter Live Nation, and veteran artist manager Marty Erlichman.
The technology will debut Friday when the band takes the stage at the Stade de France in Paris from noon to 2:15 p.m. Pacific time.
According to a statement, U.S. fans can buy in by calling (877) 784-2777 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time. At the six-minute mark, a voice will warn them that the time is almost up, which makes bootlegging the concerts a challenge. Additionally, the shows will not be taped, Erlichman told Reuters.
The ministry's detailed objection based on technical, social and financial grounds was sent to the Planning Commission two weeks ago.
Negroponte had made a presentation on OLPC at Yojna Bhavan on April 7 seeking to sell one million laptops at the rate of $100 per unit for children, the cost to be borne by the government.
In a historic moment, the US had agreed to hand over control of Net by releasing its stranglehold of the technical co-ordination and management of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS).
The announcement came last night at a meeting of Internet governance experts in Washington, and sees the US government return to its original stance over the Net, undoing some of the confusion caused by the announcement of a series of “principles” released by the Bush administration last year.
However there remains some debate over how and when the US government should relinquish control of the private, non-profit overseeing organization ICANN that is in effective charge of the DNS. Those in favor of completing a transition which began in 1998, said the political price of having the US involved in DNS management has become too high and holds back the international development of the Internet.
ICANN recently was a hotbed of controversy over the proposed .xxx domain with the US putting significant pressure on ICANN to deny that extension. The US commerce department, who has final approval on everything ICANN does, threatened to reject the .xxx domain if ICANN didn’t, allowing the US to flex it muscle when approving all TLD extensions.
With the privatization of ICANN, the US no longer will have veto power over any actions that ICANN takes which will be a major step to help foster the growth of the internet in a healthy manner.
Yesterday, the US House of Representatives unexpectedly moved forward in voting on the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA. This legislation, proposed on May 9 of this year, would require all schools and libraries receiving federal Internet subsidies known as the E-Rate to filter out all interactive websites under the mere possibility that they may lead to contact with online predators.
The vote wasn't even close.
Friendster may finally have found an advantage in the increasingly competitive social media sector — the one dominated by other companies as pioneer Friendster flailed. Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Friendster a patent on “a method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon relationships in a social network” and the company says it’s been told to expect a patent covering the uploading of content onto a friend’s page. Those two and a number of others pending could make Friendster worth more as a patent farm than a social network.
Friendster president Kent Lindstrom told the WSJ the company’s lawyers are encouraging him to consider “taking people out from a litigation standpoint.” He’s also considering asking patent-licensing fees — or could skip legal action altogether. (Can we start a pool on that last one?) While Lindstorm says he’s been assured the patent is strong, others are not so sure. EFF lawyer Jason Schultz is among the skeptics; then again, EFF is waging war against what it is sees as illegitimate patents.
– The best part of the piece is not about patents, though; it’s when Lindstrom calls the effort to sell Friendster last year “poorly timed.” That’s one way to describe it.
Related: Friendster’s Money Raise: $3.1 Million
– Friendster Was Its Own Worst Enemy; MySpace Faces External Threats
– Friendster Sales Saga Continues; Viacom Takes A Pass

Transubstantiate: a peer-reviewed, online journal for performance technologies praxis :: Call for submissions :: Deadline: November 1, 2006 :: Transubstantiate welcomes submissions for its inaugural issue on the theme of Disruptive Innovation. We seek examples of new thinking and practice that overturn and / or reassess existing performance technology praxis. Submissions may be presented as papers, reviews, audio, visuals (stills / video) and code. Authors may use multiple formats in a single submission.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Networked performance * Disruptive innovations & discourse * Pedagogy, ontologies and epistemologies * Choreography for iPod. Choreographies for iPod must be specifically devised works and may take the form of: * Video / stills * Audio description / instructions * Text description / instructions * Soundscore with text description / instructions.
Transubstantiate encourages submissions that take an alternative stance on established modes of mediated performance. Submissions should be equivalent to 3000 - 8000 words in .doc, mp3, .jpg or .mp4 (video) format.
The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2006. For more information or to submit please contact the editorial & curatorial board via curators [at] transubstantiate [dot] org.
The liminal is limited; transubstantiate.
Kevin Nalty of Cubebreak and Will Video For Food is an evangelist for Revver and their advertising model of video distribution. Both Revver and Kevin believe that video hosting sites should share advertising dollars with content makers by placing ads in videos that, when clicked on by viewers, turns into a small profit for both the hosting site and the videomaker.
Naturally, Kevin is interested in the money making prospects of viral video under this model and his blog/vlog Will Video For Food is rife with tips and tricks for producing potentially viral products.
This morning, he sent me this great video he made in which he plays the role of "Viral Video Broker" and shouts out to multiple content makers who’s videos have hit the big time….without financial compensation. He’d like to see video makers from sites like YouTube migrate to sites like Revver to rectify what he sees as a financial injustice.
(It wouldn’t hurt Revver affiliates either. Revver has an affiliate program which gives a 20% commission on all clicks for Revver videos shown on their sites. Cubebreak, I’m sure, is an affiliate.)
As an aside, advertisers are getting free ads, in my opinion, by using click-per-ad tactics. Their commercials are still being viewed (and, as any advertiser knows, internalized by the viewer) without the costs associated with every other advertising scheme. Magazine ads, televsion spots and even the guy on the corner holding up a pizza sign get money for providing visibility, not bringing customers in the door.
I wonder how long this model will continue before internet content providers get wise?
- Anne
Via a seekrit submittor, news that Microsoft Flight Sim and Navteq are teaming up for the next in the series of Flight Simulator. This is beyond awesome:
Microsoft is using data from NAVTEQ to create much of the world in "Flight Simulator X". NAVTEQ data such as road network information, ferry landings, railroads, detailed water information (e.g. oceans, rivers, lakes, harbors, etc.), parks, golf courses, and recreational areas, enhances the "Flight Simulator X" user experience.
...
Appropriate for a Superman game, perhaps? --MM
Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 27, 2006 at 11:15 AM
The fourth season of the animated series Odd Job Jack (featuring stars like Jason Alexander, John Goodman, Christian Slater, Molly Parker, and Jerry Stiller) began airing recently on Canada's Comedy Network. The show is a riot - each episode follows a temp worker through a different employment misadventure (i.e. mortuary worker, security guard, "rodent wrangler"). This week, we heard the supremely cool news that the show's creators are launching Free Jack, in which the master Flash files and bitmaps of every piece of art used in this season of the show are being released sunder the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Share, use, and remix the files to your heart's content!
animation and we just know you do too. We're proud of Odd Job Jack and we've put lots of work into our show. Our art deserves to live beyond broadcast and who better to give a free gift to than the entire planet?
Over the past couple of weeks, we¹ve received pod submissions covering what¹s going on in the Middle East. Just take a look at some of the pods we¹ve recently aired: Hezbollah Youth Leaders, Coming Home to Tel Aviv, Dodging Katyushas, Beirut 101. The range of access to different areas, unique perspectives and storytelling styles has been incredible.
Please keep your submissions coming. This is a situation with global implications that isn¹t going away anytime soon. Also, Current Correspondent Mariana van Zeller is on her way to Damascus, Syria, so keep an eye out for her reports in the coming weeks.
Current Journalism is an experiment and we need your help to make it a success. Let us know what issues are important to you or what stories aren¹t being covered by the mainstream news media on our message board. Better yet, make a pod yourself and become a part of the CJ community.



"Prodigio peruano en Nueva York". I met Gerardo a few weeks ago. He’s videoblogging for El Diario, a Spanish newspaper in New York. His videoblogs are fantastic, a great insight in daily life of Spanish New York.
He’s a pioneer. He must be one of the first paid videobloggers in the world.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 1.7 min, 13.7 MB)
Original post, from gerardo romo z.:
(Via Mefeedia)
Since Ryanne and I now live in San Francisco, we thought we'd make a community videoblog.
Introducing Ryanishungry.com.
(Yeah, the name is weird and that's how we like it. The fun is you making sense of it.)
We take our inspiration from Minnesota Stories by Chuck Olsen and his friends.
The idea is, of course, very simple. Post video about your city on a specific blog. Interview cool people. Attend events. Make announcements. In this way, your community videoblog could become a real source of info for people who live near you.
For our community videoblog, we plan to cover what is appropriate to San Francisco and our interests:
interview with tech geeks and green geeks, cool happenings, and more.
People can even "suggest a story".
You want to be locally famous? Post videos about other people. You know how excited people get when they are on the local news? (which usually only includes them when something bad happens)
You can do the same on a videoblog. Start documenting the people who are doing cool things. It makes people feel appreciated and important. You also begin to create an archive, a memory, of where you live which will be gold to the future.
So keep your own personal videoblog, but make one for your city. What balls you'll have. Maybe you'll even collaborate with others. Maybe you'll even get ocal advertising? But, in the end, don't stress about schedules and deadlines. Just record and post videos as they happen. Unlike ephemeral TV shows, these videoblogs are here to stay.
Bangladesh's top mobile phone operator GrameenPhone, and USA-based CellBazaar have introduced a service connecting buyers and sellers in an electronic marketplace over the mobile phone.
"It's like a more direct, more primitive e-Bay, a phone-based equivalent of newspaper classified advertisements. The concept was developed at the MIT Media Lab.
The service will enable sellers to list details of their products, produce or even services in a database while buyers can look for any of this information through SMS. It will not handle transactions, but will simply put buyers and sellers in contact with each other via mobile phone.
... For countries like bangladesh, where the transport infrastructure is often poor, electronic commerce could prove to have even greater appeal, than in developed ones. "
[via Rajputro, Reuters and digg]

"Is news happening in front of your eyes? Pull out your camera and I-Report it for CNN. Use the form on this page to send files from your computer."via [ LP ]
AsiaMedia reports "Japan's No. 2 telecom operator KDDI Corp said yesterday that it had developed a server which keeps an electronic record of the smallest events in a person's life and lets others sift through them.The Lifelog Pod jots down every activity made through a cellphone or computer, including taking photographs, searching for a restaurant, listening to music and managing money.While some may loathe the thought of an omniscient network, the company said it could provide a way to make friends."Users can learn who else their friends chat with or delve through their companions" data -- minus areas protected by passwords -- to gauge their interests," a KDDI spokesman said."Your information is connected to that of your friend, and that of his friend, and so on."In this country of cellphone aficionados, cellphone users can also put their blogs on the common server. Only people who have a common connection -- such as a mutual friend -- will be able to access each other's data."This isn't a violation of privacy rights," the KDDI official said. "It is simply that everyone is connected."
Japan:A mobile network that keeps track of everything you do
If you believe the manufacturers, RFID is the technology that will make identity theft a thing of the past. Two hackers at the HOPE conference in New York this week have demonstrated that this may not be the case, by successfully cloning a VeriChip tag implanted in human flesh, live on stage in front of an audience. Back to the drawing board, perhaps?
Now I hate to say I told you, but the forces of greed and stupidity are winning at MySpace. It was only a matter of time.
Wanna watch them fuck totally up a good thing? Just watch...
This latest blockage is the latest in a series of moves to keep MySpace "to themselves".
Even the best intentions of Dan Gould and his Newroosters doens't seem to be giving these people a clue.
And just to show that stupidity is no solo act, YouTube is also starting to do stupid things saying they own end-user submitted content! Just as YouTibe has surpassed the 100M video a day mark. They're the fastest growing site on the web right now.
CNN’s citizen journalism project, I-Report, is being hosted by blip.tv. It’s a good gig for blip but I’m not so sure it’s a good deal for videobloggers.
I-Report is asking for photos, audio and video of newsworthy events and the good news is that your content may be featured on the television channel. The bad news is that any content you upload will forever belong to CNN and you won’t get a dime for your troubles.
By submitting your material, for good and valuable consideration, the sufficiency and receipt of which you hereby acknowledge, you hereby grant to CNN a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of CNN’s programming or the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party. You represent and warrant to CNN that you have the full legal right, power and authority to grant to CNN the license provided for herein, that you own or control the complete exhibition and other rights to the materials you submitted for the purposes contemplated in this license and that neither the materials nor the exercise of the rights granted herein shall infringe upon or violate the right of privacy or right of publicity of, or constitute a libel or slander against, or violate any common law or any other right of, any person or entity. This license shall be governed by the laws of the State of Georgia.
to edit and/or alter any submission. CNN reserves the right not to use the material you submit at all and/or as little of the material as it chooses.
The terms of service on Blip’s own site is much more generous. I guess that’s the difference between networks and independent publishing. Of course, your chances of getting on tv are somewhat smaller when self-publishing so it’s a question of what is more important to you.
forget to read the fine print!
- Anne
A Five day Flashmob programming party is underway in Portland in conjunction with OSCON.
When - Monday, July 24th to Friday, July 28th - Drop by anytime: 7AM until Midnight or later
Where - Equator Cafe, 510 SE Morrison, Portland OR (15 blocks south of OSCON 2006) (Google Maps directions from Convention Center)
What - Be a part of a programming flashmob experiment in conjunction with OSCON 2006. The Equator Cafe is hosting a five day open source programming flashmob and we have chosen the GPL'd Democracy TV (http://www.getdemocracy.org) as our project.
The event will be filmed and compiled into a short video to be broadcast on Democracy TV at the end of the week. Folks at the codejam and other Democracy developers will be on IRC at #dtv on irc.freenode.net
The source code, wiki, and bug tracker for Democracy can be found here. Democracy Player can be downloaded for Linux, Mac, and Windows here.
TechCrunch says Limelight Networks, the content delivery technology behind such Web 2.0 leaders as MySpace, Facebook and XBoxLive, has received a new round of funding. Limelight is also widely believed to be the content delivery provider for YouTube.
They are the number two content delivery network, behind Akamai, the service provider for Apple’s iTunes. Panther Express, another content delivery network, also received funding this week.
O'Reilly's Open Source Convention 2006 (OSCON) runs July 24-28, 2006, in Portland, Oregon. Hundreds of sessions, tutorials, activities, and events, are scheduled for this year's OSCON. The $1200 conference is throughly blogged. Here's the Schedule.
OSCAMP is a grassroots cooperative effort with O'Reilly. It seeks to organize the fringe of activity that has grown up around OSCON during the last several years and is incorporated into the main conference at the Oregon Convention Center.
FOSCON is the free and fun gathering of Ruby on Rails fans held in the evening and hosted by Portland-based Free Geek, about a mile away.
The Ruby programming language allows for extensive metaprogramming. This results in a syntax that many of its users find to be very readable. Rails is primarily distributed through RubyGems, which is the official packaging format and distribution channel for Ruby libraries and applications.
Ruby on Rails was extracted by David Hansson from his work on Basecamp for 37signals (podcast). It was first released to the public in July 2004.
Join hosts Chris DiBona (of Google) and Leo Laporte (This Week in Tech), as they talk with the most interesting and important people in the Open Source and Free Software community.
Their FLOSS Weekly Podcasts are all about Free Libre Open Source Software. Here's a podcast with Perl developer Randal Schwartz.
"In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds....," the Washington Post reports.
"Dozens of TV news reports from the Middle East are offered alongside those from the BBC and CNN. Some of the commentary is serious but slightly detached from day-to-day events."
(Video "dumpster" he says. -kc.)
"A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined."Hogan expects to pay some $100,000 in legal costs but says he would spend "well into the millions on this," as he believes the entertainment industry is "abusing the system." Hogan also operates a blog here.
Good news from Brian Conley of the Alive in Baghdad video blog. His Baghdad team member has been released after being kidnapped three days ago. Brian writes:
It is with great happiness that I can tell you our correspondent was released this afternoon in Baghdad, after approximately 72 hours in detention.f... -andyWe still cannot provide his name or any more specific information, as we have not been able to reach him for permission and the specific details baout his detention.
His brother contacted our correspondent, Omar Abdullah, to tell him the good news.
As soon as we have more information, we will update the site immediately.
I would like to thank all of you who made an effort to send the word out about our correspondent and for all the support we've been provided in the last 24 hours.
Alive in Baghdad will continue producing media from Iraq, despite these recent events, and we hope to say the same about our recently released colleague, but only time will tell.
The title says it all:
A high school in Nebraska, USA is suing over entries posted on Wikipedia - the website that “anyone can edit” that’s popular with teenagers and the unemployed. Wikipedia itself isn’t the target of the lawsuit from Skutt High School, nor are many of the sites that legally or illegally scrape Wikipedia’s content.
The school has filed a John and Joe Doe lawsuit to identify the perps behind edits which, AP reports, “… include sharp criticism of Skutt principal Patrick Slattery, obscene language and a note about drug use by students.”
“These particular edits were really harmful and mean-spirited,” said Patrick Flood, a lawyer for Skutt told AP.
Isn’t the Wikipedia very clear that their site should not be used as a point of reference, rather then a bunch of editorials?
Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldnt, couldnt or didnt. They raise the money too. Q and A explains. There's $10,000 to test it, courtesy of Craig Newmark.
Socialtext just released their wiki code under the OSI-compliant Mozilla Public 1.1 license. You can downloaded it here. The package is called Socialtext Open, and according to the press release, it is "the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance." I'm on the board of Socialtext and we've been talking about doing this for a long time. Socialtext has always been an open source contributor, but this is a fairly important step forward and a shift in the business model. I think this puts Socialtext solidly on the right side of the open source movement.
Congratulations Ross et all.
Steven Clift linked me to an article in the Gainesville Sun out of Florida on a community's failed attempts to get a public access channel on their local TV. The paper reported that Alachua County commissioners in June joined the Gainesville City Commission in declining to create a public station.
What is interesting / dangerous is the reasoning used by the Commissioners to deny the request. According to the article, several commissioners said they believe the growth of the Internet - particularly sites such as YouTube.com that allow people to post homemade movies - eliminates the need for public access television.
Activist groups pushing for greater government support for access to the public airwaves need to be alarmed by and prepared for arguments like these. Because as YouTube, vlogging and podcasting become more and more a part of everyday life, groups arguing that the public need their own programming on traditional television and radio are going to have to show why the internet is not the answer. Or at least not the full answer.
What is most important is that activist groups that support PEG (public, education and government) programming on TV and radio coordinate with groups working on enabling new forms of public media like Democracy TV and Ourmedia. Otherwise they risk getting pitted against each other or working at cross-purposes.
And that would play into the hands of those who want to see all media dominated by mega-corporations whether it be Time Warner, Clear Channel or Verizon. And we all lose then.
Sony’s PSP team used some of its face time at Comic-Con to remind people that UMDs are still for sale. The memory-stick format for PSP has had some rocky times since the launch rush as some studios and retailers pulled back but Sony says more than 350 UMD titles are available. Also, according to Ars Technica, both Sony and Fox have titles in the pipeline. But UMD isn't the real priority anymore as Sony Connect looks for secure online-to-PSP distribution options. Other PSP bits:
– Sony is working on a PSP-TV connection and next week plans to add support for video delivery via RSS.
– PSPs will be able to function as "remotes" for PlayStation 3, raising the potential of delivering Blu-Ray DVDs via PSP although not sure how this would work.
– IGN: Sony is negotiating with wireless providers to create more PSP hotspots.
The web service formerly known as Prodigem (previous SmartMobs post) is now known
as MoveDigital. http://www.movedigital.com
The focus of the service is centered on moving your digital data (hence the name). So beyond just publishing BitTorrents, the service also does direct download publishing as well as mobile phone video and audio publishing (just like our publishing of torrents, we convert your video and audio to mobile phone format for you, and then also take care of the streaming to your 3G cell phone).
All Prodigem user accounts and content have been transferred over. Your usernames are still the same, and all Prodigem users also get a free 1 year membership. We're pleased also to announce that Senator John Edwards is our first official customer, not only using MoveDigital to distribute his videos for the mobile phone, but also to be distributed for the first time via BitTorrent.
There's a lot more too. We've created this very cool web widget that makes it very simple to reblog your MoveDigital links. And included with this web widget, via its 'Share' button, is a notion we're calling 'social bandwidth sharing' which allows other users to directly add bandwidth into your account from wherever you may have placed your widget. Moreover, MoveDigital bandwidth is different than what you'll find anywhere else. For direct downloads, we only deduct bandwidth from your account for completely delivered files. You don't get penalized if someone stops downloading half way through. As well, your bandwidth always rolls over to your next membership period, so it's always there for you.
Chris Weagel's American King is now opened to the public!
It's a documentary of sorts posted twice a week over a period of weeks.
The true story of a young man who has a pretty interesting view on life.
Chris has told me to be as non-specific as possible so I dont taint anyone's expectations.
American King is also the first successfully funded project from HaveMoneyWillVlog.com.
In 4 days, The community raised $1000. This money gives Chris time to get a bunch of videos in the can so he can release videos in a timely fashion. It hopefully also gives Chris a show of support for his great work.
Let me tell you why I like American King:
Daily shows are becoming very popular in the Videoblogging world. I think the TV industry really gets into the idea of short, daily content. I'm personally not so interested because it reminds me of "distraction entertainment". It's the "i'm bored at work. Make me laugh." There is certainly a place for this kind of video. Topical. Breezy. Light. Fun. It's here and then forgotten. Next thing.
Chris has made a name for himself creating the universe of Human Dog. Like an HBO series, the story is told in parts. Each part informs the later videos. A rich, complex world is formed. The stortelling of Amercian King assumes that the viewer will follow along and learn the world. Like an HBO show, the story begins and will eventually end. Complexties and subtleties are the highlights.
In my mind, Chris is using videoblogging to create new archetypes. He's making examples of what this new generation believes. Garrett, the star of AK, is not a nice guy. He's likeable if you have a sick sense of humor...which more than a few of us do. We are not always pretty and PC. Will the future look to Dawson's Creek to see how the young kids relate? I hope not, but if we don't make our own visions...Dawson's Creek will be all they have to look at.
Chris Weagel is only 24. Like any young artist, he's just discovering his voice and refining his craft. As a community we can support people who are telling the stories we know to be true. (God knows he will have trouble getting support from traditional outlets.) And in this way, we can help record a different history for the future so they remember us for who we really are.
American King comes out every Tuesday. Subscribe with this RSS feed.
The New York Times looks at several journalists who are now running thriving blog/news sites and getting funding for them: Om Malik, a former writer for Business 2.0, has received backing for GigaOM.com, a technology news Web site that has broken a number of stories; Rafat Ali, the former managing editor of The Silicon Alley Reporter, recently received funding for his company, which publishes PaidContent.org, a site that covers digital media news; and Nina Munk, a former writer for Fortune, is now expanding her site urbanhound.com to San Francisco and Chicago.
found on xeep:
Named after the sci-fi hero, Johnny Mnemonic, Guba's new copyright protector aims to block illegal uploads of movies and television shows on it's site.
The system, a joint project with the MPAA, works by generating unique fingerprints for content filtered through Johnny
“Johnny can identify a video, even if that video has been modified, cropped, reformatted, re-encoded or reposted,” said Thomas McInerney, CEO and founder of GUBA.ious as to whether video from independent creators that have uploaded to the site will be protected by Johnny as well or if content producers will pay a fee in order to have their videos "fingerprinted".
Link to the PDF press release by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
- Anne
Members of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on June 28, rejected a network neutrality amendment to a wide-ranging broadband bill but it turns out that’s not the last they’re hearing of the issue, says CIO blog.
Since that vote, a group of organizations supporting a net neutrality law have cranked up a pressure campaign on the 11 Republican senators who voted against the net neutrality amendment, which sponsors wanted to add to the broadband bill.
Organizations including the liberal MoveOn.org and the conservative Christian Coalition of America and others involved in the SavetheInternet.com coalition have urged members to contact senators and express their displeasure over the net neutrality vote.
“Thousands” of people have contacted their senators, said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org.
Nora Miller, a freelance writer and editor from Arizona, is one of them. Miller has contacted two Republican lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
“My biggest concern is that this law … minus any protection of net neutrality, amounts to a giant giveaway to telecom companies that do not have my best interests at heart,” she said in an e-mail. “My federal dollars created the Internet specifically to provide free and equal access to all users.”
Opponents of a net neutrality law, including large broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast, say a law isn’t needed because they do not plan to block or degrade Web content.
Chairman Ted Stevens could be right, the internet is a series of tubes. John Hodgman explains.
During the week which ended on July 16, YouTube, the popular online video-sharing site's unique audience soar by a whopping 75 percent to 12.8 million users, up from 7.3 million during the previous week, according to new data released by Nielsen//NetRatings.
That traffic jump follows a six-month period of exponential growth for the site, as its audience size skyrocketed by nearly 300 percent since the beginning of the year.
Broadband Reports points out that Former Congressman turned Verizon PR man Tom Tauke speaks to Business Week about Verizon's position on net-neutrality, municipal broadband, and other topics.
Tauke states: "We don't necessarily think it's a wise investment, but we aren't out fighting these things."
Note that Tauke was central in lobbying Pennsylvania and other state lawmakers into passing laws that make such projects either illegal, or considerably more difficult.
A national phone survey of bloggers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology.
Perhaps more interestingly, one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Many say they check facts and cite original sources.
- 34% of bloggers consider their blog a form of journalism, and 65% of bloggers do not.
- 57% of bloggers include links to original sources either "sometimes" or "often."
- 56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either "sometimes" or "often."
More details:
Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.
and...
Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite "my life and experiences" as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog. Entertainment-related topics were the next most popular blog-type, with 7% of bloggers, followed by sports (6%), general news and current events (5%), business (5%), technology (4%), religion, spirituality or faith (2%), a specific hobby or a health problem or illness (each comprising 1% of bloggers). Other topics mentioned include opinions, volunteering, education, photography, causes and passions, and organizations.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of waiting for my wearable cybertech enhancements. It looks like some other folk are getting twitchy too, to the extent of getting on with it themselves - some futurist with sharp eyes and steady hands cheerfully went and built his own head-up display into a pair of innocuously normal-looking sunglasses. I wonder if he does custom orders?
Ars Virtua is a new media center and gallery located entirely in a synthetic world. It was created to provide a venue for new genres of work, and as a platform to highlight working artists creating sculpture, architecture, or applying scripts to extend these and explore the interaction of avatars with in 3-D space. Our purpose is to bring the museum into "new media" as opposed to vice versa and provide a platform for work that would otherwise not be accessible.

Where is it? Located at the border of Butler and Dowden in Second Life's virtual environment, Ars Virtua's 3000 square meter two story building is divided into a main gallery space, a lounge and shop and residency space. In order to visit Ars Virtua you will need to create a free account at Second Life (http://secondlife.com/join) and need to be running the current client. Once you have this properly installed you should be able to follow this link directly to Ars Virtua secondlife://Dowden/20/40
Why is it? Ars Virtua is a new type of space that leverages the tension between the 3-D rendered game space and the what is referred to as reality, between the simulated and the simulation. It is one of a series of projects that explore synthetic worlds as the new real.

To these ends Ars Virtua is instituting several programs: the first is the creation of an artist in residence program and providing 400 prims for the use of the selected artist. The second is to host an Ars Virtua New Media Conference early in 2006.
Ars Virtua is an unprofitable volunteer run organization for more information please contact gallery@ArsVirtua.com.
Ars Virtua Mission Statement: •To enhance understanding of constructed worlds, to develop the medium as a force for art production and provide a platform for transvergence with the intersecting media and knowledge fields. •To provide a venue for development of work that cannot exist anywhere else and create a focal point for media and media industry. •To promote the development of a commons in networked space, a place where ideas can be exchanged across physical borders. •To stimulate economic interest in virtual work and create a foundation for the exchange of goods in a new economy.
Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/lauren_cornell, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 19, 2006 at 05:30 AM
Eyebeam is now accepting applications for Fall 2006-07 Residents and for 2006-06 Fellows in the Production, R&D and Education labs. The application deadline for Fellowships is Aug. 14 with Residents applications due Aug. 21, 2006. Apply now!
This 'No Fault Found' (NFF) returns rate exceeds the industry average for general consumer electronic devices by 13% and is costing the mobile industry US$4.5 billion globally.
Closer examination of the 'No Fault Found' returns calls revealed that 38% were from users abandoning devices after struggling to use a specific application".
"The industry needs to look at the causes behind this trend and take positive action to improve the general out of box experience for the mobile subscriber; a simple analysis of support call trends and records provides all the necessary intelligence to work upon", said Doug Overton, Head of Communications for WDS Global.

I'm a huge fan of RSS feeds, in part because they're perfect for niche media. You don't have to publish every day to earn your way to my reading habits. Just make sure you've got a feed and if your focus intersects with my interests, I'll subscribe. When you publish I'll get it--no need for me to bookmark it and make a note to check it regularily. (I've written more about this here).
At this point virtually everything I read is via a feed, with one glaring exception--my Wikipedia watchlist. It's the only bookmark I still use. So I was delighted to discover this morning that finally Wikipedia has feeds! Thanks to Steve Rubel for the heads-up:
Wikipedia has added RSS feeds to the 1.25 million entries in the encyclopedia. This means you can now more easily track the revision history for important articles, such as those about people, brands or corporations. Simply click on the history link at the top of any entry page and you will see the RSS link on the left hand side
![]() Image by REGIERUNGonline
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, has been videoblogging for more than a month. |
ommitment to blogging perhaps is more serious than anybody thought at first. The popular videoblog Xolo.tv was able to get a long interview with her about videoblogging. You can watch it on their site today. Don't expect any tough questions, however.
No question -- no German chancellor (or perhaps any national leader anywhere) has ever before granted an interview to a videoblogger. It's fantastic. I can understand that it must be overwhelming for a blogger to be admitted into the Bundeskanzleramt (Germany's federal chancellery) and to be shown around by the chancellor herself.
Isn't it astonishing that a chancellor would consent to be interviewed by a blogger -- maybe even in preference to an interview by a traditional journalist? Is it possible that the German government's PR officials calculated that such a move would probably generate positive feedback?
In some ways the Xylo-TV interview is the perfect follow-up to the World Cup craze we recently experienced here in Germany. It's a continuation of the theme: "We're all wonderful, our guests are wonderful, let's party and forget about misfortunes that might exist anywhere."
I'm sorry, I don't want to be a killjoy. But that's too much naive enthusiasm for me. I think that bloggers -- like journalists, like everybody -- should remember that there is no free lunch. No chancellor invites anyone on the spur of the moment.
Therefore, I think that in a democracy anybody who gets the chance to interview the highest representative of a government is obliged to ask questions that others don't have the opportunity to ask.
Am I old fashioned? Perhaps. All I can say is that we'll never know what would have happened if the first blogger who interviewed our chancellor had dared to ask one tough question. Perhaps another blogger will get a chance and we'll find out how that works.
(Manufacturing citizen content. -kc.)
Boardpusher is a site that is like Cafe Press, except you make skateboards. So, there’s a bit of fiddling going on with the Slackstreet Skateboard Store.
I learned about this from someone who sells virtual skateboards, and in her profile, links to her store on BP. And, if you want some good metaverse reading, check out this kick ass article (long) from the Boston Phoenix.
Wow, it is hard to hate GSM when you read news like this. Vodaphone, a leading foreign GSM provider, just launched their HSDPA wireless network at burst speeds of 1.8Mbps. Although the data card launched is a standard PC card, they also plan to offer a USB HSDPA modem as well as an ExpressCard version.
The cost of the USB and Card version is estimated at $399, but in turn the device will have scalability to be flashed to take advantage of the future 3.6Mbps network upgrade.
1.8 and 3.6Mb wireless networks, that really shows that the US is in the stone age when it come to wireless data.
USC’s Annenberg School for Communication — home of the Annenberg Studies on Computer Games team and the Center for Public Diplomacy (which we’ve blogged about before), as well as many other innovative programs — is “seeking to hire one or two scholars whose research illuminates the formation, functioning and impact of online communities.” More information after the jump.
education, games, governance, Politics, Social softwareNew Position: Online Communities and Communication
USC Annenberg School for CommunicationThe USC Annenberg School for Communication is launching a major research and teaching initiative to study online communities. The initiative will investigate if and how communities that are supported by network technologies and the Internet are transforming our sense of community and our social, political and economic lives. It will explore how online communities are developed for and by diverse populations. It will teach students how to build and understand online communities. We are seeking to hire one or two scholars whose research illuminates the formation, functioning and impact of online communities. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in hand at time of application. Special consideration will be given to junior scholars with a track record of high quality published research on issues relevant to online communities and new technology. The appointment is tenure-track and open rank, although special consideration will be given to junior scholars. We encourage candidates who seek to work with colleagues from a broad range of specializations and methodological approaches. The School of Communication is a leader in the implementation of USC’s new strategic plan, which emphasizes innovation in interdisciplinary research that addresses societal needs, along with the Annenberg School’s particular emphasis on communication in the public interest, new communication technologies, globalization, and entertainment as communication and cultural content. Applicants should send their curriculum vita, three letters of recommendation, and samples of their work to Online Communities Search, Mr. Justin Acome, School of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0281, acome@usc.edu, (213) 740-0934. Inquiries can also be made to the Search Committee Chair, Professor Janet Fulk, fulk@usc.edu (213) 740-0941. Review of applications is continuing and we are targeting a December 2006 decision date for a July 1, 2007 start date. USC is an AA/EO employer and is seeking to create a diverse community.
This is a cool idea: SL resident Spin Martin (aka media-maker Eric Rice) is starting a Second Life travel agency, tpTravel, and is seeking people to contribute content to its blog, for which they’ll be paid US$10 per (approved) post. VTOR linked the news, which came from the SLProfiles site.
We’ve created a new company called tpTravel, and it’s exactly what it sounds like… a travel agency within Second Life for Second Life, headquartered on the sim of Slackstreet. We are looking for well traveled residents to take snapshots, write descriptive posts, and create landmarks, SLurls, and machinima tours for posting on the blog that supports tpTravel.
As always, my question is: Will anyone actually use this? Could be. Especially if it were linked to a third-party portal to SL, it could be a great resource for new residents.
The other question it raises is paying for blog content. This is something I’ve been considering for 3pointD for a while now, though I’m not sure whether I have the budget for it at the moment. I’d love to hear from people with opinions on this. Is $10 a reasonable amount to pay for a post’s worth of content on a blog like tpTravel’s or 3pointD? How else could a blog like this (or like Spin’s) recruit authors? Ideas? And if you are interested in contributing to 3pointD, I’d love to hear from you. No guarantees that this kind of thing is going to start anytime soon, but I’d like to start talking to people, at any rate.
3pointD, blogging, Second Life, workSome ten thousand Chinese game players stage an anti-Japanese protest inside an online game called The Fantasy of the Journey West, reports the The Sydney Morning Herald.
A reporter for the Beijing Evening News, reported that 10,000 game players "from around the nation gathered to express their dissatisfaction or anger". He later witnessed an area of the game known as the Summer Palace "filled with the IDs of all the dissatisfied game players".the protests showed some among the crowd of avatar activists carrying posters condeming the use of the much-despised symbol.
Yahoo! and Microsoft's instant messaging networks are now able to exchange messages between users. A Windows Live Messenger user can IM with their Yahoo! buddies within the Windows Live application and without having a Yahoo! account. Same thing in reverse for Yahoo! users. These initial features are just the beginning of planned interoperability between Yahoo! and Microsoft's networks.
The interoperability should be especially popular in east Asia, where Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger are extremely popular. Desktop clients based on open-source libraries such as Gaim currently provide a single client for text-messaging access to multiple networks today, and the large networks mainly turn a blind eye to what could be considered rogue clients.
The original version of MSN Messenger, launched in 1999, included interoperability with AOL Instant Messenger that was shut off and turned on again through rapid patches on both sides. Although it is possible to bind to AOL's OSCAR servers and create custom clients, AOL's current developer terms of service prohibit clients "that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network." Apple Computer signed a deal with AOL in 2002 establishing iChat as an officially licensed product.
Any IM network could interoperate with Google Talk over XMPP and TLS. Google and AOL have announced plans for Google Talk and AIM interoperability "provided certain conditions are met" after Google's investment of $1 billion in AOL last year. Google previously offered the Trillian multi-protocol instant messenger as part of its Google Pack software package but has since removed the software from its bundled offering.
Instant messaging networks are the first step towards defining a broad social network across multiple networks and service providers. The more information a search company can collect about the preferences of you and your friends, the better targeted search results and advertisements they are able to serve back to the user (at a higher advertising fee of course). You can expect more interactions and data exchange between large networks as these companies try to learn more about you, your friends, and your favorite online activities.
"After being excused by the Federal Grand Jury last month, the Assistant US Attorney is bringing civil contempt charges against vlogger Josh Wolf after all."Josh is a friend, please support him.
Apart from the ever-increasing range of titles, two main factors appear to be behind the comics' success. One is their low prices of around ¥40 to ¥60 (40¢ to 60¢) per story, which makes them quite a bargain. The other is convenience. Readers can download only those comics that they want to read, as opposed to paying for a whole magazine with numerous comic strips in it. Not only that, but readers of electronic comics need not deal with the burden of carrying around bulky magazines.
When the comics were first offered, most were aimed at men, particularly office workers who commute on public transportation. But the number of female readers has since grown rapidly, now that reading from mobile phones is considered cool. In response, publishers are working on providing female-oriented comics for mobile-phone subscribers. This development may provide an additional boost to the market - from men who are fans of girls' comics but would be embarrassed to be seen buying such magazines in stores.
The IEEE has published a new book, "WirelessMAN : Inside the IEEE 802.16 Standard for Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks," an overview of WirelessMAN technology. It offers guidance in how to apply it to create broadband wireless components, systems and test equipment and was authored by the IEEE 802.16 Working Group's Chair, Dr. Roger B. Marks, its Vice Chair, Kenneth L. Stanwood, and three group participants -- Carl Eklund, Subbu Ponnuswamy and Dr. Nico J.M. van Waes.
"We created this volume as an essential companion to standards in the IEEE 802.16 family," says Roger Marks. "Its goal is to help designers, engineers, students and others rapidly understand the basics of IEEE 802.16 standards and how to work with them without having to devote extensive time in deciphering the dense text in the standards."
The book introduces metropolitan broadband wireless access networks and places them in context with respect to other wireless and wireline networks. It explains the rationale behind the choices made in creating IEEE 802.16 standards and reviews the technology they define, such as the medium access control and physical layers. It also explores the practical issues and options involved in creating WirelessMAN systems.
It can be purchased through the IEEE bookstore ($65) or Amazon. The book can also be obtained by e-mailing customer-service@ieee.org or by calling either +1 800-678-4333 in the U.S. and Canada or +1 732-981-0060 from other locales.
Frank Ohrtman of WMX Systems, also wrote a book on WiMAX, and says "the IEEE 802.20 committee has voted itself out of existence. That statement seems to be unsubstaniated. The IEEE did suspended 802.20 deliberations, but a move by the 802.20 to vote itself out of existance would be news.
It wouldn't be unpresidented, explains, says the EE Times. The 802.15.3a task group disbanded after failing to settle on an ultrawideband standard, and the 802.11n task group on next-generation wireless LANs, saw private companies launch a coalition outside the group in an attempt to muscle through a standard.
Related Dailywireless articles include; Clearwire's $900M Payday, IEEE Suspends 802.20 Deliberations, Mobile WiMAX: It Begins, WiMAX at Globecomm, WiMAX World Europe, Navini Mobilizes at 2 Dot 3, Intel's Mobile WiMAX Chip Due, Mobile WiMAX: The Attack Plan, Navini Ships Mobile WiMAX Ready Gear, XM Buys 2.3GHz, City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup and Mobile WiMax: It's Done.
One of the linchpins of the new NYTimes.com design is slipping into place finally … personalization feature My Times is now in limited beta for 5,000 registered NYTimes.com users who showed early interest (Some screenshots here). Plans call for adding subscribers in the same small batches while the shake-down cruise continues. Unlike TimesSelect, which is subscription-only, My Times eventually will be open to all registered users.
In some respects, it’s a template personalized news page with the features we expect from any major site — drill-down to specific areas, add RSS feeds, move modules around, select from suggested news sources, etc. Users can even add widgets although there aren’t many and there’s no visible way to make your own.
But the NYT is also playing its ace card: beyond-the-headlines expertise from its own journalists. A small number of staffers (26 at last count) have set up their own pages and are sharing their “sources” with other MyTimes users, who can bookmark and keep track of “My Journalists’ Pages.” This is in keeping with the over-the-top tagline: “My Times: Where the best minds in journalism help you edit the Web.” Users also can add the staffer sources to their own page. This doesn’t seem to work both ways. I’m told these are just a sample of the personalized staff pages; more will be added.
First thoughts: Smart idea to start in very limited fashion. It’s sluggish right now and still very much a work in progress. Once the logistics are settled, integrating My Times with TimesSelect would be valuable. It also will be interesting to see if they take this a step further and make non-journalists pages shareable. It’s not a customized home page, though — the NYT isn’t relinquishing the role of front-page editor to the user.

an interesting Flickr group focuses on how humans find, collect, evaluate & share information in the physical, everyday environment. the groups collects images that document personal design solutions for organizing & structuring everyday life & its environment, such as bookshelves, movie-collections, mind-maps, workplaces, toolboxes, garages, photoboxes, filing cabinets & so on.
see also hard drive visualization flickr pool
[flickr.com]
ccMixter maestro Victor Stone summarizes the good news:
The freesound project is a web site for collecting tiny audio snippets and samples and sharing them under a Creative Commons license for use in larger audio works such as soundtracks, original material and oh yea, remixes. In just over the first year of operation they accumulated almost 20,000 samples of every shape, size and variety.
ccMixter is a site sponsored by Creative Commons that specializes in hosting remixes all under CC license and has the special ability to track the sources of the remixes. In almost two years of operation, ccMixter has had nearly 5,000 uploads from producers using samples from their own libraries, ccMixter itself and of course the freesound project.
It was only a matter time the two sites work together. Remixers from ccMixter that use samples from the freesound project can now track the sources of the remix back to freesound (and soon viceversa). You can see this in action with teru's remix of "Ophelia's Song" which includes electric guitar parts and an a cappella from ccMixter as well as a sample of a train passing and a nylon guitar pluck all of which are linked to from teru's remix page.
On a technical note: The underlying technology is based on an open programmer's interface first published by Creative Commons via ccMixter called Sample Pools. CC is continuing to recruit other sites with CC licensed music to expand the pool. Every installation of ccHost (the open source code project that ccMixter runs on) is already enabled for Sample Pools.
BitTorrent’s library of licensed, copyrighted material is growing fast (disclosure: I am doing contract work for the company). Here’s a bit of yesterday’s news:
BitTorrent Inks Deals With Hart Sharp Video, Image’s Egami Media, Koch and The Orchard
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 10, 2006–BitTorrent, Inc., home to the world’s leading peer-assisted file distribution platform, announced today it has added more than 1,600 video titles to its library of content to be made available on BitTorrent.com. BitTorrent has signed video licensing agreements with entertainment distributors Hart Sharp Video, Egami Media (a subsidiary of Image Entertainment), Koch Entertainment and The Orchard. Consumers will be able to download and enjoy video from these publishers on a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and download to own (DTO) basis when the new BitTorrent.com service launches in late Fall…
Inspired by the fact that mobile phone users are to be tracked to within 50 meters, as a result of the Federal Communications Commission’s E911 mandate (allowing authorities to locate the position of mobile phones that make emergency calls), Derek Lomas plans to develop Transparent City, a city modeled in 3D using only the positions of small orbs, representing individual mobile phones.

The functional forms of a city modeled entirely by human motion will emerge from the overall behavior of the data-points. Streets and highways will be identified through the collective action of orbs flying by at 50 miles an hour. Organic skyscrapers will be built by the thousands of stacked orbs, mostly motionless at their desks-- while some orbs show the subtle motions of humans walking through an office, or traveling up and down elevators. By speeding up the rate of time, one will observe these human towers rise and fall with the beginning and end of the work day.
I found that the concept was already extremely compelling. But it gets better (or worse): Transparent City will seek to create an interface that allows for the integration of multiple databases of information. As an example, users of the "Transparent City" may be able to set the brightness of the orbs to be proportionate to personal income (darkening Harlem and illuminating the financial district). More disturbingly, users will be able to tap any on-going phone call in real-time. Furthermore, using tracked call-logs, users will be able to display the interconnected networks of callers, which represent the de-facto social network of a city.
With this project Lomas seeks to show the future of surveillance and raise public consciousness at a time when we can still determine our own fate as a society.
Another surveillance-related project by Lomas was the The Backpack Project. In 2002, he gave artists clear backpacks --mandated in many high schools in the post-Columbine era as a way to screen for weapons, drugs and other prohibited items-- and let them fill them as they wished. His aim was to encourage artists to "explore the flip side of privacy: transparency" and "discover honesty and personal expression."
Eyebeam is now accepting applications for Production, R&D and Education Fellows during 2006-07. Application deadline is Aug. 14, 2006. Apply now!
CanWest has released the first video player for BlackBerry handheld devices.
The video player is free, powered by SONA and features video from CanWest MediaWorks. So far, all that is available are daily news, sports and business clips.
Right now the video player is in BETA release. As a result, users need to check for new video files available for download and click to download them. Once the product leaves BETA testing, then 'push' based delivery of content, where new content will be automatically sent to the device, will be available and users will not have to manually request new content.
New research shows that news stories online are barely read by anyone 36 hours after they are first posted, according to a team of statistical physicists from University of Notre Dame and colleagues in Hungary who have analyzed how people access information online.
Here's a summary of the research from PhysicsWeb.
And here's a PDF of the actual research.
I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? - Dirty Harry
State-wide television networks -- over broadband -- may be an idea whose time has come. With broadband penetration moving towards 70% in the United States you have to ask yourself...why not?
Nobody's tried it. Mobile tv can carry a dozen or more channels locally. Advertisers in big cities may lease channels on local DVB-H and MediaFLO broadcasts for targeted advertising. Localized content could follow.
Mobile Television and Mobile WiMAX could be synergtic. In Korea, WiBro handhelds also include Mobile TV (via DMB-T). Perhaps live, state-wide television networks could follow. With advertisers. Small screen broadcast news may be less successful than 5,000 time-shifted video blogs. Make your own schedule.
City TV channels already exist on cable. They vary from educational and public access shows to NY-1, a full-blown 24/7 news operation just for New Yorkers.
The broadcast center, located in a shopping mall, could plug in MPEG-4 AVC encoders (above) for broadcast-quality 1Mbps transmissions. Good to go.
Statewide. The Oregon Public Affairs Network covers the government. Oregon Education has broadband connections and a 2.5 GHz Wireless Network. Broadband wireless, using WiFi and WiMAX, can deliver the last mile. One-way Mobile TV is the billboard. Broadband is the transactional element. As seen on WiBro.
Regional networks like Northwest Cable News make money. That's the new reality television. Eyeballs. Giving away AOL would reduce revenue by about $2 billion, but it increases eyeballs and ad revenue, says the Washington Post. AOL saw advertising revenue rise 26 percent to $392 million in the first quarter of 2006.
Portland's Live Wire uses an entertainment format pioneered by Prarie Home Companion. Radio shows. Great Radio is where you find it. NW theatre companies include the Miracle Theatre Group (Hispanic), Triangle Productions (gay), Northwest Mystery Theater, Willamette Radio Workshop and others.
Add Event Coverage, Music, Public Forums, Antique Auctions and Plays. Don't forget to incorporate Bloggers, Video Blogs and PodCasters into your mix. Stir.
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Amanda Congdon announces her departure from Rocketboom. |
Amanda and Andrew are two of the most creative, hardest working people I've had the pleasure of knowing on the Internet. They turned their low-budget video blog into a force to be reckoned with. And now the future is uncertain. Amanda's moving to LA, while Andrew will push forward with Rocketboom. I know both of them will be successful with whatever endeavor they choose to embrace; I am just saddened they won't be doing it together anymore. -andy

The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) are excited today about announcing a new project: a virtual Home Run Derby in Second Life that’s being held in conjunction with Major League Baseball’s own Home Run Derby, on Monday, July 10, at 5pm SL time (8pm Eastern). In fact, the virtual derby will not be a separate contest, but will be “a real-time Second Life re-enactment” of the real thing, featuring avatars for each of the eight Derby players — Major Leaguers competing to see who can hit the most home runs over the course of two rounds.
I haven’t heard what the technology is behind the re-enactment, whether it’s something like the virtual Wimbledon created by some IBM researchers, or something completely different [UPDATE: see this post for more on that]. The stadium the Sheep have built (pictured above), a re-creation of Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, where the Derby is being held, is certainly impressive. Presumably to combat lag caused by overcrowding of SL regions, a “limited number” of tickets to the event will be on sale via the Electric Sheep’s retail site, SLBoutique for a whopping L$1,000 — actually only about US$3. (Tickets go on sale at 7am SL time — 10am Eastern — tomorrow morning, July 6.)
But will anyone actually show? Hardcore baseball fans will presumably want to watch their home run heroes in flesh-and-blood 3D, which they’ll be able to do on ESPN. [UPDATE: Electric Sheep Chris Carella now reports that the Derby will indeed be streamed into the Jumbotron in the virtual stadium.] The SL event will probably be an interesting use of virtual space and a good opportunity to hang out with your friends (if you can all get tickets), but I’m betting baseball fans will tune the Derby in on their other screen.
The stadium, on the other hand, has huge potential. The Sheep press release says the stadium — and the inevitable souvenir shop attached to it — will be “open to the public following the event,” but it’s not clear on whether it will be open Monday only, or will become a persistent fixture of Second Life. (I’m going to check with the Sheep and get back to you on this. [UPDATE: see this post for more on that.]) If the latter, it would be great to make it available for some kind of organized competition. Even better would be for the Sheep to build the technology into Second Life that allows residents to show up and play a baseball game at the virtual PNC Park. It would be a big home run if Major League Baseball were to allow that kind of thing in their virtual stadium.
advertising, games, news, Second Life, sportsGoing beyond the mix tape now, here’s a new community for creative types to meet up and collaborate, all while sharing work under a Creative Commons license, as created by Marco Raaphorst of Melodiefabriek:

Any Creative Commons creator can join for free. So if you’re a composer, a filmmaker, a podcaster, a writer, you name it, please join! As far as I know this is the first community which is so broadly oriented and Creative Commons based. Sure, I love to talk with other composers and remixers about music, but wouldn’t it also be nice to communicate directly with the new generation of filmmakers for example? Connecting filmmakers and composers.
At ccCreators we can have discussions about all sorts of things, share photo’s with each others, add events to the calender and start new collaborations. It could become a killer website. So please join! No sneaky commercial reasons, just a way to connect to creators, artists using Creative Commons.
Sounds good to me. If you do join up, send us a link to your page on our Share Your Work forum and let us know how it goes.
Creative Commons site; CDM on Creative Commons
collaboration, Community, composers, Creative Commons, MP3, musiciansp://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=4HJBEL">

Mike writes - "Sketching in Hardware ended yesterday, and it was awesome. We had folks from all over the DIY electronics spectrum talking bout creating tools for easy development of DIY electronics: David Mellis, of Arduino, Bjoern Hartmann and Scott Klemmer of Stanford, Nathan Seidle of Spark Fun, Tom Igoe of NYU, David Zicarelli, author of MaxMSP, and 20 other amazing people. We held it in Greenfield Village, and spent a long time thinking, talking about, and looking at the history of innovation as practiced by Edison, the Wright brothers, and Buckminster Fuller.
ed with a frantic makeathon where groups of folks (who had never worked together) were given two hours to invent new technologies. One group hacked a USB thumb drive, another group reinvented the telegraph using Flash and Teleo, another group made a smart train set of historical objects, where each piece in the set could call up its original location on Google Earth when put into the train set, another group made an RFID-enabled street lamp (as portrayed in the photos by Scott Minneman, of Onomy labs), and another group used our beloved Roomba to create a museum rover, using a controller made of foam rubber and bend sensors." - Link.
[Read this article] [Comment on this article]Filed under: Culture, PC, Online, MMO

