unmediated

Amazon.com: Secrets of Videoblogging: Books: Michael Verdi,Ryanne Hodson,Diana Weynand,Shirley Craig

You should really pre-order this book TODAY! Amazon.com: Secrets of Videoblogging: Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand, Shirley Craig

R&D OpenLab Call For Interns

The Eyebeam OpenLab is now accepting interns for a number of project areas. Positions are unpaid but receive full named credit for all work completed. All interns will work closely with one or more of the OpenLab's staff or fellows on new or ongoing projects. Interns must be skilled in their project area but more importantly they are eager to learn and take direction from their coworkers in the lab.

We are seeking interns in the following areas:

• Web Development
• 3D Graphics
• 3D Printing/Digital Fabrication
• Graffiti Research Lab
  • Web Development
  • Engineering Technician
• Senior Fellow Cory Arcangel Intern

For more information about the positions and how to apply, please go to http://research.eyebeam.org/internships

Rhizome.org: Rhizome Commissions Program - Deadline is April 1, 2006

Artists are invited to submit proposals for new works of Internet-based art. There is no required theme. The works can manifest offline, as long as the Internet is a primary vehicle in the creation of the work, and the final work is accessible online, whether through a web browser, software, or some other use of internet technologies.

When evaluating proposals, the jury will consider artistic merit, technical feasibility, and online accessibility. Although we will provide some technical assistance with final integration into the Rhizome web site, artists are expected to develop projects independently and without significant technical assistance from Rhizome.

MediaRights: News: YOUTH-POWERED VIDEO: A Hands-On Curriculum for Teaching Documentary

Based on EVC's two decades of experience, this comprehensive curriculum package helps middle and high school teachers and out-of-school program instructors guide youth in producing a documentary video. This practical toolkit of instructional strategies uses media and technology to engage all students in creative and rigorous inquiry-based projects on current issues of importance to them. Using this multidisciplinary approach, teachers can integrate English, social studies, art, and technology into video projects as students develop their literacy, research, critical thinking, and civic engagement skills.

(Also check out Arts Engine's Youth Media Distribution Toolkit.)

Postdocs at the Annenberg Center

The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) at the University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research initiative to explore the “The Meaning of the New Networked Age: Innovation, Content, Society, and Policy.” We welcome researchers from various disciplines including anthropology, architecture, the arts, business, communications, computer science, design, economics, engineering, history, international relations, law, library science, neurosciences, political science, rhetoric, and sociology.

The Streaming Suitcase

In part this is an experiment in developing a model for the sustainable development of professional online documentation and manuals released under Creative Commons. So if you need a manual to be written on streaming and associated topics, and you have a commissioning budget then write to me and I will write one. This means you get a manual, I get some cash to support my nomadic artist life, and others benefit from having a nice manual too.

Interactive TV Web

DVB Multimedia Home Platform tutorials and information for interactive TV developers
From the site that brought you the book (or was it the other way around): Interactive TV Standards

Rhizome.org: Rhizome Commissions Program

Originally posted by marisaolson from del.icio.us/tag/eyebeam-reblog, ReBlogged by daniel perlin on Feb 9, 2006 at 04:39 PM

Wireless Networking in the Developing World

The book addresses what Rob Flickenger, the book's editor and lead author, calls a chicken-and-egg problem: "While much information about building wireless networks can be found on-line, that presents a problem for people in areas with little or no connectivity".

The book covers topics from basic radio physics and network design to equipment and troubleshooting.

It is intended to be a comprehensive resource for technologists in the developing world, providing the critical information that they need to build networks. This includes specific examples, diagrams and calculations, which are intended to help building wireless networks without requiring access to the Internet.

In the developing world, one book can often be a library, and to a techie this book may well be a bible.

Call for online journalism papers

The 7th International Symposium on Online Journalism will be held on April 7 and 8, 2006 at the University of Texas at Austin. As usual, the sessions on the first day have a professional/industry emphasis, and those on the second day will be dedicated mainly to a more academic/research focus, with presentation of papers submitted to a blind review process. The deadline for submitting papers' abstracts is January 27. More information here.

New academic journal about games: Games and Culture

Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media is a new academic journal which seems of interest with regards to my research/work/interests.

Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due January 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking work in the field of game studies.

d Culture’s scope will include the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives, including textual analysis, political economy, cultural studies, ethnography, critical race studies, gender studies, media studies, public policy, international relations, and communication studies. Other possible arenas include:

- Issues of gaming culture related to race, class, gender, and sexuality
- Issues of game development
- Textual and cultural analysis of games as artifacts
- Issues of political economy and public policy in both US and international arenas

It’s an interdisciplinary publication, welcoming submissions by those working in fields such as Communication, Anthropology, Computer Science, English, Sociology, Media Studies, Cinema/Television Studies, Education, Art History, and Visual Arts.

Technorati Tags: game, videogames

Bounty County

Bounty County is a listing of coding bounties offered by free and open-source software projects. Bounty County is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation.

Build Your Own Game Boy-Synced Hardware Sequencer Machine

Gijs Geikes has been hard at work since we last saw his latest bizarre Walkman Tape Player / Game Boy Sequencer. A new model sync with the Little Sound Dj cartridge: plug in a Game Boy, and other goodies (like a Walkman tape player and Stylophone keyboard), and you can create wild, screaming patterns like this. (A must-listen, experimental punk/hip-hop chiptune creation.)

Gijs has schematics up, so adventurous makers, you can make your own. Or you can just go buy one of those nifty Stylphones.

SEQ05 Pictures, Sounds, Schematics [Gieskes.nl Instruments]

Related:
Gameboy Music with LSDJ: Workshops, Tips, Photos, MP3s.

New York, New York

You can now take your choice of how to virtually tour New York City (and although not as good as the real thing, the virtual city doesn’t go on strike):

• Virtual NYC: Navigate through the streets of New York using thousands of pictures and reading the city’s history. 16 tours currently available.
• NYC POV: Takes the Quicktime VR 360-degree approach to touring the Big Apple. [via]

You can also use the ‘nyc’ tag to check-out other NYC mashups at any time:

    http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/nyc

There are 17 NYC-related mashups currently listed.

Update: The New York Times has a new mashup Commuting Guide that can help people find transportation alternatives including car pool staging areas.

Highly Recommended: Open Access News

Peter Suber’s Open Access News is fast becoming one of my favorite sources of information. The focus tends to be on print and scholarly journals, but it covers the whole spectrum of open access issues, and draws from an amazingly diverse set of sources. I suspect the amazing variety of new approaches to open access print can inspire new models video and television.

Technorati Tags: copyright

Mobile copying station

Burn Station is a mobile self-service for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge. It is completely legal, released under an open licence, and non-commercial.

The kit behaves as a digital content self-service station. It is a local database for mp3 and text that makes automatic the process of selection and burning of files. With the motto "taking the Internet to the streets" platoniq tries to make visible the ways in which the Web is produced showing its very modes of independent diffusion and distribution based on open licenses.

By platoniq, activists of the copyleft movement.

The work has been nominated for the Transmediale 2006 award.
Via networked_performance.

A Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use

Berkman Center for Internet & Society - Film and Fair Use:

a bit late on this one, but oh so relevant - es

Live Visuals / VJing Resources Mega-Roundup

Photo: Vello Virkhaus with Red Hot Chili Peppers in London (thanks, Vello!)

Live visuals for keyboardists? Absolutely: if you've got MIDI chops, slick new tools can help you tickle projected imagery while you tickle the ivories. There's just too much to say about VJing to fit into one story, so when I wrote up an introduction to live visuals for Keyboard Magazine's Laptops Live special, I ran out of space fast. Here's a quick roundup of some of the gear and tools you'll need to pump out live visuals at your next gig.

CDM Sister Site: Incidentally, thanks to all of you who sent in thoughtful feedback about where VJ content belongs here at CDM, or on its own site. After careful consideration, I have decided to launch a new visual performance site towards the end of the year. But don't worry: those of you who want to occasionally read VJ content will be able to follow the new site here on CDM, and thanks to a bunch of volunteer writers, I expect both sites to grow, not languish. More on that in December . . . now on with our VJ roundup..

Xbox 360 HDTV FAQ

There has been lots of FUD about what exactly the high definition capabilities of the Xbox 360 will and won't do. Will the games look decent on regular TVs? Will it work with 1080i screens? Will it show DVDs in 720p? The folks at Coldforged are gathering up the answers in a FAQ that is worth reading if you are considering lining up for the 360 when it goes on sale next Tuesday.

Xbox 360 High Definition FAQ [Coldforged]

MXF - Background on the Material eXchange Format

" The Material eXchange Format (MXF) is an open file format targeted at the interchange of audio-visual material with associated data and metadata. It has been designed and implemented with the aim of improving file-based interoperability between servers, workstations and other content creation devices. These improvements should result inimproved workflows and result in more efficient working than is possible with today's mixed and proprietary files formats."

unmediated irc the easy way.

There's now a browser-based interface for chatting in the unmediated IRC channel.

http://unmediated.org/irc

(thx shawn.)

#unmediated on irc.freenode.net

Thanks to Ian, there's now an irc channel for chatting about all things participatory media. Visit channel #unmediated on irc.freenode.net.

Rocketboom Online Video Tool Guide

"Instead of going over all the options here, I'm going to highlight the tools and some of the methods we use to create Rocketboom because, consequently, I have amassed what I would call not just a killer app, but a killer briefcase filled with lots of killer apps that all together allow us to see all video, hear all video and speak all video, not to mention create, tweak and seek. I haven't been stopped by a file yet (knock on wood). "

Internet Archive: Advanced Use of the Contribution Engine

"The Internet Archive Contribution Engine supports some advanced functionality to enable high volume contributors to more easily (and less interactively) upload and import content into the Archive. The advanced functionality consists of several parts:

1. Uploading files into a directory for an item via FTP using your username and password
2. Each item to be imported must have an XML file describing the item and an XML file describing the item files
3. Calling a URL telling the contribution engine that you are done uploading a specific directory. Results are returned in XML for easy parsing.

UNESCO Offers Free Multi-Media Training Kit

ItrainOnline has a host of modules for teaching multi-media skills to people around the world. It is produced in part by UNESCO and all the materials are under the Creative Commons license so you can use it at will.

One module deals with Producing Content for Radio and includes writing radio scripts, interviewing and more. Under Organizational Development and Planning there is a full module on conflict resolution.

If you are going to a developing country to teach multi-media skills, this might be a helpful resource.

A New Guide to Freeing Your Speech on the Internet

Reporters Without Borders has just unveiled a remarkable how-to guide for bloggers and "cyberdissidents" who want to make their voices heard in/from countries that are hostile to free speech. It's more specialized than EFF's exhaustive Legal Guide for Bloggers, focusing on 1.) how to create an effective voice online and 2.) overcoming the specific technical and practical challenges to free speech and anonymity in the face of government monitoring and censorship.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest. Plenty of bloggers have been hounded or thrown in prison. One of the contributors to this handbook, Arash Sigarchi, was sentenced to 14 years in jail for posting several messages online that criticised the Iranian regime. His story illustrates how some bloggers see what they do as a duty and a necessity, not just a hobby. They feel they are the eyes and ears of thousands of other Internet users.

Hong Kong: "I kept my promise to those who died."

ww.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15010">Iran: "We can write freely in blogs."

Bahrain: "We've broken the government’s news monopoly."

The guide is available in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, English, and French. Just outstanding.

The Washington Post has an article today announcing the guide's release here. Previous relevant Copyfight coverage: Zuckerman on How to Blog Anonymously.

The XML You Need to Know for Web Services

The XML You Need to Know for Web Services
Article title says it all...

Everybody else is doing it, here is how you can do it too..

Integrating Google Maps into Your Web Applications

InstantSOUP, an electronics cookbook.

InstantSOUP - Cover
From the site:
InstantSOUP is a path into electronics using an approach of "learning by making", introducing electronic prototyping in a playful, non-technical way. It was developed following the experience gained in teaching physical interaction design at Interaction-Ivrea.

Uses the ealier linked to Wiring language and prototyping board.

'We Media' fellowships

The Media Center is offering 15 fellowships to enable independent, non-profit or academic participants from any country to attend "We Media: Behold the Power of Us," an Oct. 5 conference in New York City, hosted by The Associated Press. Details here.

Mobile Device Database

The Mobile Device Database Solution
The Mobile Device Database is a comprehensive collection of data for each device on every carrier. Mobile Research has a team dedicated to researching every device in your market, in detail. Device data is gathered from actual devices by our researchers using in-house profiling tools and processes. The Mobile Research device profiling process provides the Mobile Device Database with an unprecedented level of accuracy and scope. The XML formatted data is designed and presented in a format that is easy to parse and load into a relational database server for programmatic use. Mobile Research continually adds new mobile devices as they hit the market, enabling subscribers to support new handsets immediately. Mobile Research will continue to expand the scope of data that is available for each device as devices become more complex and as the market embraces new mobile media types.

BitTorrent for Content Providers

"ibiblio.org has entered the fray, launching an enhanced BitTorrent site. Among the torrent offerings (all legal) are Linux kernels, distros, Project Gutenberg texts, and the ibiblio Speaker Series, which includes videos of talks by Larry Lessig, Robin Miller, and Dan Gillmor. ibiblio developed and open sourced the Osprey and Permaseed software to make BitTorrent seeding reliable, persistent, and suitable for large-scale content providers. Yes, you can find these torrents later."

