Making the jump from one-man blog to community website

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 - Civil Contempt Hearing Today

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

Wireless Warfare in the Streets

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

Happy Birthday Current TV!

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.

MySpace Forthcoming Attractions

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.

Protecting RFID cards

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

MMOG pie chart

(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)

Rolling Stones tour with phones | Tech News on ZDNet

"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.

HRD rubbishes MIT’s laptop scheme

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.

US to give up control of the Internet

In a historic moment, the US had agreed to hand over control of Net by releasing its stranglehold of the technical co-ordination and management of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS).

The announcement came last night at a meeting of Internet governance experts in Washington, and sees the US government return to its original stance over the Net, undoing some of the confusion caused by the announcement of a series of “principles” released by the Bush administration last year.

However there remains some debate over how and when the US government should relinquish control of the private, non-profit overseeing organization ICANN that is in effective charge of the DNS. Those in favor of completing a transition which began in 1998, said the political price of having the US involved in DNS management has become too high and holds back the international development of the Internet.

ICANN recently was a hotbed of controversy over the proposed .xxx domain with the US putting significant pressure on ICANN to deny that extension. The US commerce department, who has final approval on everything ICANN does, threatened to reject the .xxx domain if ICANN didn’t, allowing the US to flex it muscle when approving all TLD extensions.

With the privatization of ICANN, the US no longer will have veto power over any actions that ICANN takes which will be a major step to help foster the growth of the internet in a healthy manner.

Read More

Panic! at the Capitol: The House Passes DOPA

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.

Effects Of Friendster Patent Win Yet to be Seen; Company Weighs Options

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: Disruptive Innovation

Call for Submissions

Transubstantiate: a peer-reviewed, online journal for performance technologies praxis :: Call for submissions :: Deadline: November 1, 2006 :: Transubstantiate welcomes submissions for its inaugural issue on the theme of Disruptive Innovation. We seek examples of new thinking and practice that overturn and / or reassess existing performance technology praxis. Submissions may be presented as papers, reviews, audio, visuals (stills / video) and code. Authors may use multiple formats in a single submission.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Networked performance * Disruptive innovations & discourse * Pedagogy, ontologies and epistemologies * Choreography for iPod. Choreographies for iPod must be specifically devised works and may take the form of: * Video / stills * Audio description / instructions * Text description / instructions * Soundscore with text description / instructions.

Transubstantiate encourages submissions that take an alternative stance on established modes of mediated performance. Submissions should be equivalent to 3000 - 8000 words in .doc, mp3, .jpg or .mp4 (video) format.

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2006. For more information or to submit please contact the editorial & curatorial board via curators [at] transubstantiate [dot] org.

The liminal is limited; transubstantiate.

Kevin Nalty - Viral Video Broker

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

MSoft & NAVTEQ team up

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

Odd Job Jack files released under a CC license

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?

Show us What's Affecting Your World

Over the past couple of weeks, we¹ve received pod submissions covering what¹s going on in the Middle East. Just take a look at some of the pods we¹ve recently aired: Hezbollah Youth Leaders, Coming Home to Tel Aviv, Dodging Katyushas, Beirut 101. The range of access to different areas, unique perspectives and storytelling styles has been incredible.

Please keep your submissions coming. This is a situation with global implications that isn¹t going away anytime soon. Also, Current Correspondent Mariana van Zeller is on her way to Damascus, Syria, so keep an eye out for her reports in the coming weeks.

Current Journalism is an experiment and we need your help to make it a success. Let us know what issues are important to you or what stories aren¹t being covered by the mainstream news media on our message board. Better yet, make a pod yourself and become a part of the CJ community.

Gerardo Romo Z

"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)

Make a Community Videoblog

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.

CellBazaar : A marketplace over 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]

Reporting for CNN

"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."

The Lifelog Pod

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

VeriChip RFID Cloned By HaXx0rz

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?

The inevitable has started…..

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 hires blip.tv to host video

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

Flashmob Programming

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.

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.