/feeds.joystiq.com/weblogsinc/joystiq?g=296"/>
Omidyar Network led a $1.5 million round for non-profit social network YouthNoise, which started in 2001 as a global online community for Save The Children. Other investors include a consortium of the Surdna Foundation, the Rappaport Family Foundation and Virgin Mobile USA. YouthNoise spun off in 2004, creating a network for ages 16-22. YouthNoise.com carries only youth-generated content and focuses on social action. It has 113,000 registered users from across the U.S. and more than 170 countries worldwide; the site averages about three million page views per month. (via SiliconBeat)
Update: An earlier piece, actually, from the SF Business Times (via MSNBC.com) says the company plans to raise another $3 million this year; a third round, possibly in 18 months, would go toward international expansion. Omidyar invested $500,000 this round and will add $1 million if YouthNoise raises $2 million. Other first-round investors and amounts: Surdna Foundation $400,000; Rappaport Family Foundation, $100,000; Virgin Mobile USA $100,000.
Dena Jones Trujillo, an Omidyar investment manager, suggested the plan to make the non-profit self-sustaining and set up the first-round pitch for funds. Trujillo: “Without capital upfront to build those revenue streams, they’re never going to get to the point of self-sufficiency because they’ll spend all their time fundraising.” The article by Sarah Duxbury includes some good detail on the non-profit search for investment capital.
We’ve been writing about this for quite some time so it’s fun to see the NYT’s Richard Siklos wrangle with an essential reality (and find a way to work in Sumner Redstone’s fish): for all the fuss and the double-digit, sometimes triple-digit growth in online revenues, new media revenue isn’t close to material for traditional media companies. That doesn’t mean the gains and the revenues aren’t real. In fact, the inclusion of online revenue has helped some “print” units show a profit. So what does this say about the future financial impact of broadband, mobile and the like? Siklos: “The optimist’s view is that the spoils from this new frontier are still very much up for grabs. … The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits.”
I’ll opt for the pragmatic view: without their current investments, experiments and full-force efforts, traditional media companies wouldn’t have much of a long-term future. Period.
Still, I really liked reading about the fish.
makeTV
Despite that I absolutely loathe people calling webcasting, streaming and the like "TV" this site is interesting.
From the site:
MakeTV to Watch TV: MakeTV is a live broadcast channel open to both viewers and producers. (Wish I could copy & paste but they used Flash for the site so I can't. Oh well..)
Essentially, anyone can plugin and stream to anyone watching the content from this site.
Strange that the stats show 0 Total Broadcasts and 0 Viewable Archives.. Wonder what the deal is..
What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?, asks the New York Times.
WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. Access to WiFly's wireless network, built with Nortel's wireless mesh nodes, costs about $12.50 a month.
Despite WiFly's ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.
That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.
"Content is really key," said Darrell M. West, a professor of public policy at Brown University who conducted a survey of how well governments use the Internet. "It's not enough just to have the infrastructure. You have to give people a reason to use the technology."
To that end, Q-Ware has developed P-Walker, a service that will let subscribers with Sony PSP portable game machines log on to WiFly to play online games and download songs and other material.
The company has also developed a low-priced Internet phone service. The handsets cost about $200 and allow users to call other mobile phones for just over a penny a minute; calling a traditional phone costs less than half a penny.
Ultimately, Q-Ware expects its network to communicate with more devices, including MP3 players and digital cameras.
Taipei claims to be among the world’s top three cities for broadband infrastructure, with PC penetration of 88% and an 83.6% household penetration rate of Internet usage, of which 79.3% are connected to ADSL broadband.
By July 2006, wireless broadband Internet access will reach 90% coverage of the entire city through 4,200 access points, making it the world’s number one wireless networked city. Nortel has built Asia’s largest Internet Data Center in the Neihu Technology Park. This center will facilitate smooth broadband communications between Taipei and the rest of the world.
Related DailyWireless stories include; Big City WiFi Clouds, Taipei's Cellular Hotspots The World Largest WiFi Cloud, Taipei Unwired, The Global Hub, Transnational Media Production and City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup.
Microsoft's most ambitious software plan - to base Windows on a native database - has died again. The feature was originally touted in 1991 for 'Cairo', which Microsoft then described as an object-oriented operating system, built on top of Windows NT. Cairo was sidelined as a result of Microsoft's focus on the internet, and the evaporation of the Apple/IBM Taligent OS. But the idea, reborn as WinFS, was revived in 2001 as one of the "three pillars" of Longhorn, now Windows Vista.…
[A file system completely based on metadata is the wave of the future... but like fusion power, it always appears to be 10 years away. /t]
Originally from The Register, ReBlogged by Tom Ritchford on Jun 26, 2006 at 04:53 PM
DONE!
Click HERE for the Video Archives!
Hey all!
are eager to see what they missed at Vloggercon, that’s why I'm working dilegently to get all the tapes digitized, compressed, (looking good!) and uploaded. They'll be up soon!
More Later,
Ryanne
Warner Bros. began selling its movies and TV shows over the Internet video site Guba.com Monday, marking the second deal the studio has made to distribute content over Web sites that have offered pirated video in the past.
Guba.com has featured mainly user-generated video clips for free or as part of a subscription, some of which were unauthorized clips from TV shows or movies.
I think this has to be be one of the oddest pairings since the Roxio and Napster deal. I find the video quality TERRIBLE (Use this link, and then click trailer), and the movies are extremely over priced. Does anyone think this will work?
SL machinima-maker Pierce Portocarrero caught some footage of a protest in the virtual world of Second Life today, held to coincide with the world’s third birthday. The protest was being held to voice some residents’ dissatisfaction with the new registration requirements (or lack thereof) we mentioned earlier today. I haven’t heard the narration on this yet, as I’m still at the Supernova conference, but the footage is engaging, and gives a good idea of what it’s like when a bunch of SL avatars get together for a protest — which is not an unusual thing in itself.
avatars, governance, kids, Second Life, securityCNet’s Daniel Terdiman has been on a bit of a 3pointD-style road trip lately, visiting five states with a carload of travel gadgets that help connect him to the rest of the world. Fun, interesting reading, including a few good 3pointD insights: “While I would reach my destination exactly as planned, I had absolutely no idea how I got there. I couldn’t even have begun to tell you what roads I took, or how to get back from there without this digital helper.”
3pointD, earth, GPS, TechnologyHave any thoughts about “integrating cartographic data with geo-tagged knowledge repositories” and how “the emerging Geospatial Web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products”? If so, you may want to be in touch with Austria’s Know-Center project, which is seeking chapter submissions for an upcoming book on the geospatial Web. There’s a whole list of possible topics in the submission guidelines, including:
• State-of-the-art and emerging trends of geo-browsing platforms
• Knowledge acquisition and management in a geospatial context
• Knowledge relationship discovery and management (e.g. matching geospatial relationships with semantic or temporal relationships)
• Knowledge-intensive, location-based services
• Marketing of products and services via the Geospatial Web
• Content, annotation and ontology services as enablers of the Geospatial Web
Submissions are due by October 10, 2006 — so get to work.
3pointD, earth, GPS, mapping, Tagging
The latest fad in P2P isn't P2P at all. Some clever soul has created a simple interface that allows the layperson to search using Google for Mp3's.
Something tells me this won't last long. "Quick and dirty website allowing you to search Google for MP3s. No need to remember all those funny codes and parameters."
Funny codes and parameters indeed. A few quick tests with the G2P interface show that it does find files containing the artist name, and with an extension of "mp3". The trick uses a default behavior of the Apache webserver to identify pages that have been indexed in Google containing the standard Apache boilerplate that is generated when a published directory has no index file.
While Google, quite obviously, passes the "substantial non-infringing uses" test layed out in U.S. court decisions, the G2P interface does not.
[via Digg]
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | CommentsThe four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on Bill Gates was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair and sex.
To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of the "anyone can edit" notion....
Amazon.com: Videoblogging: Books: Jay Dedman,Joshua Kinberg,Joshua Paul
Jay, Josh and Josh's book, up on Amazon..
From the description:
Amazing, isn't it? You're on equal footing with multibillion-dollar TVand movie producers. Videoblogging lets your audience see your cause,your story, or your personal creations—and you can distribute your showto anyone with Internet access. And since the videobloggingcommunity is all about sharing, more than 20 expertshave kicked in tips and ideasto make this book the ultimatevideoblogging crash course. So head for the checkout, grabfresh batteries for your videocamera, and let's get started!
"For decades, the jailhouse interview has been a staple of American journalism, the fodder for books like 'In Cold Blood' and 'The Executioner's Song' and movies like 'The Thin Blue Line.'The New Jersey Press Association said it would seek to have the policy overturned.
"Inmates have long used such interviews to protest their innocence, decry prison conditions or just tell their life stories, not always a welcome prospect for law enforcement officials and victims of crime."
National Public Radio, which wholeheartedly embraced podcasting early, is seeing a nice return on its investment. According to Advertising Age, NPR's revenues from new-media operations is 10% of its total. Podvertising is playing a key role. Acura was a founding sponsor of NPR's podcasts and just renewed for another six months. No wonder then that CNN is set to expand its podcast play today.
Technorati Tags: CNN, NPR, Podvertising
Hiroyuki Nakano and his team posted some video messages from him for the iCommons Summit. I added the English subtitles and now they've been translated into Italian, Romanian and partially in Arabic in less than 24 hours. Pretty amazing.
Comment - TrackBack
Well, as long as they display them in Sony's ad-supported player, which bloggers can soon embed on their sites. It's part of a new Sony site called MusicBox Video, powered by Brightcove. Very slick presentation. And I'm a little surprised other media sites haven't picked up on the powerful YouTube idea of letting anyone copy-and-paste their player on their sites.
Variety is reporting that Apple is working on a movie download component for iTunes, which already sells television shows.
Studios have resisted Jobs' initial insistence that feature films be priced at the easy-to-remember $9.99. After all, library titles are typically sold to Wal-Mart and Best Buy significantly cheaper than new releases. Studios now are trying to convince Apple to sell similar content at multiple price points, something the company has never done.ref="http://feeds.tuaw.com/weblogsinc/tuaw?m=525">TUAW.com.Also complicating the deals: The studios are working out terms with a host of other distributors, including Amazon, Movielink and BitTorrent, in part to make sure that one company does not dominate. It seems that none of the studios wants to be first in making a deal with Apple. Disney would be the logical leader, but even they are cautious, fearing it will look like in-house synergy rather than a business decision.
Applicants to the University of Abertay's new Ethical Hacking course will be subject to stringent background checks before being offered a place, to make sure they are not likely to abuse the knowledge they will gain.…
Hacking in the interest of business, is that a little contradictory? --L.N.R.
Originally from The Register, ReBlogged by LNR on Jun 19, 2006 at 10:51 AM
Creativity does not like to be fenced in.
(Or maybe a precursor towards new sales. -kc.)
Google Earth has released an update, in essence, jazzier and more hi-res, with a better UI. Or some such. But this bit particularly caught my eye:
"Google is trying to make all these tools more accessible to ordinary people and get them engaged in content," Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence said, adding that "the idea of a geobrowser is fascinating, as is the eventual merger of gaming and mapping."
Now, if only they'd make an actual announcement on a partnership between gaming and mapping. Really - can you imagine a MMOG that had the earth as the default map?
The mind boggles.
Next week, the FCC may revisit the issue of whether cable providers will be required to carry every channel of programming transmitted by over the air broadcasters. “Must-carry” itself is not a new idea — for years cable systems have been forced to carry broadcast signals over their networks. When broadcasters switch to digital transmission, however, each will be able to transmit multiple channels over the same bit of spectrum. So, should cable firms be required to carry each and every one of these channels? The FCC said “no” to such multicast must-carry rules a few years ago. But that was under Chairman Michael Powell. Current chairman Kevin Martin feels differently about “multi-cast must-carry,” and may now have the votes to reverse the prior decision. (More on the issue here.)
This week, he got support for this expanded regulation from an unlikely source: AT&T. AT&T, you may remember, has in recent months been exhaustively making the case against another set of rules — neutrality regulation. The federal government should keep its paws off private networks, they (rightly) argued, warning that they would discourage needed investment in private networks. However, this week a spokesman said that, regarding must-carry, it had no objection to federal paws. “We’re more than happy to put this programming on our network,” he said. “We support multicast must-carry.”
AT&T of course, has every right to put these channels on their new video systems. In fact, the architecture of their IPTV systems makes this easy. But AT&T did more than just agree to carry these signals itself — it endorsed mandating it. This means that AT&T video rivals — traditional cable firms — would also have to carry multiple signals. For these companies, must-carry would cause more pain, since their bandwidth is more limited.
This unfortunate impact on its rivals could not have escaped AT&T’s notice. (In fact, since AT&T argues its video system isn’t technically “cable TV” at all, the rules may only hurt its rivals). And its certainly not uncommon for any company to use regulation to gain a fair advantage over its rivals. Yet, such strategies may backfire. As I wrote last year, that time criticizing the cable industry for similar behavior:
As anyone who’s followed telecom lobbying for more than a week or so knows, industry lobbyists routinely argue for policies that help them gain a “fair advantage” over their rivals. It’s probably too much to expect industries to support free-markets policies (however rational) when it conflicts with their self-interest. But it is puzzling to see them supporting policies that will end up hurting them.
And, I should have added, hurting consumers.
Filed under: Culture, Online, MMO, Business
The Guardian has produced an excellent column that addresses the problem of "griefers", people that abuse, team-kill and cheat other players of online games, particularly MMOs. Griefing has always been a problem where real players compete against their peers, although with massively multiplayer online games the problem has become much more serious. Earning a battleship in Eve Online or crafting a special item in World of Warcraft can take weeks if not months of game time. On top of that, the recent trend for people to sell items on auction sites like eBay has meant that rare online items have a monetary value.
In a major shift, Nielsen announced today it will "follow the video" beyond television to computers, cell phones, iPods and other devices. (Actually, the press release says Nielsen will measure "the new ways consumers are watching television" -- which makes me wonder if they realize that it's really video, not television.) The new effort, called Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement or A2/M2, will track streaming video consumption and even measure viewing on video iPods. Nielsen also promises to merge internet statistics with people meter TV ratings. "As more and more streaming video content, including traditional television programming, becomes available online, content providers need to measure this viewing and understands how it complements their traditional television programming," reads the press release. Finally, a headline announcement for TV folks: Nielsen promises to abolish all handwritten diaries in all markets by 2011. (About fricking time.) Of course, all these goals are very noble, but as everyone knows, measuring new forms of media consumption is always a very challenging affair. So stay tuned...

(courtesy of suchit nanda)
I’m a notoriously bad note-taker, so as usual, no full report on this conference, but just a few notes and references.
Some conferences have a real magic, and the Asia Commons conference really had it. It is probably the first time that people from all across Asia, especially South Asia, but unfortunately only a rare smattering of Thais, though the conference took place in Bangkok. The magic came from several factors:
1) the ability to witness the emergence of a movement towards the Commons all across Asia and to see how easily and warmly the people there interconnected;
2) the meticulous organization of a very motivated staff, which chose to include a large part of Open Space processes so that participants really got to know each other; I discovered the method of ‘speed sharing‘ where every participant has 3 minutes to explain himself while everyone rotates so that he can here a maximum of contributions;
3) an integrated use of collaborative tools, both before and during the conference. And of course after the conference as well, as there is still a very active mailing list. See the overall wiki with the resource page for example.
So, without further ado, here are some links for those who weren’t there, but would like to know what was said. Here’s a record of the open space discussion, with lots of info on local Asian intiatives, and the topics that local activists care about.
Frederick Noronha, the tireless promoter of Bytes for All, which monitors ‘IT for development initiatives’, created an extra page for summaries in the Wikipedia. Frederick’s report is quite complete with details on the organizers and participants, the issues discussed, etc… The pictures are located here. Another way to follow what was being said is to monitor the blog, starting with the older blog entries at the beginning of the conference, where participants have posted reports on the keynote and other interventions. The most recent entries will lead you to the podcasts which were taped at the conference, including a short one by myself, on the collaborative aspects of working at the P2P Foundation.
Finally, I was of course very pleased with the profile of my own work, written by Fredrick Noronha and posted at the iCommons blog (this is the international initiative by Lawrence Lessig and crew to internationalise the Creative Commons licenses).
The upcoming Skype version 2.5, seen at the eBay Developer's Conference, apparently will let you send or request money to other users directly from the client software. Since eBay, Paypal, and Skype are all one big happy family, you'll be able to Paypal money easily while chatting with the person you're talking to. Camwhores: Paypal $3 for another 5 minutes of show?
If they integrate this with the WiFi Skype phones, you could possibly be able to send money to people wherever you have a WiFi connection. Then again, if you have a cellphone, you could use Paypal Mobile and do that right now.
Skype 2.5 Integrates Paypal [Golem.de via Random Good Stuff]
In April we belatedly blogged license adoption estimates for December 2005, which had been published elsewhere in December. That estimate, based on Google queries restricted to CC-licensed content, came to 45 million web pages under a Creative Commons license.
What a difference six months make. Our current aggregate estimate, also based on Google queries for CC content, comes to 140 million pages. Impressive, though it must be noted that this much higher number is probably the result of both increasing use of CC licenses and overall growth of Google's index.
In April we also gave a current breakdown of license use by license property. Here is an updated breakdown:
The increased use of more liberal licenses noted in April seems to have
accelerated, though again it must be noted that some of the change may
be due to search index variability (Yahoo!'s in this case, as Yahoo!
facilitates searching for specific license URLs with link: queries).
| License Property | February 2005 | April 2006 | June 2006 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NonCommercial | 74% | 71% | 68% |
| NoDerivs | 33% | 28% | 24% |
| ShareAlike | 49% | 48% | 45% |
Look for another update in December, hopefully with some indications of adoption across jurisdictions and languages (again with many caveats).
Om Malik is making the big step of staking his life online. And the master of the scoop is quite gracious about being scooped himself by Valleywag.
More great talent breaks out from big media to make it big on their own.
: Speaking of great talent making it big, I told Om on the phone last night as he told me about his big move that I was most amused by Rafat Ali’s recollection of why he started PaidContent.org, now :
It was a hot and muggy summer in NYC, and not sure what I was thinking. Well, there was some thought to it: to raise my profile as journalist and get a job at WSJ or CNET News.com.e a hundred places that would die to hire Rafat right now. But he’s too smart to take their jobs.
: And, yes, I’m smugly proud of myself for that headline.
: LATER: On the blogging phenom as a follow-on to big media,Scott Karp says, and I agree:
All the brand value accrues to the individual. As Google continues to destroy the value of branded content, individual media brands may be the last line of defense. Individual talent as media destination may be the only viable alternative to search and social networking as portals to the web.eally not a lot different from the way things were. For reporters, as Jay Rosen points out, the value of the brand accrues to the work of the individual, but for newspaper columnists and network anchors and writers whose bylines appear on the covers of magazines, some of their brand value accrues to the bigger media property. That was the way it had to be; people couldn’t be media properties. But now we can be.
Reporting live on tape from my hotel room atop the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco, here's my encapsulated edit of the best parts from CNN's interview with Amanda Congdon from Rocketboom.

This shot of me at Vloggercon, being streamed live into Second Life, is cool.
Missed this one earlier this week…Three major public TV broadcasters have reached an agreement with Writers Guild of America on a new three-year contract, which includes digital media in major part. Educational Broadcasting Corp. (WNET/New York), WGBH Educational Foundation (WGBH/Boston) and Community Television of Southern California (KCET/Los Angeles) were the public stations in the deal.
Negotiators said the contract, which was finalized May 25, would be retroactive to Nov. 13 and bring increases in writers’ program rates on June 1, Nov. 13 and Nov. 13, 2007.
Under the pact, writers would receive payments from the stations’ new business ventures, such as Internet downloads, licensing audio portions of programs to satellite radio subscribers and licensing or selling excerpts of programs to schools and universities.
The two sides also agreed to hold annual meetings to address emerging technologies, programming innovations and the future of public broadcasting.
Some more details on the release here.
Another day, another absurd software patent: Ars reports that Nintendo has patented the concept of instant messaging in games:
In the claims section, the patent describes a chat system that uses a remotely stored buddy list, supports multiple statuses, broadcasts information about active gaming activities, displays notification of events including the arrival of new e-mail messages, facilitates transmission of player preferences, and enables users to communicate with each other either with voice or text messages. Keep in mind that this patent does not cover game-oriented chat in general; it specifically describes a console gaming chat mechanism that displays game information and uses a buddy list.
Sure, instant messaging and computer games had been around for several years when Nintendo filed for this patent in 2000. But combining them was truly a stroke of genius!
French citizen media blog Agoravox is launching - and to the best of my knowledge this is a real first - a sports themed citizen blog (in French) to get sport fans' input and photos - from tennis tournaments such as Roland Garros and Wimbledon, cycling events like The Tour de FRANCE and of course, with football frenzy kicking off tonight in Europe - the World Cup.
It's called Sport-Vox.
Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, reBlogged by ts
Sites such as MySpace and Friendster could be the latest target of the US National Security Agency as it gathers personal data for counter-terrorism.New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Another U.S. House bill that passed out of committee Thursday is causing some consternation … the EFF is among those warning that a proposed change to part of the current copyright law could result in additional licensing requirements for home digital media storage and use. The Section 115 Reform Act (SIRA) was proposed by U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., to make what most involved say is a much-needed fix that will smooth the way for music services, updating policy that dates back to ragtime and bringing it into the digital age. SIRA, passed Thursday by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property with bi-partisan support, would replace the current two-license for each recording to a blanket system operated by the Copyright Office.
But a number of organizations and companies argue that the bill’s language treats every digital performance or display as distribution requiring seperate licenses. That would seem to open the door to duplicate fees; licensing of material currently consider fair use — timeshifting like TiVo, for instance; and licensing for incidental audio or video. (The incidental licenses would be “royalty free” but it coukd set a precedent.) Their concerns are detailed here.
In a cryptic joint statement, the Digital Media Association, the RIAA and the National Music Publishers Association expressed “optimism” about the intent of the bill but said “we have not reached complete agreement on all aspects of this legislation.”
The vote doesn’t mean the bill will reach the House floor as is and changes are expected. Whether these concerns will be addressed in the end remains to be seen but, reports CNET, Smith is open to discussing changes that could exempt incidental use completely.
From The Nation.
"The First Amendment of the Internet – the governing principle of Net neutrality, which prevents telecommunications corporations from rigging the web so it is easier to visit sites that pay for preferential treatment – took a blow from the House of Representatives Thursday.
Bowing to an intense lobbying campaign that spent tens of millions of dollars – and held out the promise of hefty campaign contributions for those members who did the bidding of interested firms – the House voted 321 to 101 for the disingenuously-named Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE). That bill, which does not include meaningful network-neutrality protections creates an opening that powerful telephone and cable companies hope to exploit by expanding their reach while doing away with requirements that they maintain a level playing field for access to Internet sites.
... The fight over net neutrality now moves to the Senate."
- Net Neutrality Advocates
- SaveTheInternet.com Coalition Statement
Originally posted by Emily from Smart Mobs, ReBlogged by eteam on Jun 9, 2006 at 01:58 PM
This weekend, while biking in the glorious (but brief) Portland sun, I heard my name shouted out. I turned around to see a friend of mine sitting at a sidewalk cafe. He invited me over to chat. My friend, a media savvy (and law abiding) lawyer, is always easygoing, entertaining and fun to talk with.
But when we started talking about recent NSA wiretapping revelations, he began to act paranoid, looking around furtively, wondering if anyone was "spying" on us from nearby webcams.
As a fan of the movie "Enemy of the State", I knew the NSA utilizes commercial webcams, like those in ATMs and rooftops, as targets of opportunity. Airplanes and satellites, too.
Eyes in the sky may become more common. Take, for example,
the FBI mistake on fingerprint identification in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The FBI's automated fingerprint system mistakenly fingered Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield. The FBI hired an airplane to circle a mosque that he attended.
Border Surveillence technology may bring the practice home.
Just for fun I mentioned Pyramid Vision, of Arlington, Virginia, which can "fuse" terrestrial cameras with aircraft or satellite images. It creates a continous 3D "fly-by" space, not unlike Google Earth. But live. RealityFlythrough has similar capability.
Combining different cameras into a single video panorama patchwork allows you to "fly" though a space utilizing a variety of cameras, all with different points of view. Computer processing adjusts perspective and fills in the data gaps. Microphone Arrays will be supported in Microsoft's Vista. They can track a moving target and attenuate background noise.
Watch for them on a utility pole near you.
Maybe what my friend needs is the $500 WCH DD9000 (right). The video Walkman-sized device scans the airwaves for wireless video transmissions in the 900MHz to 2.52GHz range.
It sports two antennae with a 2.5-inch TFT LCD and locks on any usable signals within 500 feet.
What's a little spying between friends and neighbors?
CBS RADIO, one of the largest major-market operators in the United States, and Vibes Media, a leading provider of interactive text message and mobile content marketing programs, today announced a nationwide partnership for Vibes' iRadio, an Instant Response Text Messaging Platform.
The agreement provides 25 CBS RADIO stations in New York, Los Angeles and 16 additional U.S. markets the ability to personally engage their listeners in real time and create a wide variety of locally customized radio promotions.
Listeners can participate in promotions and contests from anywhere via the text messaging function on their cell phone. Using iRadio, stations can customize these promotions and contests through Vibes' OptimumAnalysis Tools, effectively tailoring them according to listener response in real time.
Everyone who sends a message receives a response, regardless of service provider. Additionally, listeners can text requests, shout-outs and votes using the cell phone they already have in their hand.
Interactive text messaging programs also add a new dimension to radio sponsorships. Advertisers like the fact that each message to the listener can be tagged with a "powered by" message, making each communication brand-specific.
The partnership will offer premium messaging strategies, with CBS RADIO listeners being able to join mobile clubs that give them access to ringtone and wallpaper downloads.
TiVo announced 'TiVoCasting' today which looks just like their existing Video Podcasting efforts but with a few content partners and a shiny new name. I guess the word "podcast" was too much of an homage to Apple so TiVo decided to try and make up a new word with their own branding.
It's cool to hear they have Cnet, NYT, and Rocketboom video downloads lined up -- I watch a lot of those small grainy videos and I'd much rather see them on the living room couch instead of a laptop or home office monitor. It'll really get interesting when TiVo eventually broadcasts content exclusively to customers. I'd love to see independent movies, unaired niche sporting events, or even popular lists from YouTube show up on a TiVo.
Cablevision said this afternoon that it will delay a trial planned for later this month and will postpone the launch of its network DVR at least until fall while the legal issues are being resolved. Cablevision is being sued by several studios and networks over the company’s plans for remote-storage DVR; they argue it’s really VOD and requires additional rights agreements. Cablevision countersued Wednesday, claiming that the plan is covered by “fair use” as defined in the 1984 Sony-Betamax decision. The two sides agreed to an expedited calendar in hopes of resolving the matter quickly. According to Multichannel News, discovery is supposed to completed by the end of July, briefs are to be filed in August and September with the hearing in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in late October.
Related:
– TV Networks Sue Cablevision
– Add Turner’s CNN, Cartoon Network To List Of Cablevision Remote DVR Foes
– Lawsuit Over Cablevision DVR Plans Could Change Copyright Law

comScore Media Metrix has published a breakdown of Technorati's visitors as well as inbound and outbound link traffic. comScore now tracks over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors to Technorati as of April 2006.
Of those people visiting Technorati.com in April, 29.6 percent arrived at the site via MySpace.com. Similarly, 26.6 percent of those leaving the site immediately went to MySpace.com. The high level of cross-visitation suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two sites.
Yahoo!, Wikipedia, eBay, and MSN are also high sources of traffic according to comScore. No mention of Google, or Technorati's media partners in the comScore analysis. Technorati's largest age demographic is 35-54 year olds (36%).
I've seen many instances of the "MySpace effect" on the growth of online startups. YouTube, Userplane, and Slide are just a few companies benefiting from easy integration with MySpace and its millions of users.
What exactly are we looking for? That's easy. We want compelling footage made with our audience of 18- to 34-yr olds in mind.
Check out the call outs, then watch a sample and you might just get inspired to take your phone out the next time you see something good. Oh yeah -- if it makes it on air, you'll get a hundred bucks.
Thanks to a new partnership with Sony Ericsson, Current is the first and only TV network to showcase your mobile videos. We're proud to be expanding the landscape of Viewer-Created Content (VC2) because, after all, you're still the heart of what we do.
Along with an upgraded player, YouTube now allows users to create video channels and share them with like-minded friends. "YouTube said that it aims to move beyond depending on the latest hit videos, which spread like wild fire across the Internet via e-mail. Instead, it wants to create a personalized programming experience akin to TV viewers surfing channels with a remote control," explains Reuters.
Last week, an Illinois school district adopted a new policy towards student online activities that’s already stirring up a lot of controversy. All students in the Libertyville-Vernon Hills Area High School District 128 participating in extracurricular activities will now have to sign a pledge saying they will not post inappropriate content on the Internet or they will face disciplinary action. The catch, though, is that the pledge also applies to online activities done outside of school. Will this decision stand up to legal scrutiny?
[via Social Synergy Weblog]
"http://slashdot.org/articles/06/06/06/1226236.shtml">Slashdot reports about Google’s launch of Google Spreadsheet. While this may be an attempt on Google’s part to try and insert advertising into new online realms, the core idea of co-editable spreadsheets and sharing data is definitely worthwhile.
Not many people are interested in putting their own personal data onto someone else’s servers. But, co-creating public or community data, and making that data open and shareable and re-useable adds a new dimension to knowledge commons.
Several similar efforts existed before the launch of Google’s online spread sheets, including:
The EditGrid developers weblog envisions co-editable web-based spreadsheets as a platform of “data democracy”:
A platform of data democracy In Wikipedia, users join the rest of the world to tie pieces together into a full picture. But there are many types of data which is not “wikipediable”, from comparing mobile phones to real-time tracking of where avian flu-infected birds are found dead.
Wiki data adds a quantitative dimension to wiki, which is an otherwise largely qualitative sphere of human collaboration.
For instance, communities can keep track of, and collaboratively create data bases on all sorts of data about their community, from environmental quality, to crime statistics, to termite or carpenter ant infestations per-household. This can allow people to collectively make facts about their communities transparent. It can also help them predict future trends together based on statistics.
Nicholas Negroponte once said: “In a digital age, data about money is worth more than money.”
The democratization of the tools needed to collaboratively collect and analyze data lower the barrier of entry for people to utilize and share data.
More resources: http://del.icio.us/srose/wikidata http://del.icio.us/srose/opendata
This month CC is presenting a Remix Art event inspired by the Free Culture movement, in Second Life. Artists are encouraged to submit remixes based on the images from Sharing is Daring and Free Culture NYU, according to the appropriate CC licenses.
Be ready to discuss your art remixes and other work!
Yahoo relaunched their video site last Thursday, offering "MyStudio," allowing content owners to upload their video, and paste them into web pages as well as view statistics on who is watching and see user ratings.
The very next day YouTube shot back by introducing new features of its own. Users can now create "channels," where they can aggregate either their own content, or that of others.
"Now all content creators and collectors, be it professional filmmakers, videobloggers or just people who love Chihuahuas can broadcast videos from their channel for all the world to see," YouTube's Maryrose Dunton said.
A new blogging feature will allow users to post YouTube videos directly to Blogger, BlogSpot and LiveJournal blogs from the Web site. Each video would include a clickable "blog it" link. Support for additional blogs is on the way, Dunton added.
The site also added a feature that allows the user to view a history of the last 100 videos watched on the service.
JuiceCaster, one of the first true application designed for high-end handsets and 3G networks, includes the ability to create new audio/video content directly within the web application and directly from the application on the cell phone.
An integrated audio and video recorder is embedded directly in to the JuiceCaster website and provides a way for users to capture audio. Uploaded audio content is available to other users immediately on the handset or the desktop.
Users can also capture multi-media content using their mobile phone
with the JuiceCaster application and effortlessly upload the content to
the web that can be viewed by other mobile phone users or friends and
family.
Juice Wireless is working with Kyocera to showcase social networking via mobile phone with JuiceCaster2.1 for BREW.
Mobilcast has an audio client for cellphones and PDAs that enable people to do just that.
ComVu says it has the world's first live video broadcast solution from a mobile device to a global audience. Bloggers, citizen reporters, family members, friends and corporate professionals can broadcast live events - simply and cost-effectively.
Today at GLOBALCOMM in Chicago, ZyXEL announced a WiMAX CPE and WiMAX PCMCIA Notebook card that's ready to go with the new IEEE802.16e-2005 standard.
ZyXEL says it makes mobile Internet access a reality with the added benefit of guaranteed Quality of Service. Alcatel is launching their 802.16e-compatible CPE products in cooperation with Taiwan-based Zyxel.
Get a fleet of Segways and go live. NY-1 everywhere (with DVB-H).
Hot on the heels of Friday's revelation in the New York Times that the Department of Justice and the FBI want Internet service providers to retain our attention data just in case they need to take a look at it, Steve Gillmor sends a memo to Bill Gates (with a few thoughts for the Attorney General as well):
Not only does this move collide with the goals of major cloud aggregators–Google for one has made it clear they will resist such demands as they have to some extent in the past–but it comes into direct conflict with the most potent wave in today's technology landscape: the user in charge. In a world where we recoil from attempts by spamsters, spyware, and identity thieves to steal our most personal data and use it against us, here comes Big Brother to demand our attention metadata without offering any service in compensation. At least Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo offer us free storage, calendar, or email in return for this data, even if it does go in and doesn't come back out. There is some sort of voluntary contract between users and providers.
Here's where the government bait and switch package starts to tick ominously: First it's about child porn. Everybody's against that. Then it's about terrorism. Ditto. But then, while we've got that data, let's go in and help our friends down at the MPAA and RIAA with their business model problem and police Intellectual Property "theft." What about peer-to-peer communications filled with inappropriate political concepts? When we've got you by the bitstream, folks, we decide what's OK, not you.
Kiyoshi @ 1.08p
Originally uploaded by yatta.
Ken Ikeda from Youth Sounds came by the Eyebeam Education Lab on Friday. Youth Sounds is about to establish a youth-staffed R&D lab in the Bay Area where young folks are trained in open source software development before working on projects for real world clients.
Apparently they're just breaking ground on the new site. I'll have to see if I can schedule a quick visit to their BAVC office while I'm in SF for Vloggercon this week.
I'll be speaking on the 'User Generated Content' panel at the Culture, Commerce, and Public Media Symposium at WNET on Monday. With Mary Hodder, Sam Klein, and Dave Marvit also on board, the panel's already stacked. I'll have to limit my comments to three or four sound bites plus a joke or two. Oh yeah, and a short movie. I'm thinking of showing this clip from Vimeo:
The latest broadband report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project offers some tantalizing evidence that certain aspects of the digital divide are finally being bridged. For many years, high-speed Internet access was the realm of the elite - generally made up of white, well-off, well-educated suburban families. According to the Pew report, which surveyed respondents during the first quarter of 2006, broadband access is rising across the board. And who's using broadband for online publishing? You might be surprised. I certainly was.
As of March 2006, 42% of all American adults - 84 million people - had a high-speed Internet connection at home, up from 30% the previous year. Amazingly, the 24 million new broadband users surpass the total number of broadband users that were online a scant four years ago.

Home broadband access, 2000-2006. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.
Whites continue to surpass African Americans on broadband access, with 42% of white households having access, compared to 31% of African Americans. At 41%, English-speaking Latinos have reached parity with white households, but the report does not account for the non-English speaking Latinos, who presumably go online much less. Income and education continue to be major barriers, though. While 68% of families earning more than $75,000 a year are online, only 21% of households making $30,000 or less had access. Similarly, (Interestingly, the strongest broadband growth rate occurred in middle-income households making $30,000-$50,000 a year.) 62% of households with someone completing a college degree had broadband, compared to only 17% of households in which no one achieved a high school diploma. So while progress is being made in terms of the racial digital divide, income and education remain enormous roadblocks.

Home broadband demographics. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.
My first reaction to this data was that the jump in broadband access is a direct result of telephone companies lowering the cost of DSL. Many DSL companies have started to offer introductory rates of $15 a month, less than half the typical rate. Indeed, the average cost of DSL in December 2005 was $32, down from $38 in February 2004. (Cable Internet access remained steady at $41.) So it would seem that cost must have been a major factor in getting new customers to switch. But according to the Pew report, this isn't the case. A whopping 57% of respondents cited speed as their primary reason for getting broadband, while only three percent said their reason was the cost of broadband lowering to an affordable level. This suggests that more people are willing to pay for broadband because of the quality of the speed. Perhaps the reasoning behind this is that so many websites now require broadband to function properly, they're egging households into upgrading their Internet access.
The Pew report also takes a look at how broadband households are using the Internet to publish online content. Overall, 35% of Internet users - 48 million people - have posted content to the Internet. Broadband users are more likely to post online content than dialup users - 42% versus 27%. This is especially true of bloggers and people who manage their own websites. While an average of eight percent of Internet users publish their own blog, 11% of broadband users had blogs, compared to only four percent of dialup users. Similarly, while an average of 15% of Internet users published websites, 17% of broadband users did this compared to only 11% of dialup users. (I wonder, though, how many of the respondents said they published a website rather than a blog because they didn't know the term "blog," since some online journaling tools that are essentially blogs don't use that terminology.)