DSLnuts | DSL Wiring 1

This guide is to show you how to rewire the DSL circuit from the phone Company's NID to your modem and hopefully you’ll gain about 100 to 150kbps in speed, lower Latency and even get rid of all the Filters that are attached to your phones.

O'Reilly Job Bank

O'Reilly Media launched the beta version of O'Reilly Connection at their Open Source Convention (OSCON) today. It's a tech-centric jobs and networking site for developers and those who want to hire them.

Sam Mohamad, CEO of Greenplum built an initial version of the service, and then, to make it widely available to the community, decided to contribute it to O'Reilly. "We're really committed to what Tim O'Reilly calls the architecture of participation, in all aspects of what we do, whether that's software development or marketing," added Mohamad.

On O'Reilly Connection, developers build a professional profile that lays out their skills, experience, and network in one place. They can connect with peers and designate "go to" people--other site members whom they consider experts in a particular technology area--and keep tabs on those alpha geeks through personalized watch lists.

Employers can quickly search through O'Reilly Connection to find job or consultant candidates with the specific qualifications they need. Because profiles on O'Reilly Connection display members' networks, they provide a richer picture than a standard resume.

During the beta period, O'Reilly Connection is offering free job posts.

A practical guide to audio tools & techniques

A fantastic guide that explores everything from how captions and audio work together, to how to record audio, to what technology and tools you should use.

Corante on rebuilding media

Corante has launched a blog on Rebuilding Media -- and God knows, we need to rebuild the media.

The authors are two of the superstars of the new media constellation: consultant Vin Crosbie and former SF Chronicle new media chief Bob Cauthorn, along with others they'll be adding to the mix. Says Corante's editor-publisher, Hylton Jolliffe: "The blog takes a hard look at the media biz and in particular the factors and forces that are leading to the disruptive change we all know well and are working hard to accelerate."

I've already added it to my RSS reader. Check it out.

Via New Media Musings

State Assembly TV

Lawmakers Allow Voters to See It Now - Jul 19, 2005
Finally..

Enhancements, Updates and Fixes to the Internet TV Station Lineup

• We added the Telewest TV stations which includes blueyonder 01, broadsports, broadway, and broadwise. You may have recently read about this via our news report, Narrowstep Creates Multi-Channel Internet TV Solution for Telewest. We recommend checking out blueyonder.
• France has been added along with a number of French-speaking stations
• Major Fix: We became aware that if people using Internet Explorer have the check box "Show Friendly HTTP Errors" checked in their options, Windows Media streams beginning with the mms protocol (mms://) will show a DNS error when redirected. (joy) After several hours of pulling hair, we resolved the error by simply "not forwarding URLs beginning with mms://!" We apologize for all the Windows Media feeds that were not playing because of this weird scenario.
• The Legend will now properly hide and show in Firefox
• Fixed other alignment issues in Firefox such as the search box and navigation bar
• Several other countries will be added this week along with enhancing our current lineup

• ManiaTV - Move over MTV and make room for ManiaTV. ManiaTV is working to bring back the music MTV started out playing but later gave up on.
• ROO TV - Wow. ROO claims they have over 4000 video clips and we have no reason not to believe them. Their entire web site is blended into the player for a really clean TV guide of sorts. You can watch video clips of music artists, news, sports, entertainment, video games, commercials, and much more.

We reMediated this a little while ago, but it is definitely worthy of an update.

remixing resolve

From Victor Stone, the amazingly talented musician/coder who is building ccMixter.org:

About 36 hours after the London bombing ASHWAN and Curious uploaded a rap in reaction specifically to the bombing. Almost immediately they were asked to upload the a cappellas. A few days later the remixes are starting to come in...

http://ccmixter.org/file/ASHWAN/40

Windows Media Player Podcasting Plug-In Round-Up

Chris Lanier has put together a nice little list of plugins to make podcasts work with Windows Media Player (on Windows) via

Creating Podcasts 101

ipodlounge has a great feature up on creating podcasts. Their iPod 101 tutorial Beginner's Guide to Podcast Creation walks through the different elements you need to create a simple podcast, from computer and microphone through to the finished product.

Via Micro Persuasion

Join the Eyebeam Open Lab

This Fall, Eyebeam R&D will launch the OpenLab, a new facility dedicated to public domain R&D.

We are seeking inaugural fellows to join us at Eyebeam. The ideal fellow has experience creating innovative creative technology projects, a love of collaborative development, and a desire to distribute his or her work as widely as possible. We encourage artists, hackers, designers and engineers to apply.

Participation in the R&D Fellows program includes:

• One year fellowship
• 4 days/week commitment
• $30,000 annual stipend + health benefits

Via Eyebeam reBlog

SourceLabs

SourceLabs has unveiled the first version of Swik, a community-based online catalog of open-source projects, which can be freely accessed and amended by end-users or developers, reports InfoWorld.

The Swik directory facilitates the sharing of information about open-source projects and includes project documentation, download sites, reviews and descriptions, using a Wiki structure for censor-free, user editable entries. It has lots of Linux, J2EE, LAMP and Ajax files.

SourceLabs sells support and maintenance subscriptions for tested, certified "stacks" of open source infrastructure software, but the software downloads are free of charge.

Source Forge is "the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications". They have a ton of free Communications and Internet applications for the downloading, including DailyWireless co-founder Don Park's AP Radar.

Playlist for the personal media revolution

Molly Krause,Project Leader of H2O at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has helped me create a playlist for the personal media revolution. H2O is still in beta, but looking real good.

Via New Media Musings

Linksys Source Code Vault

Via Broadbandreports

How to watch Beyond TV recordings on a Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP)

The Snapstream blog has a great, detailed tutorial on How to watch Beyond TV recordings on a Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). They cover every last detail. Even if you don't have Beyond TV, this is a great tutorial on how to get video onto your PSP.

Via PVRblog

Open Access Publishing Takes Another Step Forward

Science Commons - a new project of Creative Commons that works to encourage sharing of scientific and academic knowledge - has launched an Open Access Law Program. The Program is designed to make legal scholarship "open access," that is freely available online to everyone, without undue copyright and licensing restrictions. The Program involves an Open Access Law Author Pledge, Open Access Law Principles and an Open Access Law Model Publication Agreement.

Our very own Chairman & CEO, Lawrence Lessig, is one of the first signatories to the Open Access Law Author Pledge. In addition, 21 important law reviews have adopted the Open Access Principles, or have policies that are consistent with them. Leading journals like such as Michigan Law Review, Animal Law, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Indiana Law Journal, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Michigan State Law Review and, New York Law School Law Review, Texas Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Wayne Law Review and Michigan State Law Review have signed on, as have all of the journals published by Duke Law School and Villanova Law School. More information about the Program is available at the Science Commons Program page. The Program is one part of the Science Commons Publishing Project, which is working to support open access to scholarly research in a wide range of disciplines including agriculture, entomology, biology, anthropology and now law.

Via Creative Commons Blog - rss

Videoblogging resources page

New at Ourmedia: A one-page PDF of videoblogging resources, handed out by Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson at BlogNashville.

Via New Media Musings

opensource vj content databank

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

Open Source Fabrication: IFABRICATE

Scheduled for launch in July by the folks at Squid Labs
"... IFabricate is a documentation and collaboration system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. Documenting is fast and easy because you only have to list the high-level steps. iFabricate helps you link your projects to descriptions of tools, standard materials, and detailed sub-processes created by yourself and the iFabricate community. Incorporate helpful comments from expert-users to make sure your project always uses the best practice. Consumer electronics hacks, engineering prototyping, recipes, fine wood-working, and hobby projects are all equally ideal iFabricate projects..."

See related Worldchanging essay

A new Directory for Videoblogs

A new Directory for Videoblogs:

At Vloggercon in late January 2005, there were about 20 regular videoblogs.
Three months later there are well over 200...with new videoblogs popping up everyday.
I see no sign of this slowing down.

So how do we keep up?
Linking, filters... and directories which Michael Sullivan has done.
Introducing VlogDir.

Michael says,

VLOGDIR is a new Videoblog Directory Service that allows you to add a link to your vlog along with descriptive details, rss feeds and attached media.
Every VLOGDIR entry will ping and inject itself into the videoblogging.info community page which will display the most recent 20 vlogs added to the VLOGDIR.

So add your videoblog to the directory and get listed.
This way everyone will know how to find you and subscribe to your feed.

VlogDir is a great complement to Videoblogging.info, which is the public site for the Videoblogging Group. We are building a smart ecology of tools. A real community is developing.

(source: momentshowing)

Today & Tomorrow: Coverage of ContentBiz Summit

Via PaidContent.org

Journalist's Toolbox Great for Citizens, Students Too

If you are you are student, teacher, citizen journalist or professional journalist, you should take some time to roam about The Journalist's Toolbox @ the American Press Institute. It is filled with links to collect information and to practice the craft. Here is something on a psychologist's tips for interviewing and something for novice interviewers from the New York Times.

However, be warned some of the links seem to be broken. Still it is a good place for browsing.

Clickable Broadband USA Map

C/Net has a feature story on municipal broadband in the USA and has created A clickable map which makes it fast and easy to see which states have imposed restrictive legislation, fiber to the home or wireless clouds.

Across the country, acrimonious conflicts have erupted as local governments attempt to create publicly funded broadband services with faster connections and cheaper rates for all citizens, narrowing the so-called digital divide. The Bells and cable companies, for their part, argue that government intervention in their business is not justified and say they are far better equipped to operate complex and far-flung data networks.

CNET's interactive municipal broadband legislative map details the major battlegrounds on the issue. At stake is the fate of high-speed Internet access for millions of Americans, hinging on a fundamental question of civics and economics--whether the government or private industries should take the leading role in building out what's considered this generation's critical infrastructure challenge.

Additional sections include; Cities brace for broadband war, Tangled up in fiber, A question of independence, and Photos from the broadband trenches.

Other recent articles on municipal broadband have appeared in Broadband 2.0, e-Week, Newsweek, Mother Jones and Telephony Magazine.

MuniWireless has the most consolidated coverage. DailyWireless has perhaps close to 1,000 "city cloud" related articles on-line (search "city clouds").

Share and Enjoy!

Via Daily Wireless

The Internet Filmmaker’s Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ)

The Internet Filmmaker’s FAQ is one of the oldest filmmaking resources on the Internet (started in 1994) and contains answers to over 133 of the most frequently asked filmmaking questions around (and is constantly expanding). The Internet Filmmaker’s FAQ. [RebelOne]

Via Cinema Minima

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

"This is a dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypical problems, and related definitions. Algorithms include common functions, such as Ackermann's function. Problems include traveling salesman and Byzantine generals. Some entries have links to implementations and more information. Index pages list entries by area and by type. The two-level index has a total download 1/20 as big as this page."

New QuickTime SMIL Documentation

SMIL Scripting Guide for QuickTime

Via sLop

Execellent QuickTime for Java page

Jason Freeman - Quicktime for Java

Via sLop

GenderIT

GenderIT.org Global and regional highlights on gender and ICT policy -- "Changing the way you see ICT"

This site is a great resource on things NGO, tech, and ICT. I especially like how it doesn't assume you are a policy person and so offers up not one but two sections for the uninitiated: - Jargon and Beginners

Great writeup on Grokster hearings

Tim Armstrong has written a great synopsis of Tuesday’s Supreme Court proceedings in MGM vs. Grokster. He goes far more in-depth than most articles on the subject, so if you’re interested in the case it’s a must-read.

M:Metrics: American Mobile Usage Stats

Source: M:Metrics, Inc. Survey of US mobile subscribers, quarter ending January 31st 2005, n=35,381. Data for photo messaging, ringtones and graphics downloads for two months ending January 31st 2005, n=23,209.

This is pretty cool, and that's just from their press release. I like being able to see hard numbers (to repeat ad-nauseum to anyone who'll listen to me blather).

:-)

-Russ

New Media Law Blog

Cathy Kirkman, who works at Silicon Valley legal powerhouse Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, has started a Silicon Valley Media Law Blog. The current top item is a brief synopsis of my talk today at Stanford Law School.

Via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

DeafTV.Net - Links to subtitled videos and subtitling tools for vbloggers

(A good list. Scroll to the bottom of the page. -kc.)

IA Summit folksonomies panel

"

Thanks to Peter Morville, here are links to info about the panel on folksonomies at the IA Summit:

PDF's of the panelists' slides by Gene Smith Peter Morville, Peter Herholz and Thomas Vander Wal

Seb Paquet's notes on the presentations

An MP3 of Peter Morville on "sorting out social classification" which we're warned crashes Firefox but works on IE.

I'm really sorry I missed attending the Summit. It sounds fascinating: The leading thinkers and what a great time to be talking about these issues. "

New open access govt information journal

Here's a new open access journal to keep track of. The inaugural issue includes articles about the UK freedom of information act (which amazingly didn't come into force until January, 2005!), and a conference report on the 3rd intl conference of information commissioners. One of the exciting things to come out of that conference was the "Declaration of Cancún
Transparency and Accountability: A Commitment to Democracy" signed by a long list of NGOs. The PDF of the declaration is linked from another organization to track called Statewatch.

Via Library Autonomous Zone

Ubuweb audio and video archives

Via Cinema Minima

Unmediated Sanyo Xacti C5 Review

Kenyatta just got his hands on a Sanyo Xacti C5 and I've been non-stop bugging him for feedback. The Xacti is a hard-drive based camcorder that's being used by some in the videoblogging community. I was literally about to order one on eBay, but Kenyatta told me to hold off- giving the camcorder a 3/5 (5/5 = best). So here's our conversation and Kenyatta's review of the C5.