Videos on Web widen lens on Mideast conflict

"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.)

MPAA Targets the Wrong Guy

"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."

Baghdad Video Blogger Released!

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.

We 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.

School sues over Wikipedia post

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?

Read More

Introducing NewAssignment.Net

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 wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t. They raise the money too. Q and A explains. There's $10,000 to test it, courtesy of Craig Newmark.

(Continued at PressThink)

Open Source Socialtext

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.

Public Access pitted against YouTube in Florida

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.

Sony Still Pitching UMDs But Exploring Online Movie Options For PSP

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.

Prodigem becomes MoveDigital, direct downloads, mobile video & torrents

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.

Amercian King

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.

Journalists make it solo online

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.

Guba finds protector for Hollywood in Johnny

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.

Link to the PDF press release by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

- Anne

Net Neutrality: Not Dead

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.

One-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism

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.

Full report

DIY Cyberglasses

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: About

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 Call for 2006-07 Residents and Fellows

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!

Misunderstood Phones Costs Industry US$4.5 Billion

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.

Wikipedia gets RSS feeds

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

Videoblogging Chancellor Interviewed by Videoblogger

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.)

Cafepress for Skateboards

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.

1.8Mb wireless data offered by Vodaphone

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.

Read More

Job: Research Online Communities at USC

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.

New Position: Online Communities and Communication
USC Annenberg School for Communication

The 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.

SL Travel Agency Seeks Paid Contributors

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.

Avatar activists' show of force

Some 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".

Yahoo and Windows Live exchange messages

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.

Vlogger Charged with Civil Contempt

"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."

Mobile Mangas: 40 cents the story

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 Book of WiMAX

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.

NYTimes’s Personalized Service “My Times” Debuts In Limited Beta

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.

everyday information architecture

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]

Freesound via ccMixter (20k free sounds)

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.

PR: BitTorrent Bulks Up Its Video Library

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…

Transparent City

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: Now Accepting Applications for 2006-07 Fellows

Eyebeam is now accepting applications for Production, R&D and Education Fellows during 2006-07. Application deadline is Aug. 14, 2006. Apply now!

Video player now available for Blackberrys

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.

The short life of news stories online

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.

The New State Television

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.

Amanda Leaves Rocketboom

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

Home Run Derby Hits Second Life [UPDATED]

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.

ccCreators: New Community for Creative People to Meet, Collaborate

Going 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:

"/v/stories/2006/june/cccreators.png.html" >

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.

ccNoise

Creative Commons site; CDM on Creative Commons

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=4HJBEL">

Sketching in hardware

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.

More chaperones in China's Internet cafes

Filed under: Culture, PC, Online, MMO

/feeds.joystiq.com/weblogsinc/joystiq?g=296"/>

Social Action Network YouthNoise Raises $1.5 Million From Omidyar, Others

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.

Traditional Media and Online Revenue: So Far It’s [Not] A Material World

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.

make TV

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..

Taipei Builds It, Nobody Comes

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 future file system dies, again

WinFS cops it

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

Vloggercon: Working on the Archives

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 Brothers using Guba to sell movies

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?

Read More

SL Residents Protest Registration Changes

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.

On the Road With Daniel Terdiman

CNet’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.”

Call for Chapters on the Geospatial Web

Have 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.

G2P : Finding Mp3s Using Google

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]

Wikipedia refines 'anyone can edit' policy

The 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....

American Apparel Opens Outpost in Second Life

• American Apparel Opens Outpost in Second Life
  (tags: marketing games secondlife virtual_worlds)

Videoblogging, The Book

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!

NJ bans media from prisons

"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.'

"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."

Podvertising Gives NPR a Boost

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

dotSUB a-go-go

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.

Videos on dotSUB.

Apple Working on iTunes Movie Download Service

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.

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.

Hacking students will need background checks

Only the legit need apply

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

Unlimited Video Duration Announced on Google Video

Creativity does not like to be fenced in.

(Or maybe a precursor towards new sales. -kc.)