User generated online content. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006.
![]() |
Demographics of online publishers. Source: Pew Home Broadband Adoption 2006. |
Pew then asked respondents if they had ever done any of these specific activities: shared something they created themselves like a story or a video, created their own webpage, worked on others’ webpages, or created a blog. Not surprisingly, young people were much more likely to say yes. While 43% of respondents ages 18-29 said they had done one of these online publishing activities, only 29% of 50- to 64-year olds said yes, while just 18% of those 65 and older said yes. Meanwhile, race appeared to be a small factor, but in a rather counter-intuitive way: while 32 percent of whites said they had done one of these online publishing activities, 39% of African Americans and 42% of English-speaking Latinos had done so as well. So while whites may continue to use broadband in higher numbers, a higher percentage of African American and Latino broadband users are taking advantage of their access as content publishers. Similarly, income and education gaps are relatively minimal in terms of content production: 32% of users without a high school diploma versus 38% of those with a college degree, and 32% of users earning less than $30,000 a year versus 41% of those making $75,000 or more.
Does the Pew report suggest that the digital divide has been bridged? Hardly. The vast majority of low-income and low-skilled households lag behind, and gaps exist among racial groups, albeit less than before. But as we continue to work to give more people the skills and opportunities to go online, it would seem that more people of different racial, economic and educational backgrounds are taking advantage of those skills and opportunities to contribute online content. To me, this validates the whole notion of bridging the digital divide - democratizing cyberspace and giving people a voice.
It's not about access. It never was. It's about what people do with that access. And more people than ever are using that access to be creators of content, rather than mere consumers of it. -andy
Mercury News has a good package of stories on the video sharing site..the first one is a long profile of YouTube, all of which you probably already know about. The second one is more interesting, contrasting how these upstart sites like YouTube, Guba and Grouper, which embrace the Silicon Valley culture, are trying to make inroads into Hollywood and making content deals with the biggies. Silicon Valley is a world of handshakes and business cards. Hollywood is a world of kisses on the cheek and late-night martinis, as the story says, and Guba CEO Tom McInerney, for one, is trying to adapt.
“He has learned to navigate Hollywood’s hierarchical strata, a pecking order that extends from the studio parking lot, where Bentleys occupy spots reserved for actors, directors and executives, to the club scene, in which expensive memberships are frequently required.”
This is ridiculous…Infront Sports, the media rights holding agents for the football/soccer World Cup, which is starting next week in Germany, has been sending out pre-emptive “threatening” letters to sites and ISPs which it thinks will/may be doing unauthorized streaming and downloading of the matches (and put up unauthorized images as well). BoingBoing, the most popular blog on the planet, got one letter from the law firm representing Infront…the letter states that the firm “anticipates the possibility of unauthorized streaming and downloading of FIFA World Cup matches.” The letter goes on to warn Boing Boing that Baker & McKenzie (the law firm) will be “actively monitoring your website … to identify unlawful activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to ensure the protection of Infront’s rights of those licenses.”
Earlier last month, a Canadian ISP got a similar letter; another Swisss ISP also got the letter; so did another Dutch ISP and probably this German ISP as well.
And to think that this is probably the first global sports event which has such extensive online streaming rights built in. And also, to send one to BoingBoing? Why? What were they thinking?
MySociety is one of the enduring examples of simple use of internet tools to support community and democracy in the UK. Now they've created a new tool, Travel-time Maps, which addresses some of the holes in other online trip-planning map services.
Essentially, rather than find travel routes based upon known destinations, you can find out how long it takes to get to certain places using various modes of transit, and choose your destination based upon that information (useful in making decisions about where to work, where to live, or where to enjoy leisure travel).
The colour scale is in hours of total travel time. Warm colours indicate short travel timered for four hours or less, orange and yellow for four to eight hoursand cool colours longer journeys...Areas with no colour at all...cannot be reached at all by rail and a taxi journey of up to one hour.
The MySociety mappers would like to extend this service to gradations according to cost, in addition to travel time; a comparison of journey times to housing prices, which would aid prospective home buyers in choose where to live; better modal comparison maps for rail and road transit; and real-time capabilities for producing on-demand maps.
(Posted by Sarah Rich in The Tech Bloom Collaborative and Emergent Technologies at 09:14 AM)
Right on the heels of my Vox post, I came across these words from Rebecca Mead, in an interview given by friend of Hello, Typead Jason Kottke:
Anyone who read my story in the New Yorker will probably understand that I am more interested in bloggers as characters than I am in blogging as a -- yawn -- phenomenon.
Jason linked to the interview in response to her follow up to the You've Got Blog. What's striking to me is how prescient this seems in retrospect. Good blogging, like good films and novels, is character driven. When people treat it like a phenomenom or set of buzzwords, it bombs. When people treat it as a platform for learning about their friends and themselves, it's beautiful.
This leads me to the Sixth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival, which officially launched yesterday. The festival is a project of MediaRights, where I worked for three years, two of those years as Director of Technology. I produced three festival web sites (in 2004 SxSW gave us the best non-profit website award), so naturally I have a special place in my heart for this project. This year's festival may be the best one yet, and it's been awesome to see the momentum build from year to year, especially since I remember when the site was a fraction of the size and importance it is today. Some of the characters you'll find this year - a hip-hop group from Minnesota bringing a hidden camera into an interview with an army recruiter, a community in Michigan fighting the rising costs of water and, also in Michigan, Asparagus farmers talking about why eating (and growing) local food is so important.
MediaRights and Vox are both going to be huge hits because they are character driven ideas made into websites, and they both solve real problems in our world. Vox and MediaRights both help people communicate with the world about the things that they feel passionate about. MediaRights puts these passions on DVD, streams them to millions of web visitors and tours them to six continents, and Vox helps you communicate not just with the world but also with those closest to you.
ZDNet’s David Berlind has started to compile a Del.icio.us list of examples of ‘DRM train wrecks’, i.e. situations where the use of DRM has a distasteful corollary for consumers unaware of what they’re getting themselves into.
“Most people don’t realize how much they’re giving up when they consciously or sub-consciously use solutions that depend on [DRM]. I get a lot of email that accuses me of being a Chicken Little that overblows the situation by saying the sky is falling. Well, the sky is falling and if those folks want to live in denial, that’s their problem.”
Some of the examples are more straightforward cases of sloppily designed DRM implementations leading to security problems, such as the Sony Rootkit case; examples of ‘DRM switcheroo’ (what I’ve previously called feature deletion or external control on this blog) also abound.
Real-life anecdotes of users who have lost all their (legally acquired) music due to DRM errors or licensing changes - as I discussed in ‘Consumers’ reactions to DRM‘ - are perhaps one of the best ways of driving the message home to consumers (for example the examples discussed here).
The ‘DRM train wreck’ tag is a great initiative. I guess in time it would be good if DRM’d content acquired a stigma from consumers’ point of view, clearly seen as undesirable and worse than second-best, a format to avoid.
What is the most popular movie in Hong Kong? It is not M:i:3 (which is likely not to be shown in mainland China) and it is not Da Vinci Code (which is severely criticized by the Catholic Church). No, it is a stealth video clip entitled "巴士阿叔, Bus UncleTube.
The incident occurred on the top deck of a Number 68X Kowloon bus on April 29. A young man observed that the middle-aged person in front of him was talking too loud on the mobile telephone. So he tapped the man's shoulder and asked him to keep the volume down. This led to a vigorous response, including a string of obscenities. The entire proceedings were recorded by another passenger named John using a mobile camera phone. The film was uploaded on YouTube and then seen by the whole wide world. As of May 19, 1.2 million people have watched the video clip! (Update: 1.9 million as of May 26; ETTV cited a 5.9 million figure on May 27, which probably combines all the editions).
Yes, but so what?
Well, I must say that even I am astonished by the spontaneous media exposures and brand extensions that have occurred so far.
Filed under: Culture, PC, Online, MMO, Business
As most everybody knows by now, you can sell (virtual) stuff in the (virtual) world of Second Life. It should therefore come as no surprise that sellers are using advertising to hawk their wares.
One Second Life denizen (Nylon Pinkney, who blogs here) created three ad spots to stimulate demand for the Nylon 35mm, the Nyloid Super Color 1000, and the Nylonic VHS Camcorder.
There's real money to be made selling virtual goods for virtual dollars. How long before the first virtual ad agency is founded for the purpose of creating sexy spots for virtual goods? Better yet, how long before established advertising agencies hire real sluts starlets to appear in said spots? Right now, all of the advertising we've seen is first-party and generally incomparable to advertising seen on prime-time television. That will eventually change, but when?
[Via The Daily Graze]
Strangers and friends are connecting in online communities, as described in this Memorial Day article in the Washington Post:
As the country observes the memory of those who died in its wars, online memorials have altered acts of bereavement and become palliative retreats for some who grieve. Web sites dedicated to the deceased now number in the millions in the United States, and for those left behind, posting stories, photos and videos is a way of keeping a permanent record of the person's life. Material added to mark important days such as birthdays, Mother's Day and Memorial Day, or even notes left by well-wishing strangers help the page evolve, so the memorial itself can take on a kind of second life.
Playing a game within a game, like an electronic version of a Matreshka.
Originally from Waxy.org Links, ReBlogged by eteam on May 29, 2006 at 07:51 PM
It's called "Sway's Hip Hop Owner's Manual," an upcoming series that's produced exclusively for mobile devices. The show's host, Sway Calloway, is shot tight for the small screen. During an interview, Calloway and his guest are asked to "stand a little bit, um, unnaturally close to each other." One of the show's producers, Sean Lee, explains that it becomes personal in a way TV never does. "He's saying: 'Hey, it's me, on your phone. I'm talking to you.' "
According to the Miniwatts Marketing Group's Internet Usage and World Population Statistics (last updated March 31, 2006), worldwide Internet penetration is only 15.7%! So much for the World Wide Web... this is indeed sobering stuff for those of us obsessed with 'web 2.0' technology. Here's the main table of stats:
|
WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
World Regions |
Population |
%
Population |
Usage |
Usage
Growth |
|
14.1 % |
2.6 % |
2.3 % |
423.9 % |
|
|
56.4 % |
9.9 % |
35.6 % |
218.7 % |
|
|
12.4 % |
36.1 % |
28.5 % |
177.5 % |
|
|
2.9 % |
9.6 % |
1.8 % |
454.2 % |
|
|
5.1 % |
68.6 % |
22.2 % |
110.3 % |
|
|
8.5 % |
14.4 % |
7.8 % |
342.5 % |
|
|
0.5 % |
52.6 % |
1.7 % |
134.6 % |
|
|
WORLD TOTAL |
100.0 % |
15.7 % |
100.0 % |
183.4 % |
Source: World Internet Usage Statistics and Population Stats (nb: removed two columns to make it fit)
In North America, where most Web innovations still come from, the penetration figure is 68.6%. However in Africa it's just 2.6%, Asia 9.9% and the Middle East 9.6%. Together Africa, Asia and Middle East make up 73.4% of the world's population. So that basically means 3/4 of the world has extremely low Internet penetration. The one positive note is that usage growth rates are encouraging (see column on the right).
Interesting to note that China, seen by most analysts as a big growth market for Web technologies, has an Internet penetration of only 8.5%. Considering that great parts of China are rural, this isn't overly surprising. Also mobile technologies have a much bigger impact in China, than the PC.
Still, these figures put things into perspective. I feel very lucky to live in a country (New Zealand) that has 76.3% penetration - even if the broadband is slow and expensive!
p.s. amazing how in these circumstances Pete
Cashmore has managed to get 5 billion RSS subscribers ;-)
I like the concept.. A bit like turning video blogging into a sustainable "public medium". Maybe.
Would like it even better if the creative output of this was Creative Commons licensed, perhaps Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License would be appropriate.
From the site:
Have Money Will Vlog? What’s the deal?
Many good projects need only action to be successful. With the distribution of the internet, a person with a good video project can be seen by thousands of people. But some ideas need money.
Money for equipment.
Money for travel.
Money for time.
Traditional artists can apply for grants to make their work. Have Money Will Vlog supports videobloggers trying to do the amazing. The power of the community can fund projects on a regular basis. You easily spend $10 or more everytime you go out to see a movie…so consider donating $10 a month to a videoblog project. If we have 100 people that give $10 a month, that’s $1000. Let’s energize creators.
Here's our current theatrical release schedule for The War Tapes. When we know more, we'll tell you, but save the date -- make sure you're there on opening night:
6/2 – NYC (Sunshine)
6/30 - WASH DC (E Street)
6/30 – BOSTON (Kendall Sq)
6/30 – SAN FRANCISCO (Castro)
Appropriate technology is an approach to design for development which emphasizes, in a nutshell, better design for essential low-cost technologies which local communities can build and repair themselves. The Appropriate Technology Wiki Porject is a new effort to both update the classic Appropriate Technology Sourcebook and to facilitate open source design.
It's a really cool site, with already including ideas for Agricultural Tools; Aquaculture; Beekeeping; BioGas; Crop Drying, Preservation, and Storage; Improved Cookstoves and Charcoal Production; Nonformal Education and Training; Small Enterprises and Cooperatives; Solar Energy; and Water Supply and Sanitation as well as a bunch of other interesting information.
(via Emeka)
(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 07:53 AM)
A new lifestyle trend is springing up in South Korea, one of the world's most advanced digital hotbeds more and more folks are retreating to their homes instead of socializing with others. The Korea Times reports.
Experts call the phenomenon "digital cocooning'' because such a fad is enabled and accelerated by the digital revolution, which is occurring here in a full-fledged manner.
et and wireless technology is generating two seemingly conflicting tendencies - some are enjoying a nomadic outdoor life thanks to wireless gadgets while others stay nested up at home with them,'' said Park Jung-hyun, a senior consultant at LG Economic Research Institute.
"The former can be called digital nomads, the latter digital cocoons, or ones who retreat into the seclusion of their homes for privacy or escape,'' Park added.
"If digital cocooning represents future trends, it is understandable that such digital alienation mushrooms in technologically-advanced Korea faster than other countries,'' he said.
... Samsung Head: Most Famous Digital Cocoon? Korea's richest businessman, Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee.
Via Stephen Downes here is Jem Stone's summary of the BBC blogging policy for employees. This clear, cogent and reasonable document was written collaboratively, using a wiki.
Google Adds Video Capability to AdSense
So sites like PJNet.org, which could sign up for AdSense, would not only get instant text ads playing off the website content, but also video ads.
Gokul Rajaram, product management director for AdSense, says:
"We expect it to be popular with movie studios who want to show trailers, automakers who want to show demonstrations of the vehicle or consumer package-goods companies," he said, adding that he envisions the offering will be popular with both large and small advertisers. Imagine, he said, the owner of a small beachfront vacation home in Maui showcasing the home through video ads in a specific travel blog on the Google ad network.
We all know who rules the roost when it comes to downloaded music sales. But who's number two? The answer may surprise you.
In the 18 months since the relaunch of eMusic, the company has clawed its way to the number two position among digital download services (this does not include streaming music). Pakman claims that eMusic has 12 percent of the market compared to Apple's 61 percent, and that his company has now sold more than 60 million songs.
Ars looks at eMusic to discover how it has made a thriving business out of selling DRM-free music in an open format.
Intelsat, which introduced a new MPEG-4 satellite-based content delivery and management service last month known as Ampiage, today announced that Content Services, Inc. will be the first Ampiage distributor. CSI will focus on delivering wholesale video, voice and data services to retail providers in the multi-dwelling unit, hospitality, municipality, university and master planned community markets.
Intelsat, through Ampiage and CSI, allows North American multiple systems operators to expand programming offerings. Under the agreement, CSI will deliver wholesale video, voice and data services to retail providers across the United States using Intelsat's satellite-based, open-architecture, video transport platform.
It will initially focus on distribution to multiple system operators (MSOs) seeking to cost-effectively upgrade video content to MPEG-4 as well as telecommunications operators (telcos) and Internet Service Providers looking to enter the IPTV or triple-play (voice, video and data) market.
"The agreement with Intelsat is key to our ability to deliver price advantaged wholesale digital content to our customers," added David Luman, CEO of Content Services. "MSOs and telcos traditionally have had to spend millions of dollars simply to be able to receive digital content. Through our relationship with Intelsat, CSI Digital customers can now upgrade existing MPEG-2 systems or enter the digital video market at a fraction of the cost required previously, while creating unique local packages customized for geographic and demographic concentrations."
Ampiage originates from Intelsat's Video Operations Center (right), where video and audio are received and processed for distribution to telco and MSO video hubs nationwide. Ampiage distributes the programming via their Intelsat fleet. Telcos and MSOs then distribute this programming content via xDSL, fiber, conventional cable networks and other broadband networks to their residential subscribers across North America.
Ampiage plans to reduce the upfront investment with a flexible pricing structure, customized to the customers' business model.
Last year Intelsat bought Panamsat for some $3.2 billion. That deal made Intelsat the world's largest satellite carrier, ahead of SES Global, previously the world's largest. A combined Intelsat/Panamsat would have 53 satellites with customers in over 220 countries.
Competitor SES AMERICOM launched IP·PRIME last year. BellSouth is using AMERICOM’s IP-PRIME for their IP-TV trial. AT&T told the Wall Street Journal on Friday that service will next be launched in Austin. That would be followed by additional launches in the third quarter in all of AT&T's regions, including the West, Southwest, Midwest and East Coast.
SkyStream also provides IP video delivery over satellite. SkyStream’s software and hardware is said to lower costs for service delivery and optimizes video delivery in any network. TANDBERG Television, a leader in MPEG-4 IPTV, bought SkyStream this year. SkyStream’s high density Mediaplex-20 and iPlex switched digital video headends for MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC encoding and transcoding are used extensively by IPTV operators in Asia, Europe and the US. TANDBERG/Skystream has a variety of IPTV gear under one roof for the global marketplace.
Skystream's zBand is a PUSH VOD platform to enable content delivery through both unicast and multicast networks. It lets subscribers access and manage their VOD services around the home through a broadband Internet connection. Another IP-TV delivery company is GlobeCast, a subsidiary of France Telecom. It uses MPEG-4 to deliver more than 100 World Television channels.
Cavalier Telephone & TV today announced the launch of its new Broadband TV service in Richmond, Virginia. The company is said to be the first telephone provider in the United States to offer MPEG-4 AVC over a broadband connection. AT&T's Uverse IP-TV service in San Antonio won't launch until later this year.
Cavalier will deliver over 150 digital channels including all local network affiliates. It utilizes an interactive electronic program guide with parental controls and on-screen caller ID to monitor incoming telephone calls. Cavalier's "Triple Play" will offer local and long distance telephone service, high speed DSL and over 150 tv channels for $95/month.
DIRECTV, the US direct-to-home satellite operator, uses DiviCom MV 100 encoders from Harmonic for MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264/AVC) compression of standard-definition services. DIRECTV is introducing local SD and HDTV over satellite using MPEG-4.
Another route to the home is multicasting mobile tv wirelessly for reception on cellphones, PDAs and laptops.
Related DailyWireless stories include; Intelsat Offers IPTV, The IPTV Gamble, AT&T's WiFi TV, NAB 2006, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IPTV Networking, Telco's Left Behind in IPTV Armageddon?, PBS + MovieBeam, WorldView, Cuban: Broadcasting Not Dead, Wireless IP-TV Box, IP-TV End Game, Cisco Buying Scientific Atlanta, SBC Picks IP-TV Settops, GoogleNet?, The Free Triple Play, VDSL-2 Ratified, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IP-TV Settops, Legislators: Don't Mess With SBC, DirecTV + WiMax?, Muni Wireless Laws, and Duopoly Laws.
Youtube.com, per Alexa, has surpassed the BBC's website in traffic. Check it out:
Asia Times Online has a great article on the state of Chinese standards initiatives. This is in light of the expected release of licensed home-grown third generation (3G) services that will be available in mid-July. 3G technology, also known as TD-SCDMA, will compete with Western W-CDMA and CDMA-2000.
This new technology follows China's push with their 11th Year Plan in developing their own innovations in standards from DVD's, codecs, to PC's (Godsen II Dragon Dreams).
The article explains why home-grown TD-SCDMA is a source of pride for China. Here are some points they made:
Here's a great graph from Asia Times that shows the status of Chinese Standards Initiative (I copied and pasted the info an Excel file.)
Technorati Tags: 11th year plan, beijing, CDMA-2000, china, chinese, chip, development, economic, experience curve, first mover advantage, global, home grown, innovation, intellectual property, internet, IP, license, product, standard, TD-SCDMA, technology, W-CDMA, western
From Virtual China: Baidu, China's leading search engine, has launched the Baidu Encyclopedia ((百度百科), according to China Web2.0 Review. As of 7:30 today it had 2768 articles written; at 7:51 it had 2909...you can see the articles piling up before your eyes. The intro says: Baidu is in line with the equal, cooperative, and sharing spirit of the Internet...it provides a stage for Internet users' creativity.
Since Wikipedia is blocked in China, we'll see just how creative Baidu writers can actually get.
And a reader asks: How can you edit it this way? What if there's a mistake? How reliable is this encyclopedia?
Random survey of articles written in last few minutes:
"Baidu Baike does not mention Taiwan, Tibet, democracy, human rights, or any of the controversial topics besetting modern China. Nor, it's been noted, is it neutral when compared with Wikipedia. For example, it paints a very biased picture of Chinese historical figures such as Mao Zedong, forgetting to tell its users of the seventy million Chinese citizens who died as a result of Mao's actions and policies "
Technorati Tags: baidu, encyclopedia, wiki, wikipedia
Tom Abate blogs in the excellent San Francisco Chronicle's Tech Chronicles about new net neutrality legislation:
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced legislation Friday that would define open access to the Internet and give the Federal Communications Commission broad powers to investigate alleged abuses. The Senate bill is a boost for Internet companies that are fighting telephone industry plans to create toll roads on the Internet, an issue dubbed "net neutrality." The newly-introduced Senate bill is virtually identical to legislation proposed by Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) that was rejected by a House comittee last month.In its current form the House bill gives telephone companies a freer hand to charge traffic-senders higher rates for faster service. Phone companies say they need this incentive to justify their investment in providing better broadband access to homes. The House bill is expected to come to a floor vote in June.
In a related development Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation Thursday that would make it an antitrust violation to set preferential broadband access rates, a stand favored by Internet companies
.
Citizens for Global Solutions is a DC-based non-profit dedicated to building U.S. political will and increasing awareness among U.S. citizens about our global interrelationships. As a part of Global Solutions' educational and youth outreach initiatives, they've launched a flash video contest, asking students, and young designers to create videos that address global issues, and the role of the U.S. within them.
The contest has closed to submissions, but you can still vote for your favorite. There are twenty finalists, ranging in age from 14 to 32, and hailing from all over the U.S., Mexico, Germany, and Colombia. You can watch all the fims and vote for a winner here.
Thanks, Charles!
(Posted by Sarah Rich in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 11:59 AM)
The new music video for Pearl Jam's "Life Wasted" was released today under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license, so that people anywhere can legally copy, distribute, and share the clip. This is the first Pearl Jam video to be released in eight years and, as far as we know, the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. Pearl Jam and J Records are offering the video as a free download at Google Video from today, May 19th, through May 24th. After May 24th, the clip will be made available for sale. For more information, check out PearlJam.com and CC's press release.
Cool Hunting Video: ITP Spring Show 2006
For those of you wondering what I do all day every day, check out this video of the ITP Spring Show from Cool Hunting. Very nicely produced!
The president of the Society of Professional Journalists reacted to a blog post on ABCNews.com's "The Blotter" that reported that a federal source told ABC News that reporter calls were being tracked as part of an effort to identify leaks in the government. David Carlson said it would be "outrageous" and a "sad commentary on the state of the nation." Meanwhile, ABCNews.com has been following up on the story with reaction, including a quote from new White House spokesman Tony Snow. "I would be concerned if there was grounding to it," Snow said. "I'm sorry, the pieces just don't add up."
Yahoo! presented its business strategy to analysts yesterday and gave the world a sneak peek at what's to come. A new advertising system is code complete and currently undergoing some testing and, if all goes well, will be rolled out later this year. Yahoo! plans to add advertising to it's new "coming soon" video site. The webcast was not working for me this morning; all my notes below are based on the slide deck.
The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well. The top navigation bar references "My Studio" which could be a way for anyone to author and upload their own video files or maybe add some special effects. The new site supports personal favorites, tagging, and ratings of each video. The existing Yahoo! Video site does not include any user-submitted content or metadata.
Yahoo! also showed off a new Yahoo! Finance design coming later this month. Charts are now interactive, showing the trading price corresponding to trading activity on a given day. It's now easy to overlay competitors or a benchmark index onto the graph for comparison. It looks like the only news correlation may be splits and dividends, but I'm only speculating based on a screenshot in a slide deck.
Yahoo! mentioned it has learned a few things from del.icio.us and is integrating its acquisition more closely with the redesigned Yahoo! My Web shown above. Bookmarks now have an interestingness sort and an easier way to add a link to your own bookmarks. Tags are now exposed for the entire community, brought front-and-center for easier browsing.
Helio is a new mobile virtual network operator, backed by Internet service provider EarthLink and Korean-based SK Telecom,
that has rolled out two phones being marketed especially for Myspace.
They even have the tagline, "Helio: Don't call it a phone." The phones
are being marketed to 18 to 32 year olds, costing around $250 and
between $85-135 per month for service. The phones make it easy to photoblog, add friends or send messages on Myspace, as well as to gift or beg friends for content like games, videos or ringtones.
One of the funnier posts from the Myspace profile created by Helio:
"In about a month or 2 there will be kids, teens, adults <---- ewww to the adults. Walking around with no concept of theyre surroundings because of this device. . . .SHAME ON YOU"
Updated with new info from Rocketboom: No, we can’t make it to every conference so we’ve been following just-concluded Syndicate online. Josh Hallett did a great job with audio but has been asked by IDG to take it down. No word about whether IDG is going to fill the gap. Some of the coverage:
On the Avenue: During her keynote, Amanda Congdon said video newscast Rocketboom is considering charging $4 a month for access premium content, although nothing’s official. [Note: Congdon clarifies in our comments area: “… We are considering charging $4/month for premium content: outtakes, a bi-monthly podcast, a full screen DVD quality version of the show, forums, etc. The show, in its current form, will always be free.”] Also a good rundown of a session about how syndication is changing publishing, advertising, marketing.
(via Barnako.com)
– Richard Edelman: The PR exec went to the conference, saw a sparse turnout from the ad/PR community and blogged a wake-up call: “This is the future of our business, folks, and we have to remake our work flow and our work force to accommodate the change. We are not going to learn by talking among ourselves at the 4As or PRSA–we have to engage bloggers on their home turf.”
– David Weinberger has a transcript of Edelman’s keynote. and a blow-by-blof of the Jeff Jarvis un-keynote.
– Jarvis covers Doc Searls’ keynote.
– One thread showing up in a few places: the idea that it’s all about aggregation now, not syndication. It’s not either/all, folks.
With this weekend’s addition of Flickr Group Browser, FlickrRandom and GeotagIt there are now 68 Flickr mashups listed here.
Besides the ones above, some of the most interesting mashups all-round have been built using Flickr’s API: Colr Pickr, Spell with Flickr, the Fastr game, Bubblr, FlickrSudoku, Virtual Places, matchr puzzle, and retrievr.
These makeup about 10% of the total of 665 mashups on the site.
In case you haven’t seen the last issue of Education Week, they’ve released their latest Technology Counts report. Each year, Ed Week takes an in-depth look at education technology in all 50 US states. They assign the states edtech report cards, analyzing how well they stack up against each other in terms of technology access, local tech standards for both students and teachers, data collection systems and other factors.
... "ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls".
... "Other sources have told us thatphone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation."
[The Blotter via The Wireless Report]
Holy cow. MySpace is going to be offering downloads of 24 at $1.99 a pop, on pages sponsored by Burger King, the motto of which is 'Have It Your Way'.
Gawp.
Obligatory buzzword-congested blurb from over-stimulated Fox president of digital media:
“This is truly the perfect marriage of compelling content, an extremely creative advertising partner and the Internet’s leading site for young adults,” said Peter Levinsohn, the president, of digital media for the Fox Entertainment Group.
“It really exemplifies our overarching strategy of doing deals that make sense organically, and we have high hopes that MySpace users will find it an attractive offering.”
Yesterday, I had a discussion with the boy about how fast the world is changing. It's easy to forget on a day-to-day basis, but Burger King and MySpace distributing TV? Who'd have thought?
It was fun to think back to pre-internet days, and imagine what our 1980's incarnations would have thought of the world we're living in today. It's only 20 years, and yet.. mobile computers, the internet, online gaming, daily blogging, RFIDs, iris scanners at Heathrow (ugh), Shazam, Skype, eyeToy, Wii, Smart cars, being fingerprinted and photographed going to the USA, biometric ATMs, DisneySea. When you think about it, things have changed a metric sodload, most of it for the better, I think (except for the privacy-invading stuff).
The speed at which broadcast is changing is quite amazing. There are announcements like the above on an almost-daily basis these days. The cacophony of offerings by this time next year is going to be something else again, and in five years time..?
Hurry up, future!

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has a website here. The website is very much a community and collaboration digital creature. Several features contribute to rolling out the latest information about the emerging laptop. Included is a website wiki that encourages public contributions while retaining content control by the OLPC team itself. The team-focused OLPC wiki page also links out to the “comprehensive description of the project” to be found at Wikipedia.
The Christian Science Monitor has a piece about this curious socio-cultural practice in Uganda: veejaying: the act of translating in real-time foreign movies for the audience:
“Veejaying” is now a central form of local entertainment. But the art involves much more than translation. Part sports announcer, part street preacher, part comedian, a veejay must fill in cultural gaps and keep the audience engaged, which - for many veejays - often means taking considerable creative license.
o jockey is an offshoot of the distinctly home-grown phenomenon of the video hall. Makeshift shacks commonly made of plywood and tin sheeting, they function as the main form of cinema for the Ugandan masses, most of whom cannot afford theater tickets or rentals of pirated DVDs.
(…)
The festival features a “Veejay slam,” in which some of the country’s best-known video jockeys display different styles and compete for the best audience response.
Why do I blog this? it’s curious to see that this practice goes further than just translating, and it eventually lead to new forms of entertainment in the forms of slam competitions or DVD editions.
A new form of tinkering cultural content.
Researchers in LA are trying to help world’s biggest media companies and their high-profile clients understanding the divided consumer’s attention span (source: NYT):
The Emerging Media Lab is run by Interpublic, a holding company for media- buying firms like Universal McCann and Initiative. Since February, clients like Sony, L’Oréal and Microsoft have been using the lab to try to figure out how to reach consumers who seem to be doing so many things simultaneously.
(…)
Market researchers as a whole are struggling to understand the realities of what often is called “concurrent media usage.”
(…)
For advertisers, the challenge is getting the message across in one medium while the consumer is simultaneously active in several media.
(…)
In the Emerging Media Lab, advertisers can observe “engagement.” Using cameras that feed back into an observation room, advertisers watch consumers use old technologies or try new ones.oes seem that a consumer who is multitasking is not devoting an equal amount of interest to all those activities. “Terms like multitasking imply equal attention,” said Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. “But cognitive science tells us this isn’t possible. You have to give priority to one in order to absorb the messages.”
Research or market research?
It’s clear that they are facing a real challenge but I tend to be quite pessimistic towards the advertisement world, which is actually not so much of a problem to me…
The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Vivid Entertainment (warning: adult content) will be offering movies for download onto DVD's that can be played on any DVD player.
Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer.nemanowvivid" title="Cinemanowvivid" src="http://mike.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/cinemanowvivid.jpg" border="0" />It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat.
"Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff," said Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, a consumer electronics think tank in Plano, Texas.
The $19.95 movies will use a new form of copyprotection (not CSS) that will prevent them from being copied.
Slate plans to begin "textcasts" of stories to iPods, Adweek reports.
Users can receive the full text of its daily "Today's Papers" feature, which aggregates the days news. The downloaded story will appear in the iPod's display window. Slate will deliver the text attached to 15-minute silent audio file.
Sascha Meinrath says HandsofftheInternet.com is yet another prime example of astroturf in action.
I can only suspect that telecom incumbents pay some sort of professional PR group to create websites like this specifically to misinform and mislead the public. So I decided to start an investigation to figure out who HandsOff actually was.A look at the "Membership Organizations" section -- and low and behold, membership organizations included: AT&T, Bell South, Cingular Communications, The National Association of Manufacturer and a host of industry front groups
Now, this is rather enlightening, and I probably could have stopped there. But what happens if you delve deeper?...
The Portland Oregonian editorialized (anonomously) that Net Neutrality is a bad thing:
Congress can't always tell what's best for the Internet, especially in anticipating problems that haven't yet occurred.Net neutrality -- the idea that everybody should be equal in cyberspace -- has gained momentum as a populist movement but seems no closer to becoming law. A House committee recently rejected a Democrat-led effort to legislate the principle, and a current Republican-sponsored draft telecommunications bill mostly avoids the subject...
Rich Bader who runs EasyStreet Online Services, the largest independent ISP in Portland, has complete coverage of the Net Neutrality issue. Bader is pro-netneutrality. But he doesn't hit you over the head with his side of the story.
David Isenberg is the real deal. He’s put together the most definitive presentation about the Net Neutrality issue I’ve seen. It’s here with audio narration. For those of you looking for the “dumbed down” version of the issue, here’s a video, while not entirely accurate in my view, introduces the subject to lay people.
Anonomous editorials are a vestige of the 19th century. They should stimulate people to think and consider the issue. Not pitch a company line.
Advance/Newhouse Communications -- which owns the Oregonian -- is linked in a joint mobile partnership with Sprint Nextel. The newspaper never mentioned that fact.
Who would you be more inclinded to believe?
Lee Dryburgh — a friend and recovering SS7 signalling guru — has stumbled upon a barbed and thoroughly wicked anonymous denunciation of the "Quality of Service" efforts of some distressed incumbent telcos. He’s posted it up over at TelephonyDiscussion.com.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:45 AMWired News: Brave New World for Public Media
I have the immense pleasure to be sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Illinois at Chicago for the First Monday conference, FM10 Openness: Code, Science and Content. (And, what is more, I am sitting next to the stellar Eszter Hargittai, another weery traveler fresh off the Beyond Broadcast meeting.) Without a doubt, it is the most internationally and racially Internet event I have ever attended, in real time, at least. I arrived in time to hear Michael Goldhaber's paper on "The Value of Openness in Attention Economy" which posited that the "trust authenticity" that blogs enable will replace the tradition peer-reviewed journal approach. Nick Jankowski of New Media and Society just disagreed, arguing that a blog will not help a junior professor get tenure. Fascinating question– I wonder what Daniel Drezner might say?)
The conference and First Monday itself walk the talk: volunteer-driven, with the scarce resources available to them devoted for travel stipends for what is, from what I have heard from audience questions, is an impressive set of scholars. (The organizers even worked what surely must be a daunting UIC bureacracy to provide us with wireless access. Thanks!)
I was going through the file folders of my handheld digital audio recorder throwing away some extraneous files when I found some audio I recorded for a podcast at the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow last September. The audio included an interview with Brian Rowan of the broadcasting equipment manufacturer Clyde Broadcast Products. Clyde Broadcast has been working with a group of Scottish secondary schools to develop a network of low-power radio stations programmed by students. The interview, which is about six minutes long, was recorded in a very noisy expo hall with one of the student radio stations broadcasting in the background. Combine that with Brian's Scottish accent, the interview takes a bit of concentration to follow, so I'd recommend listening to it with headphones if possible.
Enjoy the podcast. -andy
The figures are based on surveys conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science and The Listening Company in the United Kingdom and compared against 2003 and 2004 sales data from banks, mobile phone networks, supermarkets and car manufacturers.
What this means for companies: Get baseline figures comparing your word of mouth to that of your competitors. A word of mouth goal or a composite Customer Evangelism Score makes it easier for employees know how well they're doing in the word of mouth arena.
Via: WOMMA
Professor Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University just gave a fascinating talk about her research on how college students use the Internet, the digital divide that exists in terms of how people use the Net, and its policy implications. Here are some notes. -andy
The digital divide: We need to move beyond the binary thinking of haves and have nots and start thinking about the second-level digital divide - differences between people who are online and how they're using the Internet.
Various factors influence IT use - socioeconomic status, equipment, autonomy, social support, level of experience. And skills play a major part in influencing how they use digital media. But how do all of these factors interrelate? What's the relationship between skills and socioeconomic status, for example?
She tries to focus her research on average users rather than niche groups. The average person comes up with things you'd never imagine as they try to figure out how to manouver online.
She collected data from 270 young adults in a fall 2004 phone survey. She found that people with higher education had higher levels of online skills. But what really mattered was whether or not they had autonomy in their use - could they use it at home on their own terms.
People in more privileged positions might be using the Internet in ways that really benefit them - this adds to the divide.
Now she's looking at college student use of the Internet, based on 1,300 students at University of Illinois/Chicago (UIC) between Feb and March 2006.
Demographics: 58 percent female, less than 50% white - very diverse.
Used the internet for six years on average, 12 hours a week, with 80%+ using it several times a day. Around 87.5% of their use is at home, with only 8.2 percent in a library or lab, and 1.7 percent at work.
When asked how often students visit blogs, 29.1 percent visit personal blogs of friends and family on a daily basis, with 60 percent doing it sometimes. Interestingly, the least likely category of blogs they access are political blogs, even though these are the blogs emphasized in mainstream media.
Types of sites used: facebook, flickr, google, craigslist, livejournal, blogger, delicious, dig, skype, youtube, myspace. Facebook was most popular - 78 percent - and 50 percent for myspace.
64 percent have ever visited the Chicago tribune, 62 percent BBC, druge 3 percent, instapundit 1 percent, daily kos 1 percent.
Most popular activities: getting info for school work, downloading/ listening to music; looking up a word or definition; finding a fact about something.
41 percent knew what an aggregator/newsreader was; 36 never read privacy statements.
User backgrounds and types of activities: there are statistically significant differences in behavior.
Groups that use the Web less frequently: Women, African Americans, Latinos, parents with limited education, people who don't access the net at home much, people who don't own laptops, people who know less about the Internet
Differences in skill, not just access, may contribute to digital inequality. Skill differences may result in differential web use, suggesting different opportunities. It's not enough to focus on technical access; training and support are absolutely necessary.
tag: beyondbroadcast
The Communication Mods exhibition in Toronto features five works by Mark Argo, that explore human-to-human communication through the process of modification. Each piece asks the audience to participate by submitting some of their music, photos or videos using laptops and cameraphones. The end result is a snapshot of a particular community at a specific time and place though the catalog of collected media.
WhereTheHeartIs asks the audience to use their cameraphones to contribute iconic images of Toronto to a screen in the gallery. The images are then sent to small screen which Mark Argo wears over his heart. During the two-month exhibition, this installation will create a direct link between the artist and his home city, regardless of location.

WhereTheHeartIs, .dot.dot.dot and hugMS
hugMS and .dot.dot.dot are two bluetooth objects designed to augment mobile phone communication. The first one attempts to transmit hugs, using SMS messages. Sensors inside the device read how long and how hard you have squeezed and format a text message based on your hug (movie). The other, .dot.dot.dot, is a wearable display that shows to the people around you who you are talking to, or what you are messaging (movie).
CoDeck, developed in collaboration with D.Melinger, S.Van Every, Ami Wolf, is a platform for community media sharing embodied in a late 1970s Betamax machine. The community can upload media using a laptop or local desktop computer, or record an 'on-the-spot' message by pushing record on the video deck and speaking into the attached video camera. The CoDeck is connected to a TV and plays a constant stream of community-shared video content. Written comments can be added to each video, displaying at the bottom of the screen while it plays. (video: mpeg4 )

CoDeck and Bass-Station
The Bass-Station, with Ami Wolf, is a mobile and networked community-media space housed inside a vintage ghettoblaster. Contained in the ghettoblaster is a modern computer that creates a localized wireless network, and features bulletin boards, chat rooms and music. Music can be uploaded, downloaded and played by using a laptop or the knobs on the front of the boom-box.
York Quay Centre, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, through July 9th.
Other works by Mark Argo: Left, Right, Center - Your Pictures Your Politics, the Nicebots.
Via Fabrica.
Now, can you handle it, or do I have to write it out in braille and shove it up your ass? - The Gauntlet
BetaNews reports Nokia and Google plan to announce Tuesday a version of Nokia's Internet tablet preinstalled with the Google Talk.
The Nokia 770 WiFi Tablet (below) would be available globally for about $390. The Google Talk service would allow for free voice conversations and instant messaging.
There's the gauntlet. Run with it.
AT&T's WiFi TV is getting competition from on-line video hosting services like YouTube, that allow users to upload homemade clips via their mobile phones or PDAs. ComVu is working with Modeo, which is rolling out DVB-H services in the US, and expects to be operational in 30 major US cities throughout 2007. It allows live broadcasts from a PocketPC to millions.
In other news, Skype is now offering real-time language translation services for Skype voice calls with 150 languages supported. A live human supplies the interpretation through a partnership with Voxeo and Language Line Services.
It costs $2.99 per minute and you can use this on the fly with no scheduling. You can get an interpreter on average in 45 seconds after an initial request.
Andy Carvin just started "Learning Now," a new blog for PBS on "the crossroads of Internet culture and education." Yesterday, he discussed a new bill from Congress that would that would
require schools and libraries to block access to online social networks…According to the proposed legislation, the bill
prohibits access by minors without parental authorization to a commercial social networking website or chat room through which minors may easily access or be presented with obscene or in- decent material; may easily be subject to unlawful sexual advances, unlawful requests for sexual favors, or repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature from adults may easily access other material that is harmful to minors.
Andy adds this caveat:
The bill does have a loophole for allowing educational uses of online social networks. The legislation states that the filtering may be switched off "during use by an adult or by minors with adult supervision to enable access for educational purposes." It remains to be seen whether schools will allow educators to deactivate the filter to allow such access, given the poor track record many schools have for letting educators make decisions over which sites get filtered and when.
T-Mobile in the UK has launched an HSDPA-enabled data card in the UK, but at the same time has banned the use of VoIP across the service. The fine print on the new Web'n'Walk Professional service explicitly prohibits both...
Continue.
(Phone service is not an app! Don't look behind that curtain! -kc.)
"The global distribution of Internet users has sharply shifted away from the largely American base of years past, giving the "world" in World Wide Web new legitimacy,"this IHT article says."Figures from March show that fewer than one-quarter of global Internet users were in the United States,comScore Networks said in a report last week. A decade ago,the rate was about two-thirds.ComScore,a market researcher based in Chicago,says it believes that its latest research is the first worldwide survey that uses consistent measurements in all major markets,including China and India.Of the 694 million unique visitors over the age of 14 who used the Internet in March,the most were in seven countries:the United States (152.1 million),China (74.7 million),Japan (52.1 million),Germany (31.8 million),Britain (30.2 million),South Korea (24.7 million) and France (23.9 million),it says.Together,China,Japan,India and South Korea represent nearly 25 percent of the total worldwide online population,168.1 million users,a figure that in the aggregate is 11 percent larger than the U.S. online surfership.That is true even though the research excludes traffic from public computers like those at Internet cafés,a primary means of access in Asia,and access from cellphones or PDAs".
The End User:More world on the web
The Show is everything that is right with the Internet. --GH
Originally posted by moth23 from del.icio.us/moth23, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 11, 2006 at 08:23 AM
Whew! At least I can legally say what the name is! That’s been an embargo for almost two months now - as the code-name AIMspace leaked out in late January in Businessweek.
So now starts the next phase - testing.
So thanks to everyone for their interest, this IS a big story and REALLY big play and a disruption in the force - as we know it. Whenever a giant dinosaur changes its direction, attitude and strategy - it effects us all. And AOL is getting a clue, a major clue - almost in real-time.
The ramifications of how this will effect things - will unfold over the next few months. Certainly by the end of the year we’ll see if MySpaces supposed ‘inpenetrateable’ armor can be cracked.
From my vantage point - all I see are the features that DIDN’T make it into this rev. I see a year’s worth of work ahead of us and LOTS of great people to do that work. The trick will be to get a decent feedback loop setup between the developers and decision makers and the end-users - to make sure that everyone gets what they want.
Having a large company be responsive, relevant and open is a victory for the Cluetrain, open standards and the blogosphere. This is a direct response to the efforts at Yahoo to open up and can be credited with starting with AOL’s Live8 promo last summer (which they won an Emmy for - BTW.)
See how these battling dinosaurs effect us? Yahoo is buying up companies, hiring people and setting new levels of openness. Well now we got AOL doing the same!
Now we just need them to one up each other!
So be to clear - this is not a launch, but just the beginning of testing. But it IS AOL, and it IS based upon working with AIM and they ARE Time-Warner, so………

a set of simple line & bar graphs that enable users to compare the world's interest in up to 5 different topics. the visualizations depict how often these topics have been searched for on Google over time, how frequently they have appeared in Google News stories & which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
see also google finance & google zeitgeist.
[google.com]
AT&T and MobiTV today announced they will deliver mobile television content over AT&T's nationwide Wi-Fi network. The service will enable AT&T customers to view live television while connected to one of AT&T's/SBC's Wi-Fi hot spots.
The MobiTV service includes 15 channels spanning national news, sports, entertainment and full-length music videos. The service will be available this month at nearly 7,000 AT&T owned and operated Wi-Fi hot spots, which includes airports, coffee shops and book stores, with plans to expand to additional locations.
Users will have a basic channel line-up available through a monthly $11.99 subscription or for each 24-hour session for $5.99. Additional premium television channels will be offered soon.
"Having topped 1,000,000 subscribers and growing faster than ever, we've proved MobiTV's technology, business model, and profitability on mobile networks across international markets on three continents," said Dr. Phillip Alvelda, chairman and chief executive officer for MobiTV. "Now, in partnership with AT&T, the nation's leading DSL provider, we are proving that the MobiTV service can deliver premium quality content seamlessly across any of the latest broadband networks."
AT&T operates one of the nation's largest Wi-Fi networks with connectivity available at nearly 11,000 hot spots nationwide. AT&T's Cingular Wireless offer AT&T Yahoo! Go Mobile, for customized online content, services and community on a wireless phone. Customers of AT&T Yahoo! DSL landline service can also subscribe to AT&T Wi-Fi services for as little as $1.99 a month.
On-line video hosting service YouTube, now allows users to upload homemade clips via their mobile phones or PDAs.
"The good thing about it is that you don't have to go home to YouTube anymore," said Steve Chen, one of the company's founders and its chief technology officer. "People may not carry their digital cameras with them when they go out. But everybody carries their cell phone.
Mobile Burn reviews the Nokia N-80, a 3 megapixel camphone with WiFi and miniSD storage which will be available through Cingular. The phone can also run Nokia's LifeBlog software as well as the free ShoZu (beta) application which enables easy photo uploads to a number of free photo services including Yahoo's Flickr, Buzznet, TextAmerica and Webshots. The N-93 features a 3x Carl Zeiss zoom and DVB-H mobile tv.
Both can capture MP4 videos at 352 x 288; 176 x 144, and 128 x 96 pixels. The Panasonic Lumix FZ7 still camera (with SD card slot) can capture 640x480 or 848 x 480 pixels at 30fps.
Nokia teamed with Six Apart so you can upload posts to a TypePad blog account. TypePad's SplashBlog runs on a wide variety of camera phones and their Widgets provide flexibility. Nokia's Lifeblog 2.0 comes in two parts; software that is loaded onto phones plus compatible software for PCs.
YouTube allows any user to upload homemade clips via their mobile phones or PDA but Nokia and Yahoo make it particularly easy for mobile photographers to upload and add comments to Flickr.
Scoop broadcasters and newspapers...for pennies. Could you make $1000/week (or more) in local advertising? Find out today.
Meanwhile, Wi-Fi TV announced today unlimited free calls to any phone number in the United States or Canada. Wi-Fi TV members must download dialer client software to their PC which delivers advertising while they talk.
"As a global delivery platform for live TV and an online community, Wi-Fi TV Inc. is honored to be working with AdCalls to be bringing our members the best online phone service at no charge whatsoever for phone calls. The Wi-Fi TV branded dialer, powered by AdCalls, just keeps getting better, and Wi-Fi TV Inc. is launching the latest version online today," said Alex Kanakaris, Chairman of Wi-Fi TV Inc.
Wi-Fi TV members can also have the additional savings and convenience of being able to have food delivered to their door and use coupons for all kinds of savings on items for sale near their home or office.
In other news, TiVo will enable about 400,000 subscribers who have their "Series2" DVR machines connected via broadband to use their TVs to watch Web videos from Brightcove. Specific programs to be offered — possibly as early as June — have not been named, but Brightcove clients include Discovery Communications, MTV Networks, Reuters, The New York Times, National Lampoon, SmartMoney and Farmers' Almanac TV. Starting in summer 2006, users will be able to download their TiVO clips from the Verizon Wireless Get It Now onto applicable handsets.
Multicasting mobile television to millions simultaneously (like television broadcasting) is another route.
Aloha Partners will use two 6Mhz television channels in the 700 Mhz band utilizing the DVB-H system (HiWire), Verizon will use MediaFLO (on channel 54) and Cingular may use Modeo (at 1.6 GHz) for mobile tv.
Related DailyWireless stories include; WiFi TV, NAB 2006, Open Revolution, Camphones for Journalists, Rebuilding Media, Newspaper Podcasts?, Portable Photostories, PBS + MovieBeam, MediaFLO Gets Satellite Backbone, Mobile TV: The Battle is On, New Mobile TV Flavor: TDtv, Verizon Goes with FLO, Global Mobile Television, Sprint: Go with the FLO?, 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.
Reuters has invested in Global Voices Online, a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.
Global Voices says:
We’re thrilled to announce an alliance between Global Voices and global media company, Reuters. Reuters has been supporting Global Voices efforts since late last year, when they hosted our annual conference at their global headquarters at Canary Wharf in London.Yesterday Reuters announced a major contribution to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where Global Voices is based. This contribution has allowed us to hire our managing editor, Rachel Rawlins, to continue supporting our outstanding team of regional editors and to bring on translators, to provide better coverage of content in languages like Arabic and Russian. Support from Reuters will also allow us to do more outreach and training in parts of the world where there are currently few bloggers. Reuters’ generosity allows us to expand the range and quality of information we make freely available to anyone who cares to use it.
We’re especially excited about the relationship because we see a great opportunity to help Reuters - and the global media community as a whole - to understand blogging better and the impact of Citizen’s Media on the world of journalism. We believe that the information, opinions and perspective that bloggers share complement conventional journalism and that bloggers and journalists can work together to give us a more accurate and representative picture of events and opinions around the world.
You can already see some of the fruits of our work together. Global Voices worked with Reuters on their recent Iraq Newsmakers event, where bloggers from the Middle East participated in a conference in New York via streamed video and IRC, asking journalists tough questions about whether media coverage of Iraq has been fair. In the near future, you’ll see content by Global Voices editors and contributors appearing on Reuters websites, providing additional information and context to some Reuters newswire stories.
Global Voices Online is possible through the generosity of two groups: the editors and contributors to the site, and sponsors who make the site possible. We’re grateful to everyone who has made Global Voices possible so far and we thank Reuters for making it possible for us to make this site even better.
Here's a great discussion of Brazil's moves to redistribute the future by spreading open source software, free digital culture and copyleft. Well worth a listen.
(via BoingBoing)
(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 12:04 PM)
Bangladesh's booming mobile phone industry has emerged as a key driver of the cash-strapped nation's economy, creating nearly 240,000 jobs and adding 650 million dollars to gross domestic product, reports the AFP.
"The mobile phone industry in Bangladesh employs 237,900 people directly and indirectly. These are well-paid jobs with salaries many times the national average," said the study by the international consultancy firm Ovum.
the world's poorest nations with nearly half its 140 million population surviving on less than a dollar day. Around 70 percent depend on agriculture to make their living".

The curators Scott F. Hall and E. Brady Robinson of Mobicapping invite submissions for possible inclusion in their upcoming international juried online art exhibition,"Mobicapping: Mobile Image Capture in the New Century."
Definition: mobicapping is the new creative and technological practice borne of the instant capture and immediate international distribution potential of images, movies, and sounds via cell phones and other portable electronic devices.
Mobicappers may submit their mobicapps by May 15, 2006 to contact at mobicapping.com as email attachments. Submit either A) five still images (600 pixels longest side, max 250 kb per image) or B) two .MOV silent or sound movies (320 pixels longest side, max 500 kb per movie) or C) two MP3 sound files (max size 500 kb per file). Include artist name, email, location, and an artist statement / bio (max 150 words). No fees. Submission deadline: 05-15-2006. Exhibition opens: 08-15-2006.
MOBICAPPING: A PREMISE
Today, we record temporal moments with our cell phones and other small mobile devices which exist now and which are incessantly soon to be invented. The cell phone and its like, however do not elicit familial bonding as it has been in the past with the snapshot. There has been a marked cultural shift; our moments are more empty, more banal. Yet, paradoxically, we find ourselves and our experiences so much more interwoven--so much more widely shared--today than in any age prior. Such moments can now be found throughout the Internet. Instead of having a shell life in a shoebox stowed away in the family closet, our images and moments quickly move between emails, websites and even podcasts. But, where is all the art in this instantly local, regional, national, and international sharing? And, what do we call it?
We feel that this new form of image sharing in the 21st century is best described with a new term: mobicapping. Mobicapping means: mobile image capture (still, moving, and/or with sound). Those who participate in mobicapping--virtually all of us--are no longer photographers but are more accurately to be called mobicappers. Together, we are sending out a call for experimentation and exploration of the potential of the art of the mobicapper. The exhibition that we propose here will feature artists who are investigating this completely new creative and technological practice. "Mobicapping: Mobile Image Capture in the New Century" will open in August, 2006.
--E. Brady Robinson & Scott F. Hall
On the surface, the announcement that YouTube will allow people to upload video straight from their cell phones may not seem like that big of deal. But in effect, the biggest user-submitted video site on the web has just armed millions of people with the ability to cover news instantly from the field. When the next big domestic story breaks -- especially if it's in a major U.S. city -- YouTube will become the source of user-generated video. And it could potentially equal or surpass the video traffic served up by conventional online news sites.
I was having a conversation with a startup around social software the other day, and those conversations almost always end up being around issues of control. I was trying to explain them that mechanisms of control don’t necessarily need to be mechanisms of all-out restriction, but are often social mechanisms of setting examples, social control, deciding what content to surface and such.
So today I am happy to find this excellent blog: Architectures of Control in Design
During an interview at NCTA, Brian Lamb, the chairman and CEO of C-SPAN, spoke of the bandwidth costs and demands faced by the not-for-profit network’s increasing online activities. One option under discussion — a deal with Google Video — would include bandwidth and reduce the strain while offering ways to make money from some downloads or links back to DVD sales. The unexpected demand for Stephen Colbert’s controversial performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner gave the prospective partnership a chance for a test run. C-SPAN asked viral video sites iFilm and YouTube to pull the user-posted copyrighted material from their sites and, instead, chose Google Video as an non-exclusive provider. (The video already was available free on cspan.org and is still.) In exchange, Google agreed to offer the entire 95-minute, 17-sec. video intact for free alongside full excerpts of the most wanted segments — and to link back to C-SPAN’s front page as well as the cspanstore.org page where the dinner DVD is on sale for $24.95.
From a C-SPAN statement: “It is important for online video providers to understand that C-SPAN-produced programming is protected by copyright in the same way that the video of any other news network is protected. Our goal in enforcing our copyright has been and continues to be to ensure that C-SPAN’s reputation for unbiased coverage of the political process is maintained.”
Meanwhile, I just started the stream of C-SPAN’s coverage of a 43-minute speech by President Bush — unauthorized and uploaded by a political organization to Google Video.
Related: Brian Lamb, Chairman & CEO, C-SPAN: Exploring Online Money Making, Google An Option
I think this was supposed to go out a bit earlier, but SirsiDynix has published the latest issue of Upstream. I'm excited about this one because I helped pick the theme and suggested a few librarians to send the question. The issue deals with examples of community building.
You can download your copy here. The question posed was:
"What is the best example of libraries building communities that you have come across or experienced? How will libraries in the future be empowered to play even a greater role in their communities?"
Thanks to the 9 other librarians whpo provided answers. And a personal thanks to Thomas A. Tarantowicz for answering questions about the Brentwood Public Library, here on Long Island.
(cross-posted on the Libraries Building Communities blog)
Joystiq's got a blow-by-blow account of the Playstation 3 presentation from E3. This bit really stood out - using the EyeToy, the PS3 will be able to process augmented reality gaming:
Neat! Adrian Woolard at work will really dig this, he's been building some awesome AR stuff for the past few years... one for you, Ade.
Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 9, 2006 at 07:41 AM
PCCW, which runs the largest IP-TV service in the world, with some 549,000 IPTV subscribers in Hong Kong, is going global, expanding into the Middle East, South America and Mexico.
Headquartered in Herndon, VA and Hong Kong, with teams based in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas, PCCW Global, is a leading global MPLS VPN provider, delivering IP-TV to millions.
The PCCW Global network now covers 70 countries and over 700 cities worldwide. Their MPLS-based platform, says PCCW, makes it easier and more cost-effective for U.S., European, and Asian-based multinational corporations to provision global networks and bring services geographically closer to the customer. It can be used to carry many different kinds of traffic, including IP packets, as well as native ATM, SONET, and Ethernet frames.
"The Middle East and South America are both key parts of our global strategy and this expanded connectivity is in direct response to the growing market demand for converged IP solutions in these areas," stated Dan Lovatt, PCCW Global CEO.
AT&T/SBC's Project Lightspeed uses VDSL-2 over twisted pair to deliver the last mile. Verizon's FiOS fiber uses passive splitters in the neighborhood. Verizon users get fiber to the home but they must share bandwidth (and television programming) with their neighbors.
MPLS-based networks can bring GigE home. Dedicated, flexible and relatively inexpensive Ethernet. It's similar to Utah's UTOPIA model. It's more costly than Verizon's Passive Optical Networks or AT&T's VDSL, but an MPLS backbone can support all flavors of IP and can be managed at low cost.
According to a company memo obtained by Reuters, Verizon is fighting back on Net Neutrality, warning the financial services industry that the internet may not be secure enough if Congress adopts laws governing high-speed Internet broadband networks.
The financial services industry is weighing whether to wade into a fight over legislation on broadband service, known as "Net neutrality." It fears that without safeguards on pricing for network access, the costs to financial institutions could rise.Verizon, the No. 2 U.S. telephone company, opposes legislation for Net neutrality and sent the memo to its consultants urging them to discuss with banking industry clients the arguments against possible legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
Verizon's chief congressional lobbyist Peter Davidson warned that the financial services industry "better not start moaning in the future about a lack of sophisticated data links they need" if Net neutrality laws were passed because the communications industry may not invest in new networks.
Maybe the financial services industry -- and consumers -- need MPLS. Municipal MPLS. Owned and operated like WiFi city clouds. With net neutrality.
The game may now be moving to another level.
Verizon is investing in Super Computer International (SCI), a leading provider of high-performance game-server hosting solutions. The Verizon-SCI relationship will focus on next-generation, online platform called PlayLinc with expanded support for IM and VoIP, team management and buddy tracking.
Verizon and SCI plan to conduct a limited trial of an all-new browser-messenger that's powered by PlayLinc, then open the trial to the public this summer. Today, Verizon offers online gamers its Verizon Game Network which allows users to join one another online to play interactive games.
Meanwhile, India's House of Tata, as it is respectfully called in India, is investing $140 million in a company to design and develop supercomputers. The company’s first project will be to build a machine based on a parallel-supercomputing architecture developed by renowned computer scientist Narendra Krishna Karmakar. The architecture will be implemented using a high-speed switching chip devised in Israel. The machine reportedly will use off-the-shelf 64-bit Itanium processors.
Tata runs the global show via Singapore-based VSNL International. VSNL is the world’s biggest IP wholesaler.
Warner Brothers announces that it will sell movies via BitTorrent. That’s good news on many levels: It’s another attempt to take out the middleman (sell your Blockbuster and cable stocks!) It’s a conforming use of P-to-P. And if BitTorrent can be adapted to handle this, I’ll bet it can be adapted to handle advertising and if that happens, networks will run, not walk, to distribute shows online.
This morning, I listened to the latest Diggnation as Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht positively raved about the new ABC pilot of streaming some of its shows for free online (taking out its middlemen — sell the rest of your cable stock). They predicted that if the networks keep doing this, then in three years, more people will watch TV via the internet than via networks. Well, stranger things are happening.
Only thing is, once that happens, the networks themselves are middlemen. How long will it be before Warner Brothers makes shows to sell (or give away with ads) online direct to the audience, without networks or cable or video stores or dvd retailers or movie theaters?
: LATER: I should have said that Warner will distribute both TV and movies.
"MySpace users are filling out marketing profiles that are mined by the company that are then presented as these people's personal webpages. MySpace knows that controlling content on these profiles is essential, which is why they will commonly censor anything they disagree with. Considering MySpace has a considerable amount of bloggers, this is a serious issue for free speech advocates."
The ad agency that went after a Maine blogger has just dropped its suit in the face of big blogger pressure and consequent bad press. Bravo to the Media Bloggers Association for making it happen.
As mobile phones become an integral part of life - a fashion accessory as much as a necessary gadget - design trends of handsets are becoming more segmented to satisfy the needs of customers in different age groups. "Select and concentrate" has become a catchphrase among domestic handset marketers. JoongAng Daily reports.
Some highlights:
-- One focus this season is businessmen - Samsung Electronics recently began selling its Platinum Card Phone" (SCH-V870), which is 8.9mm thick and can fit into one's wallet. It comes with a case that doubles as a namecard holder. Pantech has also developed a phone targeting business workers in their 30s.
-- As "slim" is today's fashion buzzword, cell phones makers are focusing on slim handsets. Skinny jeans and leggings were trendy this spring, according to the Samsung Fashion Research Institute. ... Almost 50 percent the phones Samsung sold in the first quarter of this year were "slim-type" phones, up significantly from less than 10 percent in the same period last year.
-- The dominant color is white, away from black popular for the last few seasons. "
Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 7, 2006 at 03:06 PM
As a Web (2.0) consultant and analyst (about me), I track a variety of market segments and products. Luckily for me, nowadays I don't have to do as much grunt work on gathering high level product data as I used to. There are a plethora of product lists and data about web 2.0 companies on the Web now, unlike 12-18 months ago when I had to track it all down myself. Of course my job as a researcher and analyst is to go much deeper than the high level product data - I then need to turn it into practical insights, recommendations, knowledge, etc.
Anyway here is (in no particular order) a list of the web 2.0 lists and other helpful product data that I've found on the Web. I encourage you to add other sources in the comments.
I'm sure there are more web 2.0 lists out there which I've forgotten to mention, so please add in the comments and I'll update this post as they come in.
Update 7 May 06: Added more lists based on comments. Will do more updates as required.
DMasia reports that "there are an estimated 694 million internet users worldwide,according to a report from Comscore World Metrix.The study reveals that the internet is truly expanding worldwide,with the US representing less than 25 per cent of global internet users as of the end of March.The 'major' Asian countries,China,Japan,Korea and India,currently represent almost 25 per cent of the world's internet population,with 168.1 million users.Combined,these four countries have a larger internet user base than the US,which has 152 million users, the largest of any single country.China comes in second,with 74.7 million users,followed by Japan with 52.1 million.The report also measured the average hours spent online per visitor during the month of March 2006.Somewhat surprisingly,Israel topped the list,with each user average 57.5 online hours per month,compared to the global average of 31.3 hours per month.South Korea and Taiwan came in at three and five,respectively,with 47.2 and 43.2 hours per month.Though internet use is increasing in Asia, the region is not yet producing online content which globally competes with its US and European counterparts.US companies continue to dominate in terms of global page views".
Internet population nears 700m
Steve Yahn at Editor and Publisher tries to stir up some interest in what should be -- search-term advertising and other flavors of the month aside -- the trademark story of the moment:
Embedded deep in H.R. 683, "The Trademark Dilution Revision Act," which awaits what may well be a last look in the U.S. House of Representatives before being signed into law by President Bush, is language that would remove key free-speech protections that have been part of U.S. trademark law since 1996.
Read the whole thing. He's right on: This bill will make the Lanham Act about as self- executing for plaintiffs as you could hope, at least for "famous marks." Be very scared if you're not the owner of such a mark... or its retained counsel.
UPDATE: Reaction at Editor & Publisher.
Today Kimiko Ryokai gave a a job talk for the open faculty position at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media, a wonderful presentation of her work on the I/O Brush. During the ensuing Q&A, an older faculty member whom I didn't recognize asked her, "What are you? An artist? A tool-builder? A child psychologist? What are you?"
It reminded me of a scene I've seen played out many times, wherein a curious elderly person will approach a young man or woman of indeterminate ethnic heritage (of which there are a great many here in Berkeley) and ask the same question: "Excuse me, but what are you?" Like the faculty at Berkeley who came of age in a world where this discipline lived here and that discipline lived there, they are fascinated and slightly repelled by a new generation of mongrels. They haven't yet realized how gauche their question is, and how it signals to everyone in the room their sad failure to grasp the changes that have occurred.
Business 2.0 and Fortune (via CNN.com): YouTube sees user rebellion. Recent changes in the website are turning longtime fans against the video service. Plus: French abandon attack on iTunes.
As mainland Creative Commons China launched back in March, Virtual China has reported that Mongo So has released the first Chinese music album under a Creative Commons License (CC Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2.5 Mainland China License). I love her voice - some say it sounds like Karen Mok.
Technorati Tags: CC, china, chinese, creative commons, license, mongo so, music, iMagine, web 2.0, web2.0
This is going to be popular...looks like the FCC has decided US broadband providers must pay the costs of any wiretap surveillance, plus associated expenses. I smell a weekend blogstorm a'brewing.
Optibase today announced that its IPTV streaming platforms are enabling SmartVideo, a provider of mobile video, to deliver full motion TV to Verizon and Cingular mobile subscribers in the United States.
Georgia-based SmartVideo is using the Optibase MGW 5100 TV streaming platform to encode and transmit live video received from satellite provider Crawford Communications over a dedicated network to SmartVideo's facilities.
At SmartVideo, the video is decoded using Optibase's MGW 200 decoders and transmitted using SmartVideo's proprietary technology to cell phones and other smart handheld devices. The content offering includes news, weather, sports and children's programming from ABC news, NBC Universal, Fox Sports, The Weather Channel and others.
SmartVideo uses Microsoft Windows Media 9 to provide live and download-and-play television content to video-enabled cell phones and other handheld devices, via current and next-generation cellular and Wi-Fi systems.
Qualcomm and Microsoft will work together to port the Windows Mobile to Qualcomm chips, reports Infoworld. Their collaboration will help extend the battery life of devices.
Will free mobile TV follow free WiFi networks? Newspapers already have video feeds. Unplug and play.
CBS plans to debut an ad-supported free broadband channel as soon as today, reports Broadcasting and Cable. The channel will feature mainly original content, with some material connected to programming currently on CBS. The site will most likely not launch with full-length episodes of shows airing on the broadcast network, although the network plans to stream full-length episodes of shows online in the future.
Although the CBS broadband site will be free, they have been testing different pricing strategies for online offerings of its network shows. It recently lowered the price for online episodes of Survivor from $1.99 to $.99, adding ads to the stream as well.
CBS recently had success with ad-supported streaming of this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament, earning more than $4 million in ad revenue from online Webcasts. It also runs an online only talk show devoted to Survivor.
ABC begun steaming four of its series this week. Disney-ABC debuted their two-month trial site streaming episodes this Monday.
Sling Media's Slingbox puts your tv programming on the internet, live or on demand from your computer. Orb Network offers a similar service, routing home TV or PC media to distant PCs, handhelds and even cell phones.
Embed the Video is a web application which generates the HTML to view a video in the browser. This little piece of HTML should be trivial, but in reality it is insanely buggy and difficult. I doubt that 1% of professional web developers know how to embed a video player in a web page without looking it up.
The site is about six months old, and it just got updated with code changes from Josh Kinberg, Michael Verdi, Markus Sandy, and Pete Prodoehl. I assume these changes are to accomodate the Eolas patent nightmare and a bunch of other small issues.
Consider the fucked-up-ed-ness: EmbedTheVideo.com is an entire web site which does nothing but generate a single block of HTML, and it managed to absorb work from four different people.
This BBC article says "repressive regimes are taking full advantage of the net's ability to censor and stifle reform and debate,reveals a report.Written by the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) pressure group the report highlights the ways governments threaten the freedom of the press.The report has a section dedicated to the internet and the growing roster of nations censoring online life.This censorship is practised on every continent on Earth,said the report.Although the internet is changing the way the media works as blogs,chat forums and social networking sites turn passive consumers into active critics, it is not just citizens who are taking advantage of its technological power warned the report.Julien Pain,who heads the internet freedom desk at the RSF and was one of the report's authors,noted:"Everyone's interested in the internet - especially dictators".Also this from the BBC,Blogs:To trust or not to trust?
Net censorship spreads worldwide
Web phone-calling company Skype is bringing social networking to crowds as it unveils a service for groups of up to 100 people to hold spontaneous conversations online, reports Reuters.
"Skypecasts are live, moderated discussions that allow groups of Skype users anywhere in the world to discuss shared interests, from classes to computer support to cultural or political debates. They amount to the conversational equivalent of Web blogs, complementing the written interactions of blogs."
When it comes to buying and playing video games on a mobile phone, many people have tried it -- but few ever try it again, according to Seattle-based M:Metrics who released a report yesterday. [via The Washington Post]
"The report found that prices, choice and lack of interest were the biggest factors that have kept cellphone video game sales from growing in the United States.
Less than 3 percent of cellphone users are buying and playing games on their phones -- and that number hasn't grown much in recent months".
More in Press release.
LONDON — I am your on-the-scene correspondent this week from London, where I am currently in a BBC TV studio listening to various people discuss citizen journalism at the We Media Forum. The conference bills itself thusly: “No ordinary conference, We Media is about how we create a better-informed society by collaborating with one another.”
The big news early on from the conference came from a 10-nation survey by GlobeScan about how people trust various types of media. Here are some top-line findings from the survey of 10,000+ people in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Russia:
After the data was officially released, there was a panel discussion on the topic of trust, and much talk about how media outlets earn (and lose) trust. But one question I had was about the people who were surveyed: What media do they actually see and use regularly?
My gut feeling is that people were judging types of media that they trust not from having used those media, but just from their perception of them. Especially with blogs, where 25% said they trusted blogs, 23% said they didn’t trust them, and more than half didn’t even have an opinion about them. So I have to wonder how valuable a survey about trust is when people are giving their view on trusting sources they’ve never or rarely seen.
Moreover, people come up with their perceptions on blogs from coverage in the mainstream media — which usually simplifies everything to “blogs are changing the world” or “blogs have none of the great fact-checking of mainstream media, so they have no credibility.”
While those points might be true, the trustworthiness of blogs depends on each blog, who is writing it and how much trust the blogger has built with its audience. So whether blogs (or TV or newspapers…) are trustworthy depends on many factors.
On the panel, David Schlesinger of Reuters said, “The medium isn’t the message; the message is the message.”
In other words, people decide on what they trust on a case-by-case basis, so one particular story or blog post might be trusted and another might be tossed aside. The worst thing about the survey is that it overgeneralizes each type of media. People might say, “I don’t trust TV news” or “I don’t trust blogs,” but what they really mean is “I don’t trust that story from CNN” or “I don’t trust a particular blogger because I saw some dodgy material.”
I talked to Gary Kebbel here at the conference, who’s the journalism initiatives programs officer for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Kebbel and I discussed some of the weaknesses of the survey and its generalization of the way people trust entire platforms of news.
“Trust is situational,” Kebbel said. “Technology is a tool, and you can’t remove it from its social context as they are doing in this survey. When people think about blogs, they see them as a big cacophony, so it’s not surprising that they would say they don’t trust them.”
Kebbel and Knight will be hosting the next We Media conference next February in Miami Beach. Hopefully by then, the Media Center will have a new survey that delves down below the generalizations of trust in media.
Do you find yourself trusting or not trusting entire media platforms, and how do you reach those decisions? Or is it more of a case-by-case situation? Share your thoughts in comments below.
Also, if you’d like me to pursue a particular story or person here at the We Media Forum, please drop me a note via the Feedback Form or through the comments below.
(You can see more photos from the We Media Forum via Flickr here.)
C/Net has a U.S. Map of City-wide Broadband & Wifi Projects. It may be one of the most comprehensive although it does not appear to be particularly accurate or consistant. Still, it's a good effort. MuniWireless.com does a great job of keeping tabs on Muni Network News and has an April 2006 summary of city and county projects.
Related DailyWireless articles include Silicon Valley & New York Clouds, Cloud for Windy City, Digital Cities: Saving the Internet?, Muni Wins in AZ & CA, World Wide WiMAX, February's Paris WiMAX Summit, More Tokyo WiMAX, Navini covers the state of Rhode Island, Samsung WiMAXes Michigan, Nortel is WiMAXing 8,000 square miles in Alberta, Italy Plans WiMAX, PIPEX to deploy WiMAX in UK and Seoul's WiBro pilot is On.
I'm surprised this hasn't received more attention (it has from Neville and Ewan McIntosh of the Modern Languages Blog). From David Sifry's latest state of the blogosphere:
…English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore.
And from McIntosh's post:
For linguists, what is amazing and wonderful and scary at the same time is the predominance of Japanese in the blogging world - 31% of all blogs are written in Japanese. Also, Chinese is on an equal pegging with English at 25%. Why is this scary? Because we're teaching all the languages that rank WAY under these two foreign languages. Clearly, the blogosphere is one place where authentic 'flattening' of the linguistic world is already happening.
So, what does this mean for the unity of the blogosphere? I can only comprehend one-third of he blog posts out there.