Transcript of AIM IM with Kenyatta (KC) and Eli (EC)
9:55 PM 03/28/05

KC: here's the skinny on the xacti: good size, nice lcd... mpeg4 compression was adequate in fast moving shots with lots of color... the different quality levels were nice... extremely poor low light performance...

EC: hmm

KC: poor ergonomics... too top heavy and one thumb operation was actually a hinderance with such a small camera...

EC: yeah. little camera syndrome.

KC: anytime you went to zoom it shook the shot...

EC: built in mic audio decent?

KC: no manual controls whatsoever. NO gain control (!)... zoom slow but adequate.

EC: no shutter speed?

KC: mic was actually decent... shutter speed control but buried behind at least five menu movements clicks to change it. (Too many to be handy.)

EC: yikes. so it's great for daylight, hanging with friends in bright areas.... bad for concerts, bars, and all the fun stuff...

KC: yep... i tried the mic out at the corner of atlantic and 4th ave in bklyn at rush hour... did a decent job of picking me up.

EC: nice! pointing camera at yourself? or from behind

KC: at self and away.

EC: great

KC: mic is on backside of lcd

EC: yikes

KC: yeah, so if you're shooting yourself.... well, it does pick you up well under low pressure (sound) conditions, but a little harder when having a conversation with someone walking down bway in soho

EC: hmm

KC: mpeg4s were easy to transfer. quicktime player had a problem with the mp3 mp4 audio if you tried cutting copying and pasting. (It likes cut and paste.)

EC: huh... how's file size?

KC: you had to save it as a mov file to work... file size is decent. the image quality makes sense for the file sizes.

EC: that's good... you try editing? splice splice splice

KC: about 5MB per min. spliced the vid. didn't try it with imovie or fcp yet.

EC: cool

KC: i have lots of sample video to post as well... hang on. let me check notes for other stuff...

EC: to be honest, it should be great for peru... it's a travel camera.. outdoors, pretty pix..

KC: agreed. and with an hour of 640x480 on a 1GB SD card, it'll be a welcome relief from a PDX10 and pounds of DV tape... did i mention the weird weight balance?

EC: yes... but give me an example... like when you're adjusting zoom, tpaping through menus...

KC: it's too top heavy, causing my wrist to wobble a lot more (when zooming) than if it were evenly weighted (or bottom biased)

EC: try shooting upside down

KC: i did!

EC: ha!

KC: and it was a steadier shot

EC: can the people who design cameras please come see us- paging sanyo product marketing and development!

KC: and it was probably just for the reason you mentioned - when your thumb is applying so much pressure to the top half of the camera, you have to overcompensate by pulling back with your index finger, more or less.

EC: is there a tripod screw?

KC: there is.

EC: you could add weight

KC: sure. good idea. first thing i'm buying, though, is a mini tripod... that's the other criticism of the industrial design... because they made it so thin, you can't sit it on a table on it's own.

EC: lame!

KC: i mean, none of it's competitors do it either (the sony M1, Panasonic AV100, etc) but if it included a small "travel base" besides or instead of the large round platter that ships with it, it would come in very handy.

EC: bubble gum works

KC: so many videobloggers use still cameras for shooting video...

EC: yeah, good form factor... people are comfortable with them as 'still' cameras.. more social devices than futuristic super 8 cameras.

KC: sure. problem is they do video poorly or don't handle well when shooting video (high compression AVI, can't zoom in while capturing video)... what bothers me about a lot of these small video-first solid state cameras is that they still seem like interesting gadgets first and video cameras second... it's like they're being marketed to the Sharper Image crowd (who look for cool toys) and not the user-generated content folks.

EC: yeah, at least cameraphones are often good phones... and their cameras are getting better all the time...

KC: you know, the ones apple, microsoft, and the like already have in their sights?

EC: right.

KC: speaking of which - have you looked at any of the reviews for these small solid state video cameras?
they're almost exclusively by still digicam sites.

EC: interesting

KC: and they spend paragraphs talking about the still image performance, and then leave, like, maybe a graph or two to the video performance.

EC: nice. gimme a link

KC: i'm looking through steve's digicams and dcresource right now.

EC: does the xacti remote do zoom? could be a workaround

KC: yes it does... which is why i was going for the mini tripod first.

EC: ahh... i'm looking through dpreview

KC: http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_m1-review/ review of the sony M1... maybe i shouldn't expect digital still camera reviewers to scrutinize the video on these things, but the manufacturers have to start sending the video-first cams out to videobloggers to test.

EC: we can be the source! let's do it.... hey, check http://www.dpreview.com/news/0501/05013101casioexp505.asp sounds hot

KC: a resource is born.

EC: casio. mpeg4. still

KC: reading it now. interesting... oh yeah, about the build quality of the C5... looks and feels solid with a hard plastic shell and a nice metal band around the edge of the thing. good construction. but i fear for the life of the LCD screen. I've only had it four days and it already feels a little loose... and (here's the part that kills me) all menu navigation and option selection happens with two buttons: a menu button, and a five way "Set" joystick (five-way meaning: up, down, left, right, and push)

EC: sheesh

KC: i can tell you now that the set joystick is gonna take a beating. besides being near to impossible to find the sweet spot when pushing in the set button, after a weekend of use, it's already got a bit too much play in it.

EC: wow... you're moving me from 3 out of 5 to 2/5

KC: which means that it's already feeling unresponsive at times and frustrating to use... well, what keeps it at 3 is that there are a lot of things it gets right for videobloggers... the daylight performance is excellent, the built in mic is better than i expected, and the size is incredible.

EC: and battery?

KC: battery wasn't bad. i was able to fill the card shooting about 1hr of video over a 12 hour period, keeping it in standby mode in between takes.

EC: nice

KC: (card was a 1GB SD)

EC: nice. ebay? cost?

KC: (card didn't come standard.) bought the card at j&r. (gotta fill out that rebate form)... i paid $650 for it but i overpaid. you can get it from one of the HK ebayers for about $550+shipping... sanyo is selling a special edition blue one through the sharper image here in the US for $800.

EC: ooooohhh.... ((((suckaBlue I think it's called))))

KC: i wanted one that wouldn't look like a video camera, so i figured blue would work. and it did.

EC: nice

KC: everyone i showed it to didn't realize it was a camera until i told them. (after I shot a good amount of video first, of course)

EC: heh

EC: i think this is good.. i'll edit and post

KC: cool. we should do all of our reviews this way.

EC: i was thinking a conversation between us is more valuable than a straight write up, and easier

KC: cool

Here are some examples Kenyatta shot:
xactiC5_lowlight.mov 10.3M
xactiC5_mic_flatbush.mov 2.5M
xactiC5_movement640.mov 5.7M
xactiC5_mpg_flowers.mov 2.6M
xactiC5_night.mov 4.9M

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

I'm going to have to get my hands on this book:

"Is this book sociology, anthropology, or taxonomy? Sorting Things Out, by communications theorists Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, covers a lot of conceptual ground in its effort to sort out exactly how and why we classify and categorize the things and concepts we encounter day to day. But the analysis doesn't stop there; the authors go on to explore what happens to our thinking as a result of our classifications. With great insight and precise academic language, they pick apart our information systems and language structures that lie deeper than the everyday categories we use."

On another note, I've just been informed that I will be presenting at the Canadian Library Association on folksonomies as part of their hot topics track. Here's the description I sent in:

Tag - You're It!

"The collective intelligence of Web users is not new. We have seen them work effectively in forums, newsgroups, and even electronic discussion lists. Social-tagging tools (also called folksonomies) such as del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr, Digg, and Feedmarker move this collective work into new ontological avenues. The presenter will discuss why information professionals should embrace the unstructured nature of folksonomies and how they can be best implemented into the structured library community."

QuickTime Latency

I have done exhaustive research regarding this in the past but I still have persistent problems with latency when using QuickTime or MPEG-4 streaming in my projects so I am doing the research again (and posting it here so I can find it later).

Here are the links for further examination (from Apple's Mailing Lists):
Latency on Streaming Server - Some information - How to change a setting on the QTSS that controls one aspect of latency created by the server.
Re: latency problem - Explains the reasoning for the latency from Apple's point of view.
Re: Instant-On & double frame rate - Gives a rundown on editing the server config to reduce latency.
Re: Video conferencing - More of the same
Getting real-time streaming to be more real-time - interesting note regarding specifing time stamp increments in video/audio samples to reduce latency. A major hack.
Re: I found there are more than 7 seconds time delay between the real live - More about what the latency is all about.
Re: Getting real-time streaming to be more real-time - Change the SDP file to set the default buffer on the player lower.
Re: Streaming latency between two separate computers - Use multicast
Re: Request for User-Configurable Latency Parameters - One of the original emails quoted above for changing latency parameters.
Re: buffering time - Changing buffering time in home made QT playback app (using QT API, should therefore work with QT4J).
Re: buffering time - More of the same.

Last: Use these libraries to build own streaming server and client: LIVE.COM Streaming Media: RTP/RTCP and RTSP Open Source Libraries

Ok.. now to try out all of the possibilities..

ISEA 2006 - Interactive City Early Call For Proposals -- DUE 23 APRIL 2005

ISEA 2006
Interactive City
San Jose, California, USA
1-14 August 2006

EARLY CALL DUE: 22 April 2005

ISEA INTERACTIVE CITY CFP:
http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/



GENERAL INFO ABOUT ISEA 2006:
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/

ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) is a large, international, two week long, conference and festival situated at the critical intersection of art and technology (see http://www.isea2004.net for last year's festival details). In August 2006 the 13th ISEA will be held in San Jose, California. ISEA spans a broad range of work from critical theory and application papers, interactive demonstrations, videos, installations, performances, and emerging music to name a few. In 2006 ISEA will feature four themes: Interactive City, Community Domain, Transvergence, and Pacific Rim. Each theme will of course manifest itself at ISEA in the form of papers, demos, performances, etc. Each of these topics will also feature a 2 day event immediately preceding ISEA to further focus the topic and go into more critical depth. This announcement is for the early call for proposals within the scope of the Interactive City.

Via USC Interactive Media Division Weblog

Gear for guerrilla filmmakers

Stephen Olmstead of Vigilant Studios sends links for more gear for Guerrilla Filmmakers (is there any other kind?) including a Camera Stabilizer and Guide Book for Guerrilla Filmmakers. Ron Dexter has a great site with tons of advice and plans. It looks like DV Moves is now the reseller for Dexter's equipment designs. DV Moves also sells proprietary equipment. Cinekinetic also has budget dollies, mounts, jibs and accessories. They're a bit pricey but worth it. Why do I keep writing about budget equipment? Because I get so sick of "TALKING HEADS" Independent Film. Do your audience a favor, move the camera!

Via Cinema Minima

TVForUs: online tv broadcasting for broadband users

"Tvforus is a portal to free live online tv broadcasting and other streaming content for broadband users.

Since the 4th of February, Tvforus provides you with links to more than 200 broadband channels a big selection of the best quality online television streams found on the net. In the "Sites" section you will find links to broadcasters that stream live tv exclusively on their site."

Via del.icio.us/tag/broadcasting

Gallup: Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues

I think this provides some interesting statistics, but I don't really know how important they are. I also hesitate to jump to any conclusions that my worldview might come, to a large extent, from living in a sort of bloggers' bubble.

The effects of blogs can be more subtle than, say, those of TV; the Gallup poll refers to "direct impacts" but these might be of limited importance. Blog-type media serves a valuable role as a media feeder and people don't necessarily need to read them directly, or even know what a blog is, to be affected by reports from the blogosphere. I'm also curious as to how many people happen to read blogs from time to time, but don't know that some people call them "blogs" and not something like "websites"...

According to a recent Gallup poll:

The apparent effect that blogging is having within media and political circles is far ahead of its direct impact on the American public. Relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon, and fewer still are reading blogs with any frequency. Even among the most blog-conscious demographic -- 18- to 29-year-olds -- frequent blog reading is the exception.

It's also interesting that the poll was sponsored by 2 old-media organizations - USA Today and CNN. I'm not saying the poll is necessarily suspect because of this, but we must take into account where the poll is coming from.

OJR introduces wikis on journalism skills

Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, emails:

Today OJR introduced a new feature, a series of wikis on journalism skills, designed for bloggers, "grassroots" reporters and others who write online but who haven't formally studied journalism.

We've started with basic guides on writing, reporting and journalism
ethics. Each also includes a discussion area, where readers can ask specific questions about projects they are working on or debate controversial elements of these topics.

OJR is making these wikis available under a Creative Commons license,
the first time we've used these licenses on the site.

Via New Media Musings

How to Create Your Own Podcast - A Step-by-Step Tutorial

Via Broadcasting

How to set up streaming audio using no-cost software

Shimon Rura has a writeup on how to set up streaming audio for a meeting using no-cost software. I just walked through it, using a single Windows XP machine for the test setup. Works great.

Via Andrew Grumet's Weblog

Building a mobile, locative, and collaborative application

Nicolas Nova writes: My colleague and friend Fabien Girardin wrote a post mortem of our location based project CatchBob. It's here

The document describes the whole development process, from the technical architecture to the user perception of the game. I talk about the positioning system, the data, the communication tool as well as the user interface. It addresses a large audience.

is an experimental platform in the form of a mobile game for running psychological experiments. It is designed to elicit collaborative behavior of people working together on a mobile activity.