More tantalising tidbits from Google Earth

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.

Guess Who's Pro-Regulation Now? AT&T Endorses Must-Carry

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.

Griefing and self-governance in online games

Filed under: Culture, Online, MMO, Business

The Guardian has produced

The emergence of an Asian Commons

(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).

Send Paypal Via Skype Soon

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. – Jason Chen

Skype 2.5 Integrates Paypal [Golem.de via Random Good Stuff]

Midyear license adoption estimates

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:

Distribution of licenses deployed. Those without 'by' (attribution) were not versioned past 1.0 (excepting public domain, which is not versioned).

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).

Look for another update in December, hopefully with some indications of adoption across jurisdictions and languages (again with many caveats).

2.Om

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.

: 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.

Amanda on CNN

Download File

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.

Virtual vloggercon in Second Life

This shot of me at Vloggercon, being streamed live into Second Life, is cool.

Public Broadcasters Reach Deal With Writers Guild On New Media Compensation

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.

Software Patents on Everything

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!

Sports Themed Citizen Media Blog Opens

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.

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, reBlogged by ts

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.

Effort To Revise U.S. Copyright For Digital Age Causes Alarm

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.

House Rejects Net Neutrality

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

Webcam War Driving

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?

iRadio: Text Your Station

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 launches TiVoCasting

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 Countersues Studios, Networks; Delays Network DVR Launch

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 breakdown of Technorati traffic

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.

Get Current Mobile

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.

Punishing Students for Extracurricular Online Activities: Crossing the Line?

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?

P2P Data, Opendata, WikiData

[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:

• EditGrid
• NumSum
• iRows
• Numbler
• WikiCalc

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

Remix Art in Second Life

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.

Video Blogging Expands

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).

Steve Gillmor's Memo to Bill Gates (and Alberto Gonzales)

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

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.

Culture, Commerce, and Public Media: A New Forum for Creators

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:

New Report Says US Broadband Access is Up - and Online Creativity is Way Up

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

Video Sharing Sites vs Hollywood: Handshakes vs Martinis

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.”

FIFA Agent Sending Pre-Emptive Letters To Sites on Unauthorized Streaming of World Cup

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 Travel Maps

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 time—red for four hours or less, orange and yellow for four to eight hours—and 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)

Another Launch

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: DRM train wrecks

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.

Mediasnackers

Via del.icio.us/rybesh

Bus Uncle Meme

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.

Machinima commercials for virtual products

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]

Online memorials network remembrances

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.

Wired on Tringo, the most popular mini-game in 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

Worldwide Internet Penetration is just 15%

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:

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 ;-)

Community Funding of Video Blogging

Have Money Will Vlog About

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.

The War Tapes: The War Tapes Opens in NYC June 2!

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 Wiki

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)

More People Living in Digital Cocoons

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.

BBC staff blog guidelines

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 AdSense Now Includes Video Ads

Advertising Age reports:

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.

Making money selling music without DRM: the rise of eMusic

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 Does Home Delivery

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.

• HiWire, from Aloha Partners, will use AMERICOM’s IP-PRIME IPTV Broadcast Center to deliver two 6Mhz television channels, and rebroadcast them locally in the 700 Mhz band utilizing the DVB-H system.
• Modeo (at 1.6 GHz) will also use IP Prime to backbone their mobile television service. Crown Castle Mobile Media will use AMC-9, a satellite at 83° west, for the backbone and deliver Windows Media content to a variety of mobile devices.
• Verizon will use Qualcomm's MediaFLO (on channel 54 locally) and the Intelsat Americas-8 (IA-8) satellite for the backbone network.

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 now gets more traffic than the BBC. Which is mainstream media?