Our much-discussed, game-theory-oriented approach to cultural funding represents a clear rejection of all the Austrian cultural industry's hegemonic tendencies, states MANA coordinator Stefan Lutschinger: This hack of the outmoded jury and committee system opposes every rationalistic funding cut with pure difference, contingency coping and the fruitful development of paradox.
Software-based Funding Distribution: Last week, a participatory cultural support budget of 125,000 euros was distributed to artists and cultural producers in Vienna using the MANA Community Game - an innovative software-supported selection process. The decision regarding the distribution of funding was not made by curators, juries or committees, but by the submitters themselves. Twelve people will receive project grants between 5,000 and 15,000 euros, whereby 42% of the recipients are women.
"Old" Concepts and "New Thinking": The Community Game is one of the most innovative distribution systems for cultural funding worldwide. It is based on "old" concepts of the avant-garde – auto-curating and self-organization – and the "new thinking" of second-order cybernetics. MANA's great advantage is its capacity for self-correction and adaptation to intelligent system environments: errors and irregularities can be recognized and corrected immediately by the net community, which emerges strengthened from this process. Here 120 submitters agreed to a complex set of rules.
A Self-managed Cultural Funding Budget: Since the autumn of 2004, the open net community -netznetz.net - has grown out of the numerous digital cultural initiatives that have developed in Vienna in recent years. In order to do justice to these diverse cultural and artistic modes of expression, an application has been made to the City of Vienna's Department of Cultural Affairs (Net Culture Unit) for a self-managed cultural funding budget to support this very active scene with around 500,000 euros yearly. The heart of this funding model is the software-based selection process MANA. After a two-month evaluation phase in early summer, the net community will decide on its specific adaptation and further development.
Inquiries:
Stefan Lutschinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Hans Bernhard
Email: s.lutschinger[at]digitaldrafts.at
+43 660 6538616
http://mana.netznetz.net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netznetz
http://www.parliaments-of-art.net
A card that gamers can use at cash machines around the world to convert virtual dollars into real currency has been launched.
The card is offered by the developers of Project Entropia. Last year, a virtual space resort being built in the MMORPG was snapped up by a gamer for $100,000. The buyer is developing the space station into a virtual night club through which the entertainment industry can sell music and videos to gamers.

The Entropia economy works by allowing gamers to exchange real currency for Project Entropia Dollars (PEDs) and back again into real money. Gamers can earn cash by accumulating PEDs via the acquisition of goods, buildings and land.
The new cash card allows people to access their virtually acquired PEDs and convert them into real world money at any cash machine in the world. The card, issued by MindArk, is associated with the players Entropia Universe account and has all of the features of a real world bank account: players can transfer, withdraw, deposit and even view account balances using the system.
More about games and money. And The Future of Credit Cards - Earning virtual currency for spending in the real world & other world bridging.
Via BBC news. Image via Real profits from virtual worlds.
Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 2, 2006 at 04:47 PM
At [NAB] last week, engineers from NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting company and research group, unveiled for Americans what they call "ultra high-definition" television. They also showed off new three-dimensional HDTVs under development.
How much better is ultra better?
The picture resolution, NHK researchers boast, is 16 times clearer than the best HD television technology today. Sound quality is better, too, able to deliver 24 different channels of audio to 24 different speakers, compared with five or six speakers in today's typical surround-sound systems.
The best HD sets today have 1,080 scanning lines of pixels; ultra HD has 4,320. The technology gives viewers a 100-degree field of view perspective, compared with about 30 degrees for a standard HD television today.
Google is accepting student proposals for its Summer of Code program yesterday through May 8. Student signup starts here.
Creative Commons has a page for SoC proposal ideas. In the last few days Jon Phillips has greatly expanded our Developer Challenges section, another place to look for proposal ideas.
I know you are out there…
and I want to make sure I find you. I’m writing a book and organizing a panel of artists using games and/or gaming technology in their artwork, and more specifically, for harnessing artistic aims to move towards social or real world issues (aka future farmers, anne-marie schleiner, tamiko thiel, natalie bookchin) and am always looking for pointers to new material…
Please feel free to drop me an email (mary zap maryflanagan pow com) or post via comment here on GTxA if you have your own, or a friend’s work, to share. Bonus points if any of the said artists will be in the NYC area later in June for possible panel invites! merci merci~
For anyone who hasn't seen them yet, Cabel Sasser of Panic Software has done some great posts on the DS Lite, inlcuding a video podcast.
For people who shot video during the May 1st mobilizations for migrant rights, and want to share their footage, Freepress has some tips.
Step 1. Upload your May 1st videos, to a site that will host them for free, forever. For example:
Step 2. Make it easy for others to find your video by tagging it 'noborders.' For example:

"The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole.
As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many "lectures" (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, "don't get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility." From Among the audience, SURVEY: NEW MEDIA, The Economist print edition, Apr 20th 2006.
Holy cow, did I miss some juicy happenings while away, or what?
Peter Molyneux gets bought by Microsoft. Massive Inc also gets bought by Microsoft. I say.
EA chaps claim games are as valid as TV and movies: quite right, to some audiences, though not as broadly valid as TV and movies. Yet.
MTV buys up X-Fire: the giant gaming IM goes to MTV. Curious! For a wallop-load of cash, too.
Mutants sign up for X-Men game (cor I'm looking forward to that movie, total sucker for comic conversions):
"When you plan on producing a game that features characters that the fans have come to know well in film, one of the things you must address is having your audience perceive your characters as 'genuine,'" said Activision executive producer Scott Bandy. "One of the best ways to ensure this is to work with the same talent that has brought the character to life in the films."
There's also been some announcements on the USC's Public Diplomacy game competition, but I left the URL at home. Duh. More later.
"Over 1/2 of internet users are on broadband but still a significant number slug along on dial up. But given today's new of 9 million HSI subs for Comcast that puts their penetration at less than 1 in 4; that is less than 1 in 4 Comcast HSI subs who can get their broadband service bother to buy it. This is something to keep in mind the next time we see low US broadband penetration statistics. It's not that people here can't get it, people simply don't want it and this news shows that quite a few are happy with dial up."Agree? Is our poor showing in penetration statistics because Americans don't want broadband?
When I was at Columbia a couple of weeks ago on a journalism panel, I met Maria D'vari who just e-mailed me a report by Growing Audience which mentions (on page 3) Rocketboom in the context of portraying a fictional character in a new digital world (how's that for a prepositional run?)
Understanding the Media Landscape, for the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America :
• The number of prime-time network TV watchers has
declined 30 percent in the past 10 years.
• Cable market penetration in 2005 hit a 13-year low of 64.8
percent, with viewers migrating to other video sources
such as satellite television services (20.2 percent)
• When 18-34 year olds were asked about their top media
choices, 46 percent said the Internet and 35 percent said TV
• Even older Americans are changing: 61 percent of those
55 and older say they use the Internet more this year than
last and about 44 percent said they watch TV and read
newspapers less
• Viewership for the three nightly network newscasts
declined 45 percent from 1980 to 2004
• Local early evening news lost 16 percent of their audi-
ence share from 1997 to 2003, while local late news lost
18 percent during that period
• 80 percent of online adults used the Internet for news
in the past 7 days and about 26 percent said that use
reduces their use of traditional news sources
The digital divide is narrowing as citizens in emerging markets get online via computers and mobile phones, with some regions now on a par with developed nations, a ranking of Web-savvy nations showed on Wednesday, reports Reuters.
The difference between the world's Web-savviest nation Denmark and the least "e-ready" country Azerbaijan remains nevertheless huge, with respective scores of 9.0 and 2.9 out of a possible 10.
uding their less developed provinces, scored 4.25 and 4.02, ranking No. 53 and 57 respectively.
Switzerland entered the top three, replacing Sweden which dropped to fourth place, while the United States held on to its No. 2 spot.
... Six nations in the top 10 are European, taking advantage of cheaply available broadband offerings and good education. The U.S., Australia, Canada and Hong Kong complete the top 10.
Japan remains the world's undisputed manga monarch, but the way Japanese are enjoying cartoons is undergoing a fundamental change, according to Sunday Mainichi.
"Though manga readership has been declining here for over a decade, Japanese comics are more popular overseas than ever before.
Among the main reasons given for the decline in domestic manga readership has been the proliferation of the Internet and mobile phones.
... NTT solmare has carved a tidy niche for itself after merging the competing interests and its "Comic Site" has become the biggest mobile phone site dedicated to manga in Japan.
"We've passed 10 million downloads since starting the service in August 2004," a spokesman for the Osaka-based mobile phone company tells Sunday Mainichi. "We get about 2 million to 3 million downloads a month."
The country's Ministry of Information Industry, the State Copyright Bureau, and the Ministry of Commerce recently said all computers made within China's borders, "should include a pre-installed operating system".
Now, "The ban will take place by the end of this year and is aimed to further protect intellectual property of software, said Wang Yefei, deputy director of the bureau, at a press conference," declares state news agency Xinhua.
"Government departments shall not purchase computers without legitimate software, and all domestically-made and imported computers are required to be sold with legitimate software pre-installed, said Wang."
Beijing will, "target governments of townships on protection of legitimate software this year, and in late April it will carry out pilot programs to fight pirate software in large-sized state-owned, private and foreign companies."
Chairman Bill once applauded the tendency of some people in China to use unlicensed software saying, "as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
The next decade is here, and then some, and as a p2pnet reader observes, "Isn't that the way drug dealers work too? 'Come on, kid, try it, the first one's free..'
"It makes one look at these 'donations' of software from Microsoft in a somewhat different light."
A News.com story/analysis shows that 15 states and the District of Columbia now tax downloads of music, movies and electronic books. Some high-tax states such as California do not levy the same charge on online downloads, but that could also change soon.
These taxing states typically say taxing digital-media downloads is a matter of treating physical shopping and online purchases the same. Taxpayer advocates don’t accept that premise, saying it represents an unfair addition of tax laws…the story also goes into other intricacies and runarounds that may allow other states to tax digital downloads as well.
This is criminally overdue: I got a copy of Will Richardson’s excellent book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, but I’m embarrassed to say that I misplaced it in the mess that is my office and my life. It surfaced like an iceberg of knowledge and I have to tell you that it is very good: clear, concise, useful. A far more important critic than I likes it, too. I apologize to Will and to you for taking a few weeks too many to recommend the book. But if you’re planning to use these tools in classrooms — or other organizations — I’d buy it.
: LATER: Another far more important critic, Howard Rheingold, likes it, too. Like me, he’s taking Will’s advice for the college classroom, not just elementary and high school. I’d say it works in any learning environment — which should mean companies, too.
Ball State University is launching a digital media sculpture, consisting of 4 projection screens, computers, speakers and lights. It will broadcast interactive media that reacts to the amount of traffic on the campus' 15 wireless zones, April 18 & 19.
The sculpture will contain its own wireless access points, sensing local interactions of viewers using wireless devices. The carillon bells in the Shafer Tower will also be incorporated into the performance via MIDI control. The data captured will be blended together in real time to create a multi-sensory digital experience. The event will be streamed live from 8-11 p.m.
Sound and video will be live-processed by several Apple PowerMac G5 computers using Cycling 74 Max/MSP and Jade as the interactive software. Sound will be created and manipulated by using the application Tassman, by Applied Acoustic Systems, which will be physically modeling (synthesizing) sound as well as using sampled audio streams from the internet.
Video output will be generated via MIDI control using Apple's Motion software and Jitter. The video imagery will be a combination of 3-D graphical elements that represent the historical samples of wireless internet activity.
You can connect sensors and devices to a MidiTron ($149) using its screw terminals. It simplifies the process of creating sensor and robotics based electronic art projects because it is easily user configurable and provides 20 terminals of digital and analog inputs and outputs in any combination.
How about a giant umbrella on Waterfront Park that visualizes "city cloud" status and acts as a collaborative art project:
Eyebeam and Rhizome have more ideas.
This week the 49th annual San Francisco International Film Festival starts, and I’m happy to report that the team of media hackers I work with at Yahoo! Research Berkeley was able to contribute to part of it. That contribution is International Remix, a web-based tool for re-editing selections from this year’s festival. 19 directors from Brazil, Canada, England, Macedonia, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States agreed to allow their films to be sliced and diced by the world’s remixers. From Indio Nacional to The Pretty Boy Project, these films are yours for the cutting. Read on for details, or go play with it now. If you have any problems or suggestions, shoot an email to remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com.

After logging in to the tool (a simple matter of choosing a username and password under which your work will be saved), you’ll see a selection of “Director’s Clips” in a list on the left side of the screen. These are the original selections from which you can choose. Click on clips to load them into the preview window for viewing and editing. You’ll see some details about the clip’s origins displayed below the clip list.
In the preview window you can watch clips, and then adjust the “Clip Begin” and “Clip End” points to select a segment you want to use in your remix. The buttons to either side of the central play/pause button allow you to move foward or backward 1/10 of a second. You can use the right and left arrows on your keyboard to do the same thing. This is especially handy for fine adjustments to the clip begin and end points: just select one of the yellow triangles by clicking on it, then use the frame advance buttons or arrow keys to move it. Once you’ve clipped the segment to your liking, press the “Add to My Clips” button to add it to your clip bin. Or you can drag it into your clip bin by clicking and dragging anywhere on the preview screen. Or just drag directly to the remix timeline.
On the right side of the screen is “My Clips,” a list of all the segments you’ve clipped. These clips are persistent across logins, so you can start working on a remix, log out, and come back later to pick up where you left off. You can rename your a clip by clicking on its title. You can also add special black and title clips for your transitions. To add a clip from your bin to your remix, just press the “Add to My Remix” button, or drag a clip to the timeline.
The timeline at the bottom of the screen is where you sequence the clips you’ve trimmed into your final production. Just click and drag clips around to re-order them. If you click on a clip in the timeline, it will load into the preview window, so you can tweak the endpoints until they are just right. You can add a soundtrack to your remix using the drop-down select list on the right side of the timeline–hover over the selections to hear a preview. You can also turn on and off the audio for individual clips by clicking the “Audio On/Off” buttons at the bottom of each clip in the timeline. When you’re ready to view your work, press the “Play My Remix” button.
After you’ve had a chance to see what you’ve wrought, you can go back and work on it some more, or declare it finished and submit it to the Remix Gallery. You’ll have the chance to give your remix a title and a description, and to select up to five “poster frames” or keyframes to represent your remix in the gallery. Drag the slider back and forth to get the frame you want. Press the orange button with a plus to add another frame. To get rid of a frame, slide it as far as you can to the right or left, and it will disappear. Once you’re happy with the presentation, press “Submit” and your remix will show up in the gallery, looking something like this.
That’s it! So go check it out. Submit your remixes. And definitely show up for the party we’re throwing at Edinburgh Castle on the 24th. Finally, if you have any ideas, complaints, or just want to chat about International Remix, you can email remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com, or join our Yahoo! Group. Or just leave your comments below.

World Changing picks up a post by nextbillion which has a great overview of recent pieces (by bloggers, the BBC) exploring the implications of cheap handhelds in developing countries.
... As Ethan Zuckerman notes, the speed with which Africans are embracing mobiles (and the Net) has implications for the entire world:
"[W]e very rarely hear Africans talk about what problems they think are most important. Citizens media changes that. The folks starting blogs and writing about their experience in Africa arent starving - theyre getting by, and in many cases, thriving.
Their experience isnt every Africans experience by a long shot
but its compelling evidence that Africa isnt the basket case it sometimes seems to be in the Northern media.
Read the bloggers who contribute to BlogAfrica and Global Voices and youll see people who are tackling challenges head on, starting businesses, exposing corruption, pursuing higher education and finding solutions to the problems the continent faces.
I challenge you to read African blogs for a week and not come away with a renewed sense of hope for the continent."
Visitors to Alton Towers in England could soon be tagged and tracked by cameras in a new system to video their entire day that could also tighten security.
Wearing (compulsory) RFID'd wrist bands, guests would be watched as they use the park and will be filmed on rides, which the creators say would also cut crime. Nothing new in a theme park that tags its visitors but the innovation here is that at the end of the day they would then be given the option to buy the footage in a personalised DVD.
The system called Your Day could also be introduced to Busch Gardens, in Florida and Disneyland Paris.
Via BBC News.
BlogBurst is a syndication service that places your blog on top-tier online destinations. You get visibility, audience reach and traffic, while publishers weave the rich and diverse fabric of the blogosphere into their sites.
Some big name bloggers are already signed up like Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion and so are big name newspapers like the Washington Post and chains like Gannett
Here is a more complete story at Wired, which says in part:
Newspapers are looking to BlogBurst to provide expert blog commentary on travel, women's issues, technology, food, entertainment and local stories, areas where publishers may not have dedicated staff, said Pluck's chief executive, Dave Panos.
In return, a select group of popular bloggers are offered wider distribution for their writings, he said. The online syndicate drives traffic to blog sites, allowing featured bloggers to make money from resulting online advertising fees.
Global Voices: Support from Reuters will allow us to do more outreach and training in parts of the world where there are currently few bloggers.
Yesterday Reuters announced a major contribution to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where Global Voices is based. This contribution has allowed us to hire our managing editor, Rachel Rawlins, to continue supporting our outstanding team of regional editors and to bring on translators, to provide better coverage of content in languages like Arabic and Russian. Support from Reuters will also allow us to do more outreach and training in parts of the world where there are currently few bloggers. Reuters’ generosity allows us to expand the range and quality of information we make freely available to anyone who cares to use it.
Among the many "best of" lists spontaneously appearing on the CDM forums, contributors and readers have compiled a fantastic list of inspirational music videos from a variety of acts. One thing that strikes me is the breadth of aesthetics; whereas once electronica had very strong connotations (and the videos with it), these are really high-art experimental filmmaking with a range of styles. And they're a pleasure to watch, too, like the fanciful Sigur Rós video pictured here. (Thanks, Jaymis!)

Are visual pairings with music the wave of the future? With video production costs getting cheaper by the day and modes of digital expression expanding, they offer a compelling alternative to the somewhat slackened interest in CDs. And it seems indie musicians are next in line. The one stumbling block there to me is services like YouTube. Sure, they offer wide compatibility and free distribution . . . but the fidelity is crap. Then again, that’s how MP3s started out.
Certainly, musicians are becoming more interested in crossing from aural to visual media, not only in videos but live visuals, as well. (And yes, CDM will be revisiting those topics soon.) For just an indication, take a look here:
Speaking of YouTube, those videos have been all over the Music thing blog lately, including fantastic Fairlight CMI and Kraftwerk videos. (What I notice about the Kraftwerk video: this once exotic kind of performance doesn't really seem at all strange any more. Pity they never got the musical lapels working, though. Bet you can one-up them. Click through for other neat Kraftwerk YouTube videos.)
Got a favorite music video (independent or otherwise)? Produced one yourself? Let us know. I want my music television.
Yesterday, I wrote about new tools for portraying better futures, saying it was getting easier and easier to use them. Here's a data point: this guy created an entire new video game ("Hackenslash") in 40 hours, on a dare. You can even download the game, if you're into that sort of thing.
"The bottom line is this: If you want to develop games, nothing is stopping you. You can find the time. You don't need a big budget or fancy tools. You don't need a team of specialists. You don't need years of training. All you need is the will to make it happen."
(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 10:25 AM)
Tim Lee at Tech Liberation Front points out an interesting aspect of the new MovieBeam device — it offers its highest-resolution output only to video displays that use the HDMI format.
(MovieBeam is a $200 box you buy that lets you buy 24-hour access to recent movies. There is a rotating menu of movies. Currently video content is trickled out to MovieBeam boxes via unused broadcast bandwidth rented from PBS stations. Eventually they’ll use the Internet to distribute movies to the devices.)
This is a common tactic these days — transmitting the highest-res content only via HDMI. And it seems like a mistake for Hollywood to insist on this. The biggest problem is that some HDTVs have HDMI inputs and some don’t, and most consumers don’t know the difference. Do you know whether your TV has an HDMI input? If you do, you either (a) don’t have a high-def TV, or (b) are a serious video geek.
Consider a (hypothetical) consumer, Fred, who bought an early high-def set because he wanted to watch movies. Fred buys MovieBeam, or a next-gen DVD player, only to discover that his TV can’t display the movies he wants in full definition, because his TV doesn’t do HDMI.
Fred will be especially angry to learn that his MovieBeam box or high-def DVD player is perfectly capable of sending content at higher definition to the inputs that his TV does have, but because of a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo that Hollywood insists upon, his set-top box deliberately down-rezzes the video before sending it to his TV. Just imagine what Fred will think when he sees news stories about how pirated content is available in portable, high-def formats that will work with his TV.
The official story is that HDMI is a security measure, designed to stop infringers. It’s been known for years that HDMI has serious security flaws; even Wikipedia discusses them. HDMI’s security woes make a pretty interesting story, which I’ll explore over several posts. First I’ll talk about what HDMI is trying to do. Then I’ll go under the hood and talk about how the critical part of HDMI works and its well-known security flaws. (This part is already in the academic literature; I’ll give a more accessible description.) Finally, I’ll get to what is probably the most interesting part: what the history of HDMI security tells us about the industry’s goals and practices.
Officially, the security portion of HDMI is known as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HDCP. The core of this security design is the HDCP handshake, which takes place whenever two devices communicate over an HDMI cable. The handshake has two goals. First, it lets each device confirm that the other device is an authorized HDCP device. Second, it lets the two devices agree on a secret encryption key which only those two devices know. Subsequent communication over the cable is encrypted using that key, so that eavesdroppers can’t get their hands on any content that is distributed.
In theory, this is supposed to stop would-be infringers. If an infringer tries to plug an authorized video source (like a MovieBeam box) into a device that can capture and redistribute video content, this won’t work, because the capture device won’t be able to do the handshake — the authorized video source will recognize that it is unauthorized and so will refuse to sent it content. Alternatively, if an infringer tries to capture content off the wire, between an authorized source and an authorized TV set, this will be foiled by encryption. That’s the theory at least. The practice is quite different, as I’ll describe next time.
Frontline aired a program on the Tiananmen Square uprising this week showing how China blocks internet searches. Photos searches of Tank Man (Google China & Google English) were compared.
Google said this week that it did the right thing in appeasing the Chinese government in order to offer service in the country. The comments were made by CEO Eric Schmidt during a press conference in China to announce a Chinese-language brand name and research center to be located in Beijing.
Yahoo, Google Cisco and Microsoft were mentioned as being complicit in providing information about their users to Chinese authorities. Here's Video of the Senate Hearing: The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?
Google was heavily criticized in January following the launch of its Chinese language Web site. Searches on the topics of human rights, Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and democracy omitted certain Web sites and redirected to Chinese government URLs. Google also announced that it is going to open a research and development centre in Moscow this year.
Schmidt defended Google's decision, because without it they could have not properly served the 111 million people now online in the country, he said. China now is the second largest country online in terms of Internet subscribers, behind the United States.
At the end of 2005, there were 393 million cellular users in mainland China. It's expected to hit 520 million by 2008 and 600 million by 2010.
Monopoly players such as China Unicom, China Netcom, and China Telecom, are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to complete last mile connectivity using cellular and WiMAX
China Telecom, the nation's largest fixed-line operator, is looking at ways to block phone calls made over the Internet such as the popular service offered by Skype, according to media reports. China Telecom and its largest rival, China Netcom, do not offer VoIP services.
China Wireless Communications, Inc., headquartered in Denver, CO, has signed a contract with Tianjin University. The company is focusing its efforts on becoming a premier information technology company in China, providing broadband data services, support for Internet access and Voice over IP.
CyberLink demonstrated digital TV playback via a mobile handheld at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei this week and will display its mobile solution in Beijing next week. Based on the DVB-H standard, it supports the playback of audio-video bitstream and Electronic Service Guide (ESG) data.
Of course the United States is not above spying on citizens, either:
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T engineer who is now participating in the case as a witness, has released a statement to the media in which he outlines many of the allegations that are currently under seal. Chief among them is his claim that AT&T installed powerful traffic monitoring equipment in a "secret room" in their San Francisco switching office at the behest of the NSA.According to Klein, this room contained (among other things) a Narus STA 6400 traffic analyzer into which all of AT&T's Internet and phone traffic was routed; Klein himself helped wire the splitter box that made this possible. In addition to AT&T's own traffic, Klein alleges that the company also routed its peering links into the splitter, meaning that any traffic that passed through AT&T's own network could be scanned.
Futhermore, San Francisco wasn't the only place such secret rooms were built; Klein claims that AT&T offices in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego also have them.
AT&T lawyers are now trying to get possession of the EFF documents.
Newsweek and The Baltimore Sun say the NSA spent $1.2 Billion on their Trailblazer datamining initiative, similar to the Total Information Awareness program, with little to show for it.
DailyWireless has more on Dataveillence by the NSA.
Kevin Marks puts together a nice chart comparing all the ways to watch TV now.

Vivid Entertainment is selling DVDs over the internet — without actually including the DVD — but its delivery company doesn’t want to talk about it. If you could buy a porn video, download it in about an hour and burn it to a DVD that will play in any standard drive, would you do it? What if it had built-in digital rights management (DRM) code that only let you burn the file to disk one time, and one time only? Vivid Entertainment has launched a new Burn-to-DVD service with the expectation that you, and millions like you, will. [Wired News: DAT’s Entertainment]
Filed under: Culture
Sure, Grand Theft Auto purportedly
trains kids to kill hookers, but what about the decadence caused by the Waltz? According to The Times of London in 1816,
this "foreign dance" was seen so unfit that the paper felt it "a duty to warn every parent against
exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion." Then came movies in 1909, blasted for causing many to lead
"dissolute lives." The telephone? Yeah, that, too.
Like lots of twenty-somethings, this guy downloads torrents of TV shows. But he received a letter from his broadband provider -- Charter Communications -- warning him to stop illegally downloading HBO's The Sopranos. "As a Charter internet account owner, you could be held liable for this activity," the letter reads. Charter also copied him a letter that they received from HBO urging them to shut down his account. Apparently this isn't the first time HBO has called out the lawyers. "This happened to me in August for downloading Entourage, except the letter went to my school," comments one guy on Digg. But what's the reaction from most people commenting on the story? Use better technology and don't get caught.
Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer
A new show to air on NYC TV. I scheduled the recording of the first one which is to air Monday at 11PM. I will give a better report after watching but it sounds interesting:
Media 3.0 is a weekly half-hour news/talk show about the media & technology business hosted by award-winning inventor, technologist, composer, author and producer, Shelly Palmer. The business and technology of media industry are changing at an ever increasing rate. As chairman of the Advanced Media Committee of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences NY, Palmer is one of the experts leading the industry’s rapid evolution.
From PVRs to PDAs, from IP Video to VOD ... Technology changes everyday, but business rules and our legal system don’t always keep up. Is it a parlor trick or a paradigm shift? Shelly Palmer, along with lead analyst Lydia Loizides, and subject matter experts focus on the issues that dominate the front pages of today’s business journals.
Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer is a show for consumers, media execs, investors and just about anyone interested in this exciting arena where the business of media meets technology. Fast-paced and combative, Media 3.0 doesn’t pull any punches. Interviews with senior management, opinions from respected business leaders and smart people who will make even the most complicated issues seem simple ... It’s Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer.

tablished in 2000 to support production, research and development of new media culture by an active involvement in the practices, policies and structures of the field. Aiming at a sustainable development of media culture, m-cult works to create productive and critical, interdisciplinary encounters between actors in culture, technology and society.
m-cult focuses on social and cultural innovations in urban, wireless and participatory media, and on developing open infrastructures and transdisciplinary competences in new media culture. m-cult carries out research projects, consults on media culture and technology development, disseminates information and organises events in media research, arts and technology.
m-cult's project to establish a lab for urban media now has a concrete target. The plan is to launch a collaborative production environment at Kansatalo ('People's house', named after an extinct insurance company) located in Kurvi, Eastern Helsinki. The Kurvi space is aimed to support production of urban and media culture and to house a continuous series of workshops, seminars and debates. Negotiations about the project are now in their final phase, and results are expected in May 2006.
MySociety -- the British civic tech NGO behind such projects as WriteToThem, PledgeBank and TheyWorkforYou -- has launched a new call for proposals. Not only that, but mySociety will build out the best idea for a site with the following qualities:
Founded on electronic networks. This includes the internet, mobile and telephone networks, wireless, fax and anything related.>You can submit ideas, but you can also go online and evaluate the ideas of others. Everyone's getting in on the mySociety act: yesterday Tony Blair logged onto PledgeBank and pledged to support a community sports group if 100 others would do so as well.Real world impact on democratic and community aspects of people's lives. The internet is full of excellent commerce and entertainment sites: we are not about building more of those. It is also full of great information sites: we aren't about building these either. We want sites that users visit and leave having gained something tangible: a nascent relationship wth their MP, or the knowledge that they can achieve something with other people near them.
Low or zero cost scalability. This is key. We are looking for projects that cost the same (or virtually the same) to run for ten or a million users.
As ally Jo Twist told the beeb, "This is what politics and political engagement are about in a digital age. Direct, collaborative action, and direct response."
And that's precisely the point. While any one of these sorts of projects won't singlehandedly change the world, they both represent and reinforce a broader movement to use collaborative technologies to pry open the corridors of power and let in both the sunshine of transparency and the voices of citizens. We need a lot more of these kinds of efforts, and we need more people talking about what approaches and technologies are worth using in those efforts. MySociety is doing us all a favor by stimulating debate on what civic activism looks like in the 21st Century.
(Posted by Alex Steffen in The Second Superpower Cooperation, Politics and Activism at 12:56 PM)
Some interesting posts
recently on the Internet TV trend, which is really ramping up this year. Mark Cuban, who
co-founded Broadcast.com in 1995 and sold it to Yahoo! in 1999, has a great post on his blog
outlining some of the pros and cons of rich media on the Net. He notes:
"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. What we did learn at
Broadcast.com, is that people will search, even if it takes some work, to find
things they are passionate about that aren't on TV. [...] We also learned that people
will go to portals to explore."
(emphasis mine)
He goes on to explain how user-generated content from the likes of youtube.com has taken off recently. He also talks about how Internet TV is a new medium, so just re-purposing TV shows for the Web won't work. For one there are no hit tv shows on the Web, at least not on the scale of TV shows like Lost and Desparate Housewives. Cuban sums it up:
"On the net, the value is in the network aggregator. On tv the value is in the show."
It's well worth your time reading the whole post from Mark Cuban - and don't miss the comments for extra key data.
On this topic, PaidContent.org has been covering industry moves in Internet TV. They report on BBC's trial of its Integrated Media Player, noting that:
"...most viewing took place between 10pm and 11pm [UK time], whereas the traditional peak time for viewing of linear TV channels is between 7pm and 10pm."
Interestingly the list of top tv programs downloaded on BBC's iMP are all traditional tv programs: Eastenders, Little Britain, etc. I wonder how the viewer numbers would stack up if the BBC had a breakthrough tv show that was made exclusively for the Web? Perhaps that is a year or two down the track...
Finally, check out Tom Coates' observations on TV distribution. He says that iTunes-like distribution of tv content on the Web is the best strategy. His prediction for the future:
"I think we're approaching a world in which a near-live media distribution environment will be a major partner to broadcast TV within five-ten years. This environment will be focused on show-by-show subscriptions and ultimate personalisation to get stuff down to viewers over normal broadband and mediated by the bog-standard boring old internet - probably even through the web."
(emphasis mine)
As you can see from the above 3 posts, Internet TV is a fast-growing world and a lot of media companies like BBC and Yahoo! are jostling for position. Not to mention the upstarts like youtube, the more established 'new tv' plays like Tivo, plus whatever Mark Cuban will invest in next in this field!
Photo: JumpTV
"While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites,it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking,blogging and local information,"the Washington Post reports."The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix,which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.Top-ranked sites growing the most,ComScore's data showed,were Blogger.com,a personal publishing site;MySpace.com,where young people do virtual preening and share musical tastes;Wikipedia,an open reference site jointly edited by millions of people;and Citysearch,a network of local guides focused on cities".
National Public Radio will become the first major media company to deliver podcasts to mobile phone users using Melodeo software. NPR will deliver 45 of its podcasts, which including All Songs Considered, NPR Story of the Day, and On Gambling with Mike Pesca.
Melodeo helped develop and launch the AOL mobile instant-messaging client as well as the T9 software that’s now embedded on more than one billion handsets.
Their Mobilcast software can be downloaded free, and turns any handset into a portable audio device. Melodeo works on Symbian Series 60, Java, Windows Mobile, and BREW phones, and can build the client directly into handsets. Details are available at the Mobilecast site.
While iTunes has pulled many new listeners into podcasting, it hasn't been a wireless experience. With Mobilcast, no special cellphone is required. Here's a list of current MobilCast programs by category.
NPR has done much more than simply repurpose its own material for podcasts. The radio giant is hosting podcasts for member stations, and selling and splitting underwriting revenues with them. Plus, it's launched three original podcasts under the new alt.NPR brand as an incubator for edgier content. NPR content is available on Mobilcast immediately. It digitally
encrypts each file, so every purchased song becomes specific to the
individual user. NPR podcasts are free.
The NPR podcast directory now includes 195 podcasts. The original 17 podcasts it offered last August have been downloaded more than 5 million times (as of 6 months ago).
Podcast Alley and Podcasts.Yahoo index thousands of great programs. In October, Apple cut a deal with Disney to make popular tv shows on the ABC network available for the video iPod on iTunes for $1.99. CBS and NBC have made similar forays into online content.
Rob Greenlee is Sr. Marketing Manager for Seattle-based Melodeo. He is also a long-time host, producer and founder of the wonderfully produced WebTalk Radio program (right).
Last year, people spent $2 billion online for everything from digital music and movies to research, dating site subscriptions, and greeting cards, reports the Business2Blog. While subscription revenues still account for 78% of the total, one-time payments grew 40% thanks mostly to iTunes.
The whole Entertainment segment (music, movies, etc) totalled only $573 million, but it surpassed the online dating segment for the first time, says Business 2.0.
Om Malik reports analyst Charlene Li at Forrester Research, is not bullish on Podcasting. Forester's report says only one percent of online households regularly download and listen to podcasts. In 2006, they predict that number will only be around 700,000.
The Diffusion Group has a different take. They predict “demand for time-shifted digital audio files or “podcasts” is expected to grow from less than 15% of all portable digital music player owners in 2004 to 75% by 2010.
A survey by Pew Research conducted last month found 6 percent of cell phone users play music on their device, while 19 percent wish their phone had that feature. A mere 2 percent watch mobile video or TV, but 14 percent said they would like to. Some 41% of cell phone owners say they fill in free time by making phone calls.
PodTech estimates that 15-20 million people are accessing podcasts on iTunes. Apple watchers put the iTunes client software penetration around 100 million worldwide. Podtech, incidently, has terrific podcast coverage of CTIA 2006.
Meanwhile, PayPal introduced PayPal Mobile, this week. The text message-based service enables consumers in the US and Canada to send money anytime, from anywhere, using their mobile telephones.
To use PayPal Mobile, customers first activate their telephones by logging into their PayPal accounts at https://www.paypal.com/mobile. After registering their mobile telephone numbers, users must choose a secure Personal Identification Number (PIN) which protects every mobile payment.
WSJ: This is a step forward in the collapsing windows of the movie business, but is still crazily convoluted…Movie studios have agreed to give movies to their co-owned online movie service Movielink at the same time that the movies hit DVD and retail. This will start with “Brokeback Mountain”, that is being released on DVD tomorrow.
The pact is for both new and catalog titles.Meanwhile, the independently owned competitor CinemaNow, has made a similar arrangement with Sony and Lionsgate and also plans to begin selling films this week.
Some major points:
– 300 films will go on sale on Movielink
– Movielink will allow consumers to burn a backup DVD of the movie and to keep the movie on as many as three computers. But the discs burned from Movielink will play only in computer DVD player, not on regular (TV) DVD players. If consumers have a Microsoft Media Center Edition PC, they can stream their copy of a Movielink movie to a TV set connected to a Media Center extender or Xbox.
– The TV viewing is still a few months away as movie studios agree and work on the DRM part.
– Movielink: Newer releases will cost between $20 and $30 — higher than DVDs — and catalog titles will cost $10 to $16, in line with DVDs.
– CinemaNow’s prices for all titles will range between $10 and $20, although its customers won’t yet be able to watch their movies on other computers or burn them onto DVDs. It will start with 75 movies for now.
– The movies on both services require more than an hour to download, even on a high-speed connection.
– Walt Disney hasn’t yet signed up for the sales or the earlier release dates.
– NYT: Apple, Amaxon.com and nd other online retailers are also busily trying to cut deals with Hollywood to sell downloads.
– The downloads do not include the bonus features, like deleted scenes and filmmaker interviews, that often accompany DVD’s
– Whacked up example: “Memoirs of a Geisha,” from Sony, will cost $19.99 to download from CinemaNow and $25.99 from Movielink. As a DVD, by contrast, it is priced at $16.87 at Wal-Mart.
– Some studios, including Warner and Universal, plan to withdraw some movies from online sales in the period that they are appearing on pay TV networks like HBO.
Related: @ NATPE 2006: Portable Movies: Studios May Be More Receptive But iTunes Model Poses ProblemsMovies
the process of physically 'tagging' real-world objects with semacodes, so that users with mobile phone cameras can automatically retrieve relevant wikipedia articles on their device. see also qr code & grafedia.
[semapedia.org]
Some are so clever that it's easy to be taken in. Others are so patently ridiculous that you should probably slash your wrists for falling so easily. Here are 10 of the best.