Running on a mobile device (iPAQ, TabletPc), it's a collaborative hunt in which groups of three persons have to find and circle a virtual object on our campus.

Thank you Nicolas !

Mobile Video on the Go

Mobile Video on the Go
Nice Blog about wearable, geo-located video production and consumption..

Via sLop

unmediated call for info on videoblogging digital still cameras

From Yahoo! Groups : videoblogging Messages : Message 6825 of 6825


Kenyatta and I were just chatting about how psyched we were for the oh-so-soon day when 1000s of us have hard-drive based cameras and are able to regularly post video with ease into mefeedia, vimeo, medicinefilms, ANT, ourmedia, etc... So while we both work on getting cases of cameras from Sanyo, JVC, et al., we thought it made sense to create a list of digital still cameras that shoot decent MPEG video clips. Some of these cameras are cheap and can be bought used on craigslist and on ebay, so we thought we'd compile the data and make a semi-official list of Unmediated Approved (or something more snarky please) digital still cameras that shoot video clips.


If you know of a camera that fits this description, please reply here (either in Unmediated's comments or at Yahoo Videoblogging Group) with as much of the following information you can provide:

-Brand
-Model Number
-Tell us about the movies it lets you shoot, how long, sound, file format
-How's the battery life on the camera when you shoot movies?

NOTE:
We are NOT looking for are recommendations on cheap tape-based camcorders.


We are NOT looking for recommendations on camera phones that shoot video.


We ARE looking for recommendations on digital still cameras that shoot video clips.

Thanks,
-eli, kenyatta, and the unmediated crew


P.S. If Sanyo or JVC or other camera vendors are here and want to chat, please contact me at eli AT chapmanlogic dot com.

Get that DVD's Content

Doom9.net - The Definitive DVD Backup Resource

Stay Free! now has a blog

Stay Free! Daily
The tag line:
Periodic ramblings from Stay Free!, a Brooklyn magazine focused on American media and culture

Via sLop

Kenyatta on Rocketboom

Why am I always the last to know?? :) Kenyatta was interviewed on RocketBoom earlier this week and described what unmediated is about better than I've ever heard it done...

Rocketboom wednesday 16 feb, 2005

videoblogging storms U.S. academic scene

I know it sounds dramatic, but what the hey, it's our industry, let's blow it up! From the yahoo videoblogging group comes a note from Georgia Tech's Karyn Y. Lu:

We are a group of Georgia Tech graduate students who are conducting an ethnographic study on videoblogging for an online communities course we are taking. We are writing to make you aware of our presence on this Yahoo group as observers. We are trying to learn as much as we can about videoblogging technologies and issues, and hope to become active participants in the community as well.

mo:life - tracing the mobile-media revolution

busa aat and spinach7-digital invite you to join mo:life - a moderated email list focusing on mobile-media culture and technology.

mo:life is interested in how, inherently global, mobile media will be implicated in our daily lives here in Australia and the Asia Pacific.

mo:life maps and explores how we, as a distinct culture, will produce, adapt, consume, buy, sell, accept, and reject new forms and uses of floating communication. As such, mo:life sets mobile media in an Australian context. Our geography, enterprises, and culture lend well to a mobile way of life – a mo:life.

Our region is also the hotbed of technological development and cultural uptake of mobile media, placing Australia in good stead to develop the cultural, economic, artistic, and interpersonal potential of the unmooring of our screens, workplaces, and points of creative production and consumption.

So become part of the mo:life network and keep up to date with the latest information and knowledge about this rapidly moving sector.

To join mo:life - send a blank email to molife-subscribe@lists.s7digital.com or visit http://s7digital.com/molife/

Main Page - Crazy Hacks

The mission of this wiki is to give you a comprehensive overview of what some geeks do, when they have way too much spare time on their hands.

News Most Popular Among Online Video Plays

(Useful data. But also remember this is "online", meaning sitting at your computer. When the computer's attached to a big screen near a couch, anything's possible. -dm)

Four Minutes About Podcasting

I have watched "Four Minutes About Podcasting," at least five times. As Dave says, an instant classic.

(nice little video - send it to all your friends who are asking what the heck you're listening to on your mp3 player. -dm)

Cool stuff I noticed about Google Maps

If you haven’t been to Google Maps yet,

1. Get yourself some better RSS feeds
2. Go to http://maps.google.com/

Here are some cool things I’ve noticed about Google Maps. I think this is going to be one of those posts I update a lot in a day.

• The URLs are fairly clean. You can look up an address from your location bar by putting “http://maps.google.com/maps?q=” before it. For example: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield

  You can also specify the latitude and longitude by passing ll=$LAT,$LON where $LAT and $LON are decimals. That means you can make a bookmarklet that would show you the location of a blog based on it's GeoURL. In fact, I did just that: Map GeoURL

• They use semi-transparent PNGs for routes over street maps (do they get this to work correctly in IE?). That means they only have to dynamically generate route images, all the map images can be static.

• Google Local searches are based on what’s on the map by default. For instance, search for your address, clear the search box and search for pizza. Since the map is centered on your address, it will search around you. If you double click somewhere on the map to recenter and search again, it will use the new map center.

  You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around the map. + and - zoom.

• On the driving directions, you can click on the step number to see a cool zoom of what you need to do for your turn.

• Google owns Keyhole, who make a really cool product with pictures of the world. Hopefully those pictures will get integrated real soon.

Vloggercon Video Archives are up..

vloggercon: VloggerCon 05: Conference Sessions Online

Gear for the GamerGirl

Some of these can be acquired through Amazon - if you choose to get them that way, we get a few cents! Happy shopping.

PLAN notes

A Veritable Who's Who Gathered in London

The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network [PLAN] is currently meeting in London. Here are the real time notes being compiled by Nicolas Nova, Drew Hemment and Steve Benford. [Thanks to pasta and vinegar]

PLAN is a two day event bringing together leading international figures to review the emerging fields of locative and pervasive media. Wireless and locative technologies are enabling people to break away from traditional computer interfaces. Mobile devices are mediating new kinds of social interaction and responding to physical location and context. [related]

See Tom Carden's Day 2 and Day 1 notes, and Molly's notes too.

Multimedia Training Kit

Not sure if this has been posted here or not. If it has, it is worth a remention:

The Multimedia Training Kit from Itrain Online is a series of modular training materials for use in workshops developed by ItrainOnline partners and others. The materials share a common easy-to-use format, and are freely available for non-commercial use.

While it may seem basic to most Unmediated readers, to others it is a great starting point for building capacity.

We Media Is Now Also Nosotros, El Medio

Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis's We Media white paper is now available in Spanish.

More from the HypergeneMediaBlog We Media webpage:

Guillermo Franco Morales, a university professor and manager for El Tiempo in Colombia, South America, has translated the complete text of our paper, We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, into Spanish. The translation, called Nosotros, el medio, is now available online in HTML and PDF (2.7MB) formats.

Via PJNet Today

List of ITV Companies, Manufacturers and Organizations

Interactive TV List of Companies, Manufacturers, and Organizations

Via sLop

The missing QTJ chapter -- STREAMING

ONJava.com: Streaming QuickTime with Java
An online suppliment to Chris Adamson's recent QuickTime for Java A Developer's Notebook.

From the article:
In this article, I'll introduce the basics of simple webcasting with QTJ.

AWESOME!!!!!

Via sLop

Announcing: HME.pvrblog.com

The first question I had for Howard Look at TiVo when I heard about the new HME launch today was "is there some sort of gallery/forum that I can go to find the best apps or share apps I build?" His answer was basically no, but they were hopeful that someone could put something together. I pinged a few friends and eventually George Hotelling, who has been posting here, put something together.

I give you: http://hme.pvrblog.com/

Our goals were to get a place where we could have a categorical list of applications, a way to rate those apps, the ability to add screenshots, and a forum area to discuss each app and topics in general. I encourage any new HME app developers that want others using, rating, and commenting on your work to get the word out by uploading them to our new site.

Via PVRblog

XML programming Java Tutorial

XML programming in Java technology, Part 1

DVFilm recommendations for working with HDR-FX1

Via HD For Indies

Supreme Court: MGM vs. Grokster

Bookmark the EFF page on the building Supreme Court case about P2P companies; it links to every brief filed, and they are pouring in now. Neutral and supportive (of the petitioners, the content companies) briefs are coming in now; briefs supporting the P2P case are due on February 28. At stake: the landmark Betamax decision of 1984, which establishes the legitimacy of technology that allows both infringing and non-infringing uses. Read Fred von Lohmann’s statement of the importance of Betamax.

Via The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

Riding the Media Bits: A practical guide to digital convergence.

The target reader of these pages is non-technical, but this does not mean that technical people would not benefit from being exposed to the breadth of issues laid down in these pages. Non-technical people are warned that, since these pages deal with matters that are strongly influenced by very sophisticated technologies, some understanding of them will be required, if knowledge is not to be reduced to thin air and tool building to apodictic statements. In order not to scare these readers, I guarantee that efforts have been made to reduce technical explanations to the minimum necessary to provide baseline knowledge about the issues considered substantiating arguments.

New Voices Wanted in Citizen Journalism

New Voices, a "pioneering program to seed innovative citizen media ventures around the country," has some money available for promising new ventures. Details here.

A Guide To Media Monitoring with RSS

hyku has put together by far the best guide for using RSS to monitor media that I have ever seen. Listening/monitoring is the the single most critical discipline that any 21st Century PR professional needs to practice regularly. RSS makes it a snap.  Josh R. Hallett gives you at a glance all you need to know to get started. Great work, Josh.

Technologies for Online Public Engagement

Lars Hasselblad Torres of AmericaSpeaks, shares this fantastic grid of Technologies for Online Public Engagement (PDF). Entitled “Approaches to Online Public Engagement”, the grid summarizes 17 organizations that offer tools for online public engagement. Some are familiar, like Weblab. Others are unique tools developed by local and national government.

One question I had for Lars was an indication of the underlying technologies offered — all they all home grown or based on commercial or open source products? Lars thought most were homegrown. If you know more, I’d love to know more! Likewise, Lars says he’d love feedback on any parts of the chart. He can be found at lhtorres at americaspeaks.org

As I scan the chart, I can’t see some of the emergent technology efforts I hear about from folks like Jon Lebkowsky. CivicSpace Labs, and the work that Jerry Michalski and co are doing at Yi-Tan. With a little thinking, I’m sure others comes to mind. I suspect this is because these folks have not been oriented specifically towards online consultations which is a very specific online interaction domain. They have been more in the activist domain.

That said, I sense there is a lot of opportunity bridging between the two domains.

Googling unsecured webcams

This is both very cool and very scary. Use this search string below with Google, and you will find dozens (hundreds?) of unsecured webcam feeds (most seem to be security cams).

inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="

BoingBoing reader Nick adds, "This is a Google search that gives 2000 cams instead of just 800. Pointed out on MeFi."

Interface and interaction: Social software

I wasn´t aware of this seminar which discussed different aspects of social software. Fortunately most of it is documented on video, which is accessible from the website.

Journalists for Open Government

The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government is a new organization. From their website:

Our goal is to provide timely information on freedom of information issues and on what journalism organizations are doing to foster greater transparency in government. We d like to make this your front page when you need information on open government issues and FOI efforts.

Consumers Union's Hearusnow.org

Consumers Union has released a new telecommunications and media online resource called Hearusnow.org. The site offers in-depth reading on over 60 consumer related telecom issues, including consumer tips on what to do before you buy and making companies listen when you're dissatisfied (from phone service to copyright rules on digital content). There are also 7 different ways to make a difference in less then 2 minutes (see "Get Heard" on the left bar and click the red link).

IEEE VR 2005 Workshop CALL FOR PAPERS

I am co-chairing this workshop and would love to see your submission. . .

Emerging Display Technologies - New Systems and Applications:
From Images to Sensing, Interaction and Enhancement
13 March 2005 (Bonn, Germany)

The recent flurry of display technology development has produced families of technologies that make fixed and projected pixels cheaper, faster, more flexible, and of higher quality. These advances enable smart pixels and enable a number of burgeoning applications ranging from displays being used for better and more flexible images, to user interaction, scene sensing, and environment enhancement.

Yahoo! releases "Media RSS"

Media RSS Syndication FAQ
This, along with their new video search engine shows that Yahoo is hoping on board. Things are definitely taking off.
From the Yahoo page:
"Media RSS" is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilties of RSS 2.0 (FAQ). Enclosures in RSS are already being used to syndicate audio files (Podcasting) and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, in addition to providing additional metadata with the media. Media RSS enables content publishers and bloggers to broadly distribute descriptions of and links to multimedia content.

(Looks like Ryan beat me to this one already.. Oh well, double posts show how important this probably is. -shawn)

Under Mars: online archive of soldiers' photos

Under Mars: An online archive of soldiers' photos taken by soldiers serving in active duty. This site aims only to visually document their experiences and is not a political site. I have no idea if the captions are the original captions, but they're amazing. Well worth parsing through all 60+ galleries.

Looking for an internship?

If you're looking for a media-centric internship, then you might want to check out what Elizabeth Spiers is looking for to assist with "relaunch projects" at mediabistro.