Youtube.com, per Alexa, has surpassed the BBC's website in traffic. Check it out:

China's War on Standards: Fighting IP Imperialism All the Way

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:

• First-Mover Advantage: companies that are the first to develop the standards for a product have the greatest chance to dominate the industry for long-term; China wants to be the first-movers for the Chinese.
• Experience Curve: first-movers have ability to offer products at a lower price relative to their competitors; China would like to be ahead of the curve
• Western developed products impose a high royalty intellectual property payment to use their standards, so it is in China's interest to keep the products at a lower price - therefore develop their own standards.
• China's standards are incompatible with with Western developed standards/products, but international companies cannot ignore China's large market because of standards incompatibility
• Western companies are worried that China will one day set the international standards and applications, because that means Western companies may have to pay Chinese companies IP royalty fees to use their standards
• Home-grown standards is also a way for Chinese companies to adjust to WTO reforms of foreign companies.
• Intellectual property, not material property, is the key to global economic leadership
• We are witnessing China moving from low-end to high-end tech development

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

Baidu's alternative Wikipedia

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:

• dictionary definition of the word 赫然 (hèrán)
• "setting standards" for Baidu Encyclopedia's characters
• BitTorrent
• a popular dance
• more on editing standards
• population, zip codes, area of all counties within city of Ganzhou
• amber
• failure modes and effects analysis
• more on editing standards
• diamonds

"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

New net neutrality legislation introduced

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 Flash Movie Contest

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)

Pearl Jam's “Life Wasted” video released under a CC license

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 at the ITP Show

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!

Yahoo! unveils video sharing site, Finance redesign at analyst day

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.

Yahoo! Video

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! Finance

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! My Web

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.

exorbitant Myspace phone

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"

From Syndicate: Rocketboom May Charge; Edelman Wake-Up Call

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.

68 Flickr Mashups

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.

Technology Counts 2006: Did Your State Make the Grade?

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.

Media members told their cellphone activity is being tracked by the government

... "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]

MySpace becomes a broadcaster

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!

Wikis for OLPC

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.

Veejaying: a new form of dubbing

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.

Attention span research in media industry

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…

Adult Film Industry Innovates Again

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.

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 to begin "text-casting" to iPods

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.

Dirty Tricks for Net Neutrality

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?

QoS: This won't hurt at all. Honest.

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.

Quick Beyond Broadcast write-up in Wired

Wired News: Brave New World for Public Media

FM10 Openness: Code, Science and Content at UIC

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!)

Low-Power Educational Radio in Scotland

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

Church of the Customer Blog: Word of mouth drives business growth

• A 7% increase in positive word of mouth unlocks 1% additional company growth
• A 2% reduction in negative word of mouth boosts sales by 1%
• Companies with above-average positive word of mouth grow four times as fast as those with below-average positive word of mouth

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

Eszter Hargittai on What College Students Actually Do Online

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

Communication Mods

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.

Google + Nokia = Tablet Talk

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.

Congress Goes After "Social Networking" and MySpace

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 Launches HSDPA, Bans VOIP On It

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.)

Global Internet users

"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

village voice: web love

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

Clarification on AIMpages

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………

google trends

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's WiFi TV

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.

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 invests in Global Voices Online

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.

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Brazilian Digital Culture

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)

Mobile phone boom spurs economic growth in Bangladesh

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".

Mobicapping: Mobile Image Capture in the New Century

Call for Work

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

Issues of control and information architecture

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

C-Span Opts For Google, Reciprocity Over Viral Video Of Colbert

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

SirsiDynix Upstream - Building Communities

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)

PS3 & augmented reality

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

The Verizon Code

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.

Exploding TV: Stranger things are happening

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.

The MySpace Report

"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."

One for the good guys

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.

Form follows fashion in cellphone designs

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

List of Web 2.0 Lists

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.