YourHub.com may be coming to a Web site near you.
More than a dozen newspapers, ranging from The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel to those operated by the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, have signed up to begin offering the Web-to-print grassroots journalism platform since the Denver Newspaper Agency began syndicating the concept earlier this year.
it adds:
Key features in the YourHub.com syndication launch kit include content publishing and hosting software as well as strategies for marketing, editorial and sales, Wills said.
Optional features, such as converting the Web content to print format, and online classified ad posting, are also available.
Documentary filmmakers are in a particularly difficult position in terms of intellectual property, as most documentarians focus on lives of real people -- and modern life, especially in the US, Europe and Japan, is inundated with logos, music, background video and myriad other trademark and copyright concerns. Bound by Law?, a discussion of the intersection of fair use, public domain, copyright and documentary film -- done in a comic book format -- illustrates both the complexities that documentarians face and the broader struggle over how we can record modern life in all of its forms for posterity. Created by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins at the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Bound by Law? is well-worth reading by anyone trying to understand how intellectual property rules affect our lives. Although it looks only at American regulations, many of the concepts it covers apply far more broadly.
The ongoing evolution of copyright laws in the industrialized world has served both to protect and to stymie creative artists. On the one hand, stronger and more explicit protection of copyright assures emerging artists that larger corporate entities can't simply take the artists' work; on the other hand, aggressive assertion of rights over material that is part of our common culture has a demonstrable negative impact on the creative abilities of artists. Although much of the debate online focuses on American laws, digital era copyright laws in Europe and Japan have evoked similar arguments, and the role of intellectual property laws in the relationship between industrialized and developing nations remains controversial. The solutions offered by groups like Creative Commons can go a long way to making the situation more reasonable, but they require positive action on the part of artists.
Long-time WorldChanging readers will also note that many of the issues that apply to documentary filmmakers would apply to some degree to people using "participatory panopticon"-style technologies, especially as the more rudimentary versions of these technologies come to be used as ways to document events as they happen. It's likely, in fact, that the biggest roadblocks to more widespread adoption of "lifeblogging," "sousveillance" and other participatory panopticon tools will arise not from privacy concerns, but from intellectual property problems. Some will come from twisty legal passages, all alike, that label showing the recordings to others as "public presentation." Some will come from restrictions on recording hardware meant to stop "piracy" of copyrighted material by shutting down whenever songs or videos with digital restriction "watermarks" are captured, even in the background.
As Bound by Law? demonstrates, this is not an easily-resolved situation -- but it's one that is increasingly important to us all.
(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Tech Bloom Collaborative and Emergent Technologies at 04:59 PM)
Friday is the deadline for the journalism contest for high school students, sponsored by Participant Productions. Judging the contest will be Dan Rather of CBS News and Ann Curry from The Today Show/Dateline NBC. Oh, yeah. The winner gets $1,000!
apophenia: MySpace, HR 4437 and youth activism: “For good reason, many Americans are outraged by HR 4437, a House bill that will stiffen the penalties around illegal immigration. Over the weekend, protests began with over 500,000 people taking to the streets on Saturday. Online, teens wrote bulletin board posts on MySpace, encouraging their peers to speak out against the bill. On Monday, instigated through MySpace postings, thousands of teens across the country walked out of school and marched in protest. In Los Angeles alone, 36,000 students walked out and took to the streets. Throughout the country, thousands of teens walked out in protest.”
Robert Price - Lifeblog Posting Protocol Example
Alas, after doing a bit of exploring, I see why LifeBlog never worked with my blog(s). It doesn't do XML-RPC. Arrrg..
In any case, detailed on the site above, Robert Price has done the hard work and figured out just what it does and how it can be used. A bit painful but some progress..
Does anyone have a pointer to XML-RPC J2ME code for me?
MuniWireless and
WiFiNetNews point out that consumer-oriented Common Cause has compiled a list of "astroturf" telecommunications organizations entitled Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.
Jackie Huba is warning brand marketers to scan YouTube for consumer generated 'commercials' about their products. If you're focusing only on the blogosphere, don't. Focus on the universe, not just one galaxy/center of gravity.
Technorati Tags: youtube, cgm, COGs, video, advertising
Financial Times writes (via Yahoo News):
Mobile phone users are unlikely to pay extra to access the growing range of video and audio content available on their phones, according to a global KPMG survey. This trend could push operators into rethinking their business models.
...
"Mobile service providers will need to stop thinking of converged services purely as a revenue booster," said Sean Collins, global chair of KPMG's communications practice.
ider them as a churn reduction tool, allowing them to present a much more stable, loyal subscriber base which should be attractive to advertisers and digital commerce partners."
Video Blogging by Jay Dedman, Joshua Kinsburg and Joshua Paul $24.99
0-470-03788-1 Publication date July 2006 [I don’t understand, was
the book cancelled and then re-instated?]
Secrets of Video Blogging Diana Weynand, Ryanne Hodson, Michael Verdi,
Shirley Craig $24.99 ISBN 0-321-42917-6 Publication date April 2006
Hands-on Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting Damien Stolarz and
Lionel Felix $34.95 ISBN 0-240-80831-2
Videoblogging for Dummies by S.C. Bryant $24.99 ISBN 0-471-97177-4
Publication date June of 2006.
The UK/France-based Insight has just released a field guide to participatory video (PV). The guide lays out instructions through text, illustration and photography to assist amateur videographers in setting up PV projects regardless of their location.
Insight's work focuses on empowering individuals and communities to give voice to their experience by learning about the tools and processes required to direct, film, and produce videos. Much of their work involves applying video techniques to Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) practices, which encompass a broad range of local, collaborative methods for assessment and planning in communities both rural and urban.
This of course runs quite parallel to the work of Witness and other efforts to expose injustice through local, participatory video. While Insight's work goes more in-depth on the entire video-making process, their globally-applicable handbook may prove informative even for capturing more on-the-fly footage through developments such as Witness's mobile phone project, which enables citizens to document human rights violations through cameraphone recordings, as well as environmental data documentation, as Jamais mentioned with the idea of Earth Witness.
The use of mobile technology, cameras and wireless networks for citizen-driven progress is a recurring theme at Worldchanging. But having the tools without understanding the techniques doesn't get us all the way there. With "Insights into Participatory Video," citizens have a chance to extract the full potential of technological tools that are increasingly accessible in remote areas of the world.
(Posted by Sarah Rich in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 12:02 PM)
Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated
TurnHere.com ~ The video insiders guide to neighborhoods across the world
My good friend Paul is featured pointing out all of the new buildings going up in the area. Nice..!
The site concept is interesting. I am glad to see that niche video content sites are popping up (as opposed to YouTube and Google Video).
I have a couple of problems with how it is built such as there isn't a search box (I want to see all of the Brooklyn films but could find no way to do it). There is no way to leave comments or otherwise say that I like any particular video. Also, this might be a personal bias but I think there is too much Flash used. It is fine to present the videos in Flash but why the rest of the site? Last, I wish they would give me an RSS feed with MPEG-4 videos so I can watch on my new Mini hooked up to my TV.
Overall though, I love it.. Good content!
The Borough of Lewisham in London has launched a new program to help clean up the neighborhood with the help of the public and MMS. Everyone is allowed to download an Java application to their cell phones and then proceed to take pictures of graffiti, abandoned cars, garbage, etc. The application then uploads the photo a council who will go to the pictured spot and clean up the mess. The standard MMS fees apply for the public, but just think of how pretty the environment could be without all that nasty tagging.
MMS to Combat London Graffiti [MobHappy]
Strange things afoot at Cablevision. They're apparently working on a DVR without a hard drive—the content is stored remotely on Cablevision servers and then pulled down when needed. Customers "record" by pressing a button, ensuring that the cable company's server's don't get bogged down by simply recording everything that goes over the customer's tuner.
The new service, called RS-DVR, will launch in Long Island, NY and then possibly spread to other areas. There is no major hardware upgrade needed, although existing cable boxes will need a small firmware upgrade.
While I'm all for off-loading the storage burden to folks who might have some money for a few terabytes of storage per user, I'm wondering about privacy and fair use implications.
Cablevision to test network DVR [News.com.com.com]
Two articles, one from the BBC and one from TechDigest on 3G mobile phone social trends in UK, ranging from personal security to checking your make-up.
First what is a 3G from the BBC:
3G is the next generation of mobile phone technology, offering a wide range of high speed mobile services, including video calling and messaging, e-mail, games, photo messaging and information services.
Here are few of the trends as outlined in TechDigest:
Mobumentaries --using your phones to create a mini-movie documenting your lives.
The Andrew Marr effect --Men's tendency to adopt an alternative persona and give a running commentary in the style of a news report when recording on their phone.
Visual Vanity -- Women turning their video phones on themselves for anything from applying makeup to trying on a new outfit for a more realistic view of how they look than in a mirror.
Night safe
Citizen journalism -- using 3's service that allows people to upload their own ‘at-the-scene’ reports or celebrity spottings, and get paid for it.
This Korea Times article reports 'popular online role-playing games such as Lineage,need gamers to hunt down weak monsters repeatedly to increase their character’s ability levels and obtain items.To avoid such monotonous work,gamers use cheating tools such as software programs called “Macro,”and a USB type automouse".The article explains,"such passive cheating tools are usually categorized into two types,software macros and hardware types called auto-mouse.The software type is usually called "macro.’’It is usually cheaper and easy to use,but is vulnerable to the countermeasures,as game companies can easily upgrade their systems to prevent use of macro programs.In comparison,the hardware type is more complicated,more expensive and more stable.They often look like portable USB storage with a flash memory chip and electronic circuits inside.It can grab video signals transmitted between the PC and the monitor,and analyze the signals to make a judgment.For example,when a player gets beaten by a monster and loses his health, the game shows that he is in a critical condition by showing a bar gauge on the monitor.When the reading goes down by a certain point,the auto-mouse notices it,and moves the character out of the danger zone.Then it makes the character regain his strength by drinking a magic potion or using a magic spell,before sending it to another battle.It is practically impossible for outsiders to tell whether a human or a computer program is playing a game character.Also,it is not against Korean law to use a macro of an auto-mouse,as they do no damage to the game’s main server".Further,"it is difficult for game companies to punish the cheaters or even detect them.Most companies say they prohibit using cheating programs and they close down game accounts of cheaters who are detected.But such things happen rarely,gamers say".
Yahoo! News has launched a beta version of a new local news site. You can browse most areas around the US via a map or drop-down menu. The site takes a different approach than in the past -- rather than partnering with local providers and running their full text on Yahoo! News, the site is now pulling in RSS feeds from multiple providers, creating a snapshot of all of the local coverage from an area at once.
You can see the New York coverage here, for example.
Startup to Wed Mobile Games, Live TV Shows - Yahoo! News
Very interesting:
AirPlay Network Inc. said it will introduce a lineup of cell phone games tied to live television broadcasts. While watching TV, subscribers could use their cell phones to compete against others in "real time" by predicting plays in sports, choosing winners on reality TV shows or picking answers on game shows.
anyfilms.net
I would copy and past some of the text here if the text wasn't in Flash (therefore not allowing me to copy). (With all browsers supporting precise layout and text control, why render these elements in Flash? The other elements I can understand, mostly.)
In any case, this is interesting but I don't get the grid..
Gen Kanai weblog: "HBO busted me for using bittorrent"
HBO is going after users for downloading content using BitTorrent. Here are some stories, letters and so on..
HBO could simply start doing things like simultaneous release (or at least shorten the time), offer it through iTunes and the like and maybe, perhaps just embrace the BitTorrent phenomena and offer access to a good high quality seed for 1 or 2 dollars. Would be cheaper than the lawyers..
Following on from the recent decision in a Dutch Court, Creative Commons licenses have also been implicated in a decision in Spain. The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music.
Unfortunately, as we explain on our site, because most collecting societies, especially in Europe (but not in the US), take an assignment of rights from the artist, artists who are members of these collecting societies are not free to CC-license their works. And so far, collecting societies have been reluctant to explore how they could enable those of their members, who are interested in CC-licensing, to do so.
Consequently, it seemed a little odd when in the Fall of 2005, the main Spanish collecting society — Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (“SGAE”) — sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, the owner of Metropol, a disco bar located in in Badajoz alleging that he had failed to pay SGAE’s license fee of 4.816,74 € for the period from November 2002 to August 2005 for the public performance of music managed by the collecting society.
On February 17th, 2006, the Lower Court number six of Badajoz, a city in Extremadura, Spain, rejected the collecting society’s claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society. The music performed in the bar was licensed under CC licenses that allows that public display since the authors have already granted those rights. Specifically, the judge said:
“The author possesses some moral and economic rights on his creation. And the owner of these rights, he can manage them as he considers appropriate, being able to yield the free use, or hand it over partially. "Creative Commons" licenses are different classes of authorizations that the holder of his work gives for a more or less free or no cost use of it. They exist as … different classes of licenses of this type … they allow third parties to be able to use music freely and without cost with greater or minor extension; and in some of these licenses, specific uses require the payment of royalties. The defendant proves that he makes use of music that is handled by their authors through these Creative Commons licenses.“The full text of the decision (in Spanish) is available here.
This case sets a new precedent because previously, every time that the SGAE claimed a license fee from a bar, a restaurant or a shop for public performance of music, the courts have ruled in their favor on the basis that the collecting society represents practically all the authors. This case shows that there is more music that can be enjoyed and played publicly than that which is managed by the collecting societies.
As CC Spain project lead Ignasi Labastida said: “This decision demonstrates that authors can choose how to manage their rights for their own benefit and anyone can benefit from that choice, too. I expect that collecting societies will understand that something has to change to face this new reality,”
Let's hope that Creative Commons-licensing and collecting societies will be able to work together in future. If you are an artist who is a member of a collecting society and interested in CC-licensing some of your work, let your society know how you feel so we can get to the future faster!
The popularity of the websites that allow people to share short video snippets is leading to the rise of a clip culture, writes internet law professor Michael Geist.
Yesterday's announcment by Microsoft and DT to bring IP-TV to Germany's telephone users, highlights the seriousness of phone carriers to offer television.
Deutsche Telekom's IPTV will go live in ten major German cities - including Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich - later this year. DT plans to bring it to 50 German cities by the end of next year.
Microsoft says 13 broadband service providers will use its IPTV Edition software. They include Telecom Italia, T-Online France, British Telecommunications, Swisscom and Verizon. BellSouth, Bell Canada and Reliance Infocomm are still testing the software, reports C/Net.
Siemens executives said in December the global market for IPTV could hit $1 billion by 2009, with China expected to account for a quarter of the spending.
BT Vision is launching IPTV service this year in the UK. The service gives viewers access to on-demand films, music, and TV shows by combining access to digital-terrestrial channels through the aerial with VoD provided by broadband. The Philips set-top box uses Microsoft software. Trials are due to begin shortly.
IPTV is big in the far East, reports Converged Digest. In Hong Kong, PCCW's NOW Broadband TV has more than 500,000 IPTV subscribers (pdf). Over 13 million DSL subscribers in Japan will soon get IPTV services through Softbank/YahooBB and NTT. Korea, with the world's highest broadband penetration, plans to launch IPTV via Korea Telecom and Hanaro Telecom.
Japan's NTT and Korea's KT plan to offer 30 million and 10 million (respectively) FTTH subs by decade's end. UT Starcom signed a contract last month with China Telecom to begin IPTV services in two Chinese cities, Fuzhou and Quanzhou.
In the US, Verizon's FiOS is utilizing a "hybrid system" for video that uses 860-Mhz cable tv technology to deliver broadband video to the home. Verizon, which bought MCI in January, plans to spend an estimated $22 billion on its Fios rollout.
AT&T, on the other hand, is using Microsoft's IP-TV settop box and twisted pair with VDSL modulation to deliver 10-20 Mbps. AT&T/SBC liked the lower cost (using a consumer's current twisted pair) and by the ability to offer highly interactive features compared to cable.
Project Lightspeed, which began in San Antonio this January, initially is offering 200 channels, but promises as many as 1,000 when it expands the service to other markets by June.
By the end of 2007, ATT/SBC expects to reach 17 million households with FTTN and nearly 1 million with FTTP. In 2005, SBC said it expected that its total capital expenditures will be at the high end of its 2004 guidance range of $5 billion to $5.5 billion. AT&T, with BellSouth, will have 70 million landline subscribers.
Research firm Parks Associates (above) estimates 70 million users around the world will embrace IPTV by 2010, up from 5 million last year. The IPTV market is expected to grow as much as 25% annually. Infonetics Research says there will be 13 million IPTV users in North America by 2009.
The new on-demand IPTV paradigm has profound consequences for the old media ecosystem – traditional TV channels, previously key for ‘branding’, are in danger of losing their influence, says Converged Digest. The $60 billion spent on U.S. television advertising, annually could get re-directed, opines Bob Garfield (MP-3).
Americas Network has a good overview. Telephony Magazine has complete coverage of TelecomNext while IPTV News and Google News have the latest poop on IP.
Related DailyWireless stories include; IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IPTV Networking, Telco's Left Behind in IPTV Armageddon?, Cuban: Broadcasting Not Dead, Wireless IP-TV Box, IP-TV End Game, Cisco Buying Scientific Atlanta, SBC Picks IP-TV Settops, GoogleNet?, The Free Triple Play, VDSL-2 Ratified, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IP-TV Settops, Legislators: Don't Mess With SBC, DirecTV + WiMax?, Muni Wireless Laws, and Duopoly Laws.
"In order to build this map Ches fired off 300,000 messages to various points on the Internet and mapped how they got there, recording the address of every router his packets passed. He also had to figure out a way to isolate routers in North America. The map is not perfect – he probably missed a few points and maybe double counted a couple more – but for all intents and purposes this is what the North American Internet looks like."
"We've already demonstrated we'll take action if necessary," Martin said. However, Martin also added that he supports network operators' desires to offer different levels of broadband service at different speeds, and at different pricing -- a so-called "tiered" Internet service structure that opponents say could give a market advantage to deep-pocket companies who can afford to pay service providers for preferential treatment.For the record, nobody anywhere has suggested ISPs shouldn't be allowed to charge customers more, for faster service. The debate is over incumbents pulling a new revenue stream out of thin air by charging content providers (often competitors) a new QoS tariff that will likely be passed on to consumers.
While Martin said that consumers who don't pay for higher levels of Internet service shouldn't expect to get higher levels of performance, he did say in a following press conference that "the commission needs to make sure" that there are fair-trade ways to ensure that consumers "get what they are purchasing." When asked how consumers could measure service performance levels, Martin said that public Web sites already exist that let users measure their connection speeds."
At Media Shift, Mark Glaser has the rundown on the current state of personalized news sites. What started with Fishwrap at MIT in 1994 then became My Yahoo in the late '90s, and now is giving way to Web 2.0 sites such as Netvibes and Gixo.
Increasingly when big corporate news breaks the community doesn't want to just hear just from the CEO. They want to get the perspective of someone they trust even more, the corporate blogger. This puts pressure on these individuals to comment on every major news announcement that impacts the community - and to do it quickly. The problem is, the bigger the organization, the further away they might be from the epicenter of the news.
All of this leads to a larger issue. Who is a corporate spokesperson? Is it any employee who blogs, the CEO, who? My theory is that every company that has bloggers has multiple "spokespeople." Some, like the CEO, address shareholders, key customers and more. Others, unit managers, bloggers, evangelists, address one or more communities. Where this gets messy is the media. Both Scoble and Jim Allchin, the exec who manages the Windows Vista project, are viewed by the press as credible spokespeople. The problem herein is that one, Allchin, had more knowledge of this situation than the other, Scoble.
Another sub-point here is timing. When should an employee blogger who does not have first-hand knowledge of a situation blog on the subject? To what degree do they need to become a roving corporate reporter? And last, but not least, should they remain objective perhaps to the chagrin or simply waive the corporate flag? All good questions that I don't have answers to yet as I am figuring them out in my own organization.
Technorati Tags: windows+vista, robert+scoble, scoble, microsoft
Yahoo Tuesday launched a PC phone service used in conjunction with its Yahoo! Messenger service. Those signing up can receive unlimited domestic calls for $2.99 a month or $29.90 a year. You can also purchase prepaid voice credit in $10 and $25 increments.
To use the new services you'll need to download the new client (available at http://messenger.yahoo.com). Calls have to be initiated from a PC, but can be made to traditional landline phones and cellphones. Yahoo customers can also receive calls from regular phones, explains USA Today.
Yahoo will charge 2 cents a minute for domestic calls, on top of the monthly $2.99 fee. Per-minute charges to 180 other countries will vary. It won't charge to receive calls.
Yahoo is undercutting Internet telephone leader Skype by about $1 monthly for such PC-to-phone service.
Yahoo Voice and Skype both offer PC-to-PC calls for free, as do instant-messaging services including America Online's AIM, Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Google Talk.
You need a headset with microphone to make calls or a PC with a built-in microphone and speakers.
MSN is now testing a PC-to-phone service. AOL says it will have PC-to-phone calling available later this year.
Yahoo Vice President Brad Garlinghouse says what sets Yahoo's service apart from competitors' is "aggressive pricing," and the fact that the calling services are entwined in Messenger and the Yahoo network.
Unlike Skype, which is pure calling, Yahoo offers e-mail, instant message, news headlines and many other features.
"Phone service for $2.99 monthly won't make people run out and replace their traditional phones. But, "we see a continual chipping away at the traditional model," says Maribel Lopez, an analyst with Forrester Research. "And this really hurts the future phone business."
****
Hyperpolis 3.0: Really Useful Media
Call for Papers/Proposals
We know too much about media communications technologies as instruments of social control.
We don’t know enough about media technologies as instruments of civil society and cultural development.
We know too much about media discourses as, on the one hand, "popular culture": alienated and commodified cultural forms; and on the other, "cultural theory": paranoid cosmologies of hyper-rhetoric, and the ubiquitous inevitability of evil…
We don’t know enough about digital media as something other than a means to an end, as "instrumental culture", where culture itself —mainstream, alternative, underground, or otherwise is degraded to the status of tools (some hard, some soft, all ware).
Hyperpolis: Really Useful Media will provide a forum for the discussion and presentation of some positive contributions to the field, in light of these chronic imbalances.
1 Media practices whose product is an improvement in the integrity and vitality of the culture and society in which they are embedded.
2 Media practices whose processes are in and of themselves desirable.
Deadline:
June 15th, 2006
Conference and Celebration:
October 20th, 2006
Hosts:
Integrated Digital Media Institute
and Othmer Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies
Polytechnic University, Brooklyn
Info:
idmi.poly.edu
Contact:
Carl Skelton, Director, IDMI
Polytechnic University, Brooklyn
RH 701, Six MetroTech Center
Brooklyn NY 11201 USA
cskelton@poly.edu
NBC and CBS are two of the companies that we know have sent nastygrams to YouTube over copyrighted video, and I'm sure there are many more. YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley says in some cases, the same company is both uploading video and ordering YouTube to take it down. "There's been a few examples of marketing departments uploading content directly to the site, while on the other side of the company their attorney is demanding we remove this content," Hurley said. Classic. Meanwhile, YouTube is pursuing parnerships with traditional media companies, and it's only a matter of time (in my opinion) until they're acquired. Did you know YouTube has twice the traffic of Yahoo! Video and more than three times that of Google Video and AOL Video? Wow!
Finally China will make use of its homegrown CPU chip (Central Processing Unit), Godsen II, to build Dragon Dreams, affordable computers at 1,000yuan ($125).
After testing Godsen I and Godsen II for severals years, the Godsen II chip is equivalent to Pentium III and will be China's first 64-bit high-performance processor. Godsen II also supports Linux (yea!) and Windows X operating systems. Tax-control and server machines made by domestic companies have already started using the Godsen II chip since last year.
People may wonder why China would create another processor when there is already is Pentium III and Intel. This goes back to patents issues and is reminiscent of the reactions in early March when China highly encouraged the use of homegrown codec AVS instead of using MPEG-4 and H.264. Therefore not only is this China's first 64-bit unit, but Godsen II is China's first wholly owned intellectual property rights for a CPU chip, therefore their Dragon Dream PCS will not be held to US patent royalties. Get it? Ahhhh yes anti-US imperialism working its ways! That is why the development of Godsen II was funded heavily by various sectors, from government agencies, universities to private companies.
Now UN's Kofi Annan at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) can contact China to roll those $100 computers out. Others have already noted how this affordable computer can now be used by the poor. Back in May 2005 the Director of Godsen II, Li Guojie, said that this will "enable 800 million Chinese peasants to afford PCs." So let's start working on rural education and development to make this quote come true. With recent funding directions announced at the China Development Forum 2006 and by the Premier, Wen Jiaoba, at the National People's Congress, it seems like we are at least heading in the right direction. The question is if Chinese peasants can afford these new PC's, what kind of information will they have access to online? In a top-down surveillanced world, these affordable PC's could be pre-built with monitoring devices that will track peasant's usage and control what websites can be accessed. Scary! The future of political activism may look like peasants learning how to hack into these Dragon Dream PC's to get around firewalls.
UPDATE: Dragon PC is already on trial and may be produced on a small scale by June.
Technorati Tags: china, chip, computer, CPU, dragon dream, Godsen II, intellectural property, IP, patent, processor
Keepvid translates videos back out of “protective” wrappers used by certain online video services into standard video files that can be saved locally. Given the number of sites that take works they don’t own and then try to fence them in with some bogus bit of digital barbed wire, it’s refreshing to see at least one company making wire cutters.
C/Net reports that Microsoft plans to buy Vexcel, a maker of remote sensing software and instruments, to help expand the software maker's digital mapping efforts.
Microsoft said the pending deal will help it with its efforts "to deliver a dynamic immersive digital representation of the real world that provides the best local search and mapping experience."
Vexcel, a privately held company, specializes in synthetic aperture radar processing, remote-sensing ground stations, photogrammetry, aerial mapping and geographic information systems and services.
Vexcel's GIS software is often used to plot bombing missions and cruise missile attacks. The 3D representations help avoid radar and natural hazards. Vexcel also bought a company which makes a hyperspectral camera, the UltraCam (right).
Microsoft's Virtual Earth offers a combination of aerial imagery, maps and yellow-pages data. It is designed to let users search for and share information about specific U.S. locations, but it doesn't do the spectacular flybys of.
Google Earth utilizes Keyhole's commercial software in the Google Earth application and database. Google has also mapped The Moon and Mars.
The Boulder Daily Camera, a newspaper in the company's Colorado hometown, first reported news of the acquisition on Friday. Microsoft did not offer any financial details of the transaction.
Microsoft will have to get approval first. It may not be a walk in the park. The United States National Geospacial Intelligence Agency and other agencies are sure to raise concerns. Of course, it may have been the NGA who was responsible for the "accidental" bombing of tv stations and embassies in Iraq.
DailyWireless has more on Cities as Game Grids, Tsunami Mapping, 3D Cities and Doing the Time Warp.
Thomas Hawk: CozmoTV: Welcome to Television 2.0.
American Idol fans can submit :10 second commercials on why they love AmericanIdol.com and the top five spots will air on Fox in May. "This is a great chance for our fans to grab a little fame for themselves and help promote Americanidol.com," said Jeff King, VP Fox Interactive Media. Press release follows below...PRESS RELEASE -- Los Angeles, Calif. - March 20, 2006 - Americanidol.com, the official online community for American Idol fans, today unveiled "Video Chance for Fame," a user-generated video competition that invites fans to create and submit a ten second commercial on why they love Americanidol.com the website. The top five commercials, as voted on by the Americanidol.com online community, will air in May during an American Idol telecast, with the winning commercial airing during the highly anticipated finale on May 24 on FOX.
The study found original reporting in just 5% of blog postings it reviewed.
The first post at the editors’ blog at the brand new Guardian opinionfest, Comment is Free, is a report on the daily morning editorial conference at the paper, with a promise to give us minutes of the midday meeting next. Don’t expect minutes of news meetings to be scintillating reading — attending them is no thrill ride, either. Doesn’t matter. It’s there for those who want it. CBS put up video of at least one of its story meetings at Public Eye. It appears as if this is going to become a habit at the Guardian. This shows the right attitude: opening the door and leaving it open.
Technorati Tags: Google, MySpace, COGs, centersofgravity
Today with Rocketboom’s episode 349, the rules of advertising have changed forever. Rocketboom has created a new, spellbinding advertising format.

Rocketboom is an entertaining video-blog with a news-format that hundreds of thousands of people download every weekday morning at 9AM EST. I’ve been staying with them as they burn the midnight oil putting the finishing touches on the internet ad that ushers in a new era in advertising. I’ve watched the team of crackerjack media-makers, Andrew Baron, Amanda Congdon, Mario Librandi, and Kevin Chapados edit long into the night putting the finishing touches on their first episode with an advertisement.
It was only a month ago that they sold their first advertisement package on ebay. The highest bidder, an atm company, gets an advertisement put at the end of every Rocketboom for a week. Rocktboom gets complete creative control and retains the creative commons copyright on it and so if their client likes the advertisement and wants to show it on tv, they have to buy !
Today’s one minute advertisement shows up at the end of their 4 minute show and this is no ordinary advertisement. Normal television ads know that they have thirty seconds to get their message across. They have to rely on simple powerful messages that give a one-two punch to the audience’s reptillian brain.
Rocketboom changes all that. Because they are not limited to television’s thirty seconds, they have added subtlety and intruigue and a great narrative story to the advertisements that will make Rocketboom subscribers sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the next days advertisement. When people download Rocketboom every morning, they have the episode on their computer and the Rocketboom team have taken this advantage and scored a touchdown. They made a commercial where the idea is simple, but the story is full of intruiging and subtle details. If you want to get it, you just watch it once, but if you want to really get it, you have to watch it over and over for all the easter eggs and cool details that lie just below the surface.
Rocketboom can track how many times it’s downloaded, but there is no measure for the millions of times that people around the world will watch this commercial over and over again getting new subtle insights into the clever masterminds of Rocketboom’s creative team.

Advertisers, I speak to you when I say that your day has come. You are no longer bound to make your advertisements fit into the square holes of the old media. With video-blog advertisements your world has opened up and the creative possibilities are endless.
Advertisers, the time is now to go forth and find your favorite video-blog and pay creative people to make provoking narrative advertisements that people will watch over and over again. Now is the time to make the investment in video-blogs and internet media, while it is still fresh and the barrier to entry is low and the playing field is wide.
Crossposted by author from I Make Things
Employees are now regarded as a greater danger to workplace cyber security than the gangs of hackers and virus writers launching targeted attacks from outside the firewall, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
"With email and instant messaging proving increasingly popular and devices such as laptop computers, mobile phones and USB storage devices more commonplace in the office, the opportunities for workplace crime are growing."
... The rise in internal security attacks has come about because outside criminal gangs realise that recruiting or tricking employees to hand over insider knowledge is less expensive and traceable than other forms of cybercrime."
(All I ever needed to know about hacking I learned in kindergarten. -kc.)
Big news at the IEEE mesh standards meetup last week in Denver, reports TelecomWeb and WiFiNetNews: a standard for mesh networking may be coalescing.
The new standard, 802.11s, will create a protocol for auto-configuring paths between access points over self-configuring multi-hop networks. With a standard, interoperatiblity between vendors may be possible.
Currently, all "city clouds" that use mesh networking to interconnect nodes use proprietary technology. Placing a multi-million dollar bet on one supplier is asking for trouble. A mesh networking standard would likely lower both risk and cost.
Status of Project IEEE 802.11s
ESS Mesh Networking
March 2006, Denver, Colorado
ESS Mesh Networking Task Group Report
The ESS Mesh Netwokring Task Group (TGs) met on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoon 7-9 March 2006 at the Hyatt Regency Denver Convetion Center hotel.
- The updated agenda for the meeting is in submission 11-06/256r10.
- At the January meeting, TGs suspended its proposal selection process to expedite the two remaining proposals, SEE Mesh and Wi-Mesh Alliance, working towards a merger. This merger was successful and a single joint proposal was presented and confirmed unanimously at the March meeting as the starting point for the 802.11s standard, although much work remains.
- TGs has scheduled three teleconferences on the following dates at 11am US Eastern Time to discuss mesh security and its May agenda.
- 5 April 2006
- 26 Paril 2006
- 10 May 2006
- Activities at the May 2006 meeting are expected to be to resolve informal internal technical review comments on its Draft, hear other technical presentations and possible amendments.
"Mesh-networking features will help keep IEEE 802.11, already dominant in the WLAN arena with over 100 million chip sets shipping annually, at the cutting edge of technology for the maximum benefit of its users,” says Mesh Networking Task Group Chair Donald E. Eastlake III. He adds that final approval of the new addition to the 802.11 family of standards is targeted for 2008.
SEEMesh (short for Simple, Efficient and Extensible Mesh) and the Wi-Mesh Alliance are apparently merging. SEEMesh is backed by Intel, Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, and Texas Instruments. The Wi-Mesh Alliance is backed by Nortel, Philips, Thompson and Mitre. Details of the proposed standard are not yet available.
But the biggest names in the metropolitan-area mesh network space, BelAir Networks, Tropos Networks, and Strix Systems, are not buying in, reports Enterprise Networking Planet.
| Vendor | Product | Radios for client access | Radios for backhaul | Ethernet ports |
| BelAir Networks | BelAir 200 | 1 802.11b/g | Up to 3 proprietary 5GHz | Eight |
| Cisco | Aironet 1500 | 1 802.11b/g | 1 802.11a | Zero |
| Firetide | HotPort 3203 | 1 802.11a/b/g | Same as for client access | Two |
| Nortel | Wireless AP 7220 | 1 802.11b | 1 802.11a | One |
| Strix Systems | OWS 3600 | Up to 3 802.11b/g | Up to 3 802.11a | One |
| Tropos Networks | 5210 MetroMesh Router | 1 802.11b/g | Same as for client access | One |
Strix and BelAir both have said that 802.11s may not cover outdoor mesh networking effectively.
Tropos, the mesh market leader, uses a single radio with their patented Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP). Tropos may not feel compelled to jump in bed with the first mesh standard that comes down the pike.
A total of six additional Ethernet devices, such as cameras and access points, can be added to Trango Broadband's HD Mesh micro-cell base station. It is designed to support WiMAX-ready radios and 802.11g Wi-Fi hotspots.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Mesh Standards?, Mesh Standards Proposed, Community Mesh Developments and Mesh Roundup.
Not that it's news that a old-media industry organ like Variety is out of its mind when it comes to the internet and music, but the sheer unreality in this story on the situation in Canada made my eyeballs pop out of my head.
At the beginning and end of the story it's all about stealing and illegality:
The dip is part of a 10-year decline that the CRIA blames on illegal music downloading. [...] The goal of a vibrant digital marketplace in Canada will remain beyond reach until our legal environment encourages people to buy music instead of passively accepting theft on the Web.
But buried in the middle, in the space where professional journalists traditionally put balancing viewpoints, is unambigous acknowledgement that nothing even faintly illegal is happening:
Last March, the Federal Court ruled music file-sharing on the Internet was legal and that neither downloading nor sharing digital music online infringes copyright.
The Economist writes:
Just as timeshifting lets viewers choose when to watch something, placeshifting lets them decide where. Of course, people have long been able to carry recorded shows (on videotapes or DVDs) around with them. But in the past few months, the placeshifting of live broadcasts, as well as recorded shows, has become possible. What we're moving towards is having any content, anywhere, anytime, on whatever device is available to you, says Van Baker of Gartner, a consultancy. This is, he says, part of a far broader trend: the personalisation of media consumption, from mobile-phone ringtones to music playlists.
e forefront of placeshifting is Sling Media, a start-up based in San Mateo, California. Last year it launched the Slingbox, which in effect lets you watch your own television from anywhere in the world via the internet.
NPR : Watching Cable TV a la Carte
As an on-demand society affects TV-viewing habits, the FCC supports what is being called "a la carte cable programming." Viewers would pay for the channels they actually watch. New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera and Susan Stamberg discuss TV's future.
I don't know about your cable company, but mine makes no bones about being evil, and Nocera makes the point here that a la carte would weaken the cable companies.
A study has shown that half of all malfunctioning products returned by customers are in full working order. They are returned because customers can't figure out how to operate them.
Most of the flaws found in the study could be tracked back to the first phase of the development process: product definition.
The study was done Elke den Ouden from the Technical University of Eindhoven.

another interesting news stories treemap data visualization. each rectangle is a single article, of which the size & color indicate the article age & popularity (determined by clicks, subscriptions, or features in weblogs). the map can be filtered or rearrarranged to view articles that meet certain criteria, or that contain specific text. the Hive Group website shows a wide range of similar treemaps that are based on different datasets, such as the iTunes, Wikipedia or Amazon collection. see also newsmap & week in review. [newsisfree.com]
Ajit Jaokar quotes Tomi Ahonen: "Total SMS revenues in 2005 were about 75 Billion USD. To put it in context, Hollywood box office is a bit below 30 B USD. Global music industry revenues are about 35B. Videogaming, consoles and all software are about 40. And the total value of all laptop computers sold in 2005 was about 65 B USD. SMS alone earns more than any of those industries.... And SMS is still over 90% profit. Do we love this industry or what?"
MyToday.com (created by us at Netcore) is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. It is simultaneously available on the web through an Ajax client and on the mobile phone in WML. Check it out and let me know what you think of it, and of enhancements you'd like to see.
Ajax version: http://www.mytoday.com/
Mobile version: http://m.mytoday.com/
Here is how my colleague, Veer Bothra, describes the thinking behind MyToday.
Public versus Personal Aggregators
Personal aggregators like bloglines.com, my.yahoo.com, live.com etc. give the users an empty plate which needs to be filled with feeds which the user knows about. This approach ignores the fact that users in general are interested in a subject but not necessarily aware about quality feeds and sources in that area. A public aggregator like MyToday.com depends on editorial expertise to choose and pick the best sources in a subject. This way, the reader can get going without any sweat.
Source versus Stories
Aggregators like news.google.com, topix.net are story based. Their endeavor is to distill the most important stories at any point of time. MyTodays selection is based on the quality of the source and not on the stories. Therefore the selection process when making a Daily is stringent to maintain the quality of content.
Micro-content Client
MyToday consists of a Micro-content client and an aggregation system. The micro-content client is built keeping in mind the nature of micro-content like blog posts and news stories. They are small in size, large in volume and more often than not, time sensitive. MyTodays micro-content client makes it easier to consume lots of information quickly.
Aggregation System
MyTodays underlying feed aggregation system claims to turnaround Dailies in 30 minutes. Give it an OPML of feeds and it can create a new Daily in 30 minutes which then auto-updates. Niche information / content verticals, available on both PC and mobile, can be created and served with low human intervention.
Personalisation
The reasoning behind public aggregators is that most users want to start with a choice made by the experts. But it is also true that most wouldnt be satisfied with the default for long. They would want to tweak it a bit - add a thing and remove some. This is where personalisation comes in as the natural next phase of development. Keep watching.
This is what Jonathan Boutelle had to say after he saw it at BarCamp Delhi:
It seems to be a specialized AJAX homepage. It allows the quick creation of niche publications that aggregate and present rss data. The design is very slick, with geographic filtering. It also has very rich integration with phone (at sister site m.mytoday.com). It makes it very simple to great aggregated feeds. Check out mytoday.com/bcdelhi, which they built in an hour and which is consuming all the blogs, tagged photos, etc from barcamp delhi. Awesome!
of this approach seems to be that most "real people" won't build up an rss reader from scratch. But they'll be OK with deleting feeds from a pre-existing set.
Intel has videos up showing more Origami/UMPC prototypes and scenarios in which they'd be used (including, thank heavens, a model with a sub-notebook/tablet design). Lots of happy, beautiful folks use their UMPCs to instant message, watch videos, sync up videogame save states, and respond to email—all using an interface that looks considerably different than regular Windows XP, we might add.
ultramobile2 Videos [Intel via Ultramobilize]
If we can have video on demand, pizza on demand, why not events on demand. Business 2 Blog reports that EVDB-powered Eventful is launching a new service where consumers can create a groundswell for certain concerts and events from performers.
The idea is to use the Web to aggregate demand for different kinds of events—anything from rock concerts to book readings. So someone in Omaha who really wants U2 to play there could start a campaign on Eventful, and if enough people join and demand that U2 plays there, the tour manager would probably be wise to add an Omaha date to the tour.
This is a good idea particularly for smaller bands. I wonder what is the “monetization strategy.” I had recently met with a company which was working on developing a technology that would allow people watch live concerts using the IM networks for a small fee. Again a nifty idea with a business model. How big these things could be? Who knows… clearly, broadband is working its magic in unusual ways don’t you think?
One of many things planned in the relaunch has been revealed. AIM now has APIs.
There are almost 70M AIM users.
Think about what you could do with that?
- connect AIM to Skype and create some sort of universal conversation manager. Oooops - hmmm - maybe that’s restricted! (Susan Mernit has some comments on this!)
- send important updates, alerts, data, blog posts, microcontent anything - through the AIM infrastructure to anyone of those 70M people
- AIM has a huge eco-system surrounding it - so mobile, presence management, tie into all sorts of commerce
- AIM interop is what Microsoft and Google wanted. If they want it - perhaps you might find it interesting - as well. Just the access to all those people shoudl be enough to do something!
:-)
Congrats to the team for shipping! Controversy is already swelling up around this. They’re still restricting the notion of a ‘multi-headed client’ - even though that’s exactly what Google is doing.
This news article says "teachers who express radical left-wing views in the classroom are facing a new tactic in America:conservative parents are encouraging students to make recordings of their views.The use of micro-recording devices,often in mobile phones or digital music players,is the latest twist in conservatives' struggle against what they see as the leftist slant of American education.A high-school geography teacher was placed on leave last week in Colorado after a 16-year-old pupil recorded him comparing US President George W. Bush to Hitler".Further,"an alumnus group at the University of California at Los Angeles has also caused an uproar by offering a $US100 ($135) bounty for taped evidence of professors' radical rants.The Bruin Alumni Association was founded by Andrew Jones,the former head of the student Republican organisation who was fired from a job at David Horowitz's Centre for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles.An outcry forced Mr Jones to withdraw the $US100 bounty, but he is still collecting recordings of politicising professors for his list of the university's "Dirty Thirty" academics".
Whiff of McCarthy as pupils out teachers
Flash: Podfading ravages the landscape of logorrheic bloggers | 43 Folders
I understand its useful to look back toward what new technologies remind us of, but you wont tease out the more novel uses of something until you let it just be what it is, allowing it to evolve without all the herding and expectations. In the fifties, the future always looked like TVs, and in the sixties it all looked like rocket ships. And so, today, podcasts look like relatively easy-to-produce (usually long-ass) radio shows, and thats cool, I suppose. But if we are to be stuck with this radio mindset for now, I do wish more of the many talented podcasters out there would aspire toward making a series of brilliant poppy 45s rather than manufacturing these hour. long. news. casts. Seriously. Just do 3 fun minutes every couple weeks, and then stop for a while. I want Love Me Do, not The Ring Cycle.
fast and dirt cheap because you don't have time for anything else. Why should podcasts be epics?
via a post from BoingBoing from 2004,

Spammers have come up with a brilliant way to defeat the 'captcha' distorted-word test that prevents spamming bots from signing up for free email accounts or posting to blogs: leverage the masses of users on the internet looking for free porn. Spammers set up free porn sites where users have to solve a captcha to enter, then that solution is fed through to the bot signing up for free email accounts.
This is like the evil spammer version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk project (earlier SmartMobs post), which the website describes as 'artificial artificial intelligence.'
(Thanks Luke)
Found via Technorati: smartspace by Scott Smith of Social Technologies (an international futures research and consulting firm based in Washington, DC):
Welcome to Smartspace, a new blog about annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes–the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit.
ludes discussions, observations and insights on ubiquitous and embedded computing, mapping, location-based services, surveillance and tracking, geotagging, smart homes, intelligent environments, the annotated reality, and virtual worlds, where the increasingly intersect with the physical.
An increasing amount of interest, research, development, investment and regulation is being directed at the world of smart spaces. The purpose of Smartspace is to provide context and explore implications of the convergence of the above mentioned factors as they relate to these activities. Hopefully we will feature interviews, guest authors, and other interesting features and contents that make Smartspace a compelling read.
I found it because he expanded the discussion about my post about the giving of one’s location while calling with a cell-phone, Scott adds this intriguing walkaround:
Meanwhile, I find it interesting that, while we are waiting for applications that alert the person on the other end of a mobile discussion automatically as to our location as the call comes in, it would be easier at the moment to take a picture of myself on the train and MMS it to my wife using something like ZoneTag, allowing her to see where I am before I call. Talk about a workaround.
Indeed, image can bring the context that the user wants to show, with the level of accuracy (in terms of contextual cues) the user may want to show and convey in his/her message.
Why do I blog this? another interesting contributor in the field of social usage of space/place/locative tech, very relevant ideas so far.
With all of the discussion about our libraries becoming user-centered and user-focused, I wonder when/if the time will come when we start "storing" and "carrying" their stories. Take a look at The Lit List:
"The Lit List is a site where readers submit links to online fiction—including short stories, eBooks and podcasts—and vote for their favorites. The most popular links are automatically 'published' to the front page. It's like a real-time literary journal edited by readers."
So, will the libraries of the future carry "books" written by community members? Will the library become the "publisher" of this content? It's really not that expensive if done in an online environment.
It seems to me that this is the next step in our user centered libraries...
If imitation is the best form of flattery, London-based record label BeatPick is handing it to Berkeley and London-based label Magnatune in spades. Similarities include CC license used (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike), a 50/50 artist/label revenue split, a menu of commercial licensing options and availability of wav, mp3 and ogg downloads.
Of course it's about the music and Betpick has its own set of artists. Check them out. If you're a musician you can submit your music.
Congratulations to Beatpick for copying a great business model. If you're interested in commons-based business models and happen to be attending SXSW, do not miss our panel moderated by CC board member Joi Ito and featuring Ian Clarke of Freenet and Revvr, Teresa Malango of Magnatune, and Jimmy Wales of Wikimedia:
Open source software business models have gone from theoretical to profitable over the past half decade-companies like Red Hat, MySQL, JBOSS, and IBM. How will peer production business models prove out in the content space? Learn how pioneering commons-based businesses are creating what Business 2.0 calls the next multi-billion dollar industry.
Update: David d'Atri of Beatpick responds below. For the record, I intended the above as a compliment to both Magnatune and Beatpick. Many (not just two!) commons based business models are great. As hinted in the above panel description, the field is ripe for exploration and innovation (which includes copying and improving, even though that isn't what Beatpick is doing). David d'Atri:
We admire Magnatune but think we are not a copycat.
Some thoughts:
BeatPick is a project that started in 2003 during my Master in Business Economics. The title of my -first class- final dissertation: "A paper on economic efficiency and the infringement of copyright in the music industry: An Insight into the Future of the Music Industry." I showed that a decrease of copyright rigidities in the music industry could lead to an increase in total welfare. Just ask for a copy if you can bother to read a "heavy" and very theoretical paper.
In 2003 I had no idea about Magnatune and I did not find out about it until 4 months ago when our project was already being developed.
Some basic differences with Magnatune:
- We do not use a flexible price schema. We do not find it fair. Although it is really smart from a business point of view, we find no fair to use a clever type of price discrimination which aims to extract the total surplus from each customer by asking them to self-discriminate. We admit that it takes a lot of good marketing to ask people to self-discriminate and we think Magnatune does a great job. However we prefer to sell more at a cheaper price as we are for more people having more music. If we were to implement a flexible price schema then we would find fair to give artists 100% of the earnings over a certain amount.
- We let artists go anytime. Agreement can be terminated in 30 days while Magnatune ask artists to commit for 5 years. We think Magnatune’s request is reasonable from a business point of view but it is not very fair as Magnatune does not commit to market each artist.
- We have a completely different graphic and style. We target younger people. Our message is simpler and we think more direct. The graphic is not as serious as Magnatune. Graphic is very important and says a lot about who you are.
- We try to create a network of artists collaborating for commercial and non commercial projects. ("commission work from our artists"). We get a commission on commercial projects but we get nothing for non commercial projects. Latest example is Tobor Experiment (experimental section) collaborating with HRF-LAB for the Lovebytes. Magnatune does nothing like this.
- We try to deal with hip hop and video art music (experimental section). Magnatune does not.
- We are going to make a section dedicated to VJ and use a similar business model. Magnatune does not.
Some consideration:
- Most internet website split earnings 50/50. Nothing new. Certainly it was not invented by Magnatune.
- Categories for music licensing were not invented by Magnatune's . Most music licensing websites have similar.
- We have been operating for 30 days only and we have had an holding page for the last 2 months. Our results:
Some inspirations from Magnatune:
Magnatune does a great job in marketing its idea and I do admire it. I do also admire John Buckman. I do also admit that is possible to find similarities but I think that you were way too harsh. You did not consider how good is for the Creative Commons, Fair Trade and the music business to have other record labels operating according to a fair business model. I do wish people to get inspired by this business model.
I thank you for the time you spent in reading this post and I do appreciate the opportunity we have had to say what we think. It's great to be on the Creative Commons blog.
David d'Atri
BeatPick -- FairPlay Music Label
Fans with way too much time on their hands (OK, I admit the sites are cool), are tracking characters from TV shows on dynamic maps. For example, with Idol Tracker (pictured), you can identify the location of the fan base of each of the contestants on the show. With Jack Tracker, you can see where the fictional Jack Bauer from 24 has raced all over Los Angeles to save the world. There's also The Sopranos, Amazing Race, The Apprentice, Veronica Mars and Seinfeld. (Thanks, Alice!)
Mobile video: Get started with the QuickTime for Java API
From the article:
In this article, I'll first suggest some practical (and potentially very popular) uses for mobile video, and then present two programs to get you started using the QuickTime for Java API to create video content for the iPod. These programs let you easily add captions to existing video files and convert legacy video files into an iPod-compatible format. At the end of the article, I'll leave you with some example code that you can use to learn more about manipulating videos using the QuickTime for Java API.
2005 was the biggest year yet for camera phones, those pocket-size precursors to the participatory panopticon and potential planetary protection tool (yes, I got a special deal on "p"s, why do you ask?). Market research group NPD reports:
In 2005, 45 percent of all mobile phones sold in the U.S. were camera phones, up from 26 percent in 2004. Asia followed a very similar trend. Western Europe had a higher incidence of camera phones at 64 percent, and Japan had a much greater adoption rate with more than 90 percent of all mobile phones sold with camera capabilities both in 2004 and 2005.
This tells us two things: we're on the verge of seeing a major blow-up between advocates of strict control over recordings of intellectual property and advocates of universal use of communication tools; and we're approaching a point where location-based information and communication systems relying on cameraphones will have a large enough base of potential users to really make a go of it.
(Via Picturephoning)
(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 01:18 PM)
flash lite application - Google Search
I can't find any decent applications.. Someone tell me where to find the interesting Flash Lite apps, please..
So how does a relatively little-known site like YouTube rack up 1.2 million views on a CBS News story in just a few days? It makes video obscenely easy to share. First, YouTube has a social networking engine, so you can see who's submitting clips and add them to your friends list. Then there's the handy "share this video" icon that pops up over the player at the end of each clip. And then the easy-to-copy code on very page so any blogger can drop the clip into their sites, player and all. Very smart.
Boing Boing to net-censors: Get bent!
We've decided not to rejig our editorial process to make it easier for a censorware company to block us for their customers. Instead, we're creating a clearinghouse of information on how to defeat censorware.
Last week, we reported that Boing Boing was blocked by entire countries including the United Arab Emirates, and by many library systems, schools, US government and military sites, and corporations.
Today, we've learned that Internet Qatar, the sole ISP in the State of Qatar, has also banned BoingBoing.
We've heard from librarians in Africa who want to watch the video of the American Register of Copyrights denouncing Congress, employees at the Australian Broadcasting Company, students, and workers around the world who can't gain access to our work.
At fault is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity -- even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands -- as a "nudity" site, which means that customers who block "nudity" can't get through.
Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a "nudity" site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692 -- that's 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618 -- 0.32 percent.
In fact, out of the 25,000+ Boing Boing posts classed as "nudity" by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.
Why is SmartFilter content to deliver a product with a 99.5 percent false-positive rate? Because it has promised its customers that it will stop their users from seeing nudity (fat chance -- it's a dead certainty that Smart Filter has failed to class innumerable sites containing nudity), and punishing 24,875 nudity-free posts to get at 125 that contain mild or "art" nudity is fine by them.
Secure Computing told us that their categorization system protects kindergartners from being exposed to porn. We argue that not only are products like SmartFilter incapable of blocking all potentially kid-inappropriate sites, but why treat entire countries, or entire corporate sites full of working adults, as kindergartners?
The question of keeping your child from viewing content you don't want them to see can be addressed more efficiently locally, with tech tools like the browser Bumpercar. As BoingBoing founder (and father of two) Mark Frauenfelder explains, "My daughter and I found a bunch of great kid-friendly sites and have added them to the 'white list.' As a parent, I have local control of the sites she visits instead of handing over control to a remote group of people that I don't trust to do my job of being a parent."
The fact is, there's no effective way to censor the Internet in broad strokes. Only dumb CIOs and totalitarian governments like the UAE believe that adding censorware to your network will prevent the naughty stuff from slopping in. Having a human being review a few pages on a site every couple months is a perfectly adequate classification system, in SmartFilter's lights -- which is convenient, since a genuinely thoroughgoing review would be ruinously expensive.
Secure Computing offered us a devil's bargain: if we'd change the URLs of images with "nudity" (which, they assured us, included photos of Michaelangelo's David) to something they could detect and block, they'd let the rest of the world see us again. That guy in the UAE who was worried he'd be imprisoned for trying to read BoingBoing would be OK again.
We considered their offer, and decided not to do it. What happens when the next censorware company comes along with another editorial process they want us to engage in to help them censor the site?
More importantly: why should we let a company that helps corrupt dictatorships oppress their citizen dictate morality to us?
So instead we've decided to help put Secure Computing out of business. We're doing this in three ways:
ngBoing team:
- Cory Doctorow
- Mark Frauenfelder
- Xeni Jardin
- David Pescovitz
- John Battelle
Previous BoingBoing posts:
* BoingBoing now censored in the UAE
* Argonne National Laboratory is blocking Boing Boing
_Live_Flash_Stream_via_FFMPEG
Drazen writes up the procedure he uses to do live streaming to an embedded SWF.
Now there's a place you can go to find out the top 100 most-frequently-used makes and models of digital cameras used to take pictures uploaded to photo sharing website Flickr. There's also a column that names the top camera manufacturers represented in Flickr uploads.
Here's an exquisite example of data mining, where recent uploads are sampled using some pretty tricky technology. Taking a look at the list right now, it looks like Canon dominates, with seven out of the top 10 cameras used, with the top three manufacturers lining up as Canon, Sony and then Nikon. Take a look at the list here.
The Neighborhood Story Project works with high school students and their families to write about their lives and neighborhoods. Students learn to write creative non-fiction and vignettes, conduct in-depth interviews of family members and neighbors, and take photographs. Community writing projects allow us to be the authors of our own stories, and infuse our community with real and important literature.
(Also check out the Lower East Side Biography Project -kc.)
After the print media's integrating citizen contributions in their papers and online editions, TV is now doing the same, requesting citizen videos shot with digital cameras or cameraphones for their news programs. News.com reports.
"USA Networks, Fox and NBC are programming shows featuring the most popular video shorts circulating on the Net in the coming months. And ABC News Digital plans to enhance its television news program by drawing on video captured by viewers using mobile phones.
ABC News also introduced an online service devoted to collecting viewers' video that's been captured by multimedia-equipped mobile phones. ABC collects and edits video from the online service, which is called "Seen & Heard in America," so that it can incorporate it regularly into shows like "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America."
One of the world's most successful citizen journalism sites, Korea’s OhmyNews, has gotten an $11-million investment from Softbank.
The site -- which has built a team of almost 40,000 citizen reporters -- will use the investment to launch a Japanese news site, the first “stepping stone” of the soon-to-be-formed OhmyNews International. It also plans to develop its video journalism arm and improve its English-language edition.
Originally from The Agonist, ReBlogged by huong on Feb 22, 2006 at 11:06 PM

First M, now Metropolis, one of Fritz Lang's other masterpieces, is available for download on Internet Archive.