Books We Like: Leverage Your Book Buying/Recommendations

This is an invitation/request to help test and shape a cool new approach to "activist e-commerce". It's in beta and they need forgiving early users. I know the people behind it, and endorse them without reservation. This is truly a worthwhile experiment in "sharing economy."

It's called BOOKS WE LIKE, initiated by Media Venture Collective with support from Alternet. It's a way for progressives to "vote with their book purchases" by aggregating their Amazon (or other online booksellers) purchases, thereby maximizing the resulting commissions, and pooling those to fund progressive independent media.

Every book bought there captures about a dollar that would otherwise go uncollected. That's potentially millions per year of free money!

(Continued at Smart Mobs)

(Also: Marc Canter's mention of Books We Like earlier this week. -kc.)

Eventlab (New Corante Blog)

Peter Caputa points at a new Corante Blog - Eventlab - with nobody less than our good friend - Eric Rice (and Alex Williams as well.)

Maybe these marketing dweebs can hang out with the technical wonks - and get something done in the area of OpenEvents?

:-)

Exporting QTs in highest possible quality for greenscreen.

DV is colour mapped to have only one quarter the resolution of the luminance signal; whereas D1 or Digital Betacam have twice as much at one half. To get the very best green screen quality needs the R,G,B to be fed directly from the camera to an Ultimatte type processor. Whether all this matters depends what you are trying to achieve and particularly what is your subject material. To get some idea of this, see my web site (www.perrybits.co.uk) and press Articles/Further List of assorted articles] and then look at the first two items on Chromakey.

Click here for more...

Make your own media

New York Community Access Television Links
If you don't know about Public Access, you should.

Here is a good article about Public Access from the Museum of Broadcast Communication

The How To Blog 101 Series

T. L. Pakii Pierce is writing a series titled The How To Blog - 101 Series. Here's a rundown of his courses...

How To Blog 101 - What is Blogging and Why Should I Blog?
How To Blog 102 - Planning Your Blog
How To Blog 103 - Choosing the Right Blogging Tools and Software
How To Blog 104 - Publishing Your First Blog Article
How To Blog 105 - How To Promote Your Blog
How To Blog 106 - Blogging For A Living

Citizen Shift

The National Film Board of Canada welcomes you to CitizenShift, a new interactive web site we hope will make the NFB even more accessible to emerging filmmakers, individuals and communities in Canada. CitizenShift is a web magazine that integrates written, audio and visual media and provides a space where filmmakers and citizens can share knowledge, be entertained and most importantly debate social issues.

CitizenShift is inspired by Challenge for Change, an experimental NFB initiative during the 1960s that encouraged communities to take part in the process of documentary filmmaking. Forty years later, CitizenShift offers a unique online platform that gives users a forum to talk about social issues and encourage social change.

CED Magazine Wall Charts

CED Magazine's most recent Wall Chart (warning, they're PDFs) covers North American VOD deployments showing VOD markets and what vendors are in them. Also, take a look at the Fiber Topology Comparison from October (same link as above). Pretty wild infographics.

Collection of links is taken from Dan Gillmor's book, We The Media ISBN: 0-596-00733-7

This collection of links is taken from Dan Gillmor's book, We The Media ISBN: 0-596-00733-7 (http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/). It is a replication of the the appendix titled "Web Site Directory." I have created this derivative work based on my rights under the Creative Common's license under which this text was distributed. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/) because of the terms of that license this work is available under the same license.

NewsBluntly Debuts, Tracks Broadcast Journalism Industry

The NewsMarket, an online platform PR pros use to deliver broadcast-standard news video to television journalists, launched a blog for the media community called NewsBluntly. The blog features original content by for broadcast-news staffers with succinct, riffs on major - and not so major -- "inside-the-newsroom" stories. Naturally, in addition to posts and relevant links to other media blogs and useful sites, NewsBluntly also links to the latest VNRs and B-roll provided by The NewsMarket. A sound bite from the press release

"With NewsBluntly, we're addressing television newscasters' unique social network and embracing the concept of participatory journalism," said Shoba Purushothaman, The NewsMarket's CEO and co-founder.

New blog on media law

Robert J. Ambrogi, an attorney in Rockport, Mass., has started a new blog, Media Law. Says Robert: "I will track news relating to the First Amendment, access to public records, open meetings laws, journalist shield laws, libel and other legal issues relating to news reporting, with an emphasis on Massachusetts." Robert is a lawyer and former editor in chief of the National Law Journal and Lawyers Weekly USA. He's also executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association -- a rare combination. HIs other blog is LawSites. I'll be stopping by regularly.

Podcasting from Mac OS X - A Recipe

Ingredients:
1 - Macintosh OS X computer
1 - Griffin iMic (for machines without a line-in input)
1 - Microphone
1 - Set of earphones or headphones
1 - copy each of the following pieces of software installed:
Audacity
Soundflower
Soundflowerbed
LineIn
Sound Source

Directions:

1. Open Audacity. Using its preferences, set sound input source to Soundflower (2 ch).
2. Use SoundSource (headphone icon in the menu bar) to set "Output" to Soundflower (2 ch). Set "System" to built-in audio if not already set there.
3. Open LineIn and set it to input from your microphone source (Built-in audio if using internal microphone or a line-in, the USB sound source if using an iMic or USB microphone) and output to Soundflower (2 ch). If you make any changes, click the checkbox to disable and re-enable to make them effective.
4. Open Soundflowerbed. Set the Soundflower 2 Ch monitor to "Built-in Audio." At this point, you should be able to hear in your headphones the sound from the microphone.
5. Open any media player programs you will be using - iTunes, Quicktime, etc. For any player program that was open before you began and for which you are not hearing output, close and restart it. Some programs (like Quicktime) only set their outputs at startup. iTunes, on the other hand, happily changes outputs while it is still running.
6. Begin recording in Audacity. You should be able to see the waveforms of the recorded sound from your microphone, et al. Try playing sound from other sources. You should both see them recording in Audacity and hear them in your headphones.
7. At this point, you are set up. Let your creativity be your guide. When done recording, always save your audio files before editing. Audacity is not crash free, and you don't want to lose your copy of the original by editing before you save it (says the voice of experience.)
8. Shutting down is not to order dependent. Be sure to use SoundSource to set sources back to their proper locations.

(Continued at Evil Genius Chronicles)

Receiver

The new issue of Vodafone s RECEIVER has been released. Content:
* Erkki Huhtamo: Hidden histories of mobile media * Tim Clark: Mobile communications and the wireless internet the Japanese experience * Amparo Lasen: Affective technologies emotions and mobile phones * Mike Butcher: Rewind -fast forward-play mobile Napsterisation * Barry Wellman: The mobile-ized society communication modes and social networks * Drew Hemment: The telephone exchange * Adam Greenfield: Along the fault lines designing for deception, dishonesty, and other happy facts of human nature * Cory Doctorow: Eastern Standard Tribe a story about love, death and cellular telephony * John Chasey: The future of mobile gaming multiplayer games.

Koders - Source Code Search Engine

Koders is a search engine for source code. It enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.

Networks of Influence: a new study

A new investigative study titled "Networks of Influence" by The Center for Public Integrity reveals that the communications industry has spent $1.1 billion since 1998 to affect election outcomes and influence legislation before Congress and the White House. According to the study, from 1998 through June 2004 � during a period of increasingly intense battles over ownership rules - the broadcast industry spent more than $222 million lobbying the federal government. Additional findings showed that lobbying expenditures by the broadcast industry have risen 74 percent since 1998- from nearly $26 million to more than $45 million during 2003. (via Broadcast Engineering)

F-Spot

This project looks like an attempt to bridge the gap between re-usable metadata creation and practical photo management. F-Spot is an application designed to provide personal photo management to the GNOME desktop. Plans include import, export, printing and advanced sorting of digital images.

F-Spot looks like a solid desktop client for Flickr. Via captsolo weblog, where there is a wiki, use cases, and more info.

wikinews

Wikinews is a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view (via boingboing via Joi):

We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.

While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

We seek to promote the idea of the citizen journalist, because we believe that everyone can make a useful contribution to painting the big picture of what is happening in the world around us. The time has come to create a free news source, by the people and for the people. We invite you to join us in this effort which has the potential to change the world forever.

Local news ventures will get $1 million in seed money

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism today announced it will launch a pioneering program to seed community news ventures around the country with a new $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Over the next two years, the New Voices project will help fund the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects; support them with an educational Web site, in collaboration with the Poynter Institute's News University; and help foster their sustainability through small second-year grants.

More info here. Great news for niche, local independent news sites — even one- or two-person operations, presumably. I spoke with Jan Schaffer, the J-Lab's exec director, about this last week, and we'll be exploring ways for the New Voices project to work hand in hand with ourmedia.

Creative Commons Metadata embedding

Creative Commons licenses are attached to Web pages. But we also want our licenses to be useful for materials distributed in file formats around the Net.

The first format we've learned to tag is MP3, the popular audio compression format. Other common formats — image, video, text, other audio formats — will follow soon. This is an ongoing process, and we welcome your feedback. (You can also read a more detailed technical explanation of what follows.)

If you just want to get started, try the ccTag app, available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

How to Videoblog with Blogger

Together with Svein Hier I've written a tutorial which explains in detail how you can use Blogger as a tool for easy videoblogging. Topics covered are:

• Editing the template
  • 1. Unique poster frames, playing video within the webbrowser
  • 2. General poster frames, playing video in the Quicktime player
• Workflow
• How to compress the video with QT Pro
• General tips about compression
• How to make a general poster frame with QT Pro
• How to make a unique poster movie with QT Pro
• How to upload the files and create a posting in the videoblog
• How to use some PHP and Javascript to launch a dynamic popup window

Happy videoblogging!

FeedMesh

FeedMesh is a group working to establish a "peering network" for decentralized web update notifications and content distribution.

FeedFragments is a related proposal for handling RSS/Atom content in a fragmented way, allowing aggregators to retrieve only the information they do not already have using standard HTTP features.

Cinema Minima podcast audio Tuesday edition: Rights, Sound, Tools

Cinema Minima's Tuesday edition is available as an audio podcast file (26 minutes: 24 megabytes). Tuesday's edition covers intellectual property rights; sound and music in movies; and movie-making tools, including hardware and software.

 iPodder software application will automatically retrieve podcast files from RSS news feeds.

a blog devoted to remix

Here’s a blog devoted to popculture remix. CC licensed. But needs a RSS/Atom feed.

Plazes: location-aware participatory mapquest

Via del.icio.us, plazes.beta: Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life.

Plaze is a physical location with a local network - private or public, wired or unwired... A Plaze constitutes of the information about the actual location like pictures, comments and mapping information, as well as the people currently online at that Plaze...

Plazes is a huge collaborative effort for annotating locations. Plazes does not incorporate any kind of centralised editorial staff. All the information is contributed by you, the user. We try to keep the mandatory information for a newly discovered Plaze as little as possible, to advocate the easy discovery of new Plazes and keep hurdles low. Anyone physically present at a location can incrementally complement or alter the information for this plaze. Therefore the quality of data will increase with the number of users and frequency of usage. The most frequented Plazes will therefore have the best quality of information, because it is being reviewed most often...

Why should you contribute? Plazes incorporates a system called 'Discoverer'. On every Plaze's description Plaze there is a box called 'Discoverer'. If you discovered a Plaze first, this box is yours. In contrast to the other information on that page, this space can only be edited by you and yourself. You can point to your own weblog or use this space to promote your own business. Solely up to you and your imagination. Neat, isn't it?

Also, check out the Plazes blog.

PhotoCop

PhotoCop is a private, non-commercial web site providing research, management, and technical information about the photographic enforcement of traffic laws. From the site, on 'Who delivers this technology?'

Most photo-enforcement equipment in use around the world is manufactured by American Traffic Systems (ATS), Driver Safety Systems, Ltd. (DSS), Econolite, Gatsometer, Multinova, Peek, TraffiPax, or Truvelo. Usually, however, jurisdictions buy from distributors such as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) who resell the equipment and provide processing services as well,  and SAIC-Syntonic also distribute photo-enforcement systems. Only Redflex provides complete manufacture, distribution, and processing services in the United States... Only a few manufacturers like American Traffic Systems (ATS), Redflex, and Poltech seem committed to rapidly improving the technology. Many European manufactures are slower to change since the time and expense to get a new system certified in the EC is great.

Streaming Surgical Education

In case you like this sort of thing, or happen to need to perform a little emergency surgery, take a look at Streamor.com: A Digital Window to the OR for Physicians, Trainees, and Patients. Featuring Cutting Edge Open and Endoscopic Surgery From the World's Leading Medical Centers

Mobile Phone Dev Nirvana

Benhui.net the harmony of mobile development Great information on Bluetooth, J2ME, MIDP 2 and more.

$1.5 million Grant to Anniston Star, University Experiment

It is official, the Knight Foundation is helping underwrite the new Master's Degree in community journalism program at the Anniston Star in Alabama.

Nice part is that students who get accepted when the program begins in 2006 get a free ride.

The story is below, unfortunately, it costs $4 a month to get into the Star's online newspaper, but I have permission to copy the story here, probably because I am included in it:

Ourmedia.org is coming......

ive posted before here and here about a huge door that is about to open.
It was called open-media.org, now its called Ourmedia.org.

In just a few months, this project has moved very quickly thanks to JD Lasica and Marc Canter.

What is it? Well, check the official FAQ to educate yourself if you care about free storage and bandwidth for your videos FOREVER. (or for as long as people keep caring)

Q. What's the big idea here?

A. The idea is pretty simple: People who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff for free on ourmedia's servers forever, as long as they're willing to share their works with a global audience.
Backed by the Internet Archive, ourmedia's goal is to expose, advance and preserve digital creativity at the grassroots level.
The site will serve as a central gathering spot where professionals and amateurs come together to share works, offer tips and tutorials, interact in a combination community space and repository that will preserve these works for future generations.

and more importantly for us.......

Q. I'm a video blogger. I shoot video, create mini-movies, and place them on my weblog. Can I use ourmedia instead?

A. Yes, as long as you're willing to share your work with the world.

Video Game Design and Development Resources. 01play.net

Fresh news from selected sources on Game Design, Game Studies, Game Research, Game Industry, Game Biz.

toxi: generative interactive objects, art, demos, games, source code

An overview of selected shockwave, flash and proce55ing works since 2000.

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)

The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.

W-Fi Interference Chart

This essay examines the most common forms of wi-fi interference.

Activist Video on the Internet

Before blogging (or even the Internet) existed there was an activist video scene. Much of it has moved onto the Internet, some of it has not. Here's a few groups that do have a lot of work on the Internet.

- Freespeech TV - They have a channel on DISH network, there are
hundreds of activist clips in their archive, produced by them or others.
http://freespeech.org/

- Dyke TV
http://dyketv.org/

- Global Justice Video Project
http://globaljustice.ca/

- Working TV - Primarily labor but also environment and general social
justice
http://www.workingtv.com/

- New Global Vision - Italian group
http://ngvision.org/

- Kanal B - German
http://kanalb.de/

- Beyond TV
http://www.beyondtv.org/

(Continued at Videoblogging Yahoo Group)

Face Detection

This site tries to gather all useful information about finding faces. Since much research is going on in this area, the information is grouped into several categories, which are listed on the left side of the page.

LinuxMovies Wiki

Applications, utilities, and other tools for movie-making on Linux.

iMovie Fest

iMovieFest.com, a new Web site community for Mac users, gives creative outlet to amateur filmmakers around the world. iMovieFest.com makes it easy for anyone with a video camera and a copy of iMovie or other Mac video-editing ... [Final Cut Pro News (Phila FCP Users Group)]

Media Arts Fellowships

The Program for Media Artists offers some very nice Media Arts Fellowships.

api.creativecommons.org

Web service APIs which can be used to integrate the Creative Commons licensing engine into third party applications.

The UnOfficial iDVD4.0.1 FAQ

The UnOfficial iDVD 4.x FAQ has a wealth of information for understanding how to get the best out of iDVD 4. It's a great next step after reading the Tutorial in the iDVD Help. Highly recommended. [DV For Teachers News]

New TV tech debuts at IBC

That's the International Broadcasting Convention underway in Amsterdam. Here's a write-up by Hollywood Reporter (sub. req.), various news blurbs, announcements from Microsoft and Apple and a bevy of press releases.

Macromedia Flash Video Articles

Flash Video articles at the Macromedia Developer Center.

Reusable dialog requirements

This document is part of a set of requirements studies for voice browsers, and provides details of the requirements for reusable components for spoken dialogs.

ContentNext

From Rafat Ali and PaidContent.org comes ContentNext- "a series of guest blogs and blog interviews with leading thinkers, CEOs and heads of major digital media companies." First up is Jeremy Allaire, who writes:

Now that video can be produced cheaply and with reasonable production values, and now that it can be affordably distributed and perhaps even easily monetized, will we see an emerging new class of "video site producers" rather than classic textual content. In 1994 when the Web really emerged, it helped bring forth an explosion in the amount and richness of text that was produced and available globally. I believe we're at the front-end of a very similar curve in video, and this world / opportunity is not going to look very much like how we as consumers find, acquire and view video today.

On DV Production

From Broadcast Engineering, The pros and cons of DV production, by Balvinder Singh Sanghera and Mike Smith:

The gap between the broadcast and consumer markets has never been closer, and it looks set to get closer still. Weddings, birthdays and other social events are being shot on the same cameras that are used by production companies. Price, affordability and quality are key players in this, but the ever-reducing budgets offered by broadcasters will probably mean that DV is here to stay, and may become the de facto delivery standard of programs in the future.


From a facilities point of view, our future could be said to look bleak as more and more production companies invest not only in their own equipment, but employ a new breed of multi-skilled person who is willing to shoot, produce, direct and edit. With popular and enduring programs such as �You've Been Framed� being put together using clips sent in by the public, how far away are we from a high-quality program shot on DV being sent by the viewer direct to the broadcaster to be aired?

Processing Images (pixel by pixel)

Processing Image Pixels using Java, Getting Started - A nice article/lesson from Developer.com....

Mobile Multimedia Applications & Services

A sampling of applications and services around the world for streaming or downloading of audio and video content to mobile devices.

Cassettes2CDs

Anil links to Cassetes2CDs.com where you can convert your cassettes to CD or MP3. Mike gives the service a thumbs up, getting three tapes of his Uncle playing sax and clarinet (one tape from 1970) converted for $7 each.

Canon XL2 and Panasonic AG-DVX100 Comparison

There are now two prosumer camcorder models that feature variable frame rate recording: the Panasonic AG-DVX100A and Canon's XL2. There are a multitude of differences between these camcorders, as well as some very distinct similarities. But, at the end of the day, three features set the XL2 apart from the AG-DVX100A and any other prosumer camcorder on the market: the interchangable lens system, the 16:9 aspect ratio mode, and the number of effective pixels per CCD. We've laid out the differences in a spec table.

How-to: iMovie to mpeg4

Im going to make all videos into mpeg4. Supposedly, this is a good standard that most people can play. Plus it helps Lucas Gonze and his playlists. So how do I do it?

Adrian Miles made a super cool video: iMovie to mpeg4 I can learn anything if I can see it.

OA images and videos for classicists

The Stoa Consortium, an OA portal for the field of classics, has launched the Stoa Image Gallery, a collection of OA images and videos related to classics, classical archaeology, and the classical tradition. The organizers urge submitters to distributed their images and videos under Creative Commons licenses.

Announcing the commonwealth

A few weeks back, we unveiled a new list for discussing the intersection of Creative Commons licenses and business, dubbed Commonwealth. It's headed by Marshall Van Alstyne, an Associate Professor of Information Economics at Boston University. The welcome message to the list details the goals for the list and plans for exploring hybrid licensing systems. If you'd like to sign up, the list's homepage is the place to start.

How to make a videoblog on a Mac

1. Record your video with a digital videocamera or digital still camera that takes Movies.

2. Open up iMovie. Create a project. Import or capture the video files into this project.

3. Edit. (optional) add music. narration. arrange the clips. You've got to know how to do all this, but it's pretty easy if you just read the instructions.(imovie 2 or 3) / (imovie 4) You probably want to make the video no more than 2 minutes long.

4. Once edited how you like it, you now must export the video into a Quicktime. iMovie makes this very easy. In iMovie 2 or 3, go to FILE, then EXPORT. Choose QUICKTIME. In iMovie 4, go to FILE, then SHARE, then Quicktime, then WEB. It will ask you choose where you want to save the compressed movie. Then click SAVE. It'll probably take 2-4 minutes to make this web video. The file should be less tha 5MB so people can watch it

quickly.

5. Once you have the Quicktime movie, you want to post it to your blog. Log into your blog or use Ecto, and create a new post.

(Continued at Momentshowing)

Nice information regarding QuickTime and Streaming

s o u n d s c r e e n...

"The purpose of this site is to provide resources information for web developers wishing to integrate QuickTime and MPEG-4 rich media:

- Embedding QuickTime, Basic and Advanced Streaming focus on "how-to" information.
- Resources & Downloads provides downloads of examples on this site and links to other resources on the web.
- Cool Examples demonstrate some of the samples available in the downloads section, as well as links to other sites."

30,000 songs licensed on Soundclick in one month

Soundclick, one of the Internet's biggest music community sites, prominently integrated our license engine just one month ago. In that time, over 30,000 tracks have been licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Genres vary, and many of the tracks allow derivatives, so break out your music editing software and mix away.

More details from the press release.

JBenchmark result database

Benchmark results of Java MIDP running on various phones and PDAs.

The Future of Video and Media Distribution

Deconstructing H.264/AVC goes into deep detail about the history of MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and the new H.264/AVC codec that's getting lots of hype. The author, looks hard about what the iTunes music store and Apple's deal with Motorola could mean for distribution and Digital Rights Management of music and video. [DV For Teachers News]

Open-Media.org

So here's today's architectual design. It's for an effort we're calling Open-Media.org which would enable folks to access the HUGE repositories of public domain and Creative Commons content - that's out there.

And to help build our own huge repository of CC content.

First we'll start off with upload sites - which will enable folks to start getting their stuff into the 'archives'. Then we'll provide Jukeboxes and Image Albums (much like what's in the gutter of my blog) that have built into them these huge repositories.

Bascially we're making sure to make it REAL easy for folks to utilize media in their everyday lives, school and work.

We the Media released (as PDF)

Dan Gillmor's book, We the Media, is now available for download as a PDF, under a Creative Commons license. We recently threw a book launch party for it and the audio versions of the book are already starting to be recorded by fans and readers.

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

A dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypical problems, and related definitions.

Writer's Guild publishes free TV writing manual

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has recently published a booklet on the practical ins-and-outs of TV writing. It was gang-written by a number of writer-producers and was just this month sent to all WGA members. The booklet is called "Writing For Episodic TV: from freelance to showrunner" and the best thing is, you can print your own a copy for free. [Filmmaker.Com]

Shelly Palmer's Advanced Media Blog

Interactive TV, wireless and broadband news from the Advanced Media Committee of the NATAS

The art of the single-camera shoot

A concise overview of making a video by yourself. The art of the single-camera shoot, and insert-editing techniques that will ensure that you have all the angles covered. [DV For Teachers News]

Funding and alternative methods of distribution

Netribution.co.uk is a web site devoted to funding and alternative methods of distribution. Like the NY Times Guerrilla Doc article, this site focuses on how to get your work out there. [Cyndi Greening]

BitTorrent search engine

Bitoogle is a front-end for Google that finds BitTorrent files.

Link

(via Red Ferret Journal)

A High Definition uncompressed editing system for a tight budget

Mike Curtis of the 'HD for Indies' blog makes a recommendation for the tightly-budgeted 720p editor wanting uncompressed capabilities. [HD For Indies] Although rife with acronyms and argot, this site is full of useful information and detailed observations from a working moviemaker.

SMIL

For those interested in the use of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) :

• Apple's documentation on Quicktime SMIL implementation


• RealNetworks Production Guide


• Creating Multimedia with SMIL - Boston University


• W3C Audio / Video


• Synchronized Multimedia On The Web


• Learn SMIL with a SMIL

Personal Media Technology Metrics

If the media is truly decentralizing, then the people are going to have the power to spend their time and money on content and services provided by each other- as well as those produced and distributed by the traditional mass media industry. Many of us are working hard to understand the size and scope of this peer media marketplace because we are investing money and time into the development of tools and services for the early adopters in this emerging industry. Solid metrics will help us value our work and direct our efforts. Here are some voices on the subject:

Jeff Jarvis asks, "how do we measure the authority and influence of this medium?"

Tim Oren says, "we're in need of both metrics and mechanisms to transplant some of this value and cash flow into new media. Doing so in a way that maintains usability and respects the privacy of viewers is a worthy design and business challenge."

Fred Wilson wants "to know what media outlet (new, old, or whatever) has the most authority on a particular subject. "

Dave Sifry, glowing after Technorati tracked its 3 millionth weblog, reflects on the shift from broadcast/mass media to personal/peer media: "We're connecting with each other, we're talking to each other, finding people of similar interests, and we're having conversations."

And Ronny Ko from Bityard points out that- when it comes to digital imaging and video- there is much hype behind this new media industry of conversations and personal choice and control. In an excellent article on the state of the digital home entertainment system movement, he reports that if you relied on the industry voices at the "Intel Developers Forum (IDF) sessions you�d swear that by the end of the year we�re all going to have a beautiful home system that holds your photos, video and music and wirelessly sends the stuff to every room in the house, to your friends/family and your office."

And much more in the weeks to come.

Free Academic Videos

MIT World has free videos for your viewing enjoyment.

Watch these soon to be favorites:

Nuclear Cloning and Cell Therapy: Fact and Fiction.

Progress in the Study of the X-Ray Background.

New Frontiers with Ultracold Gases.

(Steve calls them boring. I call them perfect background projection fodder. -kc.)

Resources on institutional repositories

ARL has posted a very useful page of resources about institutional repositories. Originally designed to accompany the SPARC-CARL webcast on IR's, the resources stand on their own.

History of the birth of multimedia in HTML

As part of the WaSP asks the W3C project, we consult the W3C about the correct way to include multimedia elements such as sound, animation and video into our humble (X)HTML pages. In the first of a two-part article, the W3C provides some context for this issue and fills us in on the history of the birth of multimedia in HTML.

That conversation focuses on the object tag, which is used to embed a single media object in an HTML document. However, the object tag does not allow the media object to be handed off to an external player in the form of a URL, which is the reason why streamed media is usually packaged in a playlist that contains a single URL.

HTML is not the place for audio and video objects. HTML is a layout in space; audio and video objects exist in time. Playlists are the appropriate type of hypertext for audio and video objects.

Whitepapers Now Available

[Wireless Unleashed has] posted some whitepapers written by the contributors to this site, providing various perspectives on unlicensed wireless. You can find summaries (and a few older papers) in the articles section.

Clay Shirky, The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good

David Isenberg, Four Scenarios for the Future of the Network

Andrew Odlyzko, Telecom Dogmas and Spectrum Allocations

Kevin Werbach, Beyond Broadcast

MediaCollege tutorial on How to Make Streaming Video

"This tutorial covers the different types of video streaming, how to convert video files, how to place streaming video files on your website."

Drop-Frame Timecode

dropframetimecode - an open source drop-frame timecode calculation

Free Video Hosting on the Linux Public Broadcasting Network

Linux Public Broadcasting Network.

FCLA-Digital Archive: File Format Information

A series of technical reports on various file formats, including available metadata.

A survey of playlist formats.

"This document is a survey of playlist data formats. It is useful in two ways. One, as a collation of data which is normally scattered all over the web, it is a helpful reference. Two, having this data in one place makes it easier to observe patterns.

Playlists are comparatively simple objects. They are nothing but lists -- here is the first song, here is the second. As a result they fail to excite the imagination of many people, because the expressive possibilities seem too limited. But from my background as a musician, arranger and composer, I know that the sequencing of aesthetic experiences has huge expressive possibilities. In my work on playlists I aim to help extend the expressive power of sequencing to objects on the world wide web."

FLV Metadata

Some info on FLV (Flash Video) metadata from a Macromedia developer.

Government RSS Feeds

One of the cooler bits of network tech is RSS ("really simple syndication" is probably the most common defintion), which is a way of distributing updated site content to subscribers. For people who read a lot of websites over the course of the day, RSS is a life-saver. Most blogs (including WorldChanging) have RSS feeds, and an increasing number of news outlets do, too. But any website that publishes regularly updated information can provide an RSS feed. RSS in Government is a site dedicated to collecting and promoting the use of RSS feeds by government agencies, whether local, state, federal, or international. The main site page mixes general RSS and blogging news with specific updates on government-related RSS feeds.

The XSPF Playlist Format

XML Shareable Playlist Format specification.

An RDF view of REST

Modelling REST resources using RDF.

Multimedia Filetypes

A decent collection of info on the metadata available from various multimedia formats.

Codec Comparison

A fairly comprehensive comparison of various video codecs.

FAIRCOPY lets your fans make you money

FAIRCOPY has developed an innovative way for musicians to distribute their content over P2P networks and get paid. They've also built in a way for fans to leverage the power of P2P to resdistribute their favorite FAIRCOPY artists, and make a commission. Musicians can also offer free samples of their work under Creative Commons licenses.

Feedster enclosure lists

Looking for RSS enclosures and feeds? Feedster has a new section that lists the latest enclosures it finds among the hundreds of thousands of feeds it scans continuously. Images, mp3 files, .torrents, basically any kind of file that can be dropped at a URL. Scott, you rule.

Music Metadata

Music metadata wiki workspace at Socialtext.

New PJ Educators Discussion Group

In an effort to start a broader conversation on the issues journalism educators face as they try to apply a civic focus into existing courses (or create new courses dedicated to the practice of civic journalism), I have initated a new online discussion group via Yahoo Groups: Public Journalism Educators.

For those interested in the educational implications of this movement, consider joining and chiming in.

A Brief Introduction to GPS Photo Linking

Digital cameras record EXIF data that tells us when we took a picture, but what if wewant to know where; too? Contributor to O'Reilly's Digital Photography Hacks, David Goldwasser introduces us to using GPS positioning data with EXIF timestamps to build interactive maps showing pictures of markers. What a sweet convergence of technologies.

Metadata Features

Metadata features of the Windows Media Format.

NEA media grants deadline 2004 September 10

The U. S. National Endowment for the Arts grants are available to support the development, production, and national distribution of radio and television programs on the arts. Complete Application Packages must be postmarked (or show other proof of mailing) no later than 2004 September 10. [Listen Up! Newsblog]

Make Your Own Damn Movie! by Lloyd Kaufmann

Lloyd Kaufmann, of TOXIC AVENGEr fame (or infamy), wrote a book called "Make Your Own Damn Movie!" with a lot of very practical tips for indie/guerilla filmmakers, such as keep a copy of the script with no sex or foul language for city permit people, neighborhood groups, etc. to see. [HD For Indies]

Roll your own pirate radio station with an iPod

BoingBoing reader Philip says, "After playing around with the new iTrip mini, the FM broadcasting accessory for the iPod our little minds got working on some ideas. We thought we might be able to make the range of Griffin's iTrip mini a little better if took it apart and exposed the antenna, turns out we could. And then we thought, hey -- we could use a couple iPods to broadcast something we wanted to get out there. Perhaps not 'should' that is, but could. Here's the How To."

Videoblog email list

At http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging you can join a video blog email list. Jay Dedman in Manhattan has set it up, and when I subscribed there were ten on the list. Its charter is broad, largely to facilitate discussion about video blogs with particular interest in things like compression problems and those sorts of things. Sounds geeky? I guess so, but compression and bandwidth is to vogging what leading and kerning is to typography.

Using Dublin Core

An entry point for users of Dublin Core; a useful point of reference to the documentation of Dublin Core.

RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: Streaming

RSS module for metadata about the associated application for the media stream, the codec the stream is encoded with and additional tags for the segmentation of live/continual broadcasts.

Linux set top box

My Settop Box - Very interesting is the Knoppmyth section.... Looks like a Knoppix/MythTV distro.

The purpose of mysettopbox.tv is to provide you the end user with the knowledge needed to assemble your very own settop box using Linux. Utilizing open source software and off the shelf hardware you'll be able to assemble a box that has the following functions:
- PVR
- Jukebox
- Image viewer
- Game station

Bitzi OpenBits

Open catalog of media file metadata.

Inventory of Metadata for Multimedia

An inventory of current standards, emerging standards, and some products serving as examples of current implementations in the area of metadata for multimedia.

The focus of this inventory is largely on these two perspectives on metadata. In addition, when dealing with search and retrieval in a complex interactive networked environment, other perspectives may come into play as well, but are not covered in detail here:

- From the perspective of the network provider, metadata may be needed on quality of service parameters such as latency and network throughput required to properly stream a particular resource, or billing and accounting information.

- From the user perspective individual metadata such as user ratings can be added.

PublicAccessTV: Getting Funding

How does one go about raising the money to produce a program? Generally, there are two sources: sponsors and grants. This essay examines various aspects of sponserships.

Raw format demystified

Err... you have used a digital camera before haven't you? If not please crawl back under the rock whence you came while others read on. For you digitally blessed, Photo.net has a succinct article by Bob Atkins explaining what the Raw format is and when to use it.

List of Resources for Nonprofits That Want To Blog

I was a panelist today at the Georgia Center for Nonprofit annual summit. My topic was how nonprofits can use nontraditional media--including blogging and online communities--to effectively get the word out to the general public. Unfortunately, the access to the Internet was down. Still it went okay. We had a full room of more than 100.

Instead of a hand-out I thought I would blog my resources, and then the audience members can later come here and click on things of interest. Plus maybe others can use it.

(Continued at PJNet Today)

HOW TO: Make digital movies the easy way

According to some estimates there are about 60 million (if not more) of you out there with Digital Video Camcorders, just about all DV cameras have Firewire (IEEE 1394)
output/input and there are hundreds of millions of DV tapes being shipped per year. The bad news is, we know exactly what happens - you record a lot of stuff to DV tape and never do anything with it. It's a bit of a hassle to sit and
edit for hours when all you want is a 2 minute clip from that birthday party or event. And the truth is, most of the stuff we all shoot is crap since we just aim and record everything. So in this week's HOW TO Tuesday we show you how to
make use of that footage to quickly and easily make movies and automatically add a soundtrack.

(Read the rest of this post at Engadget)

Learning Digital Video with Auntie

The BBC offers some handy reference guides for budding DV filmmakers and journalists. One of the more obscure, but, as far as budding DV filmmakers are concerned, useful corners of the BBC’s sprawling internet presence is the online courses section... [Hollywood Liberation Army: Chronicling the Internet movie revolution]

(via Cinema Minima)

Digital Video Editing - "Comparing CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP Displays"

Digital Video Editing has posted a three part series on display technology. Part I measured, analyzed and compared primary specs like Black-Level, Color Temperature, Peak Brightness, Dynamic Range, and Contrast for each display. Part II looked at Gray-Scale, Gamma, Primary Chromaticities and Color Gamut to see how they all affect color and gray-scale. Currently Part IIIa looks at Artifacts and how they affect Image Quality. Future article,Part IIIb, will discuss the computer and video viewing tests. They then plan to analyze and assess each display technology in detail and tie together all of the results from Parts I to IIIa.

MusicBrainz Wiki

Development wiki for the MusicBrainz music metadata repository.

New JIME on educational semantic web

The current issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education is devoted to the semantic web in education.

Bootstrapping a directory of aggregators

Every news site has to reinvent the wheel with a page that explains their RSS feeds (a good thing) and an incomplete list of pointers to aggregators. Further, the lists don't include objective information, they just point to the marketing sites for the programs. They're usually very nice-looking, but rarely tell the whole story.

One of my goals in starting the Really Simple Syndication site was to develop a list of aggregators, and a process for keeping the list current. I'd like the vendors to participate, in several ways -- by keeping pricing and technical information about the products up to date, and to help us understand features supported by their product, and how they compare to competitive offerings. Of course, I'd like to have all the claims verified by users of the products.

I want to do this for a couple of reasons. First, the obvious one -- with better information about products this small industry can develop into a healthy industry. The best products rise to the top, and the new ones have a clear understanding of what the competition does. It will make features and performance the basis for comparison, and that's a good thing.

(Read the rest of this post at reallySimpleSyndic News)

Cartoon Guide to Spectrum Policy (no, really)

The New America Foundation, publishers of Kevin's terrific Radio Revolution paper as well as a graphics-heavy presentation of a Citizen's Guide to the Airvaves, has now published a Cartoon Guide to Spectrum Policy, which describes the current limitations of spectrum policy in citizen-friendly terms.

It's a tool for getting your non-techie friends to understand both what's wrong with the way we mis-allocate spectrum today and what's at stake for the future.

New York City Film Resource

New York City Film Resource. The New York City Film Resource is a directory for film and media professionals! This independently-run website is made for the New York City filmmaking and media community. [New York Film Blog] [New York City Film Resource] [Cinema Minima]

the top sample sources

First of all there is The Top Sample Sources List which ranks the most popular movies, TV-series and other similar kinds of sample sources based on how frequently spoken lines from these sources have been sampled and used in some sort of musical context. Then there is The Top Sampling Groups List which is based on the former, but its ranking is instead based on how frequently these groups use samples of spoken lines. These lists started out to as being compiled mainly by the help of, and contributions from, the readers of the Usenet group rec.music.industrial, in which these lists once upon a time were born. Today the lists have grown to include most other music styles as well.

Group-Blog on Spectrum Issues

Kevin Werbach, Clay Shirky, Andrew Odlyzko, and David Isenberg have launched Wireless Unleashed, a group weblog. Kevin says:

The site focuses on the benefits of reallocating low-frequency wireless capacity from broadcasting to unlicensed applications, both here and around the world. There is a huge amount of capacity which could be used for two-way applications like broadband to the home, but which is locked up in broadcast allocations based on 1950s technology. Freeing up that capacity could create massive opportunities for innovation, and could dramatically lower the costs of wireless connectivity in developing countries. The blog will serve as a sounding board for our commentary on this issue. We will be writing whitepapers as well.

Need a Max object, look here:

Max Objects Database From the site: We all waste time in looking for objects and unless having the memory of a genius, it's impossible to keep in mind all of them and what they are designed for.

How To Convert Any Web Site Into An RSS Feed

Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips: How To Convert Any Web Site Into An RSS Feed. "Creating a Generic Site-To-RSS Tool. While this is certainly not breaking news, it maybe something that you have not had the opportunity to learn more about until now. Authored by Roy Osherove this in-depth article provides you with all of the technical information, examples and references you need to taste the flavour of true site scraping. (Not for the tech-shy or RSS novice.) By Robin.Good@masternewmedia.org (Robin Good). "

Creative Commons: Metadata Tuneup

Upgrading to one of our version 2.0 licenses or selecting one for the first time? Consider providing optional metadata about your work via the choose license process.

StreamSage's Campaign Search

StreamSage has rolled out CampaignSearch- an audio/video search engine for content from political sources like C-Span, PBS, WhiteHouse, Washington Post, BBC, NPR, AP, Bush and Kerry's respective campaign websites, etc... The search functionality is excellent. And it's easy to link within the stream because StreamSage provides both a link to a relevant excerpt as well as the whole file. For example, I searched for "mccain vice president." Here's the relevant audio (link: Real Media Audio File). Here's what StreamSage says about their system- from CampaignSearch.com:

How does it work?

StreamSage's Audio/Video Search Engine listens to and watches the audio/video content to determine what topics are discussed and where they are discussed within the media file. By automatically understanding the information presented in the audio/video content, StreamSage's Audio/Video Search Engine is able to automatically generate "Relevance Intervals" that encapsulate all of the contextually relevant information about a given topic in the audio/video content. Additionally, by employing contextual understanding, StreamSage's Audio/Video Search Engine ranks search results according to the degree of relevance to the search term. This contextual relevance ranking allows users faster access to relevant information.

Citizen Lab

Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based in Toronto, Canada, looking at the intersection of digital media and civic activism. Functioning something as a DARPA for digital freedom, Citizen Lab serves as a seed-bed for a variety of very cool and interesting projects focusing on identifying, analyzing, and resisting efforts to censor and lock down information networks. Citizen Lab is the umbrella for a couple of other ongoing projects, Infowar Monitor and the OpenNet Initiative. Infowar Monitor, run in cooperation with the Cambridge Programme for Security in International Society, is a good resource if you're interested in ongoing developments in information and network-centric warfare; OpenNet Initiative, run with CPSIS and with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, looks more closely at censorship and surveillance.

The main site is a blog-like listing of updates about net surveillance, censorship, and the like, pulled from both mainstream and niche sources, along with links to its various projects. Aside from Infowar Monitor and OpenNet Initiative, Citizen Lab is also working on a project called "Rhizome," which will "remotely interrogate the networks of censoring countries and securely transfer the results to a database node network for analysis and storage" (responding to the fact that most filter systems, both commercial and governmental, keep the lists of what they censor secret), and a project called "Psiphon," a distributed proxy project to allow computer users in controlled regions to surf the web freely. If this latter one sounds familiar, it's because another project, Peek-a-Booty, took a similar approach. Peek-a-booty, unfortunately, appears to be dead; its site hasn't been updated since December, 2003.

For an infowar and sousveillance geek like me, the Citizen Lab site provides hours of fascinating reading. But one of the most powerful Citizen Lab-supported efforts linked from the site has little to do with computer networks, and will be compelling stuff for many WorldChanging readers. The Kandahar Chronicles tell the story of the day-to-day life of a M�dicins Sans Fronti�res worker in Kandahar, Afghanistan, from August 2003 through February 2004. Good stuff.

Community Site for VJs by VJs - VJCentral.com

"Welcome to VJCentral.com, a community site for VJs by VJs intended for newbies who want to learn how to create live visuals as well as for experienced VJs looking for inspiration, advanced tips and or other fellow VJs."

Photography Resource: Web Photo School (webphotoschool.com)

Web Photo School has the largest compilation of photography and digital imaging educational resources. Our mission is to visually communicate the ease of use of digital cameras and photography equipments to all levels of photographers.

Our lessons have been written by leading professional photographers. The lessons are written for all levels of experience and are easy to learn and follow in the next photograph you shoot. The lessons range from Basic Photography to Fashion to Indoor and Outdoor Portraiture. Virtually any subject you can think of, we can help you take a better picture today.

This site has some excellent tutorials on different aspects in photography. Some of them are free, so try those out. If you like them, you can enroll in this photo school and you get a further 15 lessons free, as far as I can tell.

Progressive versus Interlaced: 720p versus 1080i

This depicts how progressive (P) scanning works - see top row - versus how interlaced (I) scanning works - bottom row. People (such as Congressmen) read "our" 720P proposal and "their" 1080I proposal and assume that 1080I is superior because the number is larger. The diagram above shows that this is a fallacy. In the progressive system, 720 lines are presented to the human eye every 1/60th of a second while the so-called 1080I system presents only 540 lines. Therefore a more accurate name for the interlaced system is 540I. It also more accurately represents the fact that the interlaced system is lower in quality than our 720P system. Not only is 720P superior to 540I in quality (note the well-known artifact: interlace flickers), but it is cheaper! And it is naturally compatible with computers (which all use progressive scanning). Now you can understand the title of this page: It is 720P that is greater than 540I - formerly known in old-speak as 1080I.

The FeedRoom's RSS feeds

Earlier this week, Reuters began offering RSS feeds of its video clips, thanks to The FeedRoom. Turns out, The FeedRoom offers a ton of video RSS feeds.

Studio for Interactive and Responsive Architectures

One of Parsons` stellar physical computing instructors, James Rouvelle, will be teaching a summer studio called Interactive and Response Architectures at Technische Universitat, Berlin. The team-based studio/laboratory for shared
collective research will be directed towards the conception, design,
programming, development and construction of one or more interactive installations or systems. Workshops will be held on the materials of ubiquitous/physical computing, from the local (microcontroller) to the global (web). Topics will include programming, basic electronics, simple circuit building, data mapping, working with microcontrollers, sensors, effectors and networks. Now accepting applications for enrollment.

Announcing KnetLit ...

Jeremy Yuille and I have moved the manifesto for creative computing to a new blog come website. The object of this is to extend our ideas and thinking about what we mean by each of the terms, and to, let's be frank, set an agenda. It is open for comments, but please keep in mind that it is very early days yet - we're writing, adding, and designing. This will also form the basis of a research paper we are writing about creative computing, and an action research project we intend to undertake in the second half of this year. The site is located at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~knetlit and comments, additions, revisions, criticisms, are welcome.

Union for the Public Domain

The Union for the Public Domain (UPD) is a non-profit citizens group. Our mission is to protect and enhance the public domain in matters concerning intellectual property. We are a membership organization, acting as an independent voice on intellectual property issues.

stock.xchng: free stock photo resource

Stock.XCHNG was launched in February 2001, as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. In about two years the site evolved into this massive community you see now - there are more than 80.000 registered users and more than 60.000 photos online!

via Seth Godin

Microbroadcasting Summer Camp

ScottGant writes "Wired has this story about Steven Dunifer and his four-day Radio Summer Camps sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley that offers how-tos for building transmitters and antennas, along with advice on handling any FCC agents that might come knocking. Imagine this: A thousand little stations send radio programming across cities and towns from senior centers, dorm rooms and attics. The understaffed FCC would be powerless to shut them down. Audiences would have substantive content choices. No one would tune into Top-40 radio. And the media moguls would slink back into their caves. The FCC and Big Radio are obviously paying attention to the microbroadcasters -- it was pressure from independent broadcasters that forced the FCC to grant a limited number of low-power, or LPFM, radio licenses to community organizations, a decision that the NAB resisted. Are these Pirates or Patriots?"

SampleSwap: free audio resource

An Ontology production: SampleSwap, "audio samples and mischief for music makers & DJ's"

DV Guide /BitTorrent & RSS/ in 5 Easy Steps

There was a text here already about DV Guide, but I think video blogging and BitTorrent require more elaborate explanation. The concept is explained in detail at P2P-TV. The basic procedure is:

1. Goto http://dv.open4all.info/bblog and enter username and password, (or post a comment here if you do not have username/password)

2. Make a torrent (using your local BT client) having set http://dv.open4all.info/bblog/tracker.php as the tracker name.

3. Upload torrent like it says to in torrents link. if it messes up try to recreate torrent with a simple name -- no crazy characters.

4. Once you upload successfully, go and post a message in the blog. To link to your specific torrent in the message use this tag in the entry: {torrents specific=mytorrent}. When you create your link, in the name of your torrent do not use the extension .torrent...example: if your torrent is called boobaa.torrent you would put: {torrents specific=boobaa}.

5. Don't forget to seed the torrent on your local, meaning start a download on your machine even if the file is there: it is necessary that there be at least one download complete.

Resource for Videoblogging

My friend Peter�Van�Dijck has created a resource for the developing world of Videoblogging.

It's an open site, so please contribute any experience you have.

Because of the posts on Unmediated, we have tried to get videoblogging to work.
But the process is still too cumbersome.

We imagine someone creating a tool that instantly optimizes, uploads, and posts the video to my blog.

Try before you buy a Content Management System

opensourceCMS:This site was created to give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best open source and free php/mysql based software systems in the world. You can log in as the administrator to any site here, thus allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

free video streaming technologies

Highlights affordable and reliable compression technologies, transport protocols, software and hardware setups for video streaming.

Given the vast panorama of video technologies available nowadays, this research could fill up way too much paper in the attempt of covering every aspect of this field, instead i'll just try to narrow the focus to certain advanced aspects of streaming video, also trying to give a quick reference guide to the usage of selected free software.

The free culture movement

From Siva: Swarthmore students (among my many heroes) have started freeculture.org, which will be the central node in a global movement to save culture and information from the grasp of oligarchs. From the freeculture.org home page:

FreeCulture.org is the home of an international student movement for free culture. Although many activist organizations have arisen to protect and promote free culture (including the EFF, FSF, and Creative Commons), for true change in the system, we must look to the future -- the youth of the world. If we can win the hearts and minds of the next generation, the vested interests will slowly and inexorably become irrelevant. And who is more qualified to build a student movement than the students themselves?

British Library audio archive coming

The British Library is releasing a ton of audio from its archive on the Web -- though the article implies that it will only be available to higher education institutions.

Examples held on the British Library site include a live recording of Paul Robeson in Othello, Florence Nightingale speaking in one of the earliest sound recordings, as well as the genesis of Sherlock Holmes.

These historic recordings will be made freely available to further and higher education institutions in the UK and will include a wide range of materials, including classical and popular music, broadcast radio, oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.

Link

(Thanks, Patricio!)

Know your TV tuner cards

Home Theater PC News has a guide with way more information than you could possibly need about buying a TV tuner card for a PC and whether or not it'll be compatible with your choice of digital video recording software. Especially helpful is the illustrated guide to identifying the diffe

[Via LockerGnome]

Halavais series on weblogs and education

Alex Halavais has been pushing out a series of texts that make up a chapter in the forthcoming International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. I'm definitely going to read all of it.

* Part 1: Collaborative Web Publishing as a Technology and a Practice
* Part 2: Weblogs as "Replacement" Educational Technology
* Part 3: The Open Classroom
* Part 4: Trips without the field
* Part 5: New apprenticeship
* Part 6: Timeless education

Source: [Seb's Open Research]

Creative Commons-licensed phonecam blogging service

Alfie Dennen of the phonecam blogging service Moblog UK says:

We operate the site code on a copyright commons basis, and with users like Warren Ellis (who want to retain control of their images/video/audio), we urge people using the site to do the same. The fact that Textamerica and mblog etc own your content once it hits their servers got us so angry we felt we had to make an alternative.

We carry no advertising, and are donation supported. In terms of the code itself, we support multiple image posts, multiple audio and image posts, in pretty much every format that phones can produce. The site is very malleable, if you can make a css style sheet, you can make the site entirely your own look, still hosting it with us. We are a community that consists partly of a lot of artists who want to make sure they keep some ownership of their work.

Step-By-Step: Turn Your PC Into a PVR

PC World's got a great article on turning your PC into a PVR.

It's a great way to dip your toe into the world of PVRs, since most modern PCs have plenty of horsepower to record TV. All you need is a TV tuner (and a lot of newer PCs come with them) and a little software. Unless you have a special setup, you'll likely run into the classic problem of how to comfortably watch TV on your PC, but it's a good cheap way to try out the technology before committing to a TiVo or ReplayTV unit.

Time-shifted TV

New Media Committee of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, New York Chapter organizes a series of interesting lectures, first of which is:

April 28, 2004 Time-shifted Television

The Public Radio Exchange

"The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is an online service for peer-review and digital distribution of public radio programming, creating a web-based bridge between producers and stations. It is a decentralized partnership that will provide good homes to good works, more broadcast opportunities for the people who create them, and new sparks of freedom, imagination, initiative, and creative vision for a mature public radio field."

Speechbot

SpeechBot (from HP/Compaq) is a search engine for audio & video content that is hosted and played from other websites. It uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe and index documents that do not have transcripts or other content information.

Larry Bouthillier's eMedia Blog

Worth checking once in a while: Larry Bouthillier's eMedia Blog.

Thoughts on:
Streaming Media Technology
eLearning and Instructional Technology
Media Content Creation and Delivery Strategies

Introduction to Photoblogging and Moblogging

JOEL JOHNSON -- If you already know the ins and outs of photoblogging and moblogging, this high-level overview of mobile web publishing won't have much for you. For the other 99% of you that think remotely publishing pictures and text to the web from anywhere the mood strikes you sounds like a great idea (because it is), this introduction is a great place to start, especially with its list of various photoblogging/moblogging services. Read

Web sites that contain collections that are copyright free

Good resource, from Google Answers.

Unmediated PVR Data Collection Project

Let's use the comment thread of this post to aggregate all commercial and open source projects related to Personal Video Recorders (PVRs). Perhaps once we have a substantial list, I'll parse through it and write it up all pretty and nice and we can post it as the first Unmediated White Paper.

Adam Wilt's DV - FAQ and more

The DV, DVCAM, & DVCPRO Formats -- tech details, FAQ, and links.
He has created a nice online non-commercial resource for everything DV. Plenty of technical information.

I got tired of answering the same old questions over and over again. By putting 'em all on the web, I can say "just go read my FAQ"....

Fighting for LPFM (Low Power FM) in the Cities

About the Prometheus Radio Project! What is Prometheus all about: To serve as a microradio resource center offering legal, technical, and organizational support for the non-commercial community broadcasters To research and develop technical resources in anticipation of legalized micro-radio. Upon...

Creative Capital 2004 Grants in Visual Arts and Film/Video

"For the 2004-05 grant round, Creative Capital will be awarding grants to individual artists in the fields of Visual Arts and Film/Video."

Browse Top Level > Moving Images > Open Source Movies

The Internet Archive's collection of open source (free to redistribute/recontextualize/watch) movies. This would make great source (forgive me) material for testing xmltv schtuff.