• Ask the eConsultant - seriously impressive list of web 2.0 companies, categorized.
• Techcrunch product review list - organized by company name; would be great if also categorized into market segments.
• Virtual Karma "Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications" - despite the title, far from complete. But scan the comments too.
• Sacred Cow Dung's Everything Web 2.0 - fantastic list and nicely categorized.
• Bob Stumple's list A-K and L-Z - this is where Sacred Cow's list is derived from, I think.
• Map of the Web 2.0 World - not comprehensive, but has interesting and unique categorizations.
• Mashable weblist - Pete Cashmore's mini-blog "featuring concise, opinionated reviews of Web 2.0 companies". Would love some high level categorization wrapped around all the reviews.
• Map of RSS Vendors (categorized) - this is my own effort, helped immensely by the people who added to the wiki.
• categoriz - nicely categorized list, but not much context around each entry.
• NEOBinaries - well-designed, well categorized and feature rich web 2.0 company/product resource; eats the 2.0 dogfood, with user reviews and ratings, etc.
• Buzzshout - makes heavy use of tag cloud for categorization. Also has reviews and user ratings.
• ProgrammableWeb - the list for mashups, complete with graphs and stats analysis. This is in many ways what I would love to see done on the web 2.0 lists.
• The Museum of Modern Betas - I'm told this is a good list of beta products (and what isn't beta in this era of the Web). Unfortunately I've never been able to see it, because of access issues with the domain.
• Library Clips meta list and Saul Weiner's list - John Tropea and Saul also have the 'list of lists' thang happening.
• Emily Chang's eHub - Another excellent resource and is categorized too.
• Web 2.0 Innovation Map - not really a list as such, but a Google Map of 2.0 startups.
• Web2List - the name says it all!
• Listable - organized by popularity.
• Web2.0Slides - "a self-running slide show of over 1,400 of the best Web2.0 sites."
• Office 2.0 Database - nicely categorized table.
• I want to: - organized by user-focused tasks, e.g. "Communicate with other people; chat, email".
• WWWhat's new? - Spanish list which looks pretty comprehensive.
• Web 2.0 in the Enterprise - wiki by Jeff Nolan with excellent list of enterprise apps.

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.

694 million internet users worldwide

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

The new dilution bill

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.

What Are You?

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.

YouTube sees user rebellion

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.

First Chinese Released Creative Commons Music Album

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

The Price Of Surveillance

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.

WiFi TV

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.

embedder code generator updated

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.

Censorship and trust

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

Skype plans Web-phone conversations for groups

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."

Cellphone Gaming Lacks Pull

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.

Live from London::Which Media Do You Trust?

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:

• Overall, 61% of people trust media, while only 52% trust governments. In the U.S., 67% trust government while 59% trust media; and in the U.K., 51% trust government while 47% trust media.

• Of news sources, national TV was the most trusted at 82%, followed by national/regional newspapers (75%), local newspapers (69%), public radio (67%), satellite TV (56%) and blogs came up last with 25% trusting them.

• On the question of what was the most “important” news source, people chose TV most (56%), followed by newspapers (21%), Internet (9%) and radio (9%).

• 28% of people surveyed said they abandoned a news source in the past year because they didn’t trust the content.

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.)

U.S. Muni Map

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.

English not leading blog language: Technorati

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.

Net Community Hacks Cultural Funding System

125,000 euros Distributed

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

Cash card taps virtual game fund

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

Ultra HDTV

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.

Summer of Code application period open

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.

Needed: Art-Gamers with a sense of Activism!

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~

Cabel Sasser on the DS Lite

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.

Mayday Video Postings

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:

• Indymedia Video: https://video.indymedia.org/
• Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/create/
• Our Media: http://ourmedia.org/
• Your local Independent Media Center

Step 2. Make it easy for others to find your video by tagging it 'noborders.' For example:

• Videobomb: http://www.videobomb.com/tags/show/noborders

SURVEY: NEW MEDIA

Among the Audience

"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.

Alice plays catchup

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.

42% of Americans Have Broadband

"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."

(An) Understanding (of) the Media Landscape

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

World's digital divide is narrowing

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.

No more 'naked' PCs in China

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."

Taxing Downloads: 15 U.S. States Now Do It

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.

Overdue recommendation for Will Richardson’s book

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.

Cloud Art

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:

• The umbrella handle, resembling a small tree trunk, is created from 1,000 recycled cell phones. They randomly ring with bird and animal songs.
  