As Bibi says, other formats are available at the Public Domain Movies. Related: Metropolis poster fetches record.
The Coral Content Distribution Network
Not a CDN for streaming, rather a distributed caching system. Developed at NYU and Open Source. Pretty interesting..
//// Welcome to eyespot ////
Just came upon this interesting new platform for online video editing. Flash based and targeted to non-video folk. I like the MMS submission process for mobile users and blog publishing though I wish it created a feed for use in things like FireANT. Guess that is a bit hard when everything is Flash video based.
From the site:
Shoot, Mix, and Share your Video.
Use the eyespot Mixer to combine your videos, photos and music. Share your video and mixes with the world for Free.
A text messaging reminder service has been launched by Lincolnshires library service to let borrowers know that their items are ready for collection.
"When you reserve a library book, talking book, CD, DVD or video you can now choose to be notified by text message , a service which is free of charge. [via eGov monitor]

In April, the Antwerp-based De Tijd will run a test for 200 subscribers by giving them a portable device using electronic ink technology from E Ink Corp. and an e-reader manufactured by iRex Technologies BV.
The newspaper will be updated wirelessly throughout the day.
Rick: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. - Casablanca
Here are two articles with opposing examples on the reliability of citizen reporters/bloggers. The first one (Fake Wedding Fools Korean Media) describes a mock wedding on a Tokyo subway captured on cameraphone which spread like wildfire on blogs, and was then picked up by the main stream media as a true story. The second (Bloggers: an army of irregulars), is one journalist's experience of how bloggers have been a very valuabe source for digging up the truth. He gives several examples, one of which is a blogger was responsible for having tracked down the origin of a fake cartoonwhich fueled the furore over the characterisation of Muhammad in a Danish paper.
The two phones are dubbed the Hero and the Kickflip. The Hero (previously known as the Pantech 8300) is a slider with stereo speakers. The Kickflip, made by VK Mobile, is a "pearlescent" phone with a spring-assisted swivel mechanism that opens in either direction. OpenSparc is Sun's attempt to bring open-source thinking and cooperation into the realm of hardware design:
Goals of the OpenSPARC Initiative
While I'm working on building my list of Web 2.0 Company Blogs, I feel compelled to point out a similar resource being built on Listable.
This is a list of Web 2.0 products and services. My list concentrates on blogs from the companies that puts out these products. What a great resource for me to use to help me build my list. Thanks to all that contribute to the Listable list.
BTW, Listable doesn't have a blog. How am I supposed to keep up with new features? :-(
This from the J-Lab at the University of Maryland:
The Knight-Batten Awards have been renamed and renewed. A $10,000 Grand Prize and up to $5,000 in Special Distinction awards will honor journalism innovations that help people use media to get news and information in new ways. This year’s competition covers new ideas launched between May 1, 2005, and June 12, 2006. Deadline for entries is June 15, 2006.
See full press release here.
MovieBeam says it plans to offer first-run films from six of the seven film studios in standard digital-video format and high-definition films from Disney and Warner Brothers. | "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and yes, it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is nothing but wires and lights in a box." - Edward R. Murrow, 1951 | |
"ShoZu today announced that Warner Brothers Record's smash pop band The Veronicas will take part in the first ever video-blog (vlog) coverage of events surrounding the worldwide release of their debut album, The Secret Life of the Veronicas. The vlogs, posted on Internet sharing site Textamerica using ShoZu technology, will be available to fans around the world, providing intimate and near-instant video of The Veronicas' personal appearances and NYC concert gig on Valentine's Day, February 14."
While I was at the Emerging Mind of Community Journalism conference, I said if newspapers were smart they would pick up on the Kevin Sites Hot Zones model of solo journalism reporting, but instead of sending them to Africa, they should send their solo journalists to their local neighborhoods.
Well, Gannett's News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida, is way ahead of me and the majority of newspapers with its "mojos" or mobile journalists. They carry digital cameras, MP3 recorders and wireless laptops and hang out in neighborhoods, teach potential contributors and file stories throughout the day to their community website. The project is, according to a Gannett newsletter, a:
"new neighborhood online publishing model, "Your Community: By you, for you."
The story, in the Gannett tradition, is short and to the point and filled with how-to information and caveats.
And very quotable stuff like:
We believe that most reporters will soon be mojos, producing information seamlessly across platforms.
Mojos are devoting up to half of each workweek to educating residents about the site through one-on-one demonstrations. They offer personal training to anyone who wants to share information -- Little League coaches, Neighborhood Watch leaders, civic activists, etc. We have streamlined the process for the public to post information, and the mojos can easily teach someone to do it.
This experiment sprang from two related beliefs: 1. Deep, useful ultra-local neighborhood Web sites can be lively gathering places of people online. 2. We must have the help of residents to build these sites, but they won't know how to contribute unless we help them.
This is a must read for anyone interested in hyperlocal and citizen media. Thanks to Romenesko for the pointer.
Maybe the sheer size of what is going on with the youth market will start to get peoples attention. It certainly has at Business Week.
(Also check out Derrick's related posts: The Blogger Intelligentsia Ignores the Youth Market and Peter Raises a Good Point. Ping Servers and Technorati. -kc.)
NTT Communications and Tmsuk have begun testing the RFID-guided shopping assistant robots at a shoping mall in Fukuoka. The robots read RFID tags embedded in the floor to get information about their location . They also carry your shopping bags and provide related sales information when they arrive at their destination.

Once you've selected a store on the touch panel, the robot accompanies tyou there, reading some 5,000 smart tags embedded in the floor and relying on its sensors to detect and avoid other shoppers. Some sales items in stores have individually RFID-tagged, allowing the shopper to get product information by holding the item near the robot display. Shoppers carry active tags that announce who they are, and the robot reads the information from the tags and responds only to valid registered shoppers. In addition, shoppers can put their belongings in the robots security box and the active tags are used to lock/unlock the box.
Online shoppers will be able to interact with store personnel via a camera on the robot to get a better understanding of the merchandise offered and communicate with the sales persons through videoconferencing. When a sales agents show a sales item to the robot, the robot recognizes the product and shows a relevant information on the screen of the remote shopper.
Plenty of images.
Via RFID in Japan, and more details about how it works.

Here is a selection of videoclips from the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) 2006 conference, which took place January 24th-26th in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The clips were taken during panel discussions, at demos, and on the show floor. Click on the descriptions below to view the clips.
yatta posted a photo:
Standing (and squatting) room only at the Podcasting and Videoblogging panel @ the NYC Grassroots Media Conference on Saturday. Nice.
The thousands of camcorders owned by people across the state represent a huge untapped capacity to produce a unique public record of Pennsylvania's democracy during what might be one of the most interesting political seasons in recent memory.
V-fib Recordings offers free CC-licensed compilations of underexposed music, from both the past and present. The Winter 2006 mix features great tracks from bands like Koester, A Don Piper Situation, and Rank Strangers. Check it out!
Inmates can be citizen reporters too, according to an article in New Kerala.
Since January, 11 amateur reporters who are all inmates in an Italian prison have been broadcasting a daily programme on the prison's closed-circuit television. They offer a press digest of national and foreign news, sport updates, information about life in jail, new laws and changes to the judicial system.
p their daily walk in the prison's courtyard to work on the news programme. They bought the lights and some of the equipment with their own money, and the rest was acquired thanks to a 1,500-euro (1,815 dollars) donation from the local town hall.
The inmates get their information from newspapers bought by the prison staff. A detainee who used to work as a tailor stitched together the curtains that darken the room when the programme is being recorded.
BusinessWeek online will publish this article tomorrow describing the acquisition dealing a year ago between the CEOs of Adobe and Macromedia, and the meshing in the aftermath of the two digitally creative companies. The merger story is interesting and the integration plans between software promising. Vision beyond is sketched as well:
That's just using existing technology. Already a team of Adobe and Macromedia developers have started an innovative project to create a new version of Reader. Instead of just letting people view documents or fill out forms, it will run media-rich interactive Web applications thanks to the combination of Reader and Flash. The goal will be to install it on a majority of computers, just like Reader and Flash Player.
ng more revenue and profit out of the ubiquity of the two technologies. Plans are to build similar prevalence on phones and consumer devices. While deals have been announced with Nokia (NOK), Samsung, and LG, Adobe has also closed deals with all of the world's six largest handset makers. This quarter 66 million phones will have Flash up 50% over last quarter. If Chizen has his way, the new Adobe will find itself smack in the middle of every sexy trend from Web 2.0 to mobile content. Not bad for a company once criticized for not getting the Web.
Via FlashForward blog
Philips would not identify their carrier partner. But the Samsung T709 that PC World saw at CES showed options to connect to T-Mobile Hotspots as well as home networks. T-Mobile is leveraging its Wi-Fi network as a competitor to other carriers' 3G high-speed cellular systems. "Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the internet: people submit links to the 'Incoming!' page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front page."
Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated
"I was born and raised in Pittsburgh Pa. I've been a fair weather fan but my sister Julia more than made up for me. Anyways, here is something interesting I've noticed in the coverage around the game:"
If you’re interested in developing apps and mashups on top Microsoft web services you might want to check-out some new videos over at MSDN. The four videos up there now cover Start.com gadgets (Live.com), MSN Search APIs, MSN Search Toolbar, and Virtual Earth. And over in at MSDN TV there’s also a good video on Atlas, Microsoft’s Ajax framework. The overview is given by Nikhil Kothari, who created Virtual Places, the most popular mashup listed here.

BIP - BUILDING INTERACTIVE PLAYGROUNDS--2nd edition Elettrowave, July 14-16 2006 Arezzo/Italy: We are currently accepting applications to participate in the second edition of BIP, an International Competition for interaction design projects for public events. BIP will happen during Elettrowave, a three day festival of electronic music. Elettrowave is part of Arezzowave, the biggest free music festival in Italy.
01 WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR? If you want to play with space and time and people, if you like crossing barriers and probing around in extreme situations, if you fiddle around with the idea the space can be programmed, if you eat social patterns for your breakfast, if you are not scared by a drunk young audience, if you keep telling your friends that environments are not passive wrappings but active processes, if your perceptions keep shifting, if your projects are about interplay, exploration and humor, if tinkering with technology is your obsession...then... this call for works is your unique chance to experiment with interaction design within the context of an electronic music festival. Nightlife, extreme characters, clubbing freaks, a young, unrespectuful and challenging audience. You know what we are talking about, dont you?
We are looking for projects. Not vague ideas. Real projects that can substantially and meaningfully enrich the Elettrowave event and strengthen involvement. Clubbing is the context, not the object, of BIP. Were looking for something innovative, passionate and fresh that can make a difference.
Interactive installations, environments, sound and/or visual projects, etc.
If your project is at an early stage we will consider it only if you can prove you'll be able to produce it within the festival deadline. We may offer production assistance if we fall in love with your project proposal.
Please keep in mind that the projects should be able to stand 3 nights of extremely intense use, in a venue with thousands of people. Please consider production feasibility and all possible setup constraints.
02 WHO IS ELIGIBLE?
Participation is open to applicants from every country in the world, to (interaction) designers, artists, researchers, architects, students. Participation is free.
03 SUBMISSION DEADLINE
All project proposals must be postmarked by March 10th, 2006.
Late entries will not be accepted. By submitting a project, the applicant warrants that it is his/her original design.
04 HOW AND WHEN ARE THE PROJECTS SELECTED?
In March 2006, a panel of jurors will select up to 3 projects.
Winners will be announced during a workshop/event in April. The event will be hosted by Università di Siena, Italy.
05 AWARDS
Selected projects will be installed for the three nights of Elettrowave 2006. This is a precious opportunity to test your interactive projects in the context of an electronic music festival.
The projects will benefit from a total budget of 10.000 euros offered by BIP. The budget will be divided between the selected projects according to production, transportation and setup costs. BIP will consider supporting production costs of new projects that are being presented to the public for the first time.
Commonly used technology (videoprojectors, screens, audio systems, monitors, mixers, etc.) will be available to the selected projects if required.
06 HOW MANY PROJECTS CAN I SUBMIT?
Only one project may be submitted per entrant. Teams register with one name only.
07 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
The submission form is available for download at http://www.todo.to.it/bip/bip_submission2006.pdf
Please fill out all the information required in the form. Send your submission to:
TODO - BIP 2006
c/o Mail Boxes Etc.
Box 294, Via Boucheron 16
10122 - Torino - Italy
Submissions which do not conform to the rules will be rejected without any notice. There is no legal recourse against this decision.
Submitted material will become part of the festival archives and will not be returned.
08 ACCURACY AND COPYRIGHT
Any moral and paternity right regarding the project sent in for application is designers property.
By participating, you grant BIP the right to edit, publish, promote and otherwise use the entry without further permission, notice or compensation. Credit information may need to be condensed or edited for space.
BIP assumes that all entries are original and are the work and property of the entrant, with all rights granted there-in. BIP is not liable for violations of any third party rights, including, but not limited to, claims of copyright, trademark, patent infringment. BIP assumes that all images provided with entries are free of any third-party rights. BIP will include photographer credits if that information is provided along with the images.
09 MORE QUESTIONS?
Send inquiries to bip[at]arezzowave.com with "BIP Call for Works" as the subject line.
10 ORGANIZATION
BIP is promoted by FAWI (Fondazione Arezzowave Italia) and ARSNOVA.
BIP is realized in partnership with the Università di Siena
The BIP project is managed by TODO interaction design studio.
Flash Ant: Flash and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Blog . :: Echo, echo, echo... I think I hear Open Source Flash Communication Server!
Reblogged:
What is Red5, you ask? It's a project on OSFlash that aims to create an Open Source Flash Communication Server. The speed at which the project is progressing is quite astounding. An Open Source Flash Communication Server alternative appears to be mere months away
more at osflash.org/red5

For the last decade, those same telcos have made promise after promise to local governments concerning the delivery of truly open fiber optic connections to the home. In exchange, they've been granted all sorts of privileges and rate increases by the government, costing all of us money. And where did the money go? Not towards what was promised.
This is a promise that they have not kept... though, they have kept our money. In fact, after all of these promises, remember that the telcos said they wouldn't offer fiber at all, unless the FCC promised not to require them to let others offer services on it.
In 2006 and beyond, I view there are only two viable courses of action that can guide the US to a broadband future equivalent to what other countries are enjoying now.
1) Get legislators behind a movement to prohibit content discrimination (I'm using this phrase loosely and imprecisely) on telco and cableco networks.2) Encourage, in all manner, the construction of alternative methods of broadband delivery - more spectrum, including license-exempt, allow water companies or any other entities to carry Internet, repeal stupid laws that restrict government entities to build alternative broadband networks, etc.That's it.
serves em right
The Soundclick music community passed the 200,000 mark for CC-licensed mp3s over the weekend. That's a whole lot of music.
Soundclick doesn't offer CC-specific search or feeds, which rather points out an opportunity for aggregators.
Forunately Google and Yahoo! have both indexed the Soundclick site rather well. Click on one of the previous links or type site:soundclick.com into the search form on the CC find page, which allows you to search Soundclick using Google or Yahoo!'s CC-enabled search.
That's a whole lot of music.
"At Spot Runner we make it easy, simple and affordable for everyone to take advantage of local TV advertising. We started Spot Runner because we saw three important opportunities:
* Small and medium-sized business people want to advertise on TV but the costs of creating ads are prohibitive. * Choosing a media plan, negotiating the price, and tracking your advertising can be time consuming and difficult. * Great TV advertising could be made more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising agencies.
We put these elements together and Spot Runner was born."
Google has recently released a report on Web Authoring Statistics.
The report, which used over 1 billion documents as its input, analyzes the relative frequency of various HTML elements and attributes. They also mention microformats.org as another initiative which is analyzing markup trends on the web.
The study is worth a read for anyone interested in semantic markup and especially microformats. Beware, however, that in order to see the graphs, you’ll need a browser which can properly render SVG content (FireFox 1.5 seems to work pretty well here).
One sort of complainer wants a link to a third party site to go away. I suspect the complainer usually really wants the content on the third party site to go away.
But maybe "hotlink" is just a great word which will mean whatever we want it to mean because it sounds so cool. What a great word - not only does it have "hot" in it, it could easily take on the smell of teenage rebellion. It's like "Hot Wheels."
smells like link spirit - michael
Watch this clip of blogger, online facilitator and collaboration expert Nancy White.

It is part of TheWeblogProject - the first open-source movie documentary about blogs and bloggers.
also see these other two great video clips:
Kamlas India has an insightful post on the power of technology in Indian Temples, many of which are IT enabled organizations run by Temple CEO's, compelete with websites, webcasts, e-donations and text messaging prayers.
Originally it was planned to be completed by the end of last year but it has been delayed somewhat. It's now expected to be finished by the middle of 2006. The WiFi cloud will easily be the world's largest, covering 90% of Taipei's 2.6 million residents. It will typically cost about $12 per month. Taipei began planning its network in 2003. Mayor Ma Ying-jeou made the Wi-Fi effort a centerpiece of his "Cybercity" campaign to give Taipei an edge over other Asian cities."This will increase the cutting-edge competitiveness of this city, and make the life of our citizens even more convenient," the mayor says.
As in Philadelphia and some other U.S. cities, Taipei opted to let the private sector build and run the network so it wouldn't cost the city money.
In August 2004, the government approved Q-ware Systems Inc., which beat out another local company in bidding. Construction started the following month. Q-ware, in turn, hired Nortel Networks Corp. of Brampton, Ontario to build, equip, and maintain the system.Taipei has encountered obstacles. The Wi-Fi plan met resistance from state-owned Chunghwa Telecom Co., the island's biggest phone company, which urged the city government not to launch the project, people involved with the project say.The "telephone companies are quite nervous," says Mr. Ma, the mayor, who expects the Wi-Fi network to help trim city spending as schools and municipal offices use it to communicate instead of pricier fixed-line and cellular-phone networks.
Crazed Viennese net.artists Monochrom have a great new tee for sale (&Euro;18): I WAS A COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IN A PREVIOUS LIFE.
Link
Dont be surprised if the US doesent start outsourcing its copyright infringement investigation resources to low wages in the east...
macworld best of show award.. some pretty interesting stuff going on here.
We are a group of determined face recognition and text recognition researchers and engineers who believe it is time for a new type of photo search that uses technology to look inside and automatically tag photos. We hope this will revolutionize how people "see" the world.
everyday biometrics for the masses ;)
A neat new machine that generates CC licenses for Second Life works will be available for the first time today at 4.30 pm PST (that's 12.30 am GMT on Thursday), just before Lawrence Lessig's talk gets underway.
Check it out on Democracy Island - if you hang out there a bit you'll be able to hear the talk piped from Pooley Auditorium.
Originally posted by Jen from Wonderland, ReBlogged by evan on Jan 18, 2006 at 08:55 AM
Alison Lewis has launched a brilliant website: SWITCH, an online DIY show where she and her friends focus on teaching young women about electronics through fashion and design.

In the first episode Alison and Diana Eng create a talking frame (using "ingredients such as nail polish and a dental floss container.)
Bonus: Alison was at CES, meeting and talking with people from Eleksen, Iqua, Chitter Chatter, etc. (video)
StoryField is a new desktop database solution for oral history and documentary process, content, resource and idea management.
Developed in FileMaker Pro, StoryField works with Microsoft Office to provide seamless desktop integration and management of multiple users, multiple projects and multiple sources of data during the pre-production to production phases. Users can customize StoryField to create their own digital toolkit and resource library with the ability to track projects, add data and store related materials in various media formats--easily cross-referenced with user defined keyword tags.
Apple Computer's iTunes store, of course, offers a few TV downloads for purchase at $1.99 each. Those include a smattering of shows from NBC, USA Network and the Sci-Fi Channel.
The selections are likely to improve, just as the iTunes lineup has gradually expanded to include additions like the Grateful Dead.
But that won't help anyone who owns a video iPod today and wants to watch something beyond "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives." It especially won't help someone with a library of DVDs that would make perfect iPod fodder.



Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated
"As our slogan says: Give one file, get one free!
File-swap.com is meant to be fun. It acts as a big black box. You put in one file and you will receive a different file in exchange which someone swaped earlier. If many users swap cool files many other users recieve cool files."
(We're back, with thanks to Corante for giving us bigger and better hardware.)
Gavin Baker of FreeCulture.org sent me a note asking for people to sign up for their Pledge to boycott DRM campaign. This is really a "no brainer" for me. I cancelled my Sony-BMG membership years ago when they put out their first copy-locked audio disk and I haven't bought a new CD from a store in almost five years. (I do still buy direct from artists/DJs and haunt used-music stores.)
FreeCulture's modest 500 signature goal has been doubled so far and I wouldn't be surprised to see them get 5000 signatures.
A CDM Special Report, http://www.createdigitalmusic.com/intel/In 2006, we're compiling our own list of audio and music software, plug-ins, and drivers that have been updated as Universal -- containing code that's optimized both for PowerPC Macs and the new Macs with Intel processors. With this list, Mac musicians can keep track of which software will run best on the new chips. We'll also link to compatibility coverage elsewhere and to additional reporting on the new machines and their performance.
You can help! Developers and readers should contact us at a special email address with any tips on software updates or other features:
intel (at) create digital music (dot) com
There are already a fair number of resources available (including new drivers from MOTU), just in case you've just purchased a new Intel iMac. Expect more complete information after we poll manufacturers at the NAMM trade show. Here's the current list:.
The platform’s speech recognition algorithms are designed to determine the context and intent from conversational speech, enabling consumers to speak in free-form language. Users can ask for directions to the nearest Italian restaurant, check on traffic for the daily commute, make hands-free phone calls, navigate through hundreds of channels on satellite radio, or search for songs and artists on their iPod intuitively and safely. A website called Everyday Hogwash just launched. File it in your ideas list under "citizen journalism"-related. E-Media Tidbits reports.
The concept is simple: Hogwash collects "rants" from people about various annoyances and things they've had to endure from companies: "Hidden fees. Really tiny fine print. Overbooked airplanes. Hypnotic hold music." We've all had bad experiences with various companies, so, the website's concept goes, let's share them and "have some therapeutic yuks at the millions of little ways companies stick it to us."
To encourage submissions, the site is very contest-oriented, giving away cash to daily prize winners as selected by a panel of judges.
The concept seems a bit thin for a website -- it's more like a feature of a larger site. Indeed, the idea of using contests to solicit citizen submissions is a good one.
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Mobile phones have emerged as a civic and campaign organizing tool across traditional socio-economic and cultural boundaries. Cell phone campaigns have swung elections through innovative get-out-the-vote activities, have been used to ensure impartial elections through monitoring, have resulted in massive collective action to free political prisoners or stop illegal logging, and are being used in public health strategies.
MobileActive convened in Toronto in 2005 to bring together, for the first time ever, activists from around the world to explore the use of mobile phones in civic action campaigns. This wiki and MobileActive site is an aggregation of the learnings from this convergence, stories from participants and their projects, and resources for activists interested in using mobiles in their campaigns. (For write-ups about MobileActive 05 go to our press page).
The goal of MobileActive is to grow the network of mobile activists, to share knowledge and skills, and to provide a peer network, training and resources to those interested in exploring mobile phones in their civic engagagement, mobilization, and civic action campaigns.
We aim to better understand the strengths and limits of the medium, explore available technologies for campaigners, and share lessons learned, campaign examples, and tech tools to increase activists ability to organize our constituencies.
If you used mobiles in your campaign, please share your story! If you need or have resources, let us know! And if you want to join this growing network of activists from around the globe send us a note: info[at]mobileactive.org.

The Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for Cyberarts is being conducted for the 19th time in 2006. In addition to the classic categories-Interactive Art, Net Vision, Computer Animation / Visual Effects and Digital Musics-Digital Communities and [the next idea] Art and Technology Grant competition that debuted last year will be reprised.
Online Submission Deadline: March 17, 2006; Total Prize Money: 117,500 Euro; 6 Golden Nicas; 12 Awards of Distinction; Up to 12 Honorary Mentions in each category.
INTERACTIVE ART: The "Interactive Art" category is dedicated to interactive works in all forms and formats, from installations to performances. Here, particular consideration is given to the realization of a powerful artistic concept through the especially appropriate use of technologies, the innovativeness of the interaction design, and the work's inherent potential to expand the human radius of action.
COMPUTER ANIMATION/VISUAL EFFECTS
The "Computer Animation / Visual Effects" category has been part of the Prix Ars Electronica since its very inception. It recognizes excellence in independent work in the arts and sciences as well as in high-end commercial productions in the film, advertising and entertainment industries. In this category, artistic originality counts just as much as masterful technical achievement.
DIGITAL MUSICS
Contemporary digital sound productions from the broad spectrum of "electronica" come in for consideration in the "Digital Musics" category, as do works combining sound and media, computer compositions ranging from electro-acoustic to experimental music, or sound installations. This category's programmatic agenda is to expand horizons beyond the confines of individual genres and artistic currents.
NET VISION
The "Net Vision" category singles out for recognition artistic projects in the Internet that display brilliance in how they have been engineered, designed and-especially-conceived, works that are outstanding with respect to innovation, interface design and the originality of their content. The way in which a work of net-based art deals with the online medium is essential in this category.
DIGITAL COMMUNITIES
This category focuses attention on the wide-ranging social impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in the fields of social software, mobile communications and wireless networks. "Digital Communities" spotlights bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, bridging the geographical as well as gender-based digital divide, or creating outstanding social software and enhancing accessibility of technological-social infrastructure. This category showcases the political potential of digital and networked systems and is thus designed as a forum for the consideration of a broad spectrum of projects, programs, initiatives and phenomena in which social innovation is taking place, as it were, in real time. A Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction and up to 12 Honorary Mentions will be awarded in the Digital Communities category in 2006.
[the next idea] Art and Technology Grant
The aim of this grant focusing on the mutually enriching interplay of art and technology is to nurture concepts for the future that young thinkers are coming up with today. This categorys target group includes interested persons throughout the world between the ages of 19 and 27, who have developed a not-yet-realized concept in the fields of media art, media design or media technology. The winner will receive a 7,500-euro grant and an invitation to spend a semester as scientific assistant and artist-in-residence at the Ars Electronica Futurelab.
Iris Mayr
Prix Ars Electronica | Project Manager
Ars Electronica Center Linz
Hauptstraße 2
A-4040 Linz
Code: Prix
Tel. ++43.732.7272-74
Fax ++43.732.7272-676
info[at]prixars.aec.at
There's been plenty of talk about the two big announcements at MWSF 2006, so I won't bother to go into them. Yes, I want a sexy new MacBook Pro (though not the first few off the assembly line, thank you very much) but my technolust doesn't add much to the conversation.
But what about the other announcements? Let's see if we can't find a common theme.
iPhoto will now be able to publish and subscribe to image RSS feeds of photo albums, deemed "Photocasting." Photocast feeds will work with regular RSS readers, but iPhoto will be able to handle 1-click subscriptions and will treat Photocast feeds as special folders. It's kind of like a distributed Flickr, using RSS.
iWeb, the new iLife tool for web sites, has built-in blogging and podcasting tools. While hosted blogging tools have gotten to the point where even executives can blog, there's still a market for client-based blogging tools. So with iWeb, people will be able to produce RSS feeds, complete with media enclosures from other iLife applications.
iMovie has been updated to make web ready video easy, specifically for podcasting video to iPods. GarageBand has added a metric assload of podcasting features. Podcasting, by the way, is something that happens over RSS.
Looking at the new things in iLife, I can't find that common theme that I was looking for. So let's talk about RSS instead.
Apple has been doing well with consuming RSS for the past year or so. It started off with Safari 2, which treats feeds like bookmarks and relies on bookmark folders to see all new items.
It's not the best feed reader for OS X, but it's likely the most ubiquitous and I use it alongside NetNewsWire for feeds that update more frequently than I care to read them (like reddit and del.icio.us/popular). Apple also threw in a pretty cool RSS screensaver to boot (seriously, check out the video if you haven't seen it).
Then, iTunes started being able to subscribe to podcasts. They even added an entire section of the iTunes Music Store devoted to podcasts! I'm reminded what a smart move that was everytime I hear an NPR show telling people to look for their podcast in the iTMS.
As an aside, OS X Server also has publishing tools. It comes with a blogging server and even provide instructions for using it as a podcast server in academic settings. However, most of the people in the market for iLife don't have access to OS X Server.
Apple has a lot to gain from more people publishing feeds. For one thing, more podcasts mean fuller iPod hard drives, which means upgrades to bigger iPods. Also, video podcasts mean upgrades to video iPods. This definitely fits with the business needs of an iPod-centered Apple. It also gives them some leverage to set the agenda for RSS. Toolmakers now include Apple's RSS extension for podcasting; I bet Flickr supports Photocasting within a week.
Now, we just have to wait and see how it all actually plays out. Photocasting sounds neat, but Apple's RSS extension wasn't met with the warmest reception. And iTunes' 1-click podcast subscription? Lucas Gonze advises the engineers behind that technology: "You can't put this stuff on your resumes, folks. It will lose you potential jobs to be known as the person who made these decisions."
Those examples show it's within the realm of possibility that Apple could screw up the very thing that RSS makes possible: interoperability. One thing I haven't touched on is how every mention of publishing RSS seems to involve .Mac, which I hope is just a marketing push. I would hate to see all these advances fail to change the world because it only works with a bundled hosting service (as opposed to failing to change the world because they're only available on a minority OS).
Apple has always carried certain perceptions. They're known for being distinct from Windows systems by their good design, high prices, and catering to people who both produce and consume. While none of those are always true, it is common wisdom and the last one is borne out by iLife 06.
It's funny though, a video has been circulating showing a Mac desktop demonstrating features Bill Gates announced for the upcoming Vista. I guess when Microsoft announced RSS would be a core technology for Vista they were announcing one more feature for Apple to deploy first.
Apple got the RSS religion a while ago.The difference here is that Apple is making the tools to create feeds, not just consume them. This is about being a producer, not a consumer. This is part of the democratization of media, giving tools to people to publish online. Not just text, but media. By lowering the barrier to entry, they're making it easier for anyone (well, any Mac user) to start publishing. They're taking some of the tools of the geek elite and distributing them to the masses.
Tags: apple podcasting videoblogging ilife rss photocasting ilife06 osx mac
One wonders what we might carry with us "digitally" a decade or two from now, with memory and storage capacity getting larger and much more affordable every day. Imation got us thinking about this by showing several interesting concepts for carrying digital files at the CES – the 256 Mb Flash Wristband and the 4Gb Micro Hard Drive. They're interesting concepts, particularly the wristband, but just think that a decade from now the bang-per-buck factor will have improved by several orders of magnitude.
But what is internet television? How does it differ from IPTV (or does it). Exchange Magazine explains it all. (Continued at Daily Wireless.)

A wonderful 22 minute video from the BBC looking at how user-generated content and mobile phone footage on stories like the London bombings has changed the way broadcasters report the news. The BBC has been looking back at how user generated content has become part of everyday news throughout 2005. Input from news editors from around the world, including Dan Gilmore. [via Cyberjournalist.net]
Users have voted gogo Happy &
Smile as this week's top choice on Newgrounds, a popular Flash portal. This anonymously developed & deployed
indie joint plays like a hyper-stylized level of Alien Hominid. Big explosions, helicopter fights, and a nasty
Boss Bear. Big ups to the creator. And please people, support the indie scene... go play this!
SPONSORED BY: Age of Empires III - Real-Time Strategy Game Control a European power on a quest to colonize and conquer the New World. AOE3 introduces new gameplay elements, as well as new civilizations, units, and technologies. http://www.ageofempires3.com/
Slate has an story about the decline and fall of the largest video rental chain in the world, Hollywood's New Zombie -- the last days of Blockbuster.
As far the studios are concerned, other than collecting the money that Blockbuster owes them for past movies, the video chain has little relevance to their future. Viacom perspicuously divorced itself from Blockbuster by spinning it off to its shareholders, and, as one Viacom executive told me, "Blockbuster will certainly not survive and it will not be missed." It is another zombie in Hollywood.
While I think it's a bit early to be checking for a pulse, it's interesting to note that it wasn't that long ago when Blockbuster was putting the "mom and pop" video stores out of business. I wonder what decisions they'll make this year in their efforts to survive in this incredibly competitive and ever-changing entertainment environment.
via Ryan from Orbitcast.
Everyone is talking abotu thsi kids Review site called Incredibooks. Thanks Peter for making sure I blogged about it.
It’s a great example of what can be done with the StructuredBlogging tools we shipped.
The term “the Flickr of Video” has been bantered around for over six months now - and it’s great to see such a large number of sites purporting to be just that. Michael Arrington has a nice overview article on it.
I don’t know if JD Lasica has been claiming that ourmedia is that, but without tags - I don’t see how they can claim that.
Anyway - there’s one dark horse which I know is coming round the bend. Won’t disclose it - just yet. But it’ll be hot.
Gear Live has a great short video of the Series 3 prototype in action at CES. It features TiVoPony showing off features (TiVoPony is the TiVo employee that hangs out on the TiVo Community board). The front LED display is incredibly sharp and looks handy. The way the multiple tuners works looks pretty smooth. Pony also covers how hard drive upgrades will be simple plug-n-play type upgrades. The new remote control is also covered, which features a way to tell top from bottom, even in the dark (they have ribs on the back, on one side).
I can't wait to buy one of these boxes and ditch my crappy cable-provider DVR, and if anyone at TiVo is reading this, I will name my next child after you if I can get a unit for early review when they're closer to being done.
It looks like the false start is over, and the Google Video Store is up for business. According to my calculations, they have lost $1.99 so far, as the episode of "The Twilight Zone" I would have paid to watch is not Mac-compatible. My BLINK reaction? Weak interface, with even weaker title selections. I'm not underestimating Google for a second - I'm just counting this as strike two in their first at-bat. Confusing launch date, confusing nav & compatibility... I believe they will do better. And, as a Mac user, I demand it.
(Woohoo! Congrats Lucas! -kc.)
Piracy is almost synonymous with the music industry and now it is creeping into the flourishing mobile ringtone segment, reports India's Sify.com.
"Until now, the telecom industry has been legitimately paying for the music offered in the form of ringtones and caller tunes. But in recent months, piracy has crept into this business as well.
There is copyright violation with shops selling high-end phones with bundled content. Some of this content is illegal as neither permission is taken nor royalty paid.
Mobile operators, however, said that piracy is not happening at their end.
"There can be no way that any illegal downloads are happening from our servers as we keep an account for billing purposes. But there could be leaks at other levels in the chain," said a Delhi-based operator. "
More in Moco News with related links.
(Why does it irk me when people refer to ringtones as "content"? -kc.)
"What [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that." Whitacre and AT&T argue that they need flexibility to exact a toll from Web services that hog bandwidth.
“During the hurricanes, Google didn’t pay to have the DSL restored,” said BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher. “We’re paying all that money.”Says Malik... "If you charge people about $75 a month for DSL and phone service, it is your job to fix the line".
The growth in the number of mobile-phone subscribers is nothing short of spectacular. In 1990 there were just over 11m of them worldwide. Today almost 1.5 billion consumers own mobile phones of various shapes and sizes. [via The Economist via Smart Mobs]
Broadcasting & Cable has a good article by Ben Grossman that notes some hard facts about online video, e.g.
NBC U, for example, says that it will only generate about $10 million from iTunes sales in 2006—or the rough equivalent of ad revenues for one typical Thursday night on NBC. And Apple says it has sold more than 3 million video downloads, so only about $6 million in revenues have come in altogether, with the majority of that number reportedly generated by music videos and not TV shows.
Grossman goes on to note that networks are trying to respond to the realities by changing their internal operations. In particular, the shift from dealing with a few customers to millions will present a tremendous challenge.
“We are now investing in new media and beginning to affect the DNA structure of our organization,” says Huntsberry. “How do I license content to hundreds of on-demand customers around the globe who want to do business with me? I can walk away from them and only deal with the top 10 big ones, or change my processes whereby I can do business with the bulk of them, collect my money faster and be able to go into business with more people.”
As an individual who has attempted to purchase footage from various networks, I can say the networks don’t have this figured out. Leaving it to Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google to figure out may make sense in the short run, but longer term, this will be one of the biggest changes the networks make in the next ten years, not excepting the move to HDTV. (And if you’re a network exec working on this problem, drop me a line).
Technorati Tags: iTunes Video, video
Cyberjournalist posts about , a site -- now in beta -- called Newsvine. I've been hearing rumors about. It applies reputational algorithms and social filtering to newsreading:
The site is a slick combination of some of the trendiest news-related tools online now, incorporating news aggregation, social networking, citizen journalism, blogging, user ratings and online discussions. Think of it as one-part Slashdot, one-part del.icio.us and one-part Google News, with a few other neat features thrown in.
around four general actions: reading, discussing, writing and seeding the news.
The site posts thousands of Associated Press articles that users can read.
Among the things readers can do with stories or links: vote for it, to raise it up the Newsvine (i.e. give it better promotion on the home page); participate in a live chat with other users about the story; leave comments; report inappropriate content.
Users can write their own articles, and get to keep most of the ad revenue from those pages. You'll collect 90% of the earnings from your own domain (yourname.newsvine.com). The other 10% goes to the person who referred you to start writing on Newsvine.
Imedia has a an interesting article on the use of tags and other forms of folksonomies for advertising. This will happen - it simply makes too much sense not to.
For more on folksonomies see these past posts on Future Now.
Originally posted by Steve King from IFTF's Future Now, ReBlogged by djacobs on Jan 8, 2006 at 02:54 PM
Soon, vegetable vendors in India Could be selling CDMA phones in the Rural part of India. The initiative would involve training of the owners of vegetable and grain mandis to demonstrate and sell the product, and to provide after sales services.
Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by djacobs on Jan 8, 2006 at 02:54 PM
PodGuide.TV has found two short form branded entertainment shorts available in iPod format. Sprite is offering a series of comedy videos entitled Marcus hates his job, while Bud Light brings us Ted Ferguson, Daredevil. Add RSS feeds and they're advercasts.
Technorati Tags: Advercasting, Advertising, iPod
>>"The news from this announcement is in what wasn't announced as much as what was. Sony has scaled back their MiniDV line significantly, dropping all vertical, matchbook-style camcorders and simplifying the line as a whole. "

(Although the CES feeds from Engadget and Gizmodo have been fantastic, I've held off on reblogging a lot of the CES coverage save the stuff that seems disruptive or more than "neat." -kc.)
If there’s an essay on machinima you’ve been burning to write, now’s your opportunity. Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche are editing The Machinima Reader, the first collection of essays to critically review the phenomenon of machinima from a variety of prespectives. 500 word abstracts should be sent as RTF files to Michael Nitsche (michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu) and Henry Lowood (lowood@stanford.edu) by April 3, 2006. If your abstract is accepted, final essays should be 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006. Here’s the full CFP:
CfP: The Machinima Reader
Edited by Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche
Machinima is on the verge of stepping beyond its chaotic mix of artistic, ludic and technical conceptions into established traditions and vocabularies of contemporary media. As machinima invents itself, the flexibility of its form poses an interesting challenge to academics as well as artists and critics. We want to offer an inaugural reader for the further development and critical discussion of Machinima, one that charts its growth from several angles and also provides a foundation for critical studies in the future.
The rapid development of Machinima is closely connected to the culture of computer and video games. In a repetition of early cinema’s history, many of Machinima’s milestones are formulated as mixtures of artistic expression and technical achievements. In our organization of The Machinima Reader, we will recognize that the creators of Machinima have been at times just as concerned with demonstrating mastery of technology and gameplay as in artistic expression or narrative performance. At the same time we acknowledge an artistic maturing process that has led to more professional production methods and results of higher quality. Consequently, we are looking for essays that address a range of topics. These include (but are not limited to):
Please submit a 500 word abstract via email as RTF document to michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu and lowood@stanford.edu by 3 April 2006. We expect that final essays will not exceed 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006.
Dan Gillmor will run the Center for Citizen Media in California. Here is the introduction:
This is the website for the Center for Citizen Media, a new initiative aimed at helping to enable and encourage grassroots media, especially citizen journalism, at every level.
The nonprofit Center is jointly affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School.
Gillmor was a panelist at our last two conferences:
The Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism and this year's Restoring the Trust conference in San Antonio.
A survey in December by Podtrac, a company that aims to connect podcasters and advertisers, showed that 78 percent of those who have ever listened to a podcast are male, CNET reports.
Filed under: Culture, PC, First Person Shooters, Online
Satellite TV giant DIRECTV has announced their creation and broadcasting of a professional gaming league called
the "Massive Gaming League." Their CES press release stated: "Using new technology
that allows for the placement of cameras within an actual videogame, DIRECTV will produce a videogame tournament and
cover it as a sporting event, complete with producer, director and technical crew. Stories of the competitors will be
told via interviews and features, complemented with coverage of their exploits in actual competition. DIRECTV plans to
launch the Massive Gaming League in 2006."
SPONSORED BY: Age of Empires III - Real-Time Strategy Game Control a European power on a quest to colonize and conquer the New World. AOE3 introduces new gameplay elements, as well as new civilizations, units, and technologies. http://www.ageofempires3.com/
Originally posted by Christopher Grant from Joystiq, ReBlogged by djacobs on Jan 5, 2006 at 02:10 PM

Microsoft’s MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs, and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN’s censorship system last summer. On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. (You can see the Google cache of his blog up until Dec.22nd here.)
Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government.
Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. (See a recent profile of him here, and an interview with Anti here.) His old blog at the U.S.-hosted Blog-city is believed to have caused the Chinese authorities to block all Blog-city blogs. In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China. (For all the gory details on the current press crackdown click here, here, here, and here.) Roland Soong at ESWN has preserved the original Chinese-language posts of Anti’s Call for a Beijing News Walk Out and his Call to Cancel Beijing News Subscriptions.
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PD (acronym of Pure Data) has recently emerged amongst the many software devoted to real time sampling and audio/video streaming, mostly thanks to its flexibility during live performances. It's a real time coding environment suitable for video, audio and graphic editing. Roman Haefeli has developed an environment made for facilitating electronic musicians' jam sessions on a network basing on PD. It's a client-server system, so it works on any network (internet included), and its name, NetPD, derives from this feature. But this is not intended as a platform for creating sounds, but as an environment where every client (i.e. every computer connected to a NetPD server) can share its music patches. The most interesting part is that the same patches can be played through NetPD, and this implemented feature triggers the jam sessions, welcoming all the different contributions. A further peculiarity is that you can't share sound files (even if they are embedded in a patch). On one hand this makes samples sharing impossible, but on the other hand it handles the real innovative significance of the generative music. [Vito Campanelli, neural]

While the ratings for the US version of The Office suck, it's doing gangbusters on iTunes. Maybe now the networks will start giving people what they want.
"The NBC sitcom The Office, which has failed to live up to expectations in the ratings, has turned out to be a smash hit on the Internet. Daily Variety reported today (Tuesday) that the show regularly accounts for half the slots on Apple's list of top 20 TV shows for sale at its iTunes Store. It also is responsible for NBC selling more copies of its shows (at $1.99 a pop) than any other network, wiping out the early advantage of ABC, which became the first network to sell shows online. Meanwhile, the Starz pay-TV channel has announced that it is launching a new Internet movie site called Vongo that will allow consumers to download full-length movies, concerts and TV shows onto handheld devices employing Microsoft software. (They cannot be downloaded to iPods, something that Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff described as a "significant problem" in an interview with the San Jose Mercury.) Users will also be able to "stream" movies from the Starz Channel on their personal computers via the Real Networks site. It is expected that the Vongo service will cost $9.99 per month."
The Fullerton, CA public school system is aggressive in its push to educate children in the ways of silicon. The school district is aiming to give laptops to select elementary and middle school kids, and they are developing a curriculum centered around students having access to their laptops. So why are some parents putting up a fuss? The plan requires parents to pony up almost US$1,500 for the privilege, and if you can't afford it, you don't get to participate in the program. Participating parents would pay about $500 each year for three years, and their children would receive an Apple iBook G4 laptop and entrance into the special program.
BBC News is opening its archives to the public for a trial period. You can download nearly 80 news reports covering iconic events of the past 50 years including the fall of the Berlin Wall, crowds ejecting soldiers from Beijing's Tiananmen Square and behind-the-scenes footage of the England team prior to their victory over West Germany in 1966. You can download the clips, watch them, and "use them to create something unique."
an interactive visual interface that shows the 'top 100 moments' of the web from 1995 to 2005 to celebrate the first 10 years of the Internet. inspired by the original 10x10 concept, a real-time data visualization of popular, international news pictures & headlines. [yahoo.com]
According to a report by Online Computer Library Center - Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources - the criterion selected by most information consumers to evaluate electronic resources is that the information is worthwhile. Free is a close second. Speed has less impact, and the respondents do not trust purchased information more than free information.

Katherine Albrecht put together a fearless photo exposé on the use of RFID tracking chips at Wal-Mart, and on various products like printers and TVs. She goes on to show how customers are electronically frisked on their way out of the store. All of this is "for your protection" of course.
Seeing these sticker-RFIDs does make me take another look at the Dorkbot dude who implanted an RFID chip in his hand and wonder, why on earth didn't he simply use a sticker?
Photos of Item-Level RFID Tagging Wal-Mart Super Center, Dallas, Texas October 15, 2005 [Spychips (via Digg)]
The Chicago Daily News is paying citizen journalists $100 for stories or photos that are the most viewed on the site in the month posted.
The site is an interesting online-only newspaper that combines traditional-style journalism with citizen journalism. It's edited by Geoff Dougherty a 14-year journalist who's worked as an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald.
More on the new Chicago Daily News here.
Jimmy Wales says Wikipedia may accept advertising. I think it’s a good idea. Some will have a kneejerk response against filthy lucre. But I say the right question is: What could those resources buy? The full Times of London interview with Jimbo here.
john batelle has an excellent discussion about makebot and how such bots could be the missing service link for mobile web 2.0 going on over at his blog, check it out
This is SERIOUS trouble.
How does Organized Music get to victims? Lawyer Ray Beckerman, who's been working with Santangelo since the begining, explains:
A lawsuit is brought against a group of John Does with the corporate headquarters of the ISP as the location of the lawsuit. But, "All the RIAA knows about the people it is suing is that they are the people who paid for an internet access acount for a particular dynamic IP address," says Beckerman, going on:
"The 'John Does' may live - and usually do live - hundreds or thousands of miles away, and are not even aware that they have been sued. The case may drag on for months or even years, with the RIAA being the only party that has lawyers in court to talk to the judges and other judicial personnel.
"The RIAA - without notice to the defendants - makes a motion for an "ex parte" order permitting immediate discovery. ('Ex parte' means that one side has communicated to the Court without the knowledge of the other parties to the suit. It is very rarely permitted, since the American system of justice is premised upon an open system in which, whenever one side wants to communicate with the Court, it has to give prior notice to the other side, so that they too will have an opportunity to be heard.).
"The 'ex parte' order would give the RIAA permission to take 'immediate discovery' - before the defendants have been served or given notice - which authorizes the issuance of subpoenas to the ISP's asking for the names and addresses and other information about their subscribers, which is information that would otherwise be confidential.
It appears that there are a handful of people out there, primarily engineers, who are taking the plunge and implanting RFID chips into their hands. Purpose? For automation of course. Having an RFID chip implanted can save time doing things such as logging onto computer work stations, unlocking electrically locked doors, ordering Pizza and buying porn. Mikey Sklar, one of the pioneers of this self-chipping procedure will be explaining the self-chipping process along with giving a talk about why he did this, different tagging options and any other self-chipping information at the next Dorkbot meet-up in NYC on Wednesday January 4th at 7 pm.
Project: Chipped [Electric Clothing]
Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications in Ithaca, New York invites high school and college students across America to submit a 30-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone. The Ithaca College Cellflix Festival offers a prize of US$5,000. It may come off like a gimmick, but Dean Dianne Lynch has no doubts about the contest’s academic value: In today’s media marketplace — where cell phones can take pictures, play music and games and connect to Web sites — it’s all about thinking small and mobile. ‘’Historically, we’ve always had students thinking bigger and bigger. It’s gone from radio to television to the movie screen, to the era of blockbuster films. All of a sudden, things have reversed and everything is getting smaller,'’ said Lynch. The submission deadline is 2006 January 10. A winner will be chosen from among 10 finalists and announced online January 30.
This fall, MTV launched Head and Body, a comedy series of eight programs created exclusively for cell phone users. Last year, Zoie Films, an Atlanta-based producer of independent films and festivals, ran what it billed as the world’s first cell-phone film festival.
And in October, the Forum des Images in Paris held its first Pocket Film Festival, which included everything from 30-second shorts to mini-soap operas to full-length features [View the winner, DÉCROCHE by Stéphane Galienni].
‘’It’s exciting. We were discussing this last year in film club,'’ said Sasha Stefanova, an Ithaca College junior from Kazanlak, Bulgaria, who is majoring in photography and visual arts. As soon as she heard about Lynch’s contest, ‘’I went immediately to the dean’s office and said, `How can I enter?’ I love old films, and old-school techniques. The challenge here is how to get a meaningful idea into such an everyday tool.'’ Stefanova is still pondering her entry. She is traveling home to Bulgaria for the holidays and plans to shoot scenes during her travels. ‘’It will be about my generation’s mobility and the falling down of borders,'’ she said.
Sudhanshu Saria is a senior in filmmaking and likes the novel challenges presented by working with a cell phone and a 1- to 2-inch screen. ‘’There are definitely visual limitations. You have to be able to tell a quick story. You can’t really make it character-based,'’ said Saria, from Siliguri, India. ‘’With a super small screen, you can’t have wide shots or crowd scenes. The images have to be visually simple. You can sustain closeups better than on a huge screen but some images may need to be exaggerated to compensate for the small size of the screen,'’ Saria said. Saria’s initial reaction was that the contest ‘’could be gimmicky … But I hope people studying film will take it as my generation’s chance to provide a new language, a new way of thinking.'’
The rules of the contest are simple: There must be a story, a narrative and sound, and the film must be shot on a cell phone. The movies can be edited digitally on a computer or a cell phone that has editing functions. The technical quality of the movies will depend on the cell phones, some of which can film with greater resolution than others. To ensure fairness, all submissions will be judged in basic VGA (video graphic array) quality, Lynch said. The submissions will be reviewed by a panel of film students and faculty, who will select 10 finalists. Those entries — which can be viewed on the contest Web site — will be judged by a panel of faculty and professional filmmakers.
‘’The challenge is, can you capture an audience member’s attention in 30 seconds and hold it an environment where not only is the delivery system small, but the time frame is short?'’ Lynch said. ‘’Every single frame matters. There’s no excess. That’s an incredible discipline to develop.'’ [The New York Times: Associated Press Online]
Niall's reverse engineering of Google's feedds API is a fantastic scoop. A few quick responses:
More later. I'm kind of surprised how excited I am about this.

UbiMate is a mobile city guide which utilizes the collective power of the mobile user community to generate customized recommendations. It looks at what like-minded user have done in the past under similar context (e.g., location, weather) to predict what the current user may like to do. It currently has two location setups, New York and Zurich.Via Annie
We are currently collecting ideas on the type of activities to recommend to our users. You can help us by recommending your favourite eateries/places/activities and rate what others have added. Start by entering into your location and register to begin recommending. Rate or edit your own activities by selecting the name from the activities page.
Many thanks for your help! Please feel free to pass it on! :)
NY Times: The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels.
Even as the recording industry staggers through another year of declining sales over all, there are new signs that a democratization of music made possible by the Internet is shifting the industry's balance of power.ut looks. It's about the new realities of the marketplace.Exploiting online message boards, music blogs and social networks, independent music companies are making big advances at the expense of the four global music conglomerates, whose established business model of blockbuster hits promoted through radio airplay now looks increasingly outdated.
On the Rhapsody subscription music service, for example, the 100 most popular artists account for only about 24 percent of the music that consumers chose to play from its catalog last month, said Tim Quirk, Rhapsody's executive editor. In the brick-and-mortar world, he estimates, the 100 most popular acts might account for more than 48 percent of a mass retailer's sales.
bout a big behemoth beaming something at a mass audience," Mr. Quirk said. "It's about a mass of niche audiences picking and selecting what they want at any given time."
The Wall Street Journal has a story about the multitude of problems facing the multiplex, including flat screen tvs, bankruptcy, rude guests, $6 popcorn, pre-show ads, cell phones, etc. Theaters are so desperate to reverse the decline in attendace that they are turning to technology to fight back:
Some chains say they're considering clamping down more, increasing the number of times ushers "sweep" theaters to rein in loud audience members. A more radical tactic under consideration: jamming cellphones to thwart chatty audience members. The theater owners' trade group and its members are looking into a cellphone call-blocking service that is currently illegal under federal communications law.
Do you still go to the theater? What annoys you the most?
Thanks to Joe for sending this in.
A lot of smart Intellectual Property types have started a blog about copyright — the title says it all: Copyrightwatch.ca: Debunking copyright myths, one post at a time.
Myths or not, there’s lots of very thoughtful stuff there, writes Lawrence Lessig. It bills itself as Canada’s home for common sense and the straight goods on digital copyright law. This blog is supported by a team of academics, public interest advocates, and creators concerned that copyright serve the interests of ordinary Canadians.
[Lessig Blog]


Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing?
A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.
Q: Huh?
A: Exactly. Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there's a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google's results. We want to trust what we read.
When professionals--editors, academics, journalists--are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems where nobody's in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.
But how can that be right when it feels so wrong?
There's the rub. This tradeoff is just hard for people to wrap their heads around. There's a reason why we're still debating Darwin. And why Jim Suroweicki's book on Adam Smith's invisible hand is still surprising (and still needed to be written) more than 200 years after the great Scotsman's death. Both market economics and evolution are probabilistic systems, which are simply counterintuitive to our mammalian brains. The fact that a few smart humans figured this out and used that insight to build the foundations of our modern economy, from the stock market to Google, is just evidence that our mental software has evolved faster than our hardware.
Probability-based systems are, to use Kevin Kelly's term, "out of control". His seminal book by that name looks at example after example, from democracy to bird-flocking, where order arises from what appears to be chaos, seemingly reversing entropy's arrow. The book is more than a dozen years old and decades from now we'll still find the insight surprising. But it's right.
Is Wikipedia "authoritative"? Well, no. But what really is? Britannica is reviewed by a smaller group of reviewers with higher academic degrees on average. There are, to be sure, fewer (if any) total clunkers or fabrications than in Wikipedia. But it's not infallible either; indeed, it's a lot more flawed that we usually give it credit for.
Britannica's biggest errors are of omission, not commission. It's shallow in some categories and out of date in many others. And then there are the millions of entries that it simply doesn't--and can't, given its editorial process--have. But Wikipedia can scale to include those and many more. Today Wikipedia offers 860,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500. Tomorrow the gap will be far larger.
The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it in this smart post, Wikipedia "should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts."
The same is true for blogs, no single one of which is authoritative. As I put it in this post, "blogs are a Long Tail, and it is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail--it is, by definition, variable and diverse." But collectively they are proving more than an equal to mainstream media. You just need to read more than one of them before making up your own mind.
Likewise for Google, which seems both omniscient and inscrutable. It makes connections that you or I might not, because they emerge naturally from math on a scale we can't comprehend. Google is arguably the first company to be born with the alien intelligence of the Web's large-N statistics hard-wired into its DNA. That's why it's so successful, and so seemingly unstoppable.
Paul Graham puts it beautifully:
"The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That's why their success seems so effortless. They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does."
The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers. That grain Graham sees is the weave of statistical mechanics, the only logic that such really large systems understand. Perhaps someday we will, too.
[Update: Nicholas Carr, who seems to have inherited the Clifford Stoll chair of reliable techno-skepticism, has a clever and well-written response here.]
been meaning to post this for a couple of days now, for those who havent come across it yet - michael
Ultramercial says they have a patent on a business model for VOD advertising. In an email, they said "it allows the viewer to make the choice: watch an ad that 'earns' them each segment of their program - OR - pay-per-view. The viewer chooses between an explicit exchange of value: their time for the content - OR - their money."
In the accompanying graphic, you can see how they expect a viewer of broadband TV shows to navigate to the show they want to watch.

Paul Grusche of Untramercial claims that the Ultramercial approach is "being considered by two major networks to bring their shows online."

good ol albert...thinking away as usual




Reinventing trust, collaboration and compliance in social systems. A workshop for novel insights and solutions for social systems design
April 22, 2006
Paper Submission Deadline - 16. Jan 06
Hosted at CHI 2006
April 22-27 2006
Montreal, Canada
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/reinvent06
-------------------------------------
Aim of the Workshop
-------------------------------------
Designing social systems that support trust, collaboration, and compliance has emerged as a core concern in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-mediated communication (CMC). Research to date has focused on policing mechanisms, stable identities, reputation systems, and rich media channels, among
other approaches. However, these approaches are often costly, negate the benefits of anonymity, or rely on the truthfulness of participants.
This workshop aims to provide a forum for novel alternative approaches that have, in our view, been overlooked or under-utilized to date. Further, we want to address how the analysis of existing social systems and user-centered design methods can help in the design of social systems that support trust and collaboration.
The European Parliament passed a measure requiring data providers to hold onto users' communication information for a period between six months and two years. While this is intended to aid anti-terrorism policing, it also worries critics for privacy and market competitiveness reasons.
One wrinkle: Wired notes that
only 20 percent of e-mail would be covered since many service providers were based outside the bloc.
(via /.)
Nature reports "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,a Nature investigation finds".The article says,"in the study,entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review.Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias;they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia.A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out,and were then examined by Nature's news team.Only eight serious errors,such as misinterpretations of important concepts,were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed,four from each encyclopaedia.But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements:162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica,respectively."
Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

In Getting Your Body (And Soul) Wired, Newsweek Magazine reports about Finger Whisper, a wristwatch-phone that transfers voice signals via your body:
"In his gadget-filled office at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Prof. Kohji Mitsubayashi tells a visitor to touch a transmitter with one hand and a receiver with another. Voila! A jaunty TV jingle blares from a pair of attached speakers. Surprised, the visitor releases both gadgets, and the music stops. The simplicity and strangeness of becoming a human circuitwith electrical signals coursing through ones body from fingertip to fingertipis so fascinating that visitors usually repeat the act. Fun, isnt it? says Mitsubayashi, grinning.
Not just fun. Japan is abuzz over the potential of such body-based technology as the ultimate wireless networking tool. A string of Japanese companies are experimenting with systems that use the human body to conduct electricitysome manipulating weak currents that pass through the skin itself (as body-fat scales do), others taking advantage of electrical fields on the surface of the body. Associated products are on the way. The question is whether this represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about wires." [blogged on wristfashion.com]
Yahoo is delving into more original video content, this time with a reality show called "Wow House." The show will follow two families as they renovate and upgrade their home electronics, and it will have plenty of opportunities for product integration. "Wow House" will debut on Yahoo's upcoming technology section -- due to launch in the first quarter of next year -- and headed up by former CNET editor-in-chief Patrick Houston. Yahoo's starting to live up to the designation of "the fifth network." (Free reg. req.)
Broadband Reports says it best:
FCC Chief: Net Neutrali-wha?There is no need for the FCC to adopt rules protecting consumers' ability to use whatever IP services they see fit, FCC chief Kevin Martin said today.
"I'm hesitant to adopt rules that would prevent anti-competitive behavior where there hasn't been significant evidence of a problem," says Martin, just one day after the Boston Globe reported AT&T and BellSouth wanted to de-prioritize the traffic of websites, VoIP providers, and any other content carriers and competitors who didn't pay them. Also recall AT&T CEO Whitacre's recent comments.
Today was apparently FCC chairman Kevin Martin's birthday -- and he celebrated it by having a bunch of big telco execs sing him "Happy Birthday" (you wonder, did they get the rights first?). Then, to return the favor, he gave them all a few birthday presents. First, he said that taxing VoIP systems was a good idea...
FCC chairman Martin sometimes seems more like a clumsy political appointee than an astute policy wonk. Martin's staff might serve the country more objectively if they put away those San Antonio brochures.
Blip.tv is hosting news videos from “Alive in Baghdad” — long form interviews and detailed coverage not available from the mainstream media.
Alive in Baghdad will encourage Westerners to ask questions about the similarity of life between working Americans and working Iraqis, to wonder about the strength of resolve it takes to continue supporting your family against all odds under occupation. We will encounter those who do not join the resistance despite the lack of any viable employment and survival in a manner that remains neutral to the occupation, as well as those who feel the resistance or the occupation are the only options.The Alive in Baghdad videos capture personal interviews with regular Iraqi citizens living day to day through the war as well as with activists and volunteers trying to work for peace and equality in Iraq. [Television Archiving]
Blip.tv
is a video blogging, podcasting and sharing service. If you don’t have a blog, we’ll give you one. If you have a blog already, we’ll make it a video blog.
Sprint and MSpot today announced the premier of MSpot Movies, the first mobile entertainment service to stream full-length feature films to mobile phones.
The movie service will come in two forms, a lower-bandwidth, lower-frame-rate service for Vision customers on Sprint's CDMA 1X vision service and a high-frame-rate, better-quality stream for 3G customers on Sprint's new Power Vision EVDO network.
The most recent movie of the 10 currently available is "Short Circuit," a family film from 1986. Most of them are in the classics genre, including films like "One-Eyed Jacks," a Marlon Brando-directed western from 1961, and "Angel and the Badman," a John Wayne film from 1947. Music concerts are also available. MSpot Movies cost $6.95 per month.
Sprint TV also allows customers to watch live TV on the go over Sprint Power Vision and Sprint PCS Vision Phones. MobiTV Powers Sprint TV. Customers who subscribe to Sprint TV can choose from 34 channels of live and exclusive on-demand programming, including NFL Network, as well as news, sports, weather, movie trailers and entertainment channels.
How much will it cost to download and view an entire movie on your cell phone? Sprint seems evasive (perhaps understandably). The voice, EV-DO, and movie service options add up to a substantial sum.
Instead of trying to stuff video onto a cellular channel like MobiTV, GoTV and Verizon's VCast, new mobile video services use standalone wireless networks. MediaFLO operates at 700 Mhz (channel 55), and Crown's DVB-H operates at 1.6 Ghz. They can broadcast (multicast) to millions, simultaneously. That frees up the cellular channels for voice and data and enables better video and faster datacasting.
Of course there are other options outside the walled prison;
Related DailyWireless stories include; Verizon Goes with FLO, Sprint: Go with the FLO?, T/W, Cingular: On Demand, DVB-H Headend Software, Intel On DVB-H, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, Video Search, Multi-Media Interoperability, BBC's Mobile Video, CBS/Comcast Broadband, Portable Photostories, Interactive TV News, The Feed Room, ABC News Now Looks to Future, Publishers Buy Online Content, The Free Triple Play, IP-TV Settops, Mobile TV Expands, The 700 Mhz Club, 700 Mhz Worth $28B, The 700 Mhz FCC Auction, Global Mobile Television, 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.
Seeking a Youthful Audience, Little Cable Channel (Current TV) Presents Features Filmed by Neophytes.
(Also see the NYT Article on Videoblogs: TV Stardom on $20 a Day)
Wired News: There are more than 500 public domain movies available on torrents for downloading to the iPod.
Once someone writes us a check, we'll put them up on Ourmedia for free download.
From the NYTimes story about the recent violence against social protesters in Dongzhou, China:
Mobile telephone technology has made it easier for people in rural China to organize, communicating news to one another by short messages, and increasingly allowing them to stay in touch with members of non-governmental organizations in big cities who are eager to advise them or provide legal help.
Shanghai "is looking at plans to build a traffic information center that would send up-to-the-minute reports on road congestion to a computer screen installed in cars or a portable device cyclists and pedestrians could use",the Shanghai Daily reports."The center will integrate information from the current three road condition monitoring departments — traffic police, the urban transport bureau and the urban project management bureau — and install more information collecting devices such as monitors along or beneath roads.Once applied, the Intelligent Transportation System will help drivers find the best routes to avoid congested roads, or suggest they use the subway or buses depending on traffic conditions,said Yang Dongyuan,vice president of Tongji University".
Traffic system would send info to computer
Originally posted by Jim_Downing from Smart Mobs, ReBlogged by emma on Dec 11, 2005 at 08:31 AM
Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, ReBlogged by emma on Dec 11, 2005 at 04:03 PM
(!! ;) -kc.)
Both houses of Congress have passed digital television (DTV) bills as part of budget legislation.
Below is a comparison of the bills from the Benton Foundaton. Representatives from both chambers are now going to conference to iron out the differences in these bills.
The bills aim to end analog TV broadcasts in 2009, auction off returned analog TV spectrum in the same year and earmark those revenues for deficit reduction and other purposes.
For more detail about both bills, see Digital Television Transition Legislation House and Senate Bills Go to Conference (DOC).
| |
Senate Bill
|
House Bill
|
|
Title: |
Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 (S.1932) | Digital Television Transition Act of 2005 (S.1932) |
| Ends analog TV broadcasts: | April 7, 2009 | December 31, 2008 |
| Begin returned spectrum auction: | January 2009 | January 7, 2008 |
| Auction proceeds to: | $5 billion, $6 billion or more to deficit reduction; $3 billion for converter box subsidies; $200 million for low power and translator TV stations; $1.25 billion to $1.75 billion for emergency communications; $250 million to fund ENHANCE 911 Act 0f 2004; $200 million to $1.4 billion in hurricane relief; $15 million for the essential air service program |
$990 million for converter box subsidies (includes up to $160 million for administration costs; $500 million for emergency communications; $30 million to help New York City broadcasters make transition; $3 million for low-power television stations; $8.477 billion or more to deficit reduction |
| Auction proceeds must be spent by: | September 14, 2010 | End of Fiscal Year 2009 |
| Additional spectrum license fees: | $10 million | none |
| FCC spectrum auction authority extension: | September 30, 2009 | Permanent |
| Converter box program: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" which bars the inclusion of extraneous matter in any reconciliation legislation considered in the Senate. The Byrd Rule may prevent the Senate from considering many of the DTV provisions in the House bill. The rule's chief sponsor was Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.VA). For more information, see The Senate's Byrd Rule Against Extraneous Matter in Reconciliation Measures | The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) would distribute paper applications and make available electronic means to apply for two $40 coupons to be applied to the purchase of converter boxes. Coupons would be distributed on a first come, first served basis and would be valid with converter box retailers for three months. All coupons would have to be used by the end of the 2009 fiscal year or any unused funds would revert to the general Treasury. |
| Consumer education: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | A) NTIA and FCC make public aware of 1) the deadline for analog TV broadcasts, 2) consumers' options after the deadline and 3) the converter box program; B) television set manufacturers are required to warn analog TV consumers of the coming digital TV transition with warning labels onsets sold in the US; C) broadcaster PSA campaign, cable/satellite notices in bills; |
| Tuner mandates: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | Directs the FCC to revise its digital television tuner mandates and require all sets sold in the US by March 1, 2007 to have digital television tuners |
| Converter energy consumption mandate: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | Sets 9 watts as maximum energy consumption for digital-to-analog converter boxes |
| Downconverting DTV signals: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | Allows cable and satellite operators to downconvert broadcasters' digital TV signals |
| DTV channel assignments: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | By July 31, 2007, the FCC is to assign digital TV channels for all full-power TV stations and not make any changes to these assignments until January 1, 2009; beginning January 31, 2006 and ending July 31, 2007, the FCC is to report to Congress every six months on the status of international coordination with Canada and Mexico of digital TV station assignments |
| Unlicensed spectrum in broadcast band: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | Within one year of enactment, the FCC is to complete an open proceeding on the operation of unlicensed spectrum within the broadcast band |
| Auctions and diversity: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | Within 120 days of enactment, the FCC is to begin an ongoing study to evaluate the participation of women, minorities, and small businesses in the auction process. |
| Auction objectives: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | Includes nonbinding "Sense of Congress" that the FCC disseminate wireless communications licenses to promote: 1) rapid deployment of new technologies, 2) economic opportunity and competition, 3) public benefit of commercial use of spectrum and 4) " efficient and intensive use of the spectrum |
| Spectrum plan: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | 1) the FCC is to initiate a rulemaking to assess the necessity of rechannelizing the spectrum located between 767-773 megahertz and 797-803 megahertz to accommodate broadband applications, and 2) the FCC is to to reevaluate the band plan for the auction of the unauctioned portions of the lower 700 megahertz band. |
| Low Power TV stations: | Subject to "Byrd Rule" | FCC is to complete by December 31, 2008, a plan for converting low power television stations to digital TV |
Attachment: DTV Transition Legislation Comparison.doc (49.5 KB)
For all the latest news check out Lee Wood's HDTV Magazine which has provided the definitive Daily DTV News Resource for years. Lee Wood is a highly regarded chief engineer at Portland's KOIN-TV.
Online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese to play the early rounds for them. These "gold farmers" work every day, in 12-hour shifts, playing computer games to harvest gold coins and other virtual goods that can be transformed into real cash.
Players around the world can trade the virtual currency to other players, who can use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Internet is now filled with classified advertisements from small companies auctioning for real money their powerful avatars.
By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers. They have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections.
"We prefer to hire young migrant workers rather than college students. The pay is not good for students, but it is quite attractive to the young migrants from the countryside," said Wei Xiaoliang who focuses his business on wholesaling Warcraft gold to overseas brokers.
Via International Herald Tribune.
Related: Virtual club to rock game culture. A different take in Cri.english.
Kin, by cshool + canade, is a system that allows people to give a prayer over the Internet.

[PC, webcam, microphone, and kin. In the main building of Ryokusen Temple.]
At Ryokusen Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, a network computer that controls Kin, a bowl-shaped sacred artifact (kind of like an upside-down bell that can be hit by a stick) is installed in the main building. One can connect to this computer from "anywhere" and hit the kin using a GUI slider.

[GUI for tele-praying.]
Praying over the Internet without physically attending a prayer would likey be considered impudent, etc. today. But there could be a good, respectable uses of this technology as well. What if one cannot walk /travel, or lives very far away from a temple.. These are some of the things that were discussed at the Digital Stadium show when this work was featured.
By the way, systems like this impose a unique challenge in GUI design. They could have used a button widget for hitting the kin. But the designers decided to make the user's task deliberately "inefficient" so that users can have something more to do to better appreciate the moment.
via Digital Stadium.
The University of South California Annenberg School Center for the Digital future has published a report that finds the most explosive growth in online time was among low income Web surfers,and "for the first time a broadband connection is the most popular way for US users to access the Web".(48 percent compared to the 45 percent of users)."In 2005,Internet use among those with incomes of less than $30,000 rose to 61 percent,after hovering around 50 percent for four years".
'Always on' Internet changing American life

Just came across this interesting site -- Bloggingheads.tv -- featuring a broadcast news style conversation between political blogger Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright. It's a little too stiff and reminiscent of CNN interviews for my tastes, but it also offers a lot of promise as a media form. Sort of like adding video to a podcast.
College Media Advisors has just launched a new blog site, Reinventing College Media. Ralph Braseth, director of student media at Ole Miss and a fellowship recipient to The Media Center’s recent We Media conference, is one of the project leaders. Ralph says about the initiative:
"College media should take a lead role in helping create the media future. This site will serve as a forum for new ideas, but it is our goal to move from mere ideas to proposing and implementing significant change for the student media of the future. Here we will share our experiments, our successes and failures. This site will highlight best practices among our colleagues and serve as a resource for any adviser of any media looking for a jumping off point."
I know Ralph to be a truly committed educator, passionate about his students as well as about the role journalism plays in our democracy. With his involvement, there can be no doubt about the sincere intentions of this CMA project, and I applaud the effort to begin a serious conversation about the issues facing college media and to collect possible solutions. But the forum’s ultimate success will hinge on who participates… and herein lies its weakness.
CMA’s membership comprises those with the most direct impact on the media producers of the future. It is uniquely positioned (in a much stronger position, in fact, than mainstream media) to scrutinize and understand how younger media audiences are evolving, to work closely with tomorrow’s media leaders to identify the behaviors and expectations of their generation. On the Reinventing College Media site, in addition to asking for participation from colleagues and other "grown-ups" that represent media’s shaky status quo, I hope CMA will invite – even beg – journalism and communications students, college media staffs and everyone else on campus experimenting with personal media, to jump in as well. Only with such a mix – of the established and the new, of the old lions and the young turks – will worldviews be redefined and the musty remnants of a media no longer relevant in a digital world be swept away. And only then will the future of college media, and media in general, become clearer.
Thanks to section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which became law in 1996, Wikipedia is most likely safe from legal liability for libel, regardless of how long an inaccurate article stays on the site, according to legal experts interviewed by CNET News.com. That's because it is a service provider as opposed to a publisher such as Salon.com or CNN.com.
Finally, Fast Company does a cover story which is worth something: a series of stories on how technology is changing the business of Hollywood and entertainment, and some of the new players emerging out of it. (Some of these stories are not online yet, but the major ones are)
ptpete writes in:
You can now subscribe to rocketboom on your tivo. It will be downloaded daily.
Here's the link to the announcement on TivoCommunity.
You can subscribe via the web or directly from your Tivo.
I think it's great to get some regular original internet content on the TV via Tivo.
Yeah, definitely cool to see TiVo doing this. It'll be great to see where they take this support for videoblogging. It feels a little bit early for this -- there's not a ton of great video blogs/vlogs/vodcasts out there, but this would certainly give people some incentive to create more.
(!!! ;) -kc.)
"China's government said it stepped up monitoring of short message services (SMS) sent between the nation's 383 million mobile-phone users to prevent fraudsters,pornographers and other "unhealthy elements" from exploiting the technology",Asia Media reports."Police found 107,000 illegal short messages and shut down 9,700 cellphone accounts since the start of last month,Wu Heping,vice minister of the Ministry of Public Security,said at a briefing in Beijing yesterday that was broadcast on the Internet."
CHINA:Beijing boosts surveillance of SMS
After a number of weeks of a secret beta, Seth Godin's new aggregation project has quietly gone live. Check it out here
Research firm Maravedis has a new study out on the licensed 2.5 GHz Broadband Radio Service (BRS) and the licensed 2.3 GHz Wireless Communications Service (WCS) band. They calculate the number of licenses and coverage in the 2.3 and 2.5 GHz bands.
Those frequencies are critical for the future of mobile WiMax in the United States. Without them it's not going anywhere.
Under the FCC terms of the Sprint Nextel merger, Sprint agreed to offer at least 15 million Americans broadband wireless access within four years, and an additional 15 million potential subscribers within six years using their 2.5 GHz frequencies.
In 2004, the FCC changed the MDS/ITFS frequency plan. Commercial Broadband (BRS) and Educational (EBS) broadband services are now allocated differently. The television oriented EBS service was moved in the middle of the band to reduce interference with the weaker 2-way data services.
As of November 2005, over 1,700 BRS Licenses and 2,500 EBS Licenses (formerly ITFS) were listed on the FCC's ULS License Search web site. The FCC's Tower Search has additional information. Maravedis estimated the broadband wireless licensees (below), from the FCC's ULS License Search web site.
| Licensee | PSA | BTA | Potential Subs |
| BellSouth Wireless | 36 | 6 | 9,070,577 |
| Clearwire | 59 | 24 | 4,693,347 |
| Nextel/Sprint | 268 | 198 | 157,519,832 |
Protected Service Areas (PSA) is an exclusive license service granted to either a BRS or EBS licensee. Each PSA is comprised of a 35 Mile Radius surrounding the licensed transmitter site.
Basic Trading Areas (BTA) is geographic region defined by a group of counties that surround a city as formulated by Rand McNally. There are 493 BTAs in the U.S.
Owners of incumbent MDS (now called BRS) and ITFS (Instructional Fixed Television Service) (now called EBS), hope mobile WiMax, likely to be available in a year or two, will take off. EBS television licensees must have a minimum of 20 hours per 6 MHz channel per week of educational use of EBS spectrum.
The 2.3 GHz WCS band, currently has a total of 282 x 5.0 MHz licenses, according to Maravedis. Many of the 2.3 GHz WCS licenses, granted in 1997, will be due to expire in 2007. The FCC gave considerable flexibility to satellite radio's 2.3 GHz DARS (Digital Audio Radio Service) to put their satellite "gap fillers" where they need them (and even where they don't).
Some fear the 2.3 GHz band will be one big mess resulting in interference between broadband wireless providers and satellite radio repeaters -- just like the FCC screwed up with Nextel. Or maybe the problem will just disappear if XM satellite radio buys out the 2.3 GHz broadband wireless band for their own purposes.
Satellite radio, at 2.3 GHz, is NOT going away in the United States.
|
The FCC also moved to open up the 3.5 GHz band, particularly for rural populations. But the 3.6GHz spectrum will be shared, unlike the 2.5GHz and 2.3GHz bands.
Other frequency options include the 5.8 GHz band with 100 Mhz of unlicensed bandwidth - but the restricted range and unlicensed nature makes mobility impractical. The 700 Mhz band is expected to have good range and might be an option in 3-4 years, but the 6-12 Mhz bandwidth will limit capacity of any licensed 700 Mhz network.
The FCC can appear to be insular with industry lobbyists guiding FCC policy. Why, for example, isn't there more information on the proposed buyout of the 2.3 GHz band by XM radio? Inquiring minds want to know.
Related DailyWireless stories include; FCC: 97lb Weakling, XM Buys 2.3GHz, The FCC Opens the 3650MHz band, Battle at 3 Dot 5, 3.5 GHz: Licensed or Un? Fixed Vrs Mobile WiMax, Navini Activates 2.3GHz in USA, President Wants 90MHz, Mobile WiMax Chips, Heartland Says The World Is Round, McCaw Profile & WCS, The 700 Mhz Club, Samsung Demos WiBro, WiBro Three-Way, Arraycomm + Intel Beam WiMax, Sprint + Motorola Test WiMax, Navini's Mobile WiMax, 4G War in Sydney, WiMax 16d+ Dilemma, WiMax: Will It Stay or Will It Go?, WiMax World Wrap.
It seems HDTV (high-definition TV) could shake up Hollywod. The unforgiving clarity of high-definition television has induced paranoia among celebrities obsessed with their appearance, reports The Telegraph via TV Predictions via digg.com.
The technology, soon to become available in Britain, produces images so sharp that even subtle imperfections, usually hidden by make-up or flattering lighting, are brutally exposed.
s have begun savaging stars normally considered attractive who appear haggard or saggy in the new medium, which boasts resolution six times that of normal television.
... Philip Swann, whose website TV Predictions covers television technology, said: "With high-definition television facial imperfections and ageing signs are dramatically visible." He said many celebrities were "scared to death" by the technology.
... Swann thinks that the technology could affect casting decisions and the longevity of careers. He believes that it could wrong-foot the "Hollywood glamour machine" which turns ordinary-looking people into stars, thanks to glossy magazine shoots and air-brushed videos.

Oslo - The first trial of interactive mobile TV programming was launched this week in Norway, a collaboration between broadcaster NRK and wireless firm LM Ericsson. The six week trial of the IM-TV service will enable viewers of the Norwegian music video show "Svisj" to interact in real time by voting for upcoming videos, and messaging the show's hosts and other viewers while still watching the program. The cost to interact is about half that of standard text messages. "Our solution makes it possible for viewers to interact with a show that they are watching on their mobile device in a whole new way, creating a much richer TV experience with the help of the mobile channel," said Ericsson Mobility World vice president Kurt Sillen.
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/051202/0102895.html
http://tinyurl.com/9ck57 (Associated Press)
http://www.nrk.no/img/541868.jpg
(This is my most recent column in the Financial Times.)
The open internet is under attack as never before, and the attackers are the usual suspects: governments and incumbent communications giants. Unhappily, this applies in America, too.
By “open” I mean an internet where customers use the available bandwidth as they see fit, not as oligopolies decree. Of course, what customers want is not especially relevant to the bureaucrats and executives who are working hard to regain control.
It is not surprising to see repressive governments, especially the ones that control national telecommunications operations, squeeze the life out of this vital new medium. Not just political control is at stake; so, in many cases, is an enormous amount of revenue.
But it is disheartening to watch the US turn in this direction. The nation that spawned the internet is renouncing some core values in the process.
My friend John Gilmore, co-founder of EFF and inventor of many key Sun Microsystems technologies, is suing the US federal government over the constitutionality of a secret law that requires Americans to show ID before boarding airplanes, a back-door to mandating Soviet-style internal passports for travel.
The TSA and airlines claim that the ID requirement for travel is a law, but the law isn't published anywhere. If it were published, it would be subject to Constitutional challenge; previous Supreme Court cases during the anti-Segregation fight established that the Feds have no right to condition citizens' ability to travel across state lines.
Now the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing John's case, and the hearing is open to the public. I wish I could be there -- this is history being made, and John deserves all our support for having the guts to put his money and liberty on the line to fight for the Constitution.
Friends and supporters of John are welcome to attend this historic hearing, but are asked to please dress appropriately for court. John would like nothing more than to have the public gallery filled to the brim with fellow Americans who care as much as he does about the US Constitution.nks, Bill!)What: Oral Arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzalez
When: December 8th 2005 at 9am
Where: 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Third Floor, Courtroom 3
95 Seventh Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Vlogball is a videoblogging game that you can enjoy by watching the films on the right, or you can join in and play! To play, download some of these films, shoot your own footage, re-edit combining your footage with excerpts from movies made by other play

(Themed videoblogging can be fun for the whole ad hoc network of needs and desires! See previous post. -kc.)
the intrnetz become evermore "just another distribution channel"
expect this to become more prevalent as vod and porncasts flood the market

Here's an English-language interview with Gary Wang, founder of Toodou, a new user-generated, interactive, multimedia content website in China that sounds remarkably like Ourmedia.org. They have 120,000 registered users and tons of podcasts.
The conference seems a little bigger this year - about 600 people are here.
This morning, Jane Johnson offered an update on MIC, a project to create a union catalog of moving image archive holdings. Over the last year, MIC has nearly double the number of archives it has listed, and added the ability to search for video that is online.
One of the big challenges for MIC is dealing with the diversity of different approaches to cataloging. MIC now has a new utility that makes it possible for an archive to map its catalog data to the schema used by MIC. Rather than forcing conformance with a particular schema, MIC accepts metadata more are less as is; archivists can contribute what they have.
This afternoon, the LC’s Mike Mashon gave an engaging overview of its collection policy. The LC currently takes in about 30,000 items a year, mostly as a result of copyright, though 70 percent plus of the materials deposited for copyright purposes are not added to the national collection.
A disturbing point was that some of the donor agreements for public domain materials require users to get permission to make copies from the original donor.
Interesting to me were the hints about how to get copyright deposits into the collection. Providing good catalog data and some evidence of real post production work helps. So does format: Mashon noted that he has yet to turn down a nitrate collection, and that DVDs have sometimes been accepted for the collection when VHS hasn’t.
(Read the update at Wired. -kc.)
The anime industry is doing everything the rest of show biz isn't: embracing technology, coddling fans—and making a killing.
(See previous :( -kc.)
Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME) announced the successful demonstration of IP-based video-on-demand application at the Wireless Broadband Forum in Cambridge, UK. The solution combined FME’s AXEL-F, ETHOS and WiMAX devices to deliver a high-resolution video-stream from a server across optical and wireless networks to an end user.
The demonstration network was developed to comply fully with the protocols that will form the backbone of the next generation of wireless broadband roll-out, such as Ethernet over SDH/SONET (ETHOS) (MB87M2181) and WiMAX (MB87M3400).
Fujitsu says the demo proves it has the capability to offer a cost-effective, highly-integrated solution that will provide a fast route to market for Telcos.
Using an optical Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), with a WiMAX connection over the last mile to the customer would be more cost/effective than the fiber to the home.
Of course the phone companies, using twisted pair or fiber, can deliver faster connections (vital for multiple tv households).
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SBC's Project Lightspeed is preparing a triple-play launch. They're using VDSL-2, to reach the overwhelming majority of their homes. They deliver fiber to the node, but twisted pair copper to the home. SBC will use Alcatel gear for the fiber backbone. It consists of IP routers, the 7750, the Ethernet switches, the 7450, the remote DSLAM, the 7330. Microsoft's IPTV solution will be used for the settop box. Verizon’s FiOS (Fiber Internet Service) does not use DSL. It brings fiber directly to the home. For in-home distribution it uses twisted pair (for voice) and coax (for video). FiOS TV uses digital cable boxes rather than IP-TV. Fios Internet Service requires CAT5 or higher grade wiring. It will deliver 5 Mbps ($39/mo) to 30 Mbps ($199/mo). When installing Fios, Verizon tears out your twisted pair to eliminate all access to competitive landline providers.
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SBC, using twisted pair and VDSL-2, is expected to deliver 20Mbps. That's fast enough to deliver two HDTV streams (using IP-TV over twisted pair), along with voice and data, says SBC. Verizon's FiOS brings fiber directly to the home. Verizon offers internet speeds up to 30 Mbps (at $199/month), and hundreds of cable channels.
The poster child for IP-TV is Hong Kong's PCCW which just passed 500,000 IPTV subscribers. No Microsoft boxes.
Related DailyWireless stories include; SBC Picks IP-TV Settops, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, VDSL-2 Ratified, IP-TV Settops, Legislators: Don't Mess With SBC, DirecTV + WiMax?, Muni Wireless Laws, Duopoly Laws, Mobile TV Expands, Verizon Does Cellular TV, Video Search, Big Media Mobilizes, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, Samsung's Video over DSL, 700 Mhz Worth $28B, The 700 MHz Club, The Man Who Invented Television, The Smartest Guy in the Room, and Unlicensed Spectrum: The Sum of All Fears.
After a young sales manager at Indian Oil Corporation was killed by the fuel mafia in Uttar Pradesh, a number of bloggers demanded speedy justice and compensation to Manjunath's family. "Signatures piled up online, condolence messages poured in from all over the world, and serious discussions about petrol pump allotments and incentive structures ensued," DNA Evolutions reports. "Media houses responded, carrying prominent edits, and ran campaigns. When readers influence editorial decisions and prioritisation, it shows the power of participatory journalism."
Russell Beattie talks about the new firmware for Sony's Playstation Portable. He likes it.
Sony just released a new firmware update v2.6 for the PSP with RSS(!) and Windows Music support. I’m downloading it to try now, but I think this is a pretty cool update. I have to say, besides Sony’s insistence on hammering the homebrew scene, they’ve done good things with the PSP firmware updates, adding a browser, LocationFree support and now this stuff.I wonder if it works on the News4Neighbors feed...
As long as there’s not a root-kit installed, then I’m willing to give them two thumbs up! Nice job Sony!
The addition of RSS to this device is something I really wasn’t expecting. It makes perfect sense - the killer app for the browser has been Bloglines mobile, so now that I’ll be able to snag a bunch of feeds right on the device itself before walking out the door? That’s pretty cool.
Waiting…. Okay, it’s installed.
Hehehe. Surprise, surprise. So I immediately went to the “RSS Channel” app and started it up, and it gave me a message that I didn’t have any subscriptions, and asked me if I wanted to open up the browser so I could add some. I said yes, and arrived at this page. Awesome...
Engadet says you can download videos directly to your Memory Stick Duo. Some of the rental videos are available at a resolution of 480 x 270, dispelling the rumors floating around that such video resolution wasn’t possible from a Memory Stick Duo. Watch out for the DRM, though.
The new Mac mini will feature an Intel processor, Front Row 2.0, TiVo-like DVR functionality, and a built-in iPod dock, according to Think Secret. Talks of an Apple-TiVo deal recently fizzled, according to Think Secret, prompting TiVo to independently announce the ability to move content to a video iPod (or PSP).
In related RSS news, Yahoo also announced the launch of two new RSS products today. They have integrated an RSS reader directly into Yahoo Mail Beta, and are expanding Alerts to include RSS feeds.
This afternoon I stopped in at NOAA's Portland weather office
just out of curiosity. After getting through the Homeland Security
entrance, I was greeted by a friendly receptionist who gave me a badge.
A meterologist explained to me that
all the National Weather Service products are free to
everyone. TV stations use outside contractors for presentation
enhancements.
One local station has their own doppler. That allows them to scan just to a neighborhood to produce a micro-climate in 3D.
It occured to me that weather overlays on Google Earth would be useful (they're probably already being done).
A wireless traffic gauge, News and
Local Information, too. Of course, Google Earth doesn't run on a PSP or PocketPC.
Yet. But I guess that's what Google Maps for Mobile is for.
Speaking of browsers, Firefox 1.5 with faster performance and other goodies is now available for free downloading. Firefox extensions feature hundreds of free weather forecasting, music players, and other widgets. Firefox now has 11% of the market and has found a godfather in Google, which recently announced its Firefox affiliate program. Google will pay $1 to a web site for every referral to the Firefox site that leads to a user downloading and using the browser.
Leo Laporte and
Amber MacArthur (left) interview the people who made it happen (MP-3) on their new podcast, Inside the Net.
Billboard reports that iPod-friendly Rush Limbaugh video clips are on the way. Meanwhile, Broadcasting and Cable says Disney will roll out a massive effort to use iPods to promote the upcoming film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
Technorati Tags: vidcasting, Vodcasting
>>In what's a surprising turnaround, the FCC is expected to support "a la carte" pricing of cable channels, reports Reuters. This would stand in stark contrast to an earlier FCC report praised by the cable industry, which suggested such a move would result in higher prices for consumers.
That original report (pdf), which we discussed last fall, was attacked by consumer groups. "The study was rigged against consumers in favor of large cable companies, giant broadcasters and other media behemoths," concluded Gene Kimmelman of the Consumer's Union, publishers of Consumer Reports (see statement).
As cable-rate-hike season rolls around each year, the idea gets brought up as a possible panacea, but is never implemented. One of the plans largest proponents, Senator John McCain, seemingly lost interest in pushing the idea after the FCC report surfaced.
According to the Wall Street Journal, this new report will conclude that a la carte pricing could lower prices for television viewers. FCC chief Martin will back the idea of a "family-friendly tier" of cable channels. But will such a regulation-loathing FCC head actually get the pricing scheme implemented?
"The music and film industries are demanding that the European parliament extends the scope of proposed anti-terror laws to help them prosecute illegal downloaders",the Guardian reports ."In an open letter to MEPs,companies including Sony BMG,Disney and EMI have asked to be given access to communications data - records of phone calls, emails and internet surfing - in order to take legal action against pirates and filesharers.Current proposals restrict use of such information to cases of terrorism and organised crime".
Music industry seeks access to private data to fight piracy
Here's how it will work: TiVo users create a user profile. Relevant ads are uploaded to their respective TiVo boxes. They they can search through the ads with keywords "utilizing the same revolutionary keyword search techniques offered with Internet advertising." (Read: Google.) TiVo is heralding the new feature as "the first television-based advertising search solution" with the possibility for keyword sales. I can imagine the key to success here is that the ads are not traditional TV ads but advertainment and product reviews (such as a two-minute clip on "Holiday Gifts for Geeks"). And contests, of course. Otherwise, I can't see TiVo subscribers searching for TV ads. (Thanks, Chris!)
Jonas Kjellberg, VD Skype Nordic, has said that Skype will release a client for all Symbian smartphones in the next two quarters… "Even if there is no charge for the voice call, the user must pay for using the data connection. This charge tends to be a lot lower than what mobile operators charge for voice calls today."
I think it depends on the data service as to whether the call quality is good enough.
Related stories:
–Musings On Skype
–@ CTIA: Qpass To Launch Skype Ringtones
–IPdrum Plugs Mobile Phones Into Skype
Paul Martino has announced: “Aggregate Knowledge”.
In his own words:
Our Goal: To deliver the best content to people based on the aggregate behavior of everyone who has gone before them.
We think that the wisdom of crowds can help people get at the best of all the information that’s out there.
This is key shit.
Paul will turn your system into an auto generating, relevance and connectivity engine. Paul was the main guy behind Tribe and was also at Intertrust. he’s knows his shit - and he’s my brother in arms.
Just as it pioneered the use of MP3s, Public Enemy is now an early adopter of the wireless phone network as a distribution system for music. This is the best revenue-generating market that exists today. It's like the Internet in '98, but with a business plan," says Walter Leaphart, who manages Public Enemy leader Chuck D.
Originally from ringtonia.com, ReBlogged by julianbleecker on Nov 28, 2005 at 11:00 AM
At this point it's not exactly clear whether Sony is fixing past mistakes, upgrading features or making entirely new flubs. Probably all three, but this latest PSP upgrade does offer some improvements:
PSP Firmware 2.6 is OUT! [psp3d]
"http://feeds.gawker.com/~c/gizmodo/full?a=9TINzE">
(When the efficiency of old work is mistaken for the creation of new work.... -kc.)
Have you seen Mefeedia lately? There is some cool stuff going on over there.
Peter Van Dijck is a really cool user interface architect and he’s working like a busy bee on Mefeedia. Next week he’s going to be coming out with a “Vlog This” feature which I’m really looking forward to. It’s going to make it easy for me to post about cool video posts that I find!
Here is how I intend to use it. I’ll search the tags for “remixoff2005″ or “remix” and I’ll find all sorts of cool remixes. Then I’ll click the “Vlog This” button. Mefeedia is going to automatically snag a bunch of pics out of the video for me to use as a thumbnail and so I’ll choose a little pic from the choices given. Then I’ll slap the code that mefeedia spits out and slap it into a WATM post and share the vlog treasure with the world. It’s kinda like that “Blog This” button in Flickr, except that it is way cooler!
With this re-vlogging tool, Mefeedia is making it easier for vloggers to send the vlink vlove around the vlogosphere!
I wouldn’t put it past Peter to add a snazzy re-vlogged feed so that I can subscribe to a feed of all the videos that people have revlogged!
Update: Peter says that he just made it even easier so that you don’t even need to cut and paste the code, you can have mefeedia do the job for you!
We've made the point repeatedly here that mobile phones represent a critical leapfrog tool for the developing world. They provide access to information, contact with friends and relatives, even community business models. With programs like Grameen Phone and efforts like the GSM association's Emerging Markets Handset project, mobile phones are available to growing numbers of people in the poorest countries. The revolutionary utility of the mobile phone hasn't escaped the notice of phone manufacturers or even the gaze of conventional journals like The Economist.
Now the world of international development is picking up on this idea. Developments: The International Development Magazine just published an article entitled "Loose talk saves lives," by Matthew Bishop, describing the poverty-reducing effect of widespread access to mobile phones.
Readers familiar with the discussion here on WorldChanging will find in it little that's new. That's why it's a useful piece, in fact: the article provides a wonderful summary of the major points of the argument. Bishop hits the key issues, including the rapid spread of mobile phones in Africa, the relationship between phone access and GDP, the need for even lower-cost phone units, the Grameen Phone program, and even the mobile phone as a "leapfrog" technology. Bishop uses enough new examples that the piece doesn't simply read as a mashup of various Worldchanging posts, but it's clear that he's on our wavelength.
(Via Smart Mobs)
(Posted by Jamais Cascio in Leapfrog Nations - Emerging Technology in the New Developing World at 12:34 PM)
Jennifer Urban of USC's Intellectual Property Legal Clinic and Laura Quilter of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall have released a summary report examining over 900 DMCA take-down notices collected from the Chilling Effects project. The report finds that nearly 1/3rd of all notices are improper and potentially illegal. The full report will be out in March 2006.
Link to summary report.
Link to USC press release.
WiFi Planet fills us in on The Evolution of WiMax Certification (pdf) from Senza Fili’s Web site. It shows 5 waves of certification. The WiMax Forum, like the WiFi Alliance, is supposed to assure interoperablity from different vendors (if it's meant to be).
Monica Paolini, the president of Senza Fili and the paper’s author, says most of the people she spoke to had different perceptions of the certification process. “The information is out there, but it’s a little scattered,” she says, “So I thought it would be useful to put it all together.”You need to have interoperability for each spectrum band, and separately for TDD [Time Division Duplex] and FDD [Frequency Division Duplexing] and for different channels,” Paolini says. “And for each one of these possible combinations, you need to have at least three vendors.”
WiMax certified indoor clients & PCMCIA cards in a year. Mobile WiMax in two -- according to the chart.
Unstrung has a complete rundown of WiMax Carrier Trials around the world.
A recent article by Nikkei Electronics Asia, went a long way towards providing some much need clarity on the respective roles and capabilities of 802.11n and Ultra-Wideband (UWB). This is a well written and illustrated article and is worth taking time to check out.
The Washington Post has launched their own site to champion remixing of their content – unofficially dubbed “The Mashington Post”.
The aims of “Post Remix” is to spotlight cool stuff people have mashed up with WP content and to promote their RSS feeds.
Welcome to the mash-up party, Washington Post!
"The heavily regulated Bells are looking to Congress and the FCC, as well as to state leaders, for regulatory relief in their effort to gain a competitive edge. In January 2004, the Bells, through the USTelecom, began a reported $30-million-to-$40-million multiyear lobbying and media campaign. The simple but consistent message to the 535 lawmakers in Congress and the five FCC commissioners has been: "Deregulate."
From Mercury News:
Professor Marc Davis has dedicated years of his life to studying how the Internet is changing people from passive Web surfers to active content creators who post their own text, video and audio online.But like any professor, Davis longed for the ability to test his theories on a wider, real-world audience.
Now he has his chance.
Davis, a media professor at the University of California-Berkeley, has been given the keys to perhaps the biggest real-world lab in the world -- Yahoo's vast network of Web sites and the hundreds of millions of people who use them.
As head of Yahoo's new social media research lab in Berkeley, just a brisk walk from the UC-Berkeley campus, Davis has been tasked with helping Yahoo chart a course through the rapidly evolving world of ``social media'' -- from blogs and social networking services to interactive mobile devices...more...
His research projects include:
Here's his think piece (pdf)
Although we are living in the "computer age", the full implications of computational ideas have not been realized in our century. We are at the early apparatus phase of computational development—the profound ideas of computation have not yet affected all other fields of human inquiry, especially our thinking about media.
As computational ideas transform our thinking about media, new apparatuses and new ideas will emerge that will change relationships to media and to each other.
The ways we create, communicate, and play will become computationally revisioned, transforming us in the process.
We are on the verge of a monumental change—like the invention of writing—that will arise out of the still evolving transformations of the television, camcorders, and computers.
What the next 50 years of computational motion pictures will bring is a fundamental change in the possibilities of “written” language and communication, and I am not talking about email.
PalmSource, France Telecom's Orange and several other companies plan to standardize aspects of Linux running on mobile phones. News.com reports.
"The Linux Phone Standard (Lips) Forum wants to standardize Linux interfaces so that higher-level software won't have to be customized for each variation of the open-source operating system appearing in different cell phone models. If successful, the allies believe they'll make Linux a better competitor the fast-growing market."
Frustrated at limitations on mainstream mobile phones, "homebrew" enthusiasts are building their own, reports News.com
... "Cell phone use has already exploded all over the world, but it is only recently that falling component prices have made it practical for homebrew phone hackers to build their own.
Certainly, the phone tinkerers are chafing at the boundaries set by the handset makers and the big phone carriers. They want phones to be programmable, so they can create their own services, either as start-up companies or just for their own use. "

Look out iTunes video store! Nintendo and AM3 are now distributing video content for the GBA Movie Player this winter in Japan. Taking the form of an old-school "Gashapon" (toy capsule) machine, this device allows you to insert your GBA movie player flash memory card, crank a handle and instantly download anime episodes to watch on your GBA. Episodes are around 25 minutes each and priced at 300-yen to download, with popular shows being offered, such as Pokemon and Detective Conan. There even appears to be a "free content" button, presumably giving you trailers, etc. The machines will be dotted around at Japanese Pokemon Centers, Toys "R" Us stores and other kid-friendly outlets.

Gashapon How-To [Product Page]

Instead of going with the ole' downloading music thing, Cingular decided to go another route, introducing a mobile radio service that includes about 40 channels of commercial-free music running over data connections. The content is coming from Music Choice and MobiTV Inc's streaming media service (which also delivers video clips to Cingular and Sprint multimedia phones). And all this for an extra $6.99 a month. Of course, we've heard this tune before when Sprint Nextel introduced streaming radio from Sirius back in September for an extra $7 a month. And that will include Stern, so many may find it a lot more worth their cash. Right now, Cingular's radio service will work on one Nokia phone and two from Sony Ericsson.
Cingular unveils mobile radio service [Reuters]
Pricing for Cingular Plans and Handsets [Amazon]
The New York Times has an inside look at the financial life of a movie by Adam Leipzig (president of National Geographic Feature Films).
It's bad enough that a movie's box-office gross revenues will decline about 50 percent each week and that the time between a film's release in the theater and its debut in the home-video market is shrinking rapidly. (That window is less than four months now, down from six months just a year ago; some industry leaders predict it will soon shrink to nothing.) Even more vexing, success or failure in theaters, often a break-even proposition at best, will be determined with near-certainty by early afternoon of the opening Friday - and then by the turnout at a few bellwether theaters like Loews Lincoln Square and AMC Empire 25 in Manhattan.
TechWeb News reports that Yahoo is working on a tool to make it easier for people to produce and publish podcasts. Joe Hayashi, senior director of product management, told TechWeb that the the challenges podcast publishers face are based on not understanding the technology behind the publishing tools - particularly RSS.
He's absolutely correct. Creating podcasts has to become as easy as blogging for it to take off beyond the geeks. People won't want to invest the time, PR professionals included. This is welcome.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo
>>Yahoo today launched the Yahoo! Shoposphere. The site let you tag and share wish lists through RSS feeds. Michael Arrington has more.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo
>>
There was a story on Slashdot this morning about new research involving a giant ape. It's awfully coincidental that this research came out 1 month before the King Kong movie. Think I'm being cynical? Listen to this NPR piece on how Hollywood manipulates science (8:54) to promote its movies.
Universal Pictures worked with paleontologists to ensure that dinosaur news would coincide with the release of each Jurassic Park movie. They even had one scientist lie about the discovery date of some fossils by a few weeks, in order to have the discovery date closer to Jurassic Park 3's opening. He was fine with it, since Universal paid for a lot of his research. Universal is also the studio that is releasing King Kong.
Still think I'm being cynical?
Tags: science productplacement movies kingkongWarner Brothers and AOL are preparing an Internet service that lets fans watch full episodes from more than 100 old television series, reports the New York Times. The service, called In2TV, will be free, supported by advertising, and will start early next year. More than 4,800 episodes will be made available online in the first year.
Programs on In2TV will have one to two minutes of commercials for each half-hour episode, compared with eight minutes in a standard broadcast. The Internet commercials cannot be skipped.America Online, which is making a broad push into Internet video, will distribute the service on its Web portal. Both it and Warner Brothers are Time Warner units. An enhanced version of the service will use peer-to-peer file-sharing technology to get the video data to viewers.
Warner, with 800 television programs in its library, says it is the largest TV syndicator. It wants to use the Internet to reach viewers rather than depend on the whims of cable networks and local TV stations, said Eric Frankel, the president of Warner Brothers' domestic cable distribution division.
Other recent internet video offerings include a deal with ABC and Apple iPods for $1.99 downloads of hit tv series. NBC and CBS also announced last week that they would sell reruns of their top new shows for 99 cents an episode through video-on-demand services. CBS is working with Comcast and NBC with DirecTV.
The NY Times says next month AOL will introduce TMZ, an entertainment news service, in a joint venture with another Warner Brothers division, Telepictures Productions. TMZ, named for the 30-mile zone around Hollywood that is mentioned in some film-union contracts, will mix breaking entertainment news and gossip with a database of information and video about celebrities.
TMZ and most of AOL's programming effort, so far, have been built largely around short video segments, reflecting the conventional view that Internet users are less likely to want to watch full-length programs on a computer screen.
AOL will offer a version of the service meant to be watched on a television set connected to a Windows Media Center PC, and it is exploring a similar arrangement to link the Internet programming to television through TiVo video recorders.
For those who want to watch on a big screen, AOL is introducing optional technology called AOL Hi-Q. To use the technology, viewers will have to agree to participate in a special file-sharing network. This approach helps AOL reduce the cost of distributing-high quality video files by passing portions of the video files from one user's computer to another. AOL says that since it will control the network, it can protect users from the sorts of viruses and spyware that infect other peer-to-peer systems.
AOL is using file-sharing technology from Kontiki, a Silicon Valley company providing a similar system to the ambitious Internet video program of the BBC.
Other recent VOD announcements include:
Yahoo TV offers show times, program descriptions and cast photographs as well as exclusive content like information from "Entertainment Tonight" and others. Subscribers with a TiVo Series2 box and a standard Yahoo ID may use the service, the companies said. TiVo has some 254,000 subscribers, down from 288,000 a year earlier. Key to that drop was a 5 percent decline in new customers from DirecTV, its biggest source of new customers, which has said it plans to cease marketing TiVo's product.
Other movie download services include the studio-backed MovieLink, Walt Disney's over-the-air MovieBeam, Starz Encore, CinemaNow and soon Netflicks.
Related Dailywireless stories include; Telco's Left Behind in IPTV Armageddon?, Google TV, The Free Triple Play, NY Times Blinkx, CBS/Comcast Broadband, Global Mobile Television, The FeedRoom, Ad Supported Wireless Net, Cellular Ads, Localizing Content, Microsoft CoLocates, Intel: Cloud Apps R Us, Rebuilding Media, Revolution in Mobile Services, Ad Supported FreeFi, Wireless Advertising on Buses, Dayton's Ad-Supported Cloud, DotSpot Ad Server, Bridging the Divide and WiMax Handsets.
According to UNCTAD’s (United Nations Conference on Trade And Development) Information Economy Report (PDF) released on Friday, the uptake in India and China has made mobile telephony the only ICT indicator where the developing countries have higher share than developed countries. While China recorded 3,34,824,000 mobile phone subscribers in 03-04 (up 24 per cent from 02-03 base), India grew a whopping 81 per cent to 47,300,000 in 03-04.
In the context of net penetration, while the growth in China has slowed down, from 35 per cent in 2002 and 2003 to 18 per cent in 2003 and 2004, India has seen a whopping growth from just 12 per cent in 2002-03 to over 89 per cent in 2003-04. The number of users has increased from 184,81,044 in 02-03 to 350,00,000 in 03-04.
The report has also called attention towards the short comings in the developing countries preventing them to take advantage of the huge potential of e-financing, e-credit and e-tourism. While it has put a finger on the loopholes in the existing payment systems, the report has enlisted ICICI Bank in India as one of the most advanced banks in terms of online financial services in Asia. It has one of the most evolved e-business suites, online trading services in the region. (from our sister site ContentSutra)
Related stories:
–3G Against Digital Divide
(Are you paying attention, Andrew? ;) -kc)
George Bush has nominated Tennessee regulator Deborah Taylor Tate to fill a vacant Republican seat on the FCC and nominated Democrat Michael Copps to serve another term at the agency.
Tate would fill the vacancy left by Michael Powell, who stepped down in March as FCC chairman. The five-member FCC, headed by Kevin Martin (statements) has been evenly split between two Republicans and two Democrats since Powell (a Republican) left.
Last month, for example, Martin was forced to make some concessions to Michael J. Copps (statements) and Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein (statements) to get approval for SBC Communications' takeover of AT&T and Verizon Communications' purchase of MCI. Those provisions (pdf) included "naked DSL", where consumers can buy DSL without being forced to also purchase voice service and "net neutrality", where the RBOC doesn't block users from running their own applications on the bandwidth.
RBOCs seem to approve of the Tate monination
“This is a critical time for the telecom industry with technologies and the marketplace rapidly evolving, and we applaud President Bush for nominating Deborah Tate, a strong, experienced candidate, to the FCC,” said Walter B. McCormick, president and CEO of USTelecom, in a prepared statement. “With the President’s goal of achieving universal broadband deployment by 2007, Congress preparing to update the nation’s communications laws and technology forging ahead, the FCC is at the center of today’s communications debate. We urge the Senate to quickly confirm Deborah Tate to help Chairman Martin move the President’s agenda forward.”
The full FCC board will be a temporary phenomenon. Bush will have to nominate a third FCC member when Kathleen Abernathy is required to step down when this session of Congress ends in December.
Tate’s term would run through 2007 and Copps’ through 2010.
Business Week has an interview with Kevin Martin, who has been a big supporter of the incumbants including, The buyout and elimination of 2.3 GHz broadband wireless by XM radio, the domination of licensed 2.5 GHz by Sprint/Nextel, the power limitation of 5.4GHz, limiting the 3.5GHz band, the elimination of telco DSL competition, silence on attempts to ban virtually all municipal networks, the elimination of unlicensed 700 Mhz, a screwed up DTV system, and the general lack of affordable broadband and competition in the United States.
According to Mark Shubin (who knows about these things), NTSC offers, at best, about 440x480 resolution, roughly 0.2 megapixels (Mpel). HDTV, in the 720p version, is about 1 Mpel, and 1080i (depending on how you count line averaging) about 2 Mpel.
Again, depending on how you count, the ARRI D20 is 6 Mpel, the Dalsa Origin is 8 Mpel, and the Panavision Genesis is 12 Mpel.
NHK's UDTV (ultrahigh-definition) system is 32 Mpel. Now try wrapping your mind around the idea of 128 times more pixels than that!
This EE Times story describes a camera that would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture. The image could be seen 20-feet wide with the sharpness of a typical 6x4 photograph (when viewed from one foot away). That's what's contained in a single Gigapxl exposure.
The Gigapixel Project is compiling a photo of North America. Some of the nearly 1,200 images that have been collected so far can be viewed at gigapxl.com.
Here's a 360 degree panorama from the top of Mt Everest and a one Gig Panoscan. DailyWireless related stories include iGrid 2005, 360 Degree Surveillence and How To Spend Your Homeland Security Check.
I’m interested in your reaction to bloggers’ relationship to the French riots (because I may be writing about it in a column) — about the bloggers who were pulled in by the cops for allegedly inciting and about the French blogosphere’s reporting and reaction to the riots. Any help appreciated. Here’s the Guardian story:
Two bloggers have been detained by authorities in France on suspicion of encouraging people to take part in the Paris riots.
nch teenager and an 18-year-old of Ghanaian nationality are being questioned by Paris prosecutors, according to reports.
One of the blogs was called “sarkodead”, a reference to the interior minister and presidential contender, Nicholas Sarkozy, who referred to the rioters in disparaging terms and has been singled out for criticism by many French bloggers.
The pair have been placed under investigation, which is a step short of formal charges under French law, for “inciting harm to people and property over the internet”.
Sarkodead and the second blog - called “hardcore” - were suspended last weekend, according to judicial officials in Paris.
French bloggers have been divided over their attitude to the riots. Some have tried to calm the situation, while others have tried to inflame the situation.
“I have never got how turning where you live into a war zone proves anything,” said “bobcoloredglasses”.
“If anyone in the ghetto is reading this and is ever part of a riot, try rioting in the mayor’s neighbourhood. I bet you get a much faster reaction, and you can go back to your house that hasn’t been wrecked.”
Another blogger wrote: “It is not by firing teargas into a mosque - in Ramadan - how one restores order. Peace is gained by meeting people. Unfortunately this long-term work does not figure in the presidential planning of Mr Sarkozy. Sarkozy will never be my president.”
: See also this fascinating Business Week story on Sarkozy buying Google AdWords to try to drum up support for his side.
Welcome to the uncontrolled world of media where anybody can try to control it but can’t.
"SNCR.org vision: To be the leading think tank for the advanced study of new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, i.e. blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, collaborative tools and the growing phenomena of participatory communications and their effect on traditional media, marketing, public relations and advertising, as well as their broader impact on business, politics, entertainment, culture, education, religion and society."
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Just to make people aware of it, I also blog on ballpark.ch now, along with Laurent. It deals with innovation, internet strategies, tech usage, collaborative and social technologies. |
On the occasion of today's gruesome statistics on the continuing fall of newspapers, here's an updated look at mainstream entertainment and media in decline (April's version is here).
Down:
Mixed:
Up:
By the end of 2006, all three of the next-generation game consoles should be on the market. But with Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony all going with more complex hardware for their upcoming consoles, how easy will it be to develop for three very particular platforms? More complex hardware means longer development times and more time-consuming ports.
The next generation of consoles presents developers with entirely new programming challenges, the most significant of which is the move from single-core to multicore CPU design.
A single task with two threads that each demand 100% of a CPU's time should also be able to run them both, one on each core, in half the time as a single CPU at the same speed.
In practice, however, things are invariably much less straightforward. Most games today are still written to use a single thread, because it is the simplest programming model and because most hardware (both PCs and consoles) contain only a single CPU core. All programmers are very familiar with writing single-threaded code, but few are experts at multithreading.
Ars Technica takes a look at the architectures of the next-generation console and what they mean for developing new titles. Will next-gen titles be able to take full advantage of the new hardware, or will they be written for the least common denominator?
The average weekday circulation at U.S. newspapers fell 2.6 percent in the six month-period ending this September. Here are the figures for the 20 biggest U.S. newspapers, as reported Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The percentage changes are from the comparable year-ago period.
Circulation has been steadily declining at newspapers for several years as readers look to other media such as cable TV and the Internet for news. Tougher rules on telemarketing have also hurt newspapers' ability to sign up new readers.
Newspapers also face sluggish growth in advertising, higher newsprint prices and increasing concern among investors about their growth prospects. The second-largest newspaper publisher in the country, Knight Ridder Inc., is facing a revolt from two of its top shareholders, who want the company to be sold.
The World is Flat (mp3).
Related DailyWireless stories include Interactive Journalism Awards, Camphones for Journalists, Rebuilding Media, Newspaper Podcasts?, Portable Photostories, Global Blog, NY Times Blinkx, BBC's Mobile Video, CBS/Comcast Broadband, Handheld Tablets, Rollout e-Reader, Interactive TV News, The Feed Room, ABC News Now Looks to Future, Publishers Buy Online Content, Mobile TV Expands, Big Media Mobilizes, and U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H.

(Screengrabs courtesy of tsalon.)
People outside China were able to watch this weekend’s Chinese Blogger Conference through the live webcast provided by videoblogger “Seehaha”. The conference was in Chinese of course, so I helped provide live (very imperfect & incomplete) English-language running notes on IRC. Then the amazing Bahrain-based blogger Angelo Embuldeniya took my English IRC notes, combined them with screen grabs from the live video webcasts, and posted it all on a blog. Check it out for detailed session-by session notes on what was discussed.
I came away from this conference with a lot more than just a t-shirt.
I’m also leaving Shanghai with a realization: Web2.0 is potentially a very Chinese thing. One of the most important words in the Chinese language is “guanxi.” It means “relationship.” Whatever you think about the term “Web2.0”, the point is that social networking and relationship-building are at the core of today’s most exciting web innovations. The Chinese happen to be the most natural and skilled social networkers on earth.
The Chinese economy functions today (to the extent that it does) thanks largely to personal relationship networks: networks that enable people to get stuff done despite bone-headed regulations, politics, logistical obstacles, and everything else. You are nothing in China – and can accomplish very little – without a good “guanxi” network. Expect Chinese internet users to seize upon Web 2.0 tools as a way to expand and deepen their human relationships, enhancing both personal lives and businesses. Expect Chinese users build new tools that suit their own preferred ways of communication. The Chinese are likely to have a growing impact on the evolution of web applications.
Individual empowerment with Chinese characteristics. Isaac Mao in his opening keynote talked about the power of many small voices. On the web, “everybody is somebody.” What’s more, Chinese web users are increasingly reacting to events taking place in their lives, in real time, online. “We are all grassroots. We are all small voices,” he says. “The combination of all these small voices will make our society smarter.” He spoke about his Social Brain Foundation, based on the idea that the web enables people to plug their brains directly into an open network.
A key theme of the whole conference was how the semantic web empowers and amplifies individual voices. On Sunday afternoon, Blogger “zuola” described how his blog is his personal platform for his own ideas. Blogging, he believes, helps us understand our lives better. Chen Xuer, one of the bloggers who volunteered to work on the conference, said he started blogging and reading blogs because he wanted “to hear the truth and speak the truth.” Sound familiar?
The Chinese bloggers have adopted the language of the semantic web, made it theirs, and are inventing some of their own terms to help describe what’s happening. In the session on tagging, Zhang Yang spoke of “microfunction”: a term he uses to describe the way we connect pieces of micro-content together through tagging, RSS and search. Blogger “Topku Chan” on Saturday afternoon spoke of “keyvoice” – as opposed to “keyword” as the essence of what people should be paying attention to and tracking when it comes to conversations on the web.
This group of bloggers, by the way, have enthusiastically embraced tagging. Check out the CNBloggercon Technorati tag – and also the flickr photo feed.
I was particularly impressed with Shanghai educator Zhuang Xiuli, who believes passionately that blogs and social media tools like RSS and tagging can potentially play a big role in reforming China’s ossified educational system. She spoke of the need to move from rote learning to individual discovery and creativity, and the way in which blogging encourages new more creative and individual-centric ways of learning. She spoke of how blogs and RSS can help teachers share information with students better. She also believes that student blogs and RSS aggregation of those blogs can help teachers get to know students better than would be physically possible in large classes of 40–plus kids.
Then there’s the hitch, censorship, and the Chinese way of dealing with it. There was much bemoaning of the fact that Wikipedia – both English and Chinese – has recently been blocked here. Some wikipedians advocated that Chinese wikipedia should stay away from politically sensitive topics for the time being and focus on more scientific, practical and historical material so that it will get unblocked. Offline and in the halls there was some whispering about how the government may release some regulations at the end of the year specifically aimed to deal with blogs and blog content. One of the participants was emailing around a proposal for bloggers to organize self-control and regulation committees as a way to respond to top-down efforts (I don’t think it was greeted with much enthusiasm). There was some annoyance expressed in the session I moderated about “blogging beyond borders” about the fact that censorship prevents mainland Chinese bloggers from communicating freely with bloggers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But this was not the time and place to discuss how to circumvent censorship. Addressing that huge elephant in the room directly would have flagged the gathering as subversive, and would have killed all the good stuff that came out of the meeting. People did talk a bit, however, about how to work with censorship. In the podcasting session, there was a surprisingly frank exchange about the way in which service providers have to police user content and kill everything political. All blog hosting and service providing companies must police their users’ content. This is a fact of life which web businesses as well as users accept as part of being Chinese in China. They must naturally bake censorship functions into their software and into their business models.
I am not saying that this situation justifies censorship in any way. But if you’re Chinese, you’re not going to get anywhere by openly defying or opposing it. Instead, people are creatively making the best of the situation. And many of the people at this conference are doing so to an impressive degree. This is how I would characterize the view of most people here: The majority of Chinese users and pretty much all web entrepreneurs believe that the Chinese Web 2.0 must remain as un-political as possible in order to develop, spread, and innovate. Since people in China have never been free to express their political views in public, not being able to do so in cyberspace isn’t actually viewed as a sacrifice. People don’t feel like they’re giving anything up. On the contrary, they feel that blogs and other forms of online social media have given them a great deal more freedom of expression than they ever had before. Most feel they’ve got plenty to say and do within the limits they’ve been given. Of course some chafe at the limitations, but most users don’t even recognize what they’re missing because they’ve never had it. So they’re a bit bewildered that the Western media focuses mainly on that portion of speech that remains forbidden, while from the Chinese perspective the story is a very positive one about how they’re saying and doing more than ever before. They’d like more appreciation and recognition for all the cool things they are managing to say and do.
What this means is that Web 2.0, just like Web 1.0, is not going spark a democratic revolution in Chinese politics any time soon. People here find it annoying that the Western media keeps framing the Chinese internet story within the question of whether the internet will or won’t bring down the communist party. The real story is about the cultural and social implications of the semantic web as it continues to spread among China’s fast-growing pool of internet users. In the very long run, cultural and social change may have political implications, but to people here any attempt to speculate on that is counter-productive.
Another thing about this story: it’s not so much about what the internet is “bringing” to the Chinese, or how the internet is coming in as an outside force and “changing China.” The real story is about how Chinese users are taking the connectivity, tools and applications, internalizing them, and making them their own.
Here's a site to keep an eye on - an English language blog about Web 2.0 in China:
"China Web2.0 Review is a blog dedicated to track and review web2.0 development in China. We will profile and review web2.0 applications, products, services and business in China, and track the buzz about web2.0 in Chinas internet industry as well."
China Web2.0 Review has an interesting post about FeedSky, which is like China's answer to Feedburner (although more than that, according to the post).
Hat-tip Rex Chung for the link. It's great to see what's happening outside Silicon Valley and I hope to discover more international Web 2.0 blogs.
The following is via Google Ads Facilitate Propaganda."The UMP,the political party of French interior Minister,Nicholas Sarkozy,has turned to Google Ads to drive support for a petition to support his tough stance against the riots in Paris",the Morrison blog says."The situation has been deteriorating for over 10 days and according to a BBC report,1,400 hundred vehicles were burned out and 395 people arrested on Sunday night.Earlier today,The UMP launched a petition on its web site to support his policies.If you search on Google France for words associated with the riots like "banlieue", "Sarkozy","Sarko", you'll find a Google ad which reads
Emeutes en banlieue
Soutenez la politique de Nicolas
Sarkozy pour rétablir l'ordre
Which roughly translates as "Suburban Riots,Support the policy of Nicolas Sarkozy to re-establish order". According to Liberation,with a 10% click through rate,more than 3,000 people had signed the online petition by 2pm this afternoon".
Paris Riots.Political Party turns to Google Ads to win support for policies of Interior Minister
It's November, and that means Today Show viewers get to play along with "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" This time, Lauer is video blogging from the road. Each two-minute-ish clip features some of his personal observations, behind-the-scenes details and a clue of where he's headed next.
washingtonpost.com is now offering users video "podcasts" of select original video news programming. Users can subscribe to existing and newly released video directly from washingtonpost.com or via software such as iTunes.
Video available so far includes news and short-form documentary pieces on the preservation of New Orleans jazz after Hurricane Katrina, large scale evangelism events and updates on National Zoo panda cub Tai Shan.
The video podcasts may be found at this link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts
Q1: Tell me how often you access sites from your mobile phoneIt is highly interesting in this respect, that the users which have a flatrate use the mobile internet much more:
All Male Female About every day 73.8% 76.7% 72.5% Four or five days a week 10.4% 9.4% 10.9% Two or three days a week 10.9% 9.5% 11.6% About one day a week 3.1% 3.1% 3.2% Less than that 1.6% 1.3% 1.8% Not surprisingly, the younger the user, the more frequently they accessed.
Breaking down the table in Q1 by usage of inlimited access plans, we get:
Unlimited access users Not unlimited access users About every day 85.7% 57.5% Four or five days a week 6.8% 15.5% Two or three days a week 5.5% 18.4% About one day a week 1.3% 5.7% Less than once a week 0.7% 3.0%
"The French government met in emergency session Sunday evening to confront youth rioting that worsened on its 10th night",the IHT reports.Later in the article it says,"in its early days,the rioting appeared to spread spontaneously,but law enforcement officials said it was also being abetted by exhortations on the Internet.Worse,said Patrick Hamon,the national police spokesman,"what we notice is that the bands of youths are,little by little, getting more organized" and are sending attack messages by mobile phone texts".
As rioting spreads,France maps tactics
Spy Media International has launched an automated news photo exchange for buying and selling of citizen journalist and professional news photos. Photographers can upload to spymedia.com and sell their photos within minutes to businesses, news organizations or other consumers anywhere around the globe. Spymedia.com includes thousands of photos in its database so far.
C/Net and the Washington Post report that Google and Yahoo are rolling out new services for wireless devices.
Starting today, cell phones can access Google Maps. Google's application can be used on more than 100 current phones that use the Java Brew programming language that can download the Google Local application. From there, they can conduct searches in a specific location and view results plotted on a map.
Google's application and service is free, but users will need an Internet data plan from their cellphone provider, which adds $10 to $25 to monthly bills. Google Mobile and Yahoo Mobile currently provides search on cell phones, but the services are more text oriented.
Google Maps is getting some competition from Yahoo Maps Beta. Local maps have geoRSS feed for searches, showing local traffic conditions, for example. The default view is Flash-based, with an Ajax version of the API available.
Yahoo will introduce its own cell phone, through a partnership with SBC. Operating on the Cingular Wireless network, the phone will link music, photos and e-mail with consumers' existing online Yahoo accounts, address books and preferences. It have an MP3 player, a 1.3-megapixel camera and a removable memory card. The SBC/Yahoo phone will be manufactured by Nokia and is expected to be available early next year for $200 to $300.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and TiVo are teaming up to blend TV and the Web. The service will allow TiVo users to program their DVRs remotely using Yahoo's web site.
Starting Monday, Yahoo TV offers show times, program descriptions and cast photographs as well as exclusive content like information from "Entertainment Tonight" and others. Subscribers with a TiVo Series2 box and a standard Yahoo ID may use the service, the companies said.
TiVo has some 254,000 subscribers, down from 288,000 a year earlier. Key to that drop was a 5 percent decline in new customers from DirecTV, its biggest source of new customers, which has said it plans to cease marketing TiVo's product.
Google is rumored to be interested in advertising via tv but has not announced any definitive plans.
The drug company that makes Panexa (from whom I am using this image without permission) is wholly fictional, yet that didn't stop the copyright crusaders at Cafe Press from removing t-shirts emblazoned with the brand from its site. Carrie at StayFree! magazine says her collaborator Jason Torchinsky created Panexa awhile back to poke fun at the over-pharmacization of our culture, and an ad for the faux drug ran in her publication. Their reason for removal of Panexa products: trademark infringement.
Watchout A-Listers, this just in: "Most young people aren't spending their time at the highly-trafficked A-list blogs. They're reading and creating the 'long-tail' of blogs-personal sites read by networks of friends and family."
That's part of a press release from survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Here is more:
WASHINGTON, November 2, 2005- American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own mdia creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, osted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed nline content into their own new creations.
About 21 million or 87% of those ages 12-17 use the internet, according to a urvey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results highlight that his is a generation comfortable with content-creating technology. Teens are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider nternet population. Some key findings:
* 33% of online teens share their own creative content online, such as atwork, photos, stories or videos.
* 32% say that they have created or worked on webpages or blogs for others, including groups they belong to, friends or school assignments.
* 22% report keeping their own personal webpage.
* 19% of online teens keep a blog, and 38% of online teens read blogs.
* 19% of internet-using teens say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.
Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey. "For American teens, blogs are about self-expression, building relationships, and carving out a presence online," said Amanda Lenhart, co-author of the report entitled, "Teen Content Creators and Consumers" and Senior Research Specialist at the Project. "Most young people aren't spending their time at the highly-trafficked A-list blogs. They're reading and creating the 'long-tail' of blogs-personal sites read by networks of friends and family."
These findings are based on a November 2004 survey of 1,100 youth ages 12 to 17 and their parents. The margin of error for responses based on the sample of teens or parents is ± 3 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.
Teens continue to actively download music and video from the internet and have used multiple sources to get their files. Half of online teens (51%) report downloading music, compared to just 18% of adults who report similar behavior. Nearly one third (31%) of teens report downloading video files so that they can watch them any time they want.
Teens who get music files online believe it is unrealistic to expect people to self-regulate and avoid free downloading and file-sharing altogether. Out of the 622 teens in our survey who say they have tried music downloading, 75% agree with the statement that, "Music downloading and file-sharing is so easy to do, it's unrealistic to expect people not to do it." Just 23% disagreed with this statement.
"Today's online teens have grown up amidst the chaos of the digital copyright debate, and it shows," said Mary Madden, a Research Specialist at the Project and co-author of the report. "At a time when social norms around digital content don't always appear to conform with the letter of the law, many teens are aware of the restrictions on copyrighted material, but believe it's still permissible to share some content for free."
About half of them think free downloading and file-sharing copyrighted content without permission is generally wrong, yet roughly the same number say they don't care about the copyright on the music files that they download.
Engadget says Nokia’s new N-Series media convergence phones (from the left, the N71, N80, and the N92) are real powerhouses.
And Nokia isn’t kidding around with these 3G Series 60 phones, no sir, they’re busting out the WiFi for the N80 and N92, a 3 megapixel camera in the N80, decent music support in the N71, DVB-H for the N92, and QVGA or greater resolution displays in all three phones. Both the N71 and N80 should be available Q1 2006, with the N92 following in the middle of the year. They’re priced at 400, 500, and 600 Euro (US$490, $610, and $730) respectively, and we’ve got all the juicy specs.
Nokia's mobile video phone, the N92, uses a hinged, 2.8-inch display that lets the device sit on a table like a portable DVD player or twist into an LCD viewfinder like a handheld video camera. Their mobile television system, using DVB-H, is being tested in about 40 pilots worldwide. Nokia expects it to go live in the United States in the first half of 2006.
Nokia also launched today opensource.nokia.com, a new Internet portal for its open source software projects. Nokia believes the projects will enable the company to share mobile software knowledge and innovations with open source developers in order to further drive the mobile industry's development.
Nokia is currently working with the open source community on several projects, such as the open source browser for S60 (Series 60), Maemo, URIQA (URI Query Agent), and Python for S60. Bringing all these projects together, the new portal provides a consolidated view of Nokia's open source activities and access to its open source projects.
The Maemo development platform provides the tools to collaborate with Nokia on future devices and open source releases in the Linux-based Internet Tablet category. Python for S60 allows the developers who utilize the powerful Python programming language.
In addition to its own open source projects, Nokia participates in industry-wide open source projects and communities like the Eclipse Foundation:
an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an
extensible development platform and application frameworks for building
software.
SourceForge.net can also provide a home for open source projects, but information on how best to set up an Eclipse project there is sparse. This article is an introduction to SourceForge for the Eclipse developer.
Google is entering into a $350,000 joint open source technology venture with both Oregon State and Portland State University.
The universities will collaborate to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide.
Oregon is also home to the Open Source Development Labs and Linus Torvalds.
Recently, OSDL launched a Mobile Linux Initiative to tackle technical challenges and support the adoption of Linux on handheld devices.
Says Apple CEO Steve Jobs, "Selling one million videos in less than 20 days strongly suggests there is a market for legal video downloads. Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings, so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods." I'm sure many of those downloads were curiosity purchases, but as Apple offers more video, it will continue to accelerate. And not just paid clips. I've found myself downloading free video podcasts, like DriveTime.
Yesterday's announcement of a deal between Sprint and Comcast, Time-Warner, Cox and Advance/Newhouse is expected to go beyond just a sales partnership. A few possibilities: Exclusive video and text content, the ability to program your DVR from your phone, and a single voicemail box for both wireless and landline (novel concept, huh?) Analysts say the cable companies were motivated to make the deal to compete with Verizon and SBC's aggressive foray into IPTV.

Architecture of Interaction [AoI] is a project initiated by a group of artists and theorists who are collectively aiming to create a toolkit which can be used to describe the processes and effects of interactive work. This toolkit will consist of a standard vocabulary which can be used by individuals from different artistic backgrounds, as well as a set of generic models that describe six different critical dimensions of interactive working methods. The editors of this site want to connect vocabularies and ideas about art and interaction from various disciplines, namely theatre, visual arts, performance and new media.
Why?: The initiators--Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Yvonne Dröge-Wendel, Lino Hellings, Anna Best, Mina Kaylan, Nikolaus Gansterer--have several reasons to do this. The interest in interactive artistic work methods continues to grow among makers, curators and commissioners. Yet, each discipline (and often each individual artist) has an independent language for describing interactive works. These languages don't mingle well at all. There is therefore currently too little scope for communication between artists from different disciplines. This often means that the nuanced and vital elements of interactive art works are overlooked.
So?: The main goal of making this toolkit is to make interactive work methods more transparent for makers, commissioners, curators, critics and more general audiences. In doing so, we hope to contribute to both artistic development of interactive works, and to a more sophisticated criticism in the practice and discourse of interactive works.
What works do we (the editors...) call interactive? We see interactive work methods as a kind of meta-discipline, as a disclipline that informs other disciplines. Interactive work methods can be applied to any artistic discipline. Yet, at the same time, these methods have qualities and notions which are entirely their own. From the standpoint of the maker, an interactive work begins when a maker designs the form of the work, the context of the work, AND possible experiences or perceptions for the others that come in contact with his work. In other words, we begin to speak about interactive works when a maker considers the intelligent context as an intrinsic part of the work.
Techworld reports "Chinese services company Capinfo has made a Motorola flip-phone speak Chinese for visitors to the 2008 Beijing Olympics".Capinfo chairman Chen Xinxiang says 'this is the first wireless multi-lingual city guide for any Olympics."Further,"the handset will carry guidebook data,including text,images and videos about historic sites,as well as directions to those sites and other useful locations like restaurants and hotels.The guide also includes a phrase book,showing phrases in English and Manadarin,which can be read out by the phone using a text-to-speech converter.In Dr Chen's example, a visitor can get a taxi ride or order a meal by picking phrases from the book and holding the phone up for the taxi driver or waiter to listen to.If the conversation gets beyond the scope of the phrase book, the user can press a button to talk to a call centre in his or her own language (registered when the phone was hired), and get specific phrases translated. "GPRS and call centres are mature technologies," said Dr Chen. "We plan to use Wi-Fi and 3G, and have location technology in future versions of the system."
Olympic visitors to get Chinese-speaking phone
You'd think we'd be at the point, by now, that a PC comes in a box of Cracker Jack, but that is not to be. Instead, the majority of the developing world has to depend on cellphones, or rural cyber cafes, to maintain a connection to the increasingly important data and tools that we take for granted. Well, here is a cavalcade of low-cost, high cool PCs for developing nations—we got roll-up waterproof keyboards, uber-neat clear cases, and all kinds of wireless.
Low-cost PCs around the world [News.com.com.com]
The ITU says that "in 2001, the Americas had 38% of the world's Internet users and Asia-Pacific had 32%.In 2004, this is essentially reversed with Asia-Pacific having 37% and the Americas with 31%.Europe has kept a relative 29% share but Africa has seen a slight gain from 1% to 3%. Because of their much larger populations and potential for growth, the Asia-Pacific region will continue to take a larger and larger percentage of the world's Internet users.
Asia-Pacific Region Takes Over Lead in Internet Usage

The Associated Press reported about a high school in Sparta that ordered its students to remove their online diaries from the Internet, citing a threat from cyberpredators.
[via the Boston Globe]
The school's principal told the school population in an assembly earlier this month to remove any personal journals they might have or risk suspension.
ficials said students aren't being silenced but rather told that they cannot post online writings about school or their personal lives. The Associated Press found no postings by users who mentioned the school. Profiles posted by other users include photos and detailed personal information on topics such as musical tastes, body measurements and sexual history.
Kurt Opsahl of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions the rights of bloggers, said there have been several attempts by private institutions elsewhere to restrict or censor students' Internet postings.
is the first time we've heard of such an overreaction," he said. "It would be better if they taught students what they should and shouldn't do online rather than take away the primary communication tool of their generation."
A spokeswoman of the school said parents of students who enroll in the schools sign contracts governing student behavior, including responsible Internet use.
That could dilute the students' free speech claims somewhat, acknowledged Ed Barocas, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
"Videoblogging and education go together like peanut butter and jelly. And all of sudden, there are a lot of sandwiches being made. Here’s some links to some recent activity on this front:"
DirecTV subscribers may be getting more HD programming this fall, thanks to DirecTV's recent contract with LG Electronics to supply them with "next gen" HD set-top boxes. The new set-tops are designed to transmit satellite broadcasts in MPEG-4 HD, basically compressed HD, as well as up to 150 channels in normal HD. This is all part of DirecTV's recent push for increased HD programming. LG Electronics has already started production and will begin shipping its boxes soon which in DirectTV terms means "in five years or so." Definitely a good sign for DirecTV subscribers who've already invested a chunk of cash in their HD-capable TV set.
Next Gen DirecTV Set-Tops [Digital Media Thoughts]
DirecTV Contracts LG for MPEG-4 HD Set-Tops [ExtremeTech]
MIT and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Nokia Research Center today announced a research collaboration to advance the state of the art in mobile computing and communications technologies.
CSAIL and Nokia will establish a new research facility - the Nokia Research Center Cambridge - near the MIT campus, where researchers from MIT and Nokia will work closely together on a new vision for mobile computing.
"By carrying out long-term research in these fields, including novel uses of hand-held devices, MIT and Nokia will make new communication opportunities and services available for people around the globe", said MIT President Susan Hockfield." [via Moco News]
Britons are communicating more frequently than ever, but many feel that the rise of text-based digital services has made communication with friends and family less personal, according to a new survey, reports Netimperative.
... Despite mobile phones and the internet, nearly 50% of people felt that they have less time to keep in touch with friends and family now than in the past. Neil Armstrong, head of marketing at PlusNet, said: “When you’re busy, it’s tempting to send an email or text, rather than pick up the phone.
Other communication trends revealed by the PlusNet research included a high proportion of people resorting to using email, text and IM in situations where they are trying to avoid confrontation or find communication uneasy_
-- Two-fifths (40%) of respondents found new technologies less confrontational and used them to flirt (27%), apologise for missed birthdays (22%), and to inform their employers about being sick (19%)."
Dan Glicksman thinks so: Hollywood lobbyist concerned about protectionism [pdf]
Hollywood’s top lobbyist has fired a warning shot against countries that might be emboldened to use the newly approved UNESCO convention on cultural diversity as a means to block Hollywood movies.
“No one should use this convention to close their borders to a whole host of products,” Dan Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, told representatives of an annual French film industry conference held Friday in the Burgundy wine capital of Beaune, in eastern France.
“If countries start passing laws that are in contravention of World Trade Organization rules, there will be conflict,” he warned.
[…] “It appears to be more about trade than the promotion of cultural diversity. The World Trade Organization is the place for (trade),” Glickman said. “What’s to stop a country saying that it’ll only take 20% of U.S. films, or taxing our films but not its own?” he asked.
Glickman was a lone voice in Beaune not heralding the U.N. convention as a major triumph for free expression as a way to affirm cultural identity.
(I never understood cultural imperialism until I heard Celine Dion playing from loudspeakers in rural Yunnan. ;) -kc.)
I missed this last week, but I find this new service from Hutchinson’s 3UK called See Me TV incredibly interesting:
See Me TV is set to become the ultimate reality channel - providing an opportunity for 3 customers to shine in front a potential audience of millions.budding star has to do is submit a thirty second video clip to the service displaying their talents in front of or behind the camera. The clip will then be uploaded to the ‘See Me TV’ channel for other 3 customers to view*.
Each time a clip is downloaded by a 3 customer the performer gets paid 1p. With a potential audience of 3.2 million, the most popular clips from contributors could make thousands of pounds worth of cash.
Credits from downloads are accumulated in an account and then a transfer made via Paypal - with no cap on what a 3 customer can earn from See Me TV.
I think this is pretty amazing. God knows how much they’re charging the viewer for the clips - probably a lot more than the meager 1p they’re sharing back to the creator… But it’s just the fact that Three is basically doing a rev-share for user-generated content that blows my mind. Not a lot, but if you happen to have a hit video seen by a decent percentage of Three’s 3 million UK subscribers, you could make some money!
It could be the beginning of a whole new revenue stream for the mobile industry based on multimedia microcontent. Think about it. This isn’t a mobile operator playing broker between merchant and consumer (like DoCoMo has famously done), but instead playing broker between the consumers themselves. It’s got an eBay or AdSense like quality to it, no? Who’d have thunk the Wall Gardeners would be the company to do this?
Speaking of eBay, I have to wonder why they’re bothering with PayPal, though. Why not just deposit your earnings back into your account? Maybe because of all the pre-paid accounts out there? Maybe because Three doesn’t want to become essentially a bank (by holding your earnings in case you earn more than you owe)? Very strange to me.
Regardless, I think it’s brilliant. What do you think?
-Russ

"The VideoEgg Publisher is a small browser plug-in that makes it truly simple to capture, edit, encode, and post video online. VideoEgg and Six Apart have partnered to make it easy to post video to your TypePad blog. You can post a short video clip to any one of your TypePad weblogs. "After logging in from a Mac you get this message, "A Macintosh Version of VideoEgg Publisher is currently under development - please check back soon!"
Some of you may have heard of the Photogapher's Right, a guide to your right as a photographer in public places by attorney Bert P. Krages II.
Well, videoblogger Pete Prodoehl, in a post on the videobloggers mailing list titled Are We The Media?, relates this episode today:
Yesterday I was shooting some video and walked into a university. I was told by an employee "I don't mean to ruin your fun, but you can't film in here." (She may have said 'videotape' instead of film, I'm not 100% sure, I just remember I was told I had to stop shooting.)imate question. In my view, citizen journalists should have the same rights of access afforded news crews from the mainstream media.I noticed later that the fine folks from the local TV station were allowed to shoot inside, where I was not allowed to.
So, that brings up some questions in my mind.
Were the media given 'special priviledges' ordinary people are not?
Could the fact that it was a university have been in my favor? Don't my taxes help pay for it?
Is there "Videographer's Rights" document, like the Photographer's rights? Would it apply?
I was following what became a news event -- this is backed up by the fact that the local TV folks were there. I can't help but feel like I'm the little guy who got squashed by Big Media.
Xbox 360 chief architect Peter Moore has
already stated that there are no plans to stream full-length 360 titles via Live. However, there is great potential to
introduce episodic gaming. Services like Xbox Live Arcade are definitely going to take a chunk out of retailers’
profits, but episodic gaming could completely change how we buy and play games.
By staggering the release of a game’s content into weekly intervals, publishers can create the same kind of frenzy
and anticipation that avid television watchers experience. But is the Xbox 360 HDD prepared to handle this transition?
Would new episodes replace old ones? How would this affect replay value? Once you own an episode, can you download it
again? Questions, questions, questions…
[Thanks, Davis]
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SPONSORED BY: Fable: The Lost Chapters. Now On PC. Enter a world where every choice changes your fate. Enhanced graphics, new journeys, good or evil-how will you choose to play?
The Creative Weblogging network of bloggers has launched a new project, Creative Reporter, that pays readers to write "collaborative journalism." Creative has no formal contract with the reporters, but will give them a byline and pay $10 for every 1,000 page views of a story, according to PC Magazine. So far 100 "reporters" have signed up for free registration.
"There is no line for us between blogger, amateur, and real journalist," CEO Torsten Jacobi said. "We are blurring the lines." That is certainly true, but don't believe everything you read.
Business Week has an interview with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
As he waits for the White House to fill vacancies that will give him a Republican majority, the FCC chief is now set to approve the historic mergers of SBC and AT&T, and of Verizon and MCI, by as early as the end of October (see BW Online, 8/31/05, "So Long, AT&T? Not So Fast").
Then, he tackles an ever-thornier set of issues, ranging from indecent broadcasts to the rewrite of the telecom laws. Martin discussed upcoming issues with BusinessWeek's Washington correspondent, Catherine Yang, on Oct. 12. Below are edited excerpts of that conversation.
What do you want to accomplish most during your tenure?
The Commission's top priority is broadband deployment and to make sure other new technologies are deployed as quickly as possible.
Are you troubled that the U.S. ranks No. 16 in the world in broadband penetration?
It should be a concern of the Commission to make sure that broadband technologies -- both wire-line and wireless -- be deployed as quickly as possible.
When you compare where we stand internationally, you have to take into account that we have very large sections of the country that are rural and where it costs more to deploy (see BW Online, 6/28/05, "Good for Cable, Bad for America").
For example, Massachusetts and Japan have about the same population density. Massachusetts is ahead of Japan in broadband penetration. But that doesn't mean there's not more we can do.
Should broadband providers have to pay into the universal service fund, which taps long-distance fees to subsidize phone service for rural and low-income households?
What I advocate is moving to a technology-neutral way of collecting universal service funds. Telephone numbers are technology-neutral. Whether you're a wire-line provider, wireless provider, or new VOIP provider, [your customers] need a telephone number. [By assessing charges per phone number,] we're could [put a system in place to] collect money from consumers regardless of which technology they use.
One hot regulatory issue involves the efforts of phone companies to win approval from local cable-franchising authorities to provide TV services over fiber networks. Do you favor a broad granting of authority allowing phone companies to go ahead?
Local franchising authorities have the responsibility of granting access to their communities. But the 1992 Cable Act says local franchising authorities are not allowed to [unreasonably prevent] second entrants [in a market] from coming (see BW Online, 9/28/05, "Verizon's Muddy TV Picture"). The Commission may hold a proceeding to see if we have a role in [the franchise approval process].
Why have you taken such a strong stand to require Internet phone providers to link up to 911 operators -- at a time when many warn of saddling new technologies with too much regulation?
There's nothing we can do that's more important than making sure new communications services don't leave people unconnected with emergency personnel.
Many of the FCC policies completely baffle me.
The Bush administration says they want to offer ubiquitous broadband and plans to open of 90 Mhz of spectrum (see DW: President Wants 90MHz), which will be auctioned next June. The spectrum, at 1710-1755 MHz and 2110-2155 MHz, will be broken up in smaller geographic portions in order for smaller carriers to bid on them.
Sounds good. But duplex 5Mhz channels sound like a sweet deal for UMTS-based
Cingular. How does that help inexpensive broadband wireless? It sounds like a bad play.
The buyout and elimination of 2.3 GHz broadband wireless by XM radio is another issue. Then there's the domination of licensed 2.5 GHz by Sprint/Nextel, the power limitation of 5.4GHz (made available by the efforts of Senator Barbara Boxer), the elimination of telco DSL competition, the limitations of 3.5GHz, silence on attempts to ban virtually all municipal networks, the elimination of unlicensed 700 Mhz, a screwed up DTV system, and the general lack of affordable broadband and competition in the United States.
What kind of broadband policy is that?
Sucking up to SBC is good for America?
Adrants reports that Budget Rental Car has launched an online contest/marketing campaign that includes The Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt blog. The site drops clues in a nationwide scavenger hunt. The contest itself will be promoted almost entirely within the blogosphere with advertising promotion on 74 weblogs in what is a big test for the medium. Congrats to B.L. Ochman who played a pivotal role in the campaign. This is one to watch.
Technorati Tags: Advertising, Promotions
>>
Dam!
I guess I don't make it onto Jason Shellen's list. And I guess Adam Bosworth doesn't consider me important enough to get back to me and followup from our meetings on microcontent from six months ago.
Oh well - cause it sure is nice to see Google swallow the red pill so hard. And gulp it down.
Regardless of what their schemas loOk like, we'll support them and bake them into our 'Structured Blogging' compatiblity box. That way people won't be locked into the Google schema and can post their Reviews, Events, Lists, Recipes, JogBlogs, People and Group showcases, Listings, Personal ads, etc. - anywhere they want.
They can choose to put it into Google cloud - or anywhere else. Or both. That's what the 'OutputThis' service will allow - sending stuff to multiple locations - your favorite destinations.
Anyway - this is great news for us 'structured content nuts' - as long as Google publicly exposes all this content and lets others spider it and index it - as well.
Here we go.
I bet Tantek is happy - too. And Bob and Salim.
Now where was that San Francisco Restaurant Reviews server? I'd better go ask Gavin.
A while back now we asked you to submit ideas to rethink how to present TV and Radio listings using the TV anytime data and other relevant feeds.
The response was magnificent and thanks again to everyone who took the time and effort to submit entries. But on to the bit you really want:
The winners of the first Backstage competition are...
Leon Brocard and Leo Lapworth for
http://www.mightyv.com/
We all loved this.
It’s a fantastically impressive prototype with a wealth of features and innovative ideas already implemented that we were almost overwhelmed. That said the simplicity of the user experience meant that it was easy to use out of the box. There is a lot of different findability here; tagging, ratings, recommendations as well as the basic grid format with innovative and different ways of navigating your way through thousands of hours of TV and radio.
There was a real effort to integrate non BBC feeds (imdb, bleb) and the TV Anytime metadata was neatly exploited via the accessibility search tool as well as genre lists such as films and comedy. I haven't mentioned the personalisation (but you can sign up for your preferred channels) and some real heavy lifting behind the scenes plumbing like an open source PERL TV-anytime parser which the team have made available to CPAN. We were itching to use this and show it around as soon as it was submitted which is a sure sign that Leo and Leon had come up with something special...
This is fantastic prototype which thoroughly deserves to win the first Backstage competition.
Leon and Leo win some "Geek Bling", ie: a rackmount server to the cost of £1K and a trip to the BBC to talk further.
Runners Up:
Thomas Scott for the TV Map
http://tvmap.thomasscott.net/
It was the lateral approach to the brief that we liked here. The idea that TV metadata descriptions could be versioned as a google map mash up sounds odd but, in fact, works very well.
This is a very simple prototype with only a weeks sample data but we can see the opportunities for introducing viewers to programmes they would have never considered viewing.
It’s rough and ready but does the job of suggesting that there are different ways to visualise those hundreds of tv and radio programmes per week. Thanks Thomas.
Fraser Nevett for the Programme Similarity Visualiser
http://www.nevett.org/lab/tv/similarity
The complete departure from the grid was what made this stand out. There's a simple algorithm there combined with a compact visualisation tool and Fraser has done a fine job of representing a weeks broadcasts in a vastly different way to the time/channel axis. There were plenty of ways in which we could think how this could be built on with plenty of different features but it was again another easy to use prototype with an extremely intuitive interface. More importantly it set us thinking about what might be possible.
We'll be dropping a note to the winners/runners up to arrange prizes/delivery and meet ups as soon as this mail has arrived
Please don't think that because your prototype wasn't shortlisted that we weren't impressed. There was some great use of phones/sms, avatars, automated speech, some traditional but keeping it simple listings layouts, some fine personalised epgs and a Radio 4 clock!. Thanks for putting the effort in.
Watch out for further competitions...
p2p news / p2pnet: It’ll be D-Day at 7:00pm outside the Virgin Megastore on East 14th Street and Broadway in New York City on October 25, 2005.
Or, rather, it’ll be DRM-Day because Free Culture believes it’s time to make the offline public aware of DRM (Digital Restriction Management) issues. Accordingly, supporters of the protest will be turning up at the Megastore to hand out leaflets.
“If you’ve purchased CDs from Sony BMG or EMI, you may have purchased a digital rights management product and your fair use rights to your CD are at risk," says the handout. "Here’s what you can do:
s out, the Dave Matthews and Switchback bands both have albums poisoned by DRM. But both groups are telling fans how to get around it.
Discs with DRM are indeed damaged goods and should be treated accordingly.
DRM is just another entertainment and software cartel scam to limit your ability to freely choose.
But it can't, and doesn't, work because anything which can be seen or heard can be copied by ones means another.
A recent survey from Parks Associates has found that more people are interested in camera phones (52% indicating an intent to buy one) compared with music phones (30% indicating an intent to buy one).
“Although the industry is currently focused on iPods and Motorola’s new music phone ROKR, consumers would rather have a camera phone,” said Vibha Pant, an analyst with Parks Associates. “Moreover, the impending introduction of advanced mega-pixel camera phones will strengthen demand, which will create great opportunities for service providers to increase their ARPU by offering photo sharing, photo printing, and other applications.”
Check out this article from Game Revolution. Using data from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics it shows that contrary to the current media hoopla over the epidemic of youth violence, recent data shows that "... the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded.” The data is only available up to 2003, but at least herein lies some hard facts with which you can confront those who find your choice of entertainment "distasteful."
As I was looking at how network providers regulate the sharing of the Internet access they provide to their subscribers, I came across the initiative from Fon.
Fon is planning on being first a Spanish Internet Service Provider (ISP) that will make it possible for subscribers to share ADSL service through wireless connection (WiFi).
Basically, suscribers could choose between 2 models:
The first ever SMS vote is taking place in Switzerland with the residents of Bülach using mobile phone text messages to decide on speed restrictions in the town, reports Swiss Info.
The Bülach vote will be followed by similar ballots in two other communities also in canton Zurich, after which the federal authorities will decide whether to roll out text voting throughout the country.
Project leader, David Knöri of canton Zurich's Office for Statistics explained that SMS voting will bring Swiss voting technology into the 21st century, following a successful internet voting trial in Aniéres, canton Geneva, in January 2003. Knöri also believes the new technology will change voting habits in Switzerland. "We forecast that particularly younger people will take advantage of e-voting, but we have seen in Bülach that many middle-aged people regularly use SMS too," he said. "I don't necessarily think that more people will vote as a result of e-voting but I do believe that many people who used to send their votes in the post will switch to SMS."
TechCrunch » Flock is launching publicly today, in about four hours or so. Apparently its out on the filesharing networks.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other industry leaders urged lawmakers Friday to speed the transition to digital television in order to free up radio spectrum for wireless broadband services, especially in rural and poor areas.
In a letter to House and Senate lawmakers, high-tech officials said the spectrum would reap enormous benefits for consumers and the economy. "New and innovative technologies that will help meet the goal of universal, affordable broadband access are already being developed and readied for early deployment in this spectrum," said the coalition's letter.
The letter also stressed the need to clear the spectrum to improve police, fire and other first-responder radio communications. Some of the frequencies that would be vacated in the transition from traditional analog to digital TV were promised to public safety officials in 1997.
The rest of the spectrum would be auctioned by the government. It's been valued by congressional officials at $10 billion, though industry puts the estimate as high as $30 billion.
(Continued at Daily Wireless.)
"We are blessed and thankful that Days of our Lives fans are some of the most fervent television viewers and online participants in the world, and this innovative program will not only help us reward that loyalty, but continue to reach new viewers in the 18-34 demographic..."
"Combining our production and creative expertise with the lessons learned from the text, photography and music pioneers that came before us, we are taking positive,we are taking positive, progressive steps to build new and sustainable business models that only increase the value of the assets we manage. We are proud to launch this new broadband video production unit and are looking forward to delivering many captivating videos to MSN and other broadband platforms."
"Television, drug of the nation, pacifier par excellence, we love you. Except you never quite have the things we really want when we want them, especially if we live outside the US. Thankfully, the gods of filesharing and encoding have delivered us from dispair and we are all happily enjoying shows pretty close to transmission times, sometimes before.
But how do I know when these magical gifts might be available for all my favourite shows? HBO schedules are not published in my backwater country!
Fear not, because now Tape It Off The Internet is a simple online service to keep you up to date and on track with your latest releases. We've even shoehorned in some crazy Web 2.0 social software for you to extend your fun in hundreds of ways. Did we mention we haven't built released it yet? Never mind, sign up now and we'll invite you into our Beta. Did I mention Web 2.0? I'm sure I did."
(chuckle. -kc.)
via Search Engine Watch,
Video streams and podcasts have exploded in popularity on the web, but how do you search to find this type of content? And if you're a content owner, how do you make sure your multimedia files can be found?
Video search engines include Google Video, Yahoo Video, Singingfish, and Blinkx. Google offers a Windows, Mac, or Linux application for free uploading as does OurMedia, which hosts homepages and video from the Internet Archive.
Thanks for the link, Biewald