• The umbrella would be 25 feet in diameter and composed of 2,000 LEDs, changing colors depending on node activity in the city cloud.



• Electro Luminesent wire (ElWire) would delineate 32 sectors and "sweep" like a radar



• A java applet, based on the Daisyphone (right), could be downloaded into cellphones or laptops to create a collaborative musical composition as the radar sweeps around the umbrella.



• A picnic table under the umbrella provides shelter.

Eyebeam and Rhizome have more ideas.

International Remix

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.

A DVD of your own fun surveillance afternoon

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.

Get Your Blog Syndicated to Mainstream Media

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: Announcing Our Alliance with Reuters

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.

Genre-bending, Brilliant Music Videos: Dive In

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:

CDM tag: VJ
CDM tag: visual

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.

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Build Your Own Video Game

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)

HDMI and Output Control

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.

Tankman Goeth

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.

Exploding TV: Pick your fuse

Kevin Marks puts together a nice chart comparing all the ways to watch TV now.

Online burn-to-DVD service

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]

Kids corrupted ... BEFORE video games? [Update 1]

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.

Wired has a few choice quotes from the advent of each of these technologies and art forms, among others. Of course, the point of this comparison is to show that the current hysteria over video games -- "known" to promote drinking, drug usage, and sexual deviance -- is just an initiation rite. While some works of art will always cause controversy (Catcher in the Rye, for some reason, is still not allowed in some schools), as a sect of society this hooplah should be a passing phase in its maturity.

[Image from the film Footloose; Thanks, White Rose Duelist]

[Update: fixed a typo -- thanks, Garold]

Media 3.0

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.

open, participatory platforms for audiovisual production

multi channel internet tv

At m-cult, the M2HZ collaborative, distributed television project, initiated in August 2005, proceeds with the first programme of 2006 - Map to Postfordist Life.

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.

This is What Democracy Codes Like

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.

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)

TV on the Web ramping up in 2006

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

Social networking,blogging and local information

"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".

New Trends In Online Traffic

NPR Podcasts to Cellphones

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).

Podcasting: Big or Not

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.

Studios Agree To DVD-Download Simul-Release; Burn, But Only PC Viewing

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

semapedia physical wiki entries

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]

Wired News: The Best Internet Spoofs

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 Syndicates Citizen Journalism Web

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.

Can You Copyright the World?

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)

High school journalism contest

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

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.”

LifeBlog doesn't use XML RPC

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?

Telecom's Astroturf Organizations

MuniWireless and WiFiNetNews point out that consumer-oriented Common Cause has compiled a list of "astroturf" telecommunications organizations entitled Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.

• Consumers for Cable Choice

• FreedomWorks

• Progress and Freedom Foundation

• American Legislative Exchange Council

• New Millennium Research Council

• Frontiers of Freedom

• Keep It Local NJ

• Internet Innovation Alliance

• MyWireless.org
  
  

Citizen Marketers Party on YouTube

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

Mobile Data Survey

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."

Upcoming videoblogging books

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.

Insights into Participatory Video

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)

flexatone h.f.p. | consumable music

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

TurnHere - Short Films about Cool places

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!

London uses MMS to Fight Ugliness

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]

Cablevision to Roll Out Network DVR

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]

UK's 3G Phone Impact: Citizen Journalism to Dates

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.

Cheating tools and auto-mouse

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".

Mouse Plays When Gamer’s Away

Yahoo Launches Local News Beta

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.

Mobile Games Tied with Live TV

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.

Choose your own adventure films

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..

"HBO busted me for using bittorrent"

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..

Spanish Court Recognizes CC-Music

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 rise of clip culture online

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.

The IPTV Gamble

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.

Who Owns The Pipes?

"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."

Your guide to personalized news

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.

Who Should Speak?

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 Voice

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

****
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

Affordable PC Dragon Dreams To Become a Reality: China's 1st Domestic 64-bit CPU

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.com: Cool, Useful, Free

